Monthly Archives: January 2018

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by Reid Fitzsimons

Robert Casey, Jr is the senior senator from Pennsylvania. He has a name you might know in that his late father was a former governor of PA and one of the last truly Pro-Life Democrats, a belief and position which is now incompatible with being a Democrat. His son the senator, whose qualifications are pretty much limited to the fact he is the son of a revered figure, lamely claims he is Pro-Life but this is fully contradicted by his actions. Why he feels the need for this pretension is not entirely clear. Certainly he’s aware there is an ethnic/Catholic voter demographic that wants to believe his utterances (Casey is one of those Catholics that rejects much of the church doctrine but enjoys the wafer and wine part), but I wonder if some deeper psychology is involved. Perhaps some Daddy issue- “I'd like to be a good boy, but if I do what is right the celebrities and hip media won’t let me be in their cub” kind of thing.

Hypocrisy is an inevitable frustration we encounter in life; it is especially annoying when it originates with our elected elites and when it is effective in terms of re-election, etc. In Sen. Casey’s case, his undying support of Planned Parenthood combined with his faux Pro-Life position makes one almost appreciate Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” sloganeering. Below is a letter sent to Casey’s senate e-mail address with three possible outcomes: no response (likely), a meaningless form letter response (likely), or a thoughtful reasoned argument (awaiting the cow to jump over the moon).

...continue reading →

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by Barry King

(Reviewer’s note: The Calvin and Hobbes Barry mentions refers not to the characters of the well known comic strip but to John Calvin, the somewhat theocratic theologian of Reformed Christianity from 500 years ago, and Thomas Hobbes, the social/political philosopher of 450-some years ago who was known for his book Leviathan and the concept of a “social contract.” Note the characters of the comic strip were named after the real Calvin and Hobbes.)

The modern debate about human nature goes back to Calvin & Hobbes, who asserted that natural (uncivilized) humans were totally depraved (The T in the Calvinist TULIP), and their lives were nasty, brutish, and short (from Leviathan), v. Rousseau, after it popped into his head without evidence, that the lives of savages were peaceful, easy, happy and idyllic, because, he thought, they were naturally and intrinsically good people (until "civilization" comes along and ruins them). Rousseau's view prevailed in France, informed the French Revolution, and that POV difference has been one of the most fundamental disagreements between the left and the right every since.

If there had been a "#metoo" campaign centuries ago, echoed by women all over the world, leading to a widely-held hypothesis that "all men are potential rapists", Calvin & Hobbes would have said, "well, yes, of course they are" while Rousseau would have asserted a more nuanced view, that sexual freedom was natural and therefore really cool (while assigning his own several illegitimate children to be raised by Hillary Clinton's proverbial peaceful, easy, happy and idyllic "village").

So here I sit trying to work out how and why the current iteration of "#metoo", and the associated widespread warlock hunts in Hollywood, academia, and Congress, seem to be coming mostly from the left. Human nature itself is not changing, so other things must be changing. The left now seems to be kind of saying to the right "OK we will join you in such moralistic crusades", while deploying Saul Alinsky's principle of holding the enemy to his own standards ("OK we're crucifying Franken, so you have to crucify Moore", with the tactical twist of saying, after Moore is dead, "oops, maybe we won't crucify Franken after all.")

If we date the current "sexual revolution" to the 1960s: is 50 years really enough time to rediscover the ancient notion that even if sexual freedom is natural, it's not necessarily really cool? I would have thought it would take longer than that, but maybe high tech accelerates social evolutionary processes.