Apologies from Utopia

[American_Jihad]

This article sums it up pretty good...

Apologies from Utopia

November 12, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield

Apologies, like postcards and encyclopedias, are another of those elements of our past being left behind in the detritus of the old twentieth.

Obama’s non-apology apology “I’m sorry that you’re unhappy” is typical of the passive aggressive apology of the twenty-first. What was once character has become branding. What was once manners has become damage control.

In the peculiar “I feel” grammar of the twenty-first century, “Sorry” has become ubiquitous and meaningless, it’s the new “Eh” or “Is that so.” The ubiquitous sorry assumes that everyone else is constantly being subjected to a torrent of grievances and acknowledges that while taking no responsibility for it.

To the millions of Americans kicked out of their health plans, Obama was offering an “Is that so”; not an admission of guilt or a confession of fault.

...

Obama, Hillary and Sebelius all recite formulaic admissions of responsibility without actually taking any. Hillary was happy to take responsibility for Benghazi, as a verbal statement, without actually accepting political or practical responsibility for any of it. Likewise Sebelius and Obama took responsibility for the ObamaCare website without actually accepting it.

Obama took responsibility and then explained that he doesn’t really know anything about programming so he isn’t responsible.

...

This is the innocence of incompetence. Obama isn’t a programmer; he can’t be held responsible for Healthcare.gov. Hillary Clinton isn’t a soldier or even a real diplomat. She can’t be held responsible for Benghazi. Sebelius is a political appointee whose job is to look into the camera with the baffled incomprehension of the professional civil servant. “I don’t know anything. I just work here.”

...

Liberal columnists ponder whether Obama is too smart to be president. By that they mean that he’s much too elevated a being to sit around trying to make things work. His proper role would be theorizing how things should work and then putting those theories in book form.

...

And so Obama has apologized. Not for lying, but for the inability of an idiotic public to understand that he has nothing to apologize for. In apologizing, Obama is really forgiving us for not being as smart as he is. He is condescending to our diminished intelligence by apologizing for our misunderstanding of him. He is sorry for how stupid we are that we actually believed him.

...

The left never really apologizes. Not for the millions dead under Communism or for pretending that Michael Moore was a documentary filmmaker. It passively aggressively doubles down on its original premise. “You didn’t understand what I was really getting at.”

...

As with drug addicts or schizophrenics, the real world is unreal to the left. It’s a world that denies them their fantasies. It’s a world they hate and want to destroy.

And so Obama is sorry. He is sorry that we in the real world failed to live up to the expectations that he and his comrades worked out in their imaginary world. It’s not his fault that we weren’t good enough for the people’s health care revolution. It’s our fault. In the imaginary world of the policy experts, everything worked. The bottleneck must be us.

And that’s true.

...

And the people behind it are sorry. They’re sorry that we don’t recite our lines on schedule. They’re sorry that we’re a sullen and stupid folk. They’re sorry that their imaginary world is wasted on us.

Apologies from Utopia | FrontPage Magazine

 

[bitterlyclingin]

Took some continuing education courses yesstidy. One of these was a two hour presentation on the joys of Obamacare given by an upper eschelon administrator in a teaching hospital located smack dab in the center of one of Liberalism's numerous Ground Zeroes.

One of the first statements out of his mouth was that the Affordable Care Act should have really been called the "Accountable Care Act". The purpose of the act was to deliberately spread the risks in health care out to the providers and the recipients, the doctors, the hospitals and clinics, and the patients. If you, as a patient with a cancer, feel that a medication costing $15,000 a dose would be the best treatment for your cancer, but the organization providing your treatment feels that the cost is not worth the benefit, you may still receive the treatment but you'll be responsible for every penny of the treatment's cost. Remember the ten year old girl at death's door HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius denied the life saving lung transplant for?

