Reflections From a Murky Pond

If America couldn’t have expanded westward, would the Civil War happened? Would it have happened without that opportunity for a massive trade imbalanced based upon the divergent costs of labor under respectively slave-holding and purely freemen societies?

Prima facie, this seems to be useless musing but it truly isn’t. It may be a very important question.

Face facts, the Civil War wasn’t a war to free the Black slaves per se. Nobody of any consequence wanted those slaves freed and even the rank and file Abolitionists favored a fanciful deportation / repatriation strategy.

Both the Civil War and most of the serious problems that led up to it were over allowing slavery to expand westward, either by the Southern states or, after the Secession, by a foreign nation. Business interests in the non-Slave states knew that they couldn’t compete against slave labor.

That was then and this is now, and that now includes America not being able to effectively against China, to lesser extent the rest of Asia, and the Developing World where, once again, what amounts to slave labor is used.

That is certainly worthy of consideration.

Mr. Rogers – The Garden Of Your Mind

Auto-tuneish or not, it’s cool and fine that PBS is doing what they can bring Mr. Rogers into the 21st century.

For good or ill I was exposed to a great deal of literature as a young child and encouraged to take full advantage of that privilege. Consequently, I became an avid reader starting at what most would consider a very young – I won’t, however, say “tender” – age.

It followed quite naturally that my reading greatly influenced my thoughts upon many things

While many, many books of varied sorts influenced my views on myriad topics, I truly believe that no single work influenced my thoughts on living more than Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love.

Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein finishes his “Future History” as presented to world by his then-editor, John W. Campbell. In it we are given a cornucopia of other stories, as Lazarus Long, now some 2300 years old, is induced to reminisce about his life as part of a complex deal to preserve the ‘wisdom’ of the oldest man alive. Each of the stories that Lazarus relates are fairly complete by themselves, and many authors would have chosen to publish each of them separately so as to maximize his monetary returns.

Heinlein, being the author and the man that we was, chose to keep them all as one piece, as each story helped to illuminate his overriding theme, on just what is love in all of its myriad aspects and why it is so important to man’s survival as a species.

This is a book that I strongly and most emphatically recommend for everyone, though not, perhaps, for children as young as I was when I first read it as it contains much that I prepubescent child cannot viscerally understand. This does, however, present a problem as many of the “lessons” contained within this work are best learned as young as possible.

Many Christians will have issues with this work; of this I have no doubts. I would suggest trying to get past this as the work contains many ethical and behavioral lessons of great worth.

If you can bring yourself to do so, put the situational details aside and absorb the underlying context and message.

Go to your your library and check it out if they have it. If not, buy it. In any event, read it. Personally, I’d suggest buying it since I’ve been returning to it for nigh on 40 years and love it still. It’s the sort of book that becomes an old friend and teacher – one that you keep coming back to and finding new meaning, joy, and sorrow in.

Time Enough For Love also contains two “interludes” which comprise the 64-page The Notebooks of Lazarus Long (Kindle), which I believe is a useful addition to anyone’s traveling library in the same fashion that Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Mushashi’s The Book of Five Rings, and Machiavelli’s The Prince are.

And yes, I know; it’s more than odd to include a work of fiction – science fiction at that! – alongside philosophical works such as I have done. Mr. Heinlein was that sort of man though. He, much like that radical rabbi from Nazareth, knew that parables teach far better than anything else.

Consider for a moment the homeless. Especially consider any one of the estimated 107,000 (0.035% of US population) chronically homeless within the borders of America.

Homeless, Hungry, Sick, and Tired – He Has No one

Why are this small number of people chronically living on the streets? The answer to that question may have greater importance for society than for these individuals.

At 0.035% of the American problem, the chronically homeless are hardly a national emergency and often get lost in the noise of homeless statistics.

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You hear a lot of people, mostly Liberals and Progressives, whining about supposed ad hominem attacks. They just don’t, from what I can see, have a firm grasp on what that term means.

Ad Hominem

A Hominem ( Latin for  “to the man” ) is short for argumentum ad hominem, a logical fallacy that is an attempt to negate the validity of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it.

While Leftists of all sorts do get abused regularly be citizens of the Civilized World, especially Americans, I see only a small minority of the occurrences being truly argumentum ad hominem.

In political discussions and across the blogosphere – neither a place known for staid and polite discourse – I see comparatively few instances where people have tried to negate the validity of a Leftist’s claim by pointing out the Leftist’s negative characteristics or beliefs.

I have, on the other hand, often seen examples of what I’ll call argumentum ad factis ( Latin for “to the facts” ). Very often people try negate the validity of Leftists by pointing out the negative characteristics of their arguments.

It’s not the same thing to say that they’re wrong because of their arguments (“ad factis“) as it is to say that their arguments are wrong because they said them (ad hominem).