Sign of the fist.

Taking  short glimpses of the televised Democrat candidates for president in the debates and at their rallies I saw two of them raising their right arms with their fist clenched. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I may have missed others doing it but to me it was disturbing. The fist is a symbol of brute force, of power.

Now I know that in sports a fist is often used as a symbol in victory over an opponent. I don't have a problem with that. But in the context of a political speech given by candidates who are offering their ideas of how they will run the government, a clenched fist is not a comforting image.

Politics is the fourth of five branches of philosophy. Its task is to determine what kind of social system is most conducive for conceptual beings like us humans.

For centuries it was believed that some men had the right to rule all others by force. But with the Renaissance then the Enlightenment it was thought that men were better off if ruled by permission of  enlightened governments.

That led to the further innovation in America that a proper government would get its just powers only by the consent of the governed: a profoundly historic political and moral principle.

But since the ink dried on our Constitution, state and federal governments have been trying to reverse this process to the point where today government can do anything it wants through regulations while the citizens cannot do anything without getting permission from a host of permission grantors called regulators. (There is a great deal of public confusion about what is a rights protecting law and a law that violates rights as regulations do. But that is a subject for another post.) 

And so we see today's political hopefuls promising more regulations on our energy, our freedom, our self defense and everything else. And when we watch our prospective rulers raising a clenched fist, we had better understand that image is an omen as to how they plan to govern us: not by giving us more freedom to provide for our own welfare, but by their idea of what should be our future achieved via their brute physical force.

It's all about appearances Pt 2

Continuing on my theme that "It's all about Appearances" from my last post I'll add:
(Note, my use of 'Progressive' below includes academia, the media and the Democrat party.)


Since Donald Trump was elected I have been  amazed at how the Democrat Party leadership could accuse the President of colluding with the Russians to help him get elected when there was no evidence for that notion. Congressman Adam Schiff declared on television a number of times that the evidence of Trump's collusion with the Russians was 'All over the place."

He said this, knowing that if it were true, special council Robert Mueller (investigating the so-called collusion) would have been all over it. He also had to know that Mr Mueller was not in fact all over it since that would have been made public with thundering fanfare.

So I wondered if Mr Schiff thought words had some magic power to create reality where if one wanted a certain reality to exist (like Trump's guilt) one had only to utter the words describing that reality and viola, a new reality would then be born. Then I thought no he can't be that far gone. Surely he would not believe his desk will become a frog at 7 am tomorrow morning if he utters those words.
So what was he trying to accomplish?

To understand this I had to look back at history. I wanted to know where the idea of appearances originated.

It was philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724--1804) who told the world that our reality is one only of appearances, not substance which he called the phenomenal world. He said there was another world of essences or substance which he called the noumenal world to which we humans have no access. (How he came to access it, well he wasn't very clear on that.) 

Since the Democrat Party leadership has been educated in American universities and studied the social sciences they would have been introduced to the philosophical descendants of Kant like  Karl Marx (1818-1883) Nietzsche (1844--1900) and his "Will to Power" which Hitler held in high regard and Herbert Marcuse, father of the New Left and the student rebellions of the 70s, to name a few. They taught students that there is no reality "out there" for us to understand because reality is created inside of our minds via appearances only.

Since appearances are all that count, then it follows that the Democrats guided by Mr Schiff were trying to create the reality of Trump's guilt in the minds of their political base hoping the appearance of said guilt would translate into action (votes) favorable to the Democrat party's agenda of impeaching Trump.

In my view, all the Progressives have been raised and indoctrinated in an intellectual bubble where for decades all they had to do is pronounce certain magic words like "I care for the poor and needy" and the public would unhesitatingly vote for them.

Not any more. Or at least not as much as before. And that is why the Progressives are in a desperate panic. Their power of brute force (via regulations) to achieve the social good seems to be slipping away from them.  Their world no longer appears the way their professors told them it would. This they cannot tolerate.

Thus the constant vitriolic hatred, lies, and outright condemnation of everything Trump in particular, and Republican in general. It is adults having a childish temper tantrum against a world that is no longer conforming to their whims and wishes and they cannot figure out why. They have spent their entire political careers manipulating appearances in the minds of the citizens and refuse to accept-not just Trump-but any person winning voters with pro-American appearances. It is the pro-American appearances that are the target of their hatred.

So what does it mean to be pro-American? Is that a good thing on the face of it? I say no. Hitler was pro-Germany and Mussolini was pro-Italy. So? Did that benefit those two nations? Clearly not. In my view being pro-American should mean being pro America's founding principle of individual rights.
The question is, Is Trump's image of being pro-America the same as being pro-individual rights?

That's debatable. Trump is for Eminent Domain a major violation of property rights and a salute to a main tenet of Progressivism. What America needs is a principled president who is concerned more with substance than appearances, one who understands that if you have the right substance (principle of individual rights) the appearances will take care of themselves.