Secondly, the system is set up so that no individual providers will be able to survive. All health care providers must be able to fold themselves into organizations larger than just themselves. The goal is to essentially have each provider become mere worker bees in a hive required to justify each of your decisions and actions as the most economical and efficient possible, indivdual rights and responsibilities are now subservient to the state's. Organizationally, the government will be at the center receiving most of the benefit, but sharing as little of the responsibility as possible, with the doctors as the gate keepers, much like the Nazi Doctors who met the incoming train transports on the loading platforms deciding which incoming prisoner went immediately to the showers and the ovens and which incoming prisoner would go to the slave labor camps instead. One of the architects of the ACA was Ezekiel Emmanuel, renown for his statement "The sixty five year old has lived his life. The resources necessary to keep him alive would be better spent treating the thirteen year old pregnant female" This is straight out of the Joseph Mengele School of Medicine stuff.

Part of the Democrats rationale and argument for the ACA was the declaration by some Liberal group that the United States ranked number thirty seven on the world's list in quality of the nation's health care despite the money spent. The reason they decided the US ranked thirty seven was that the female who chose to grab life's brass ring by lieing on her back in bed with her legs open but ended up instead only with five children, each with a different last name, and on the poverty rolls could not get the same level of healthcare that some one like Mitt Romney and wife could and would obtain. Remember Nancy Pelosi's remark that with the ACA some artist could now go about pursuing their dream, irregardless of the merits of their work, without having to worry about having a job to fund their healthcare? The same for the guy who chooses to spend his life inhaling crack cocaine instead of furthering his education or undergoing occupational training of any sort. Its meant to be cradle to the grave care, in return for their votes and support, of course.

As far as security and confidentiality of your health records are concerned, forgeddaboudit. There is no security and confidentiality by design. Anyone in the system will have up to the minute access to any and all treatments and therapies you've received. That means that if Barack Obama, located exactly in the center of this entire system, decides that Antonin Scalia, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, or Marco Rubio is being a little bit of a PIA at the moment, he can just have Valerie Jarret or Ben Rhodes look up their records to see if the current offenders caught a dose o clap from some bimbo they were seeing on the side, and use that info to ease the irritation they're creating for our Liar In Chief.

The mandate for mental health coverage in each remaining plan under the ACA also presents Obama, or whoever his successor may happen to be, with some unusual opportunities. The old Soviet Union was infamous for its use of mental health issues to silence its critics, while the Chicomms were known for charging the executed prisoner's family the cost of the bullet used to execute the family member. The government will now be able to exile its critics to the bowels of some mental institution and have the entire cost of the exile picked up by the health care organization, or until the doctors at the institution decide its time to send the inmate to the 'showers'

Welcome to Obamacare. Its a brave new world in there.

 

[American_Jihad]

False Utopias and Their Victims
The eco-utopians want to eliminate fossil fuels.
December 3, 2015
Michael Finch

...

The force that has empowered hundreds of millions is made possible by fossil fuels. The same thing that revolutionized the West in the 19th and early 20th centuries is still happening elsewhere around the world.

So it is time to celebrate, yes? After all, we rejoice that poverty is less of a scourge than ever before. We rejoice that millions of children will not die in infancy of untold numbers of diseases. But, no - for the eco-utopians this is not a time of celebration, but of desperate urgency. Their war against fossil fuels is being driven by a religious fervor matched only by the one emanating from the hot desert sands of the Middle East. Nothing and no one must stand in its way. After all, if you are fashioning a heaven on earth, if you are creating utopia, what is the loss of any number of souls, if it means saving the planet?

The end of fossil fuels, when it comes, will come at the hands of human ingenuity, not forced diktat. In time, we will accept that the earth warms and cools by the actions of the sun, not by our own hubris and arrogance. Until then, may we stop this utopian march back to the Stone Age and a time of cold and dark and death and disease?

False Utopias and Their Victims

 

[Claudette]

Took some continuing education courses yesstidy. One of these was a two hour presentation on the joys of Obamacare given by an upper eschelon administrator in a teaching hospital located smack dab in the center of one of Liberalism's numerous Ground Zeroes.

One of the first statements out of his mouth was that the Affordable Care Act should have really been called the "Accountable Care Act". The purpose of the act was to deliberately spread the risks in health care out to the providers and the recipients, the doctors, the hospitals and clinics, and the patients. If you, as a patient with a cancer, feel that a medication costing $15,000 a dose would be the best treatment for your cancer, but the organization providing your treatment feels that the cost is not worth the benefit, you may still receive the treatment but you'll be responsible for every penny of the treatment's cost. Remember the ten year old girl at death's door HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius denied the life saving lung transplant for?

