"Culturism"

Rich Nikoley is a culturist.

I get it. I am, too. I know exactly what he's talking about, and I've had easily enough experience to understand it and agree. He's right. This is a perfectly clear concept that he's laid out, although, these days, I could see any number of people losing their minds behind it.

I might pick at one aspect of it. To "judge that all cultures on Earth are to varying degrees inferior to the idealized American culture" is simply to endorse observable facts, and I would not call that a "prejudice".

The crucial thing about all this is whether any given individual subscribes and actively endorses any given culture. The free will of an individual always implies the possibility of theoretical and practical dissent from the prevailing ethics of his time. It should be pointed out that this is profoundly American, and one of its greatest manifestions is one that Rich points out: America is "capable of absorbing the best from all other cultures". It's not for nothin' that individuals from around the world came here with their very best. Cultures are won or lost, flourish or languish, one person at a time. Sometimes, there are large numbers of them making roughly the same sorts of value decisions at the same time -- concurrently, not collectively -- but it is nonetheless the responsibility of every individual to see to their own convictions.

This Won't Do

"First, Socialism is an economic system, and is not particularly related to a particular tax system."

This person is abysmally stupid.

Extraordinarily (meaning: in times not like these), I would say that it is astounding to see him accorded the respect that he gets. Unfortunately, this horseshit is just par for the course.

And he has the motherfucking nerve to run his insipid yap about "the real world".

If "the world" gets any more "real", he'll have an interrogater squashing his balls with a finely polished boot-toe on an antique carpet deep in some commisar's bunker, which is where he's headed and he's too bloody dim to know it.

He'll deserve it, though, because there is simply no excuse for him to be running a line like that.

That's why I have such an attitude on about it. There is simply no excuse for him -- or anyone else -- to be parroting what someone jammed into his brain before he thought about it, and take my word for it: he's simply not bright enough to have come up with that on his own. It's just taken up residence in his head like some kind of alien that he's grown happy at living with. He doesn't know the very first thing that he's talking about, but he sure is getting popular.

Look out.

Enduring Credulities

Just now on ABC's "This Week", Sam Donaldson sneered at George Bush for tagging FDR with his complicity at Yalta for the disaster that overwhelmed eastern Europe at the end of World War II. Donaldson cited Ronald Reagan asserting that Josef Stalin had "broken his word" promising elections in those countries.

I don't have a cite from Reagan, so I can't argue what he said or didn't say. I will, however, point out that anyone who took Stalin at his word was a functional retard who deserved whatever he got. The tragedy of history, of course, is that the people who lived and died under the Soviet yoke didn't deserve what they got.

Yalta was an abominable disgrace to a nation that went to war under the auspices that America did in World War II. In a rational culture, it might be enough to say that this fact should never be forgotten. What's worse is the truth, which is: it is a fact that would have to be learned before it could ever be forgotten.

In Case You Didn't Notice

Greg Ransom is back up after being down for over three weeks.