PeteFree.comIntelligent cultural insights from — William Astore, Ron Paul and Baruch Pletner
© 2019 Peter Free
25 November 2019
Idiocy is drowning us
However, some capable people are fighting it.
Three such are William Astore, Ron Paul and Baruch Pletner.
Had we many more of the same, we could build a lifeboat.
Call it an Ark.
For instance — William Astore
Astore wrote a brief summary of the candidates at the fifth Democratic presidential debate. His summary is remarkable for its ability to capture a BS-avoiding candidate picture in two or three sentences:
W. J. Astore, The Democratic Debate for 2020, Part 5, Bracing Views (21 November 2019)
Similarly — Ron Paul
Libertarian Ron Paul cut through the charade that the Democratic Party's absurdly narrow impeachment process has generated:
[Lt Col] Vindman did not witness any crimes, he just didn’t think the elected President of the United States had any right to change US policy toward Ukraine or Russia!
And who gets to decide US foreign policy objectives in Europe?
Not the US President, according to government bureaucrat [and Vindman's boss] Fiona Hill.
Who was Fiona Hill’s boss?
Former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who no doubt agreed that the president has no right to change US foreign policy.
Bolton’s the one who “explained” that when Trump said US troops would come home it actually meant troops would stay put.
One by one, the parade of “witnesses” before House Intelligence Committee Chairman Schiff sang from the same songbook.
Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans in large majority voted to continue spying on the rest of us by extending the unpatriotic Patriot Act.
Authoritarianism is the real bipartisan philosophy in Washington.
© 2019 Ron Paul, The Real Bombshell of the Impeachment Hearings, Unz Review (25 November 2019) (excerpts)
Paul did not mention the nauseating fawning over the militaristically inclined Vindman.
Israeli military veteran Baruch Pletner, fortunately, did.
Be careful whom you worship — Baruch Pletner
Pletner speaks from a Zionist perspective that I do not usually credit with humane wisdom.
However, he said something accurate about the United States' increasingly totalitarian culture:
When Douglas MacArthur, a five-star general, received the unconditional surrender of the Japanese Empire on board the battleship Missouri, he did so without a coat or tie, wearing not a single piece of insignia beyond his rank.
When Lt. Col. Vindman testified before Congress on a matter that had nothing to do with his military service, he wore so many military insignia that he could easily put to shame any Soviet or North Korean officer or equivalent rank.
The moral of this story is simple: a nation’s vigor, morality, and military prowess is inversely proportional to the weight of the insignia worn by its military officers.
When there is no more room to pin as much as a penny to their chests, we can be sure that our freedoms are gone, that we live under a totalitarian regime, and that the military brass does not work for us the people, but precisely and specifically against us.
The Achilles heel of nationalists, is our penchant for giving the military and various law enforcement and intelligence agencies deference that they long since have stopped deserving.
This is true . . . well documented by historical examples from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union.
Not only are the American security services . . . excluded from America’s descent into deep state totalitarianism, they are at the spearhead of this descent.
© 2019 Baruch Pletner, Patriots Must Scrutinize, Criticize, And Fear The Military, Intelligence, And Law Enforcement Agencies More Than Any Other Branch Of Government, Tsionizm (24 November 2019) (excerpts)
The moral? — Be wary of our cultural direction
A fondness for unnecessary war-making is not good for personal or national soul.
That this is not self-evident (to most of us) says something ethically negative about American society.
Is — "We are devils, but mighty" — good enough?
And for whom?