...
And it strikes me that now turning to listening to someone from our far left "right" might go well by keeping President Kennedy in the front of my mind while listening. Yes, he's Canadian, but that's definitely still "us" and he was a Harvard Professor for years and worked for the UN for years and is a tenured professor of psychology at University of Toronto now, and attracting very handsome global support to branch out into a tenured public intellectual at the same time.
Worth every penny and twice or thrice as many.
He has helped me deal with a couple of issues that have plagued me my whole life, all on cosmic accident, already, and it didn't cost me a penny. See, he can help us all if those who can support him, and that's what he's doing.
The introduction is some guy who goes on boringly for over fifteen minutes, but might be worth enduring because he describes how he and three buddies came up with an association which rose from the four of them to over 15,000 members in a bunch of chapters across Canada very, very quickly.
But, of course, I mean to listen to Jordan Peterson talk while gazing at JFK and see how far off he is from what I grew up knowing was true American liberalism.
Tenets of a viable 21st century conservatismYou might think it's weird that I love this guy so much, that maybe I'm turning conservative after all, but, no, not at all, and I still hate monetary systems as much as ever, but we're talking about true human society, culture, civilization here and I can't snap my fingers and turn this back to the continent it was before it was invaded, and so this man is helping ALL of us etch out a good way back to sanity... a good way to a level of sanity we never even reached before.
1. The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid.
2. Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and to war. In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy.
3. Hierarchies of competence are desirable and should be promoted.
4. Borders are reasonable. Likewise, limits on immigration are reasonable. Furthermore, it should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual-rights predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities.
5. People should be paid so that they are able and willing to perform socially useful and desirable duties.
6. Citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from the result of their own honest labor.
7. It is more noble to teach young people about responsibilities than about rights.
8. It is better to do what everyone has always done, unless you have some extraordinarily valid reason to do otherwise.
9. Radical change should be viewed with suspicion, particularly in a time of radical change.
10. The government, local and distal, should leave people to their own devices as much as possible.
11. Intact heterosexual two-parent families constitute the necessary bedrock for a stable polity.
12. We should judge our political system in comparison to other actual political systems and not to hypothetical utopias.
And I'm noticing nobody's bothering with his summer lecture series on the Bible, and I'm trying to tell you this is no kind of take on the Bible you ever heard before and high time we all did.
No shit. He gives the snobs of scientism a way to respect the Darwinian roots of religion... and THAT, you might agree, is worthy beyond measure, outright unspeakably valuable.
And, I guess we can consider this my declaration of having lived through today's heat thus far. 85º in here and 78º out there right now. 47% humidity and expected to stop dipping below 50% by nightfall. Whatever. We're going to see.
pipe up any time....