Secondly, the system is set up so that no individual providers will be able to survive. All health care providers must be able to fold themselves into organizations larger than just themselves. The goal is to essentially have each provider become mere worker bees in a hive required to justify each of your decisions and actions as the most economical and efficient possible, indivdual rights and responsibilities are now subservient to the state's. Organizationally, the government will be at the center receiving most of the benefit, but sharing as little of the responsibility as possible, with the doctors as the gate keepers, much like the Nazi Doctors who met the incoming train transports on the loading platforms deciding which incoming prisoner went immediately to the showers and the ovens and which incoming prisoner would go to the slave labor camps instead. One of the architects of the ACA was Ezekiel Emmanuel, renown for his statement "The sixty five year old has lived his life. The resources necessary to keep him alive would be better spent treating the thirteen year old pregnant female" This is straight out of the Joseph Mengele School of Medicine stuff.

Part of the Democrats rationale and argument for the ACA was the declaration by some Liberal group that the United States ranked number thirty seven on the world's list in quality of the nation's health care despite the money spent. The reason they decided the US ranked thirty seven was that the female who chose to grab life's brass ring by lieing on her back in bed with her legs open but ended up instead only with five children, each with a different last name, and on the poverty rolls could not get the same level of healthcare that some one like Mitt Romney and wife could and would obtain. Remember Nancy Pelosi's remark that with the ACA some artist could now go about pursuing their dream, irregardless of the merits of their work, without having to worry about having a job to fund their healthcare? The same for the guy who chooses to spend his life inhaling crack cocaine instead of furthering his education or undergoing occupational training of any sort. Its meant to be cradle to the grave care, in return for their votes and support, of course.

As far as security and confidentiality of your health records are concerned, forgeddaboudit. There is no security and confidentiality by design. Anyone in the system will have up to the minute access to any and all treatments and therapies you've received. That means that if Barack Obama, located exactly in the center of this entire system, decides that Antonin Scalia, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, or Marco Rubio is being a little bit of a PIA at the moment, he can just have Valerie Jarret or Ben Rhodes look up their records to see if the current offenders caught a dose o clap from some bimbo they were seeing on the side, and use that info to ease the irritation they're creating for our Liar In Chief.

The mandate for mental health coverage in each remaining plan under the ACA also presents Obama, or whoever his successor may happen to be, with some unusual opportunities. The old Soviet Union was infamous for its use of mental health issues to silence its critics, while the Chicomms were known for charging the executed prisoner's family the cost of the bullet used to execute the family member. The government will now be able to exile its critics to the bowels of some mental institution and have the entire cost of the exile picked up by the health care organization, or until the doctors at the institution decide its time to send the inmate to the 'showers'

Welcome to Obamacare. Its a brave new world in there.

Well anyone with a brain knew it was a POS and the Dems passed that POS all on their own.

They don't care about cost because we taxpayers will be covering them for the rest of their miserable lives.

 

[American_Jihad]

Lead Letter: Socialism in Europe is no utopia
By Bill Spinner Thu, Feb 11, 2016

Our millennial generation will probably determine our next president.

Advocates of free market principles should explain to the millennials that the biggest obstacles to their economic success are socialist policies that have failed miserably wherever they have been tried.

England’s Winston Churchill said this about socialism: “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue the equal sharing of misery.”

The JAX Chamber fights to recruit companies to Jacksonville, but we won’t stand a chance to recruit overseas or keep our own companies in business if we enact socialist ideas that require more and more taxation on those who are economically successful.

COMPANIES ARE LEAVING

For example, the headquarters of medical industry giants Pfizer and Medtronic have recently left the U.S. in part due to our high corporate taxes at 35 percent. And socialist politician Bernie Sanders proposes to raise them up to 90 percent.

Having lived and worked in several socialist countries in Europe, I have witnessed how stifling regulations and high taxes cripple economies, raise unemployment and make products noncompetitive in world markets.

