PILOT SPIN
Spin Zone => Spin Zone => Topic started by: Lucifer on December 04, 2018, 11:03:52 AM
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I like listening to or reading Camille Paglia.
She is usually spot on with her observations and calls it like it is. This article is a good read.
https://spectator.us/camille-paglia-hillary-trump/
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Thanks for sharing, good read.
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Wow, brilliant. And much deeper than what Hillary wants. Here's part:
The deep state is no myth but a sodden, intertwined mass of bloated, self-replicating bureaucracy that constitutes the real power in Washington and that stubbornly outlasts every administration. As government programs have incrementally multiplied, so has their regulatory apparatus, with its intrusive byzantine minutiae. Recently tagged as a source of anti-Trump conspiracy among embedded Democrats, the deep state is probably equally populated by Republicans and apolitical functionaries of Bartleby the Scrivener blandness. Its spreading sclerotic mass is wasteful, redundant, and ultimately tyrannical.
I have been trying for decades to get my fellow Democrats to realize how unchecked bureaucracy, in government or academe, is inherently authoritarian and illiberal. A persistent characteristic of civilizations in decline throughout history has been their self-strangling by slow, swollen, and stupid bureaucracies. The current atrocity of crippling student debt in the US is a direct product of an unholy alliance between college administrations and federal bureaucrats — a scandal that ballooned over two decades with barely a word of protest from our putative academic leftists, lost in their post-structuralist fantasies. Political correctness was not created by administrators, but it is ever-expanding campus bureaucracies that have constructed and currently enforce the oppressively rule-ridden regime of college life.
In the modern world, so wondrously but perilously interconnected, a principle of periodic reduction of bureaucracy should be built into every social organism. Freedom cannot survive otherwise.
She NAILS it!
What is true multiculturalism?
As I repeatedly argue in Provocations, comparative religion is the true multiculturalism and should be installed as the core curriculum in every undergraduate program. From my perspective as an atheist as well as a career college teacher, secular humanism has been a disastrous failure. Too many young people raised in affluent liberal homes are arriving at elite colleges and universities with skittish, unformed personalities and shockingly narrow views of human existence, confined to inflammatory and divisive identity politics.
Interest in Hinduism and Buddhism was everywhere in the 1960s counterculture, but it gradually dissipated partly because those most drawn to ‘cosmic consciousness’ either disabled themselves by excess drug use or shunned the academic ladder of graduate school. I contend that every educated person should be conversant with the sacred texts, rituals, and symbol systems of the great world religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Islam — and that true global understanding is impossible without such knowledge.
Not least, the juxtaposition of historically evolving spiritual codes tutors the young in ethical reasoning and the creation of meaning. Right now, the campus religion remains nihilist, meaning-destroying post-structuralism, whose pilfering god, the one-note Foucault, had near-zero scholarly knowledge of anything before or beyond the European Enlightenment. (His sparse writing on classical antiquity is risible.) Out with the false idols and in with the true!
An atheist admitting that secular humanism is a disastrous failure. It's true, but not because atheism isn't a reasonable philosophy if that's your thing, but because she sees that the lack of exposure to a range of human religions is resulting in deeply ignorant youth ungrounded in any moral compass and lacking understanding of all the historical and geographical contexts that juxtapose the world's religions. Wow, what an interesting observation.
Also this points out a huge difference between the idealistic liberals of the 60s and today's typical liberal. I have been looking for an opportunity to point this out: The late 60s and early 70s were my formative years and I was heavily influenced by the liberal movement, while not ever embracing the economic collectivism part of it. Looking for morality and spiritual connection was very big, and feelings of responsibility for your fellow man was huge. There was no prejudice against Christianity that I could see, in fact, it was acceptable to be Christian, as long as you wore beads and had long hair, and were also open to other spiritual pathways. Remember the Doobie Brothers, "Jesus is just alright by me"? Can you imagine such a song TODAY? Today's liberal would ban it! Schools would ban it! Remember the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar? It was HUGE. The same liberals that loved Jesus Christ Superstar also studied cosmic consciousness and all the other religions because exploring morality and expanding one's world view to include understanding other points of view was a big thing.
Today's liberal is shallow and rigid and all about imposing speech control on anyone that disagrees with a very narrow and limited viewpoint. They give lip service to multiculturalism and to them it means if you don't have people of many skin colors in your group you are RACIST. If you don't open your arms to Muslim fundamentalism you are RACIST. If you don't proclaim the superiority of stone age native American tribalism you are RACIST. And it ends there: There are NO explorations of expanded moral consciousness (which includes CHRISTIAN and must, because all mystical spirituality admits to being the search for GOD period, without further definition and so therefore must include Christianity).
No, today's liberal instead of being open to all viewpoints has chosen to define the world as consisting of a set of victimized minorities, against evil everyone else, and that's the end of it - there is NO exploration of spirituality or being open minded and most especially not of Christianity which is now completely part and parcel of deplorable racist zenophobic Trumpsters.
On top of that philosophical wasteland they also mindlessly embrace economic collectivism. Youth that couldn't give a definition of socialism if their life depended on it. THIS is what we have today as a "liberal" ladies and gentlemen. If there was any saving grace in the liberals of the 60s it isn't now, now it's become a fascist power-grab at the top, and a bunch of vapid idiots at the bottom.