Newt Gingrich has a piece on our current despotic regime; he looks at a Google search for “totalitarian impulse” and finds
There is a clear and growing understanding among many smart people that we are on the edge of a totalitarian takeover of our culture, institutions, and lives.
Well, yeah, I’d say that is a problem wherever and whenever there are people that think we can make the world better with politics.
I have an acquaintance who looks on the current world of identity politics and notes that it is “turning us into a nation of oppressed and oppressors, so that Washington’s ‘progressives’ can ride in as savior.” Only maybe we should celebrate our achievements in the arena of “rights” and stop pretending things are getting worse.
And yeah, if protesting for rights worked well in the past then it ought to work well in the present and future. Right?
But then I was reading a long piece on obesity full of buzzwords: "society-wide," "tackle," "experts," "scientists," and calling for a "effective, scalable solution."
Really? Do we have to get government deeper into the diet and obesity game? Hasn’t this already proved to be a complete failure ever since the days of Ancel Keys and the war on fat — although La Wik still thinks he was a good guy.
This gives me a chance to rehearse my Narrative on politics, on the basis of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s notion that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy.
I say that human politics is based on chimpanzee culture where the males defend the food-growing territory against the males from the neighboring troop. Clearly, it is a matter of life and death that the troop has enough territory to feed the females and their baby chimps.
But at some point before the Roman Empire and its legions conquered land from Britland to Scythia for its booty and its slaves, humans lost the plot, as the Brits say.
You could say that we finally made the transition from the sublime to the ridiculous when Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf asserted that of course the Germans needed to conquer Eastern Europe so that Germans could grow their own food. No, Adolf: the Germans, the ones that invented the automobile and quantum mechanics, would do much better buying grain from Russia with the money earned by their world famous Mittelstand manufacturers.
Yeah. So what did World War Hitler achieve, exactly? Other than send a bunch of experts through 109 East Palace in Santa Fe, NM, for a chat with Dorothy McKibbin and a trip up to Los Alamos to develop the first atom bomb.
By the way, there is a curious fact about the nuclear age. Up to the present moment, nuclear powers have not gone to war with each other. President Biden please note. I wonder what that means.
Where was I? Oh yes. I believe that once we humans got out of the era of the troop defending its food-growing area from the neighboring troop then we don’t need no stinkin’ leader leading us against the stinkin’ neighbors encroaching on our land.
But whatabout the Age of Imperialism? I agree. It was monstrous of the Brits do an end run around the good old taxable trade routes in the Middle East and substitute their ocean going ships sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, and doing an end run around the Portuguese that first thought of it. And then ship their “waste population” off, filling up the Americas with White Trash right alongside the noble West Africans picked off by their tribal chiefs as their own “waste population” to be sold to the slaver cartel and sent to the Americas. And then allow the Puritans to skedaddle from Europe to New England. And then, oh no! There were the kids that got in a bit of trouble with the local notables — folks like Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale — that didn’t wear no stinkin’ Scarlet Letter but headed out West to the territory.
But that was nothing to the Age of Equality. Frenchie egalitarians decided that it was time to cart off les aristos, and appropriately for the age of machines, asked Joseph-Ignace Guillotin to invent a machine to execute the annoying 50,000 aristos and their aristo-adjacents. And then the moralists of the US decided to free the slaves at a cost of 700,000 dead and a century of Jim Crow. Then our noble leaders fought World War Practice helping along the Cuban Revolution and the Philippine Revolution. Then we joined in World War Kaiser and helped revolutionary Vladimir Lenin bring equality to Russia, at a cost of a mere 5,000,000 deaths in the Holodomor, and who knows how many more in the Great Purge and World War Hitler. And that gave the philosopher Mao Zedong a chance to equalize the Cchinese people at a cost of at least 55,000,000 dead. Then the egalitarians decided to obliterate the mutual-aid culture in Europe and the US and substitute a staggeringly expensive welfare state that today sucks up about 30-40 percent of GDP. Then the egalitarians decided that civil rights for blacks, and liberation for women, and marriage for gays, and access to women’s restrooms and sports for transgenders wasn’t enough and so all white armed insurrectionists — and don’t worry, the FBI knows who they are — should be sent to jail, pour encourager les autres.
Are you getting a bit tired of all this? I know I am.
The solution is quite simple. We tell the educated idiots to Go Away. But how? Maybe Elon Musk can send them all to Occupy Mars.
No wait. Elon should send them to “tackle” Mars.