SplendorQuest.com

You bastards!

The essence of Political Correctness is to get people to volunteer for their own self-imprisonment. In fear of offending some perpetually-offended jackass, the victims of Political Correctness come to be stunted, stilted, stifled — and ultimately silenced. But, alas, they never, ever manage to escape the snide, sneering insults of all those perpetually-offended jackasses.

Why? It’s simple: The sole objective of Political Correctness is to take power of other people — who are innocent of all offenses against anyone — by inducing them to to volunteer for their own self-imprisonment.

Heads up: If you don’t have the guts to stand up these cowards, these moral midgets, then you deserve what they are doing to you.

There’s more, and I’m loving it: Mark Steyn, Diana West, a wonderful unsigned manifesto, a kickin’ cartoon from Chris Muir, and, finally:

May 20th is everybody draw Mohammed day. This last strikes me as being a little over the top, since the objective would seem to be to offend Muslims, rather than simply to defend one’s own right to express oneself at will, without fear of a violent demise. But that distinction delivers precious little difference, and the time for phlegmatic reason in this particular dispute was three years (more…)

Shrug, Atlas, shrug. Mark Steyn from Investors’ Business Daily:

In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from “No taxation without representation” to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it. The top 5% of taxpayers contribute 60% of revenue. The top 10% provide 75%. Another two-fifths make up the rest. And half are exempt.

This isn’t redistribution — a “leveling” to address the “mal-distribution” of income, as Sen. Max Baucus, (D-Kleptocristan) put it the other day. It isn’t even “spreading the wealth around,” as then Sen. Barack Obama put it in an unfortunate off-the-prompter moment during the 2008 campaign.

Rather, it’s an assault on the moral legitimacy of the system. If you accept the principle of a tax on income, it might seem reasonable to exclude the very poor from having to contribute to it. But in no meaningful sense can half the country be considered “poor.” The U.S. income tax is becoming the 21st century equivalent of the “jizya” — the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens: In return for funding the Islamic imperium, the infidels were (more…)

Cathleen and I have been on a love jag, lately, and I cannot begin to tell you how beneficial it’s been. A very simple idea: We added spending time alone together every day as a part of our goal-getting regimen. This turns out to have been an inspired idea, although I did not foresee that going in.

At some point I may write about this experience in detail, because there is a lot to be learned from it. As an example, consider this: If you want to end the day married, start the day married. No relationship can endure if you’re not doing anything to maintain it.

Teri and I have been talking about the same sorts of issues privately. Here’s a clip from email I wrote to her:

My wife is most beautiful when she’s all the way in love with me. Her features are very fine in the ground state — striking, as an old family friend would have it. But when those features are lit from within by her passions, then she is many orders of magnitude more enthralling. But it’s my job to earn that response from her — and I wish I could insist that I’ve earned that response (more…)

This is clipped from a book I wrote in 1988 — a book I really need to write anew. It’s an epistolary novel, so the writing is kind of affected. I expect you can worry your way through it. “Madness,” as the term is used here, is an attempt to claim, as knowledge, a proposition the proponent knows in advance is invalid. –GSS

 
Redemption Is A Being Aware.

Redemption is finding Splendor in Rectitude. But much more importantly, Redemption Is Egoism In Action.

Egoism is the worship of the self by the self, all the time, for all time. Egoism Is A Being Aware of who he is and what he is doing and why — all the time. It is the pursuit always of values and never of disvalues, always of pleasure and never of pain, always of Truth and never of Madness. Egoism is the recognition that the fullest value of the self is realized through the fullest knowledge of the self.

Egoism is knowing and doing the good through time. It is a set of ideas, but ideas devoid of meaning if they are not put into practice. One can know Splendor by taking those actions one thinks are right. But one (more…)

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
‘Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.’
      –Robert Louis Stevenson

This is important: Everything that matters in human life is to be found to the right of the zero on the number line. Zero is never greater than one, so concentrating on the zero or on negative values is necessarily anegoic — contrary to the true interests of the ego.

