Ponderances …
1) They walk out into the outside world with no real clue as to what the real outside world is like.
2) No, I wouldn’t say that is a myth that there is a difference in wages. I might stop short of calling it discrimination.
3) It only weakens you is you actually pay any attention to it.
4) A bit perhaps. Less so than it used to be. Not so much as freedom of speech, religion, etc.
5) The national debt. Numbers with lots of zeros behind them frighten me.
1. A sense of entitlement, poor work ethic, and no respect for authority/rules. (along with what Stanley put)
2. No comment.
3. It turns them into touchy feely “everybodys a winner” weenie liberals.
4. It is the keystone. Without RKBA, the other freedoms would start to erode.
5. Lack of patriotism and eroding values. MSM propaganda is the driving factor.
Posted by Semper Squidelis
05/19/2005 at 05:30 PM
(1): Ayn Rand made the best comparison. Our diseducation system does for young people what birds would do for their babies, if they tore the wings off their babies before throwing them out of the nest.
(2): There are wage differences to be found, but like Stanley, I am reluctant to lump them under the term of “discrimination.”
(3): PC aggravates the weakness of being afraid to trust the witness of your own eyes, the validity of your own reasoning, and the conclusions your own reasoning provides you. A “thou-shalt-think” ideology offers you a sense of security in such a case. But it gets nowhere with you unless you are already vulnerable to it.
(4): An armed population is a free population. All other political freedoms depend on your ability (and willingness!) to defend them against those who would take them away.
(5): I believe that our greatest weakness is a lack of national unity. In the absence of this, a sense of national purpose or mission is bound to falter, and our national strength falters with it. As Lincoln put it, a house divided cannot stand.
1. Ideological uniformity in higher education has led to daily, systematic deprivation of the civil liberties of students and professors. 70% of college campuses have freedom-squelching speech codes. This is suppression of Constitutionally protected free speech. It leads to the exclusion of people of faith from campuses, it twists hiring and admission practices, suppresses classroom discussion, and ultimately promulgates an atmosphere of fear. In the absence of intellectual competition, sheltered students who emerge from this one-party state are bereft of any means of negotiating with reality once they engage in politics as adults. Instead of being given the background knowledge of American institutions they need to make judgments as citizens, they are fed attitudes. Credulous undergrads fall prey to priestly professors who claim to be initiating them into the subterranean mysteries. Those who buy into this worldview are left both insufferably pretentious and substantively silly.
2. Women, better than men, tend to something that equal pay advocates do not: that we cannot measure happiness and success purely in monetary terms. Women simply choose to work in different fields, and many of those pay less. It remains the woman’s choice. Men who work more dangerous positions, positions that women would naturally not want to work, are certainly paid higher for that danger. Men place more weight on compensation and potential for advancement, while women favor instead an emotionally rewarding job and healthy work environment. Women’s organizations insist on defining success and happiness purely in economic terms. So of course when they discover that wages are not equal, they cry sexism, never considering the possibility that the gap is due to women’s choices. Their story is tired. Their political agenda is disconnected from reality.
3. The self-help movement has changed the meanings of right and wrong, good and bad, winning and losing, while attaching entirely foreign connotations to once commonly understood terms like family, love, discipline, blame, excellence, and self-esteem. Two polar camps within the movement contend for influence: the ‘victimization’ camp has eroded time-honored notions of personal responsibility, convincing its believers that they’re simply pawns in a hostile universe, that they can never really escape their past or their biological make-up. The other camp, focused on ‘empowerment’ has drilled a generation of young people in the belief that simply aspiring to something is the same as achieving it, and that a sense of “positive self-worth” is more valuable than developing the talents or skills that earn recognition from others.
4. Guns owners believe that guns symbolize core American values: freedom, independence, individualism, and equality. They are principally interested in two related issues: social equality (the idea that all individuals should have equal access to societal benefits) and political equality (the idea that all individuals should have equal access to political rights and guarantees). These basic kinds of equality are woven into the fabric of American history and are a hallmark of living in a country that is indeed governed by its citizens.
5. Political correctness. Beneath any problem of our society today lies an element of political correctness.
Posted by Phoenix
05/19/2005 at 06:59 PM
Tanny,
Good answers. Especially, #3.
Posted by Phoenix
05/19/2005 at 07:05 PM
Damn Phoenix, I love you for your brains.
Thank you, Phoenix, but your answers are a lot more comprehensive and more worthy of note. And I like Stanley’s and Semper’s answers, too.
It is good when Steel gives us something like this to get our philosophical teeth into.
Keep up the good work, all.
Oh, Stan,
It’s okay if you love me for my body. I don’t mind. I’m not one of those tawdry, bitchin’ feminists. Besides, I can two-step, and I’m sure if you were to two-step me around the old corral, I’d fall in love. And probably right into the hay.
:=}
Posted by Phoenix
05/19/2005 at 09:16 PM
Semper: Ditto
Posted by Z Woof
05/20/2005 at 10:37 AM
Phoenix thinks too much.
Posted by Steel Turman
05/21/2005 at 12:43 AM
#5. I’ll answer the question with a question. What is the most important political office in a representative republic like ours?
Chistopher ...
How about ... voter?
Posted by Steel Turman
05/21/2005 at 02:37 AM
You’re on the right track. I was thinking of citizen. One of the things a citizen does is vote. Let’s name some other things that would come under the heading of ‘good citizenship.’
(have to dig out my trusty old, dog-eared, copy of the Citizenship merit badge pamphlet...)
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