Currently, Europe’s youth unemployment rate is over 20 percent. Those with jobs are 30 percent underemployed and frustrated with their lack of opportunities.

...

Lead Letter: Socialism in Europe is no utopia

 

[American_Jihad]

I think we found utopia for the progressive left wing liberals/commies in a communist run country. With the help of the rich left you can buy it all for a cut rate price. You can even take all the ilk with you, syrian refugees and anybody else that wants to go to utopia...

12 eerie images of enormous Chinese cities completely empty of people

Business Insider
Sarah Jacobs2/18/2016

Look, pretty rainbow colors for the gay...

Plenty room for all...

When Caemmerer found out about these empty cities, he was immediately fascinated. "As an architectural photographer, I found the notion of a contemporary ghost town to be appealing in a sort of unsettling way," he said.

...

12 eerie images of enormous Chinese cities completely empty of people

 

[American_Jihad]

Lookie here another place you libtarts can go...

An American GI defected to North Korea. Now his sons are propaganda stars.

The Washington Post
Anna Fifield

Their names are Ted and James, and they look like the kinds of men you might bump into on the streets of Richmond, Va., where their father was born.

But they’re speaking perfect North Korean and wearing badges of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, the first two leaders of North Korea, over their hearts. Oh, and the younger one, James, is a captain in the North Korean army.

They’re the Pyongyang-born sons of James Joseph Dresnok, the former American GI who defected to North Korea in 1962 when he was stationed in South Korea after the war.

And they’ve just appeared in an extraordinary video published online by Minjok Tongshin, a pro-Pyongyang news service based in the United States that runs the kind of stories that wouldn’t look out of place in North Korea’s official media.

“I want to advise the U.S. to drop its hostile policy against North Korea. They’ve done enough wrong and now it’s time for them to wake up from their delusions,” said Ted Dresnok, 36, who goes by the Korean name Hong Sun Chol. He was wearing a navy blue suit with a red Kim badge on it.

His younger brother, James, or Hong Chol, was wearing a North Korean army uniform and said he held a rank equivalent to a captain in the U.S. Army. His comments also sounded like they came out of the propaganda department.

“The American Imperialists caused the division of the Korean peninsula,” James said.

This led to a bizarre situation in which Roh Kil-nam, the ethnically Korean, naturalized U.S. citizen who runs Minjok Tongshin, asked the ethnically Caucasian, North Korean citizen brothers if they considered him among such ilk.

“No, I mean the very top leaders of the U.S.,” James clarified.

Video:

Ted and James are the sons of Dresnok, known as Joe, and a Romanian woman, Doina Bumbea, who was reportedly abducted by North Korea. Charles Jenkins, another U.S. serviceman who defected to North Korea but was allowed to leave in 2004, described Bumbea as a Romanian abductee in his memoirs and said she died of cancer in 1997.

Dresnok is then thought to have married the daughter of a North Korean woman and a Togolese diplomat, and they are said to have had a son, Tony. (North Korea is big on blood purity and won't allow foreigners to marry Koreans, meaning that the foreigners get matched up among themselves.)

Ted and James said that Tony was at school at the time they did the interview, which was apparently carried out in Pyongyang after the much-hyped congress of the Korean Workers’ Party this month.

All three sons, along with Dresnok’s third wife, appeared in "Crossing the Line," a British documentary about the former American and his life in North Korea. That film showed the older boys speaking English with a Korean accent.

...

But his sons were apparently trotted out to extol the glories of the “socialist paradise” into which they were born. Each contact with the media is highly scripted in North Korea, but it's impossible to tell whether the men were saying what they'd been told to say or if, after spending their entire lives in North Korea, they really think this.

...

An American GI defected to North Korea. Now his sons are propaganda stars.

 

[American_Jihad]

This is a great bump, lol...

The Utopian Vision of the Future (Then and Now): A Marxist Critique
by Bertell Ollman


Topics: Marxism

Oscar Wilde said that any map that doesn’t have utopia on it is not worth looking at.1 There are few quotes I’ve cited as often or with as much pleasure as this one. Yet, there is something in the sweeping nature of the claim that has always left me unsatisfied. In examining utopian thinking, I will also try to distinguish what is valid and useful in Wilde’s claim from what is not.

