Greene Is Good!

Greene Is Good!
Greene Is Good!

Greene is good! At least in the case Of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA 14) this is true. Is she the perfect Representative or even close to perfect? No. But, as Voltaire wisely aphorized, “Perfect is the enemy of good.”

Rep. Greene is a staunch defender of Americans’ core liberties, especially their individual right to defend their own liberties, and has spent a great deal of effort in trying to hold the Democrats accountable for their theft of the 2020 elections and the illegal witch-hunts subsequently waged against President Trump. That is good and good is enough.

Besides, Americans’ domestic enemies hate her with black, bleeding, festering passion. And that is not only proof of Greene being good, it’s good enough for me in and of itself.

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Bastiat’s Conundrum

Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, a 19th Century economist and political philosopher of the French Liberal Schoolthink proto-libertarian – was more than a little concerned about society turning its back to what is good and embracing what it is evil.

When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.

— Frédéric Bastiat
Economic Harmonies (1850 AD)

Not, of course that this is new thought or warning. It goes back to at least Biblical times.

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Isaiah 5:20, The Bible (KJV)

But, inherent to these very thoughts and proscriptions in the conundrum. Who are the misguided of the public? Who, indeed, have chosen to call evil good, and good evil? When a society – truly, at this point more of a population than a society – cannot even agree upon what words mean, much less what are examples thereof, it becomes almost moot to try to decide this. And yet, from the standpoint of both utility and primal, existential need, decide this America must do.

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Good Muslims

In my rarely humble opinion, it’s a sad thing that the majority of people don’t believe that there’s any such thing as “Good Muslims.” This is patently untrue; both the world and history are filled with literally billions of good Muslims, Muslims who neither claim nor offense and who commit no acts of evil and/or savagery in their name of either their God or their Pedophile Prophet.

The World Is Filled With Good Muslims

It is simply the duty of Man to purge the evil and bring out the good in the Muslim population, not in the manner of war but in the manner of supporting the public health. 😉

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Reciprocal Engine

ReciprocityI have posted before about the ethics of reciprocity – the “Golden Rule” – as have others that I know online, which is not surprising since this Golden Rule seems fundamental to almost all ethical thought, philosophies, and religions.

The question arises though of whether we’ve all failed to fully grasp and internalize both sides of this ethical equation.

Have we focused too much upon the primary action and not enough upon the reciprocal reaction? Have we also failed to recognize that it functions much as an engine, a natural law that we’ve placed too many “higher order” considerations upon?

Any of the variations of, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” may serve well as admonishment or exhortation to right behavior by people, but we seem to fail to connect it with, “As you sow, so shall you reap,” which common sense tell us must be the reciprocating side of this ethical equation.

The greatest problem this schism causes is the cognitive dissonance it causes is in those cases where the primary action was a negative or harmful one.  This causes both internal conflict and hampers effective mitigation of the negative or harmful effects of the primary actor’s actions.

If the theory of Reciprocal Ethics is true than it must be true in all its parts or be claimed false. Therefor, natural law would require that negative actions lead to similarly negative responses as a normal course of events and to break this cycle requires conscious decision to engage in an unnatural course of response which might very well, due to its unnaturalness, be misunderstood as weakness, vulnerability or surrender of the point in contention by the original actor.

Some few in the course of history have understood this, though with mixed results.

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.

— Mahatma Gandhi (Disputed)

Gandhi, through his cult of personality and abetted by the nature and proclivities of the two cultures involved and the greater scope of world events, succeeded in breaking the natural laws of reciprocity and doing so in a manner that achieved his victory, India’s Independence from Britain.

Somewhere somebody must have some sense. Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love.

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

MLK seemed to understand the basic equation of reciprocity but did not seem to understand that sense was not what was called for, since sense would lead people to follow the natural order of action and reciprocation. As can be seen by the largely unalleviated and unabated levels of racial angst and hatred among the Black population in America, despite the legal and pragmatic success of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King was largely unsuccessful in his prescription.

One has to accept the basic nature of the reciprocal engine that is the foundation of Reciprocal Ethics and fully understand the difficulties involved in convincing people to behave otherwise.

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