Dec 22
To Jeremy Tedesco and his blogpost reporting on a Minnesota law that threatens a Christian filmmaker for making a film celebrating traditional marriage. This appeared in the Gospel Coalition website.
As much as the law mentioned and its interpretation are disturbing and outside the bounds of previous laws about respecting LGBT rights in a Capitalist economy, we need to remember the past in order to gain a partial understanding about the present. For centuries, homosexuality was considered a criminal offense that could lead to the incarceration of its practitioners. Has practicing Christianity ever become a criminal offense in America? In addition, in the majority of our states, people can be legally harassed and even terminated from their jobs because of their sexual orientation. In contrast to that, we Christians have religious freedom laws that protect workers from the same mistreatment when that mistreatment is based on religion. In addition, many Christians have talked about homosexuality in ways that encourages violence against those who practice homosexuality.
The point being is that some of the intolerant reaction against our beliefs about sexuality merely shows a change in the direction of the swing of the pendulum; the intolerant reaction has a context. To not see the Minnesota law referred above nor its interpretation as a result of the pendulum swing reversing direction is to decontextualize what is happening and to pretend that we are becoming innocent victims of unprovoked responses.
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Dec 24
To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost quote of an article that claims that the province of Ontario’s Bill 28 is laying the groundwork for the state to be able to arbitrarily designate who the parents of a any child is. This appeared in Heidelblog.
The article from which the quote comes makes a big deal out of the substitutions made for the words 'mother' and 'father.' However, the conceptual definitions of the parents is still the same. Having gone through part of the Bill, what I see is a lot of gender neutral substitutions for the those words. The bill itself is is simply a legal recognition of who the parents are under a variety of situations such as natural birth in a variety of spousal and conjugal relationships as well as surrogacy and other situations. Will read further but would appreciate any specific parts that lead the author of the article to conclude this leads to a state abrogating the rights of the parents.
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Dec 27
To Paul Gottfried and his blogpost about the past conservative battle between paleoconservatives and neoconservatives. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
A couple facts have emerged about neoconservatism as time has gone on. First, Conservatives do not have a monopoly on neoconservatism. Some political liberals have also embraced its basic tenets and this is seen some of the foreign policies pursued by many Democrats. Second, just as not all neoconservatives are political conservatives, not all political conservatives are neoconservatives. Though this second fact was well know to only a few, it is now becoming known to more and more people.
But as far as I can tell, paleoconservatism and neoconservatism share the same basic desire for exercising some degree of dominance over those who are different. The difference between them is in the theaters of their operations. While neoconservatism's theaters of operation is in the world, paleoconservatism's theater of operation is the nation. And because paleoconservatism's mode of control is by controlling culture and, as the Alt-Right has correctly pointed out, that our culture cannot be separated from race, it seems rather consistent that paleoconservatives, or the Old Right back then, resisted Civil Rights and the Civil Rights Voting Act of 1964 in the past. And it would be inconsistent for them to significantly reverse course today. In saying that, I am not equating the paleoconservatism with the Alt-Right. It is that the Alt-Right, for all of its horrendous faults, can make a few correct and informative observations.
Thus, the paleoconservates' efforts to seek control culture by forcing it to maintain its original Western identity here is simply doing what its liberal and leftist counterparts are trying to do nationally and what their neoconservative counterparts want to do globally: that is to rule, to some degree, over others rather than to work them as equals by collaborating.
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To Joe Carter and his blogpost on Thomas Sowell’s escape from what he called Socialism. This appeared in the Acton blog. This additional link is the article Carter’s blogpost was citing where the below comment was also blocked.
As I read the article on Sowell's escape from Socialism, I concluded that though Sowell understood the basic problem Socialism was addresses, his identifying of the players was backwards. Of course his identifying of the players assumes that Socialism is elite-centered rule by big government so that the only elites recognized by Sowell were those from the public sector. What we should note is that the public sector has not cornered the market on elites. Please note the research cited claiming that America is now an oligarchy rather than a democracy (see http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 ). And with that claim comes an elite population that arises from the private sector.
Sowell's basic argument is that the collective wisdom of the many outweighs the collective wisdom of the few--this is an argument with which I, as a Socialist, agree. But more than the fact that there are more people who run businesses than there are elites in the government, there are more workers working in businesses than there are those who run them. And in an investor-oriented economy, what is often the case is that the major investors have far more say in the decision making process than workers do. And while those investors want their executives to follow the de facto ethic of maximizing profits, the welfare of those who make the actual products and provide the services that provide the ROI desired by these investors, as well as other stakeholders, is often ignored. That ethic is carnivorous as it devours all other ethics that get in its way. Thus, what we have we have with many major investors today is analogous to absentee landlords. We should note that such landlords care little about what they were providing for their tenants because all they cared about was what profit they could extract from their properties
Sowell's view of Socialism misses Rosa Luxemburg's critique of Lenin's rule after the Russian Revolution of October, 1917. For Luxemburg said that what Lenin was doing was to institute a bourgeoisie dictatorship. Why did she call it a bourgeoisie dictatorship? It was because his elite-centered rule with a centralized government was modeled on how the bourgeoisie organized their businesses (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch08.htm ). And we should note that what followed Lenin was an expansion of his bourgeoisie dictatorship.
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