There Will Never be a Way

What is art? Here is a definition from Google:

 (art is) "...The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power."

Or this, from the Britannica on-line dictionary:

"...Something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings."

Now the question is, are these valid definitions? All art is simply the expression of human creative skill and imagination ? That sounds good enough for me, but I would have to add that art also has a deeply subjective value, either to the artist or to his patrons, or both. People are willing to spend time and money on producing art, and consuming art. There are both spiritual and material components involved here that the vast majority of us take very seriously.

A Symptom of Cultural Rot

 

It seems like the absolutely coolest thing in the world to do, is to scoff at even the very idea of sexual morality. Not only that, but there's also this thing about scoffing at traditional gender roles. Women are told that they don't have to be women, and men are told they don't have to be men. Holding these attitudes at the same time makes you warmly accepted on social media. Just say "men can have periods", and you're in.

Then there's the biological male athletes who identify as trans competing against biological women. They think everyone should be focused on the tranny's struggle to overcome sexual dysphoria and social conditioning. Fairness-justice-to the real women athletes-is irrelevant. Also, there are men who honestly believe that the best way to get a mate is to feign suspicion and contempt for maleness-and essentially, become feminine.

All of this is clearly absurd, and irrational. In this worldview, the law of identity (everything is what it is) does not apply. Contradictions exist. 

Victor Davis Hanson's lecture Hillsdale College

“Mr. Hanson, an accomplished classicist and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is one of the great amalgamators of American political writing. He has a particular gift for bringing together a dizzying array of events, controversies and ideas and making sense of them by advancing a coherent argument that incorporates thousands of years of history… Mr. Hanson hits hard, but I don’t find his analysis unfair or partisan. There is enormous value, moreover, in thinking about toxic political developments not as problems of the moment but as destructive pathologies to which all societies are prone at all times.”―Wall Street Journal

Politics and the English Language

by George Orwell

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Elian Gonzalez Revisited

It seems like so long ago now, but I remember when I first became really interested in politics. It was the Elian Gonzalez affair, about twenty or so years ago now, that caught my attention.

Individual Human Rights

by John Russell Turner

For Erich Ferger

THERE ARE ONLY THREE RIGHTS which every man, woman, and child possess, regardless of their gender, skin color, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, or political orientation:

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

-United States Declaration of Independence

Let's recap: the three rights are: 1. the right to life, to live; 2. the right to liberty; and 3. the right, i.e., the liberty or the freedom, to pursue that which makes one happy, as long as in so doing, you do not kill, do physical harm, nor steal from anyone. These rights can not, must not, be taken away from any person without legal due process (they are inalienable), and for violation of clearly defined, morally objective laws. 

Furthermore, these rights are not granted by man, by the state, nor by any human group or society, nor by any individual. They are granted by the Creator,  by God. And if you don't believe in God, these rights are intrinsic in our nature as human beings. We are literally born with these rights. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Period.

All the other so-called "rights" we hear about, the alleged right to a job, housing, medical care, et al, are not given to us by God, nor by our nature as human beings. These are not rights, they are entitlements, usually given to people by a government agency. Such entitlements require the transfer of economic goods (jobs, services, money, and stuff) from the producer of those goods to the taker of those goods. If citizen A is told he has a right to a job, and so decides to collect on this right, citizen B must give it to him. If citizen B refuses, then by any number of methods (threat of imprisonment, fines, and ultimately, death if he refuses hard enough), the government will force him to do so. This is clearly immoral, because it violates citizen B's rights to hold property, his right to pursue his happiness without being literally robbed in order to supply someone else's "right" to his property. The right to own, and to freely dispose of property is a necessary corollary to the right to live, and to pursue happiness. This is because of man's nature, of his means of survival. He or she builds a house, buys a car and clothes, and plants, raises, or buys food. These things are his, for him to dispose of as she, or he sees fit, so that he might live a reasonably happy life.

Socialism, in essence, is parasitism, but of a weird, bizarre kind because it is human parasitism upon other humans. Cannibalism. Furthermore, it offers the hideous spectacle of evil masquerading as good, since it all depends not on the moral and just, but on violence and death. Such is the moral sewer underneath the concept of socialistic, man- granted rights.

On a personal note, this is why I believe in God, why I believe that all of my rights come from Him, and not from the state. When rights come from the state, hell ensues, and we get rivers of blood and corpses stacked on top of each other in ditches.

On Abortion

by John Russell Turner

The human right to life begins at conception. At the very instant of conception, human life begins, and so the basic human right to life begins. That is why I say: abortion is murder.

To say that life begins at any other point besides conception is arbitrary and ultimately, self serving. For if you can say that life and the right to live begins at birth, then you could also say life and the right to live begins at any age. Just because an individual is physically under-developed does not disqualify that individual from his or her right to live. Pro-abortionists see the line drawn when the child travels through the birth canal and into the outside world. Before that, the child was living inside his mother' body, just a clump of cells with the potential to become human, but not actually human. Why? Under what criteria, then, do we objectively define when this "clump of cells" is actually human? Furthermore, abortion is a hideous act of evil, not only because the baby is defenseless, totally dependent upon his or her mother, but because most people (but not all, and this is important) support abortion so as to have sex without consequences. Murder and betrayal, for convenience. Abortion, as birth control.

Whatever you want to call an unborn human being- zygote, embryo, fetus, a clump of cells, etc., this is a separate, distinct individual existing inside the mother's body.  It's not the mother's body, it's the baby's body, and the baby's life.