Reflections From a Murky Pond

Adam Smith was an 18th century Scottish moral philosopher, a pioneer of political economy, and an important figure in the Enlightenment. He was a very wise man and helped shape much of the modern era’s thoughts upon the role of work and business in the world.

The Wisdom of Adam Smith

Sadly, Mr. Smith’s great wisdom has been largely lost, expunged from mainstream education by the Liberals and Progressives who’ve infiltrated the school systems and destroyed much of our children’s education.

There’s no room anymore for moral thought such has Adam Smith thought because the Liberals and Progressives indoctrinate all that they can in the belief that it is and should be out of benevolence that the makes provide for the eaters and takers and, if such largess can be voluntarily garnered, it must be coerced through fiat.

Rep. Pete Olson (R-TXs) and 10 other House Republicans have drafted four articles of impeachment against Holder. They plan on introducing these articles of impeachment as early as today, though the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) won’t commit to moving forward with any of the resolutions of impeachment.

Yet Rep. Goodlatte has little or argument with the content of these resolutions. He’s just unlikely to act upon them.

Under Attorney General Holder’s watch, there has been a lack of leadership and a politicization of the Justice Department. Scandals from the Fast and Furious gunwalking operation to the seizure of reporters’ emails and phone records in national security leaks investigations have undermined the Department’s credibility and the American people’s trust. Attorney General Holder has also politicized the rule of law by refusing to enforce laws he doesn’t like.”

The only way to restore credibility at the Department of Justice is through an improvement in the quality of leadership. President Obama should make a change in the leadership of the Department of Justice to restore the confidence of the American people in our nation’s top law enforcement agency.

This combined with the expected utter lack of support from Speaker John Boehner (“R”-OH) means that the efforts to impeach and remove Attorney General Eric Holder from office are most likely doomed from the start and that Holder will remain protected from the consequences of his myriad high crimes and misdemeanors.

A Moral And Philosophical Divide

Perhaps prophetically, the House is divided morally and philosophically on the matter of Impeaching Holder or Obama.  The House Republicans fall into two camps: those who adhere to the philosophy of Deontology and those who follow the dictates of Consequentialism. With the Senate, still being firmly in the hands of the Democrats, very unlikely to convict Holder no matter what he has done there is no point beyond doing the right thing for its own sake for the House to indict him.

Obviously, the deontologists want to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do and the fact that nothing will come of it doesn’t really come into the picture insofar as they’re concerned.

Conversely but equally obviously, the consequentialists want to do the right thing but only if doing so will produce a beneficial and ethical result, which any attempt to impeach Holder won’t do since, even of the House indicts, the Senate won’t convict.

With such a fundamental philosophical and ethical divide, the House is unlikely to take any action against Holder.

The Politics of Hate and Othering

Of course, one must not make the mistake of attributing too much devotion to people, especially professional politicians. Most people don’t have a strong tendency towards letting their ethics and morality cause them to put themselves at risk. This is even more true of professional politicians since they want to keep their jobs.

This tendency towards amorality in favor of survival is exacerbated by Obama’s success, with the aid of the ever-complicit Lamestream Media, in the politics of division, hate, and othering. He’s has both successfully redefined bipartisanship and labelled any GOP dissent from his agenda as obstructionist, classist, and racist. That inherently has a chilling effect on many Republican politicians – as Obama and his handlers meant it to.

This has, from what little we’re allowed to know about him, has always been Obama’s preferred modus operandi. He divides people, gets his side to think of the opposition as the Other, and gets them to vote against them rather than to vote for him.

~*~

So, for both philosophical and materialist reasons, I sincerely doubt that the impeachment of Eric Holder will move forward at all. Most likely it won’t even be heard or debated by the House Judiciary Committee Chairman.

The shortage of doctors in America and both the impact that this will have on ObamaCare and the impact that ObamaCare will have on this growing shortage can only be resolved in one fashion – assuming, of course, that ObamaCare continues. The government must force medical professionals to accept any and all patients that the government decides upon. Nothing short of enslaving doctors to the will of the State will work.

This is also the only way to make a dent in the costs of healthcare in America. Stripping doctors of the liberty to decide upon which and how many patients to take on will allow the government to decide upon how much they will pay doctors for the services and what specific services, tests, procedures, and medications they will provide those patients.

The only questions are whether providing doctors to anyone and everyone is worth stripping medical professionals of the Constitutionally enumerated rights and which will be the next profession that the government determines must be enslaved for “general welfare.”

OK; there’s one final question – Why in the name of the Gods hasn’t the American people risen up, dragged any and all of the politicians who advocate this – and any families they might have – into the public square, and burned them to death?

~*~

Keep your eyes open. Travel light but load heavy, and always put another round in the enemy after they’re down. 😉

“You can’t legislate morality” is one of the common refrains from Liberals and Progressives whenever they are faced with actual or proposed laws that would govern and place limits upon people’s behavior. Any time that Americans try to enforce and/or reinforce normative societal values the Leftists start screaming and raving about the separation of Church and State and that America’s de facto Christian ethos must not be enforced.

This demand of the Liberals and Progressives is beyond ridiculous and is patently false. Not only can you legislate morality but you must if you’re to have even a vestige of a hope for a functioning, civilized society. This means that whenever the Liberals and Progressives rant about legislating morality they’re actually admitting their own immorality since they cannot abide by these moral strictures.