Can it sometimes be needful to attend to negative values? Yes. I speak of eradicating bugs all the time, since this is a useful metaphor for understanding the actual meaning and importance of disvalues. If my food is being devoured by ants, I need to to exterminate them. If there is a scorpion in my home (it happens here), I have to crush it — grind it to a gooey pulp. If a two-legged predator attempts to confiscate my wealth, I must be prepared to defend myself.

But this is not what human life is for. Some days are cloudy, but (more…)

A letter from a sane doctor, posted at The Corner on NationalReview.com:

March 23, 2010

My Dear Patient,

As you must know, Congress has just passed extensive legislation governing health care delivery and insurance systems. Whether you agree with what it does or not, we are all now subject to this law and its sweeping changes.

I have always conducted my medical practice with my patient’s best interests as my first priority. Although not legally obliged to do so, I have routinely provided you with a receipt that has all the codes necessary to bill your own health insurance company for any reimbursement to which you are entitled. Until now, that insurance company was a free enterprise despite the fact that it was heavily regulated by state and federal laws. Now the situation is quite different. Through the new law’s mandates, regulatory powers and reform, health insurance is and will be largely a government activity which will have an ever larger jurisdiction over how doctors practice, make clinical judgments and are paid.

The new law provides for about 150 new government agencies, many of which are designed to be ‘oversight’ bureaucracies which will have the right to decide what medical care is legal to provide (more…)

Nothing Outside the State

by Robert Higgs

A popular slogan of the Italian Fascists under Mussolini was, “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” (everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state). I recall this expression frequently as I observe the state’s far-reaching penetration of my own society.

What of any consequence remains beyond the state’s reach in the United States today? Not wages, working conditions, or labor-management relations; not health care; not money, banking, or financial services; not personal privacy; not transportation or communication; not education or scientific research; not farming or food supply; not nutrition or food quality; not marriage or divorce; not child care; not provision for retirement; not recreation; not insurance of any kind; not smoking or drinking; not gambling; not political campaign funding or publicity; not real estate development, house construction, or housing finance; not international travel, trade, or finance; not a thousand other areas and aspects of social life.

One might affirm that the state still keeps its hands off religion, but it actually does not. It certifies certain religious organizations as legitimate and condemns others, as many young men discovered to their sorrow when they attempted to claim (more…)

I wrote this a dozen years ago, and I’ve posted it here before. It’s apposite today, because, to all indications, we are all about to be involuntarily inducted into a cannibal cult. My question for you: Will you choose to be devoured by your neighbors, or will you elect to devour them instead? –GSS

 
What I want to discuss is Socrates’ question about whether it is better to inflict an injury or to have an injury inflicted upon you. It’s a favorite of sophists and sophomores, I know, but I think it strikes at the very core of justice. The justice I seek and seek to defend is not “out there”, apart from myself. Justice (or injustice) is not what others do to me, it’s what I do to myself and to others. Where I find myself availing myself of the fallacies tu quoque or two wrongs make a right, I am rationalizing injustice, and the worst havoc I am wreaking is upon my own ego.

The Nazarene’s answer to Socrates was this: It is better to have an injury inflicted upon you, because redemption is still possible to one who has not inflicted injury upon another. I don’t believe in an afterlife (more…)

We have been cursed, as a civilization, because so much of the social sciences side of the university quadrangle has for so long been in the thrall of Marxism. It has been difficult for intellectuals to see the world for what it is, so avidly have they sought to portray it as the product of their preconceptions. Nothing changes quickly, but it is nice to see academics actually testing their theories in reality, rather than just blathering on out of prejudice.

Why am I in such a celebratory mood? Anthropologists in Canada have discovered that the so-called “noble savage” is quite a bit less than noble, while the much maligned greedy capitalists of the West are in fact kinder, gentler, more trusting people. This is the sort of thing that should be obvious to anyone with eyes, but it takes an effort, apparently, to get a social scientist to take note of the territory instead of insisting on the sacred validity of the truth presented by the map.

From Canada’s National Post:

Free-enterprising, impersonal markets may seem cutthroat and mean-spirited, but a provocative new study says markets have been a force for good over the last 10,000 years, helping to drive the evolution of (more…)