Message from Morlockland
Gentle readers, I got this message in my spam filter, and I could not tell if it had been written by a robot or a man, if it were directed at me, or was part of an anonymous mass-mailing. I wrote a note to the address, to find out if it were robotic or human, and as of this writing received no reply, so I yet wonder.
Savor the voice of those who sit in the seats of the scornful:
Oh wait… I thought “the issue” was abortion for you… The issue that defined all others. Guess that was yesterday.
So if you hate debt so much how about the next time a republican manufactures a war you bring up that wars cost money, and recommend that this president pay for his multi trillion dollar hissy fit in Iraq? The way wars are paid for (besides blood, and I would go into that waste of life but this is on the debt… So allow me to stay on track) with “taxes and bonds, and bonds and taxes” not by “tax cuts for the rich and hey why don’t y’all go shopping”?
I know that war is not a popular topic these days, but if you want to look at where all the money went, and is still going, avoiding the topic is like looking at an empty sink and wondering where the water went without looking at that big whole in the middle of the basin. That war (and I refer here to Iraq, because we had good reasons to invade Afghanistan, and had we stuck to invading the people who attacked us and taxed accordingly I do not believe we would be in the mess we are in now) continues to be a drain; it drains us of the interest we pay on the debt we incurred to invade that country, it costs us in the lost jobs of those who got sucked into the recession ushered in by the GOPs complete lack of fiscal restraint when they had their way, and it will cost us billions in caring for those who were wounded and have every reason to expect the support of a nation that sent them to harms way. I find it disingenuous that the same party that now screams “fiscal responsibility” treated the US treasury with all the responsibility of a drug addled teenager with their mothers Visa card.
Now about getting out of the gigantic hole the right dug for the rest of us; cutting your way out of spending is like trying to bail out a leaky ship with your hands instead of borrowing a bucket. If you want a look at where austerity gets you look no further than Greece. The more they cut the more their economy collapses. If they are any more successful at it they might have the fascists in power by 2014. The better solution is not to spend less, but to spend wisely, on investments that create increased productivity.
Now I am not saying the government does not waste money. We keep building landing craft. The last landing under fire in our history was Inchon during the Korean War. We are building fighters when the current fighters are still the best on earth. And I am sure there are others. But cutting health insurance is a net loss; people still get sick and without insurance they end up in hospitals, costing us all more in the long run. Short changing schools simply leads to less productive workers as time goes on, simply cutting services is pointless unless we are willing to the Ron Paul/Randian extreme of letting people die unless they can pony up the money for health care, or food if you cut food stamps etc. I will take this moment to point out that Paul did not obtain the GOP nomination much less the presidency so I would argue that the nation as a whole have looked at his worldview and found it lacking. As we are unwilling to sink to that level, the best choice is to be smart and leverage our public investment to its greatest extent (think Medicare, as opposed to Medicare part D) to reduce the expense of our humanity. And when it comes to protecting the children (all of them not just the fetuses) things like food stamps, chip, Medicaid have done more for them then a million well meaning churches or words about the sanctity of life; social security means my mother has a place to live after a lifetime of toil and Medicare means she can get the medical attention she needs to have some quality in that life. That is money well spent… The amphibious landing ship? Not so much.
My comment: If I were Mark Shea, I would post this under the tag ‘sin makes you stupid’ while emphasizing the line where it is stated that food stamps and welfare have done more to protect human wellbeing that the Church and her talk of the sanctity of life.
Being a Houyhnhnm, I will instead point out that, logically, if life is not sacred, there is no duty to preserve it, either by food stamps nor any other means; and if it is sacred, one cannot end the life of helpless in the womb without abrogating that sanctity. If feeding the destitute is a sacred duty, exterminating their children desecrates that duty.
Again, a progressive or a eugenicist, attempting to outwit this paradox, could argue that some human life is sacred and other life is not, and that the state has the right to decree who is human and who is not, or grant to certain individuals that right. The Negro and the Jew were, in times past, were called less than human, and now it is the turn of the unborn. Logically, the progressive argument assigns greater sanctity to the power of the state than to human life. Even granting this dubious assumption, however, the same paradox arises: if human life is not sacred, the state cannot sanctify it by fiat; and if it is, the state may not desecrate it.
Being from a military family, and being an attorney who used to do personal injury lawsuits, all I can say is the argument that the government should not fund a new generation of fighter jets on the grounds that the old ones were already the best in the world applies with equal, if not greater, force to the argument that the government should not socialize the American medical industry on the grounds that the free market model was already the best in the world, the one which subjects suffering under socialized medicine in other lands fled to when they craved the latest and best life saving procedures.
But, without addressing the argument further, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the tone. The first line is an accusation of hypocrisy. Against whom, I am not sure. It does not seem to be addressed to me. The accusation makes no sense even on its own terms: as if anyone not a monomaniac were insincere. To accuse the motives of the foe is the only argument of the Left.
The rest follows in like manner: mere pontification, self-glorification, sneers, scorn, disorganized and illogical thinking.
The argument, first announced during the Cold War, and older, if memory serves, than the Johnson ‘Great Society’ programs, that we should spend more on welfare than warfare comes from a time when the military budget did exceed federal expenditures on payments to the poor. This was circa 1964, when I was three years old. I am now fifty-one winters. The slogan is nigh unto half a century out of date.
It is boilerplate thinking, one unexamined stereotype after another. The same so-called argument could have been constructed by walking through the parking lot of a Democrat Party convention, or Woodstock Reunion, and writing down the slogans on the bumperstickers.
To him, the Global War against Jihadist Terror is …. wait for it … a ‘hissy-fit’. (I trust any feminists who, by unhappy mistake, have stumbled in horror upon my overly-masculine blog will nonetheless pause to note that I, whom feminists wrongly account their enemy, have never insulted the gentle sex as this Morlock does. Of course, it is possible that, in the modern world, the origins of the phrase has been consigned to the unisex memory hole of the Ministry of Truth: it refers to the hysteria of a menstruating woman.) But, in any case, the entire Terror War boils down to the evil and absurd motives of one man. Again, the only weapon of the Left is to accuse motivations.
Again, the mere fact that a close reading cannot reveal, at least to me, whether this was meant to answer an article of mine or a comment of yours, dear readers, is telling.
A more charitable and, indeed, reasonable assumption is that this was a reply to a comment I had not read, merely affixed by a careless button-fumble to the wrong comment-thread.
But here I assume there was no carelessness, because I have seen such language used far too often by the dishonorable opposition in the culture wars. My admittedly uncharitable assumption is that the Morlock lacks the basic skill of tying their comments into the topic being discussed; and so it is left to the imagination to discover whether the words are intentional, meant to be part of a conversation, or not, a blind mass mailing.
You see, the Morlocks raised in modern schools are not taught to use reason or rhetoric. They can neither persuade the intellect with prose nor rouse the passions with poetry.
All they can do is vomit scorn.
Such is the voice of the Morlocks, gentle reader. These are the kind of half-formed and foetid thoughts which the cannibals craving to consume our nation, our life work, and our lives tell themselves as they take our goods, our taxes, and our liberties.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