Moral Law

Frankly, the vast majority of civil laws, and all the truly important ones, in America are based largely or solely on moral law and, as well, upon Jude-Christian religious law.

• Slavery – The prohibition against chattel slavery is solely based upon morality.  It has no component that isn’t a legislation of morality.
• Murder – The prohibition against killing another person is largely, though not wholly, based upon morality. It is also a core tenet of Christianity.
• Rape – Treating rape as a crime largely, though not wholly, based upon morality. Treating it as as serious of a crime as we do is solely based upon morality.
• Civil Rights Laws – The whole of civil rights legislation is almost entirely composed of the legislation of morality and has little or no basis for existence beyond that of what is Right and Wrong.

The list could go on, and on, and on ad infinitum et nauseam, with each consecutive point further illuminating rank stupidity of ever claiming that one can’t and shouldn’t legislate morality.

Consensus Morality

One of the arguments that the Leftist apologists will use when faced with incontrovertible fact that the majority of laws are either wholly moral law or, at the very least, carry an implicit moral component is that America must only legislate morality within the context of an irreligious consensus morality. By that, of course, they mean that only those moral laws that can be agreed to by non-Christians can ever be considered valid and that anything that coincides with- or abides by the Judeo-Christian morality is inherently suspect and must be subject to strict scrutiny.

Leaving aside the anti-Theist in general and anti-Christian in specific bigotry and bias in this viewpoint, it’s also factually as ridiculous and patently false as their base claim that you can’t legislate morality. There is, by and large, no consensus morality, especially if one includes the views of non-Theists.

• Slavery – This is as close as we come to a true consensus morality enacted into law. Still there are a significant, and I’ll hazard growing, number of people who do not find explicit chattel slavery to be morally repugnant. There’s an even larger number that have no problems whatsoever with “softer” and more implicit forms of slavery as the dependence upon illegal immigrant labor clearly shows.
• Murder – There’s no moral consensus whatsoever on what even constitutes murder as opposed to a justified killing or it being a killing that isn’t quite wrong enough to be called murder.
• Rape – In no way, shape, or form is there consensus morality concerning rape as a crime.  We can’t even decide what the borderline is between consensual and non-consensual sex. Nor can we reach consensus on who can rape and who can be raped. Lastly, we’re nowhere near reaching a consensus upon grievousness of the crime.
• Civil Rights Laws – There’s little or no consensus on the plethora of civil rights laws in the US and what consensus there was is rapidly falling apart as more and more Americans find the various laws to be both out-dated and morally repugnant.

The above are just a very small sample set of the significant laws in America that Liberals and Progressives falsely or wrongly claim that are supported by- and serve an objective, non-religious moral consensus.

Their Morality, Not Ours

Of course these same Liberals and Progressives have no qualms about legislating their own brand of morality. That’s all that there various calls for “fairness” and equality of personal results are after all – calls to legislate their morality.

This is why these Liberals and Progressives are immoral instead of amoral. They have a moral compass; it just points towards a completely different “North” than that of normative Americans.

The Slippery Slope is generally considered to be a fallacy. It is an argument in which a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another, prior event without any providing any argument for the inevitability of the event in question. In most cases, there are a series of steps or gradations between the eventual event and the one being argued against but no reason is given as to why the intervening steps or gradations will simply be bypassed or enacted in their turn.

In general I agree. The Slippery Slope is a fallacy and, much more often than not, sloppy thinking. But what if we’re greasing the slope as it were?

Many laws, especially those dealing with sexual partnering, sexual acts, and sexual relationships are wholly or primarily based upon societal mores and cultural “prejudices.” Many of those laws that once had valid scientific rationales at one time have lost those rationals due to medical advances. Others had and still have outcome-based basis in the effects such things have upon the titular children of such unions, yet those negative consequences have been ignored in favor of a new ideology.

As you chip away at those laws that are based upon societal mores and cultural “prejudices” or apply new societal mores and cultural “prejudices” to existing situations you can make it so that each increase in permissiveness makes the next incremental increase that much more likely through normalizing or “main streaming” what was once unthought-of, abhorrent, and/or outre.

Western, especially American, jurisprudence also has to be taken into account because it’s inherently based upon Common Law and under the US interpretation of such court cases are decided based upon prior argument, precedents, and judicial pronouncements rather than solely on legislative enactments. in other words, arguments and verdicts in prior, similar court cases can be compelling or even binding precedents in current and future cases.

The Slope As It Was, Is, and Will Probably Be

Progress Is Opinion. Progression Is Mathematics

The battle to overturn the laws against miscegenation was long and hard-fought but it was victorious. But many of the same arguments that were successfully used Loving v. Virginia to end those “Jim Crow” statutes were later used in Lawrence v. Texas to abolish or make largely enforceable the various laws against: Sodomy, Fornication, Adultery, and violent sexual fetishism (BDSM). In turn, arguments from both Loving and Lawrence have been used to legalize Gay Marriage in various states and to overturn DOMA at the federal level.

Each set of court cases added their levels of grease to the slope, making it increasingly slippery. Hence, there is no logical reason not to predict that this progression will continue and that these increasingly entrenched arguments and precedents will be used to legalizing polygamy, incest, and some forms and/or levels of pedophilia.