Before starting on our meta-journey to utopia, however, there are a few ambiguities in the meaning of “utopia” that need to be clarified. The term comes from Thomas More’s famous work, Utopia, where it is used to mean both an ideal society and also one that doesn’t exist anywhere. Later, utopia also came to be used to refer to a society that did not exist because it could not exist; it depicted an impossible dream. An ideal as yet unrealizable, or unrealizable because impossible? This ambiguity in the term’s meaning has teased but no doubt also stimulated writers on the subject from More’s day (early sixteenth century) to our own, and also accounts for the delight or dismay with which different people have reacted to the charge of being a utopian.

In most discussions of this subject, utopian thinking has simply been equated with having a utopia, whether of the first or second kind. Clearly, this is inadequate, for if we take utopia as meaning an ideal that exists nowhere but could, then anyone who thinks society can be improved and has some idea of what that would look like (and who does not?) can be labeled a utopian, and we’ve learned nothing worthwhile about any of them. But if we understand utopia as an impossible ideal—besides begging the question of what is possible—this only gives us the main result of utopian thinking; it doesn’t tell us anything about the process that led to it. As a criterion for determining what is and isn’t utopian, it is not sufficient. More troublesome, it may not even be a necessary criterion, since utopian thinking may on occasion produce a vision of the future that is realizable. What, then, is the connection between having a vision of the future, whether realizable or not, and utopian thinking?

The confusion surrounding our topic is due largely to the conflation of three distinct elements: having a vision of the future, realizable or not; the impulse to speculate about the future using one’s hopes, wishes, wants, and dreams; and the construction of one’s vision out of just such materials. It is the latter that is the chief characteristic of utopian thinking. We have already indicated that virtually everyone who voices their dissatisfaction with the status quo has a vision of the future that differs in at least some respects from the present. Certainly, this is true of Marx, whose vision is far more complete and systematic than even most of his followers realize.2

The impulse to speculate about the future is even more widespread. Hoping, after all, is natural, as is wishing, wanting, dreaming (including daydreaming), anticipating, and fantasizing. We have all engaged in these activities, some have let them run unchecked, some have shared them with others, some groups in the population—usually subaltern ones—have done more of it, and some societies and ages in history have been particularly marked by it. The Marxist philosopher, Ernst Bloch, wrote a three volume work cataloguing such human qualities, trying to free them from the self-delusion and escapism that all too often accompany them. Even that consummate realist, Lenin, can be found approving of daydreaming if the dreams are based on objective reality and one accepts the responsibility for realizing them. There is without any doubt the motivation to achieve a better, happier, more secure, and more fulfilling life in all of us, and our imagination has a role to play both in helping us clarify what this is and in stimulating us to act upon it. To this extent at least, the roots of the emancipatory project can be said to exist within human nature itself.

While everyone has utopian impulses, however, only some use them as the main raw material for constructing their vision of the future, only some, therefore, qualify as utopian thinkers. Furthermore, wishing for a better future, speculating what this might consist of, is not always and everywhere progressive or even political. Capitalism, after all, has proven very effective in co-opting free-floating utopian impulses. Fashion, for example, is but one example of how our desires for happiness, beauty, and community are cynically manipulated and turned into a means for enriching the few. Lotteries, rock concerts, and mass spectator sports are others. Given forms that are sufficiently distant from the main battlegrounds of the class struggle, even the most radical impulses can be rendered safe for the status quo.

2.
From what Marx and Engels said on this subject, utopian thinking would appear to have the following characteristics:

1. The vision of the future is constructed primarily—though not necessarily exclusively—out of hopes, wishes, and intuitions, whether envisioned by an individual or taken from the writings of other utopian thinkers, or some combination of the two.
2. Constructed in this way and from such materials, this vision is externally related to whatever analysis one may have made of present conditions (each is viewed as logically independent of the other).
3. But without any necessary connection between the two, there is no need for extensive analysis of the society in which one lives, and as a rule there is very little.
4. Constructed from one’s hopes and wishes, and logically set off from one’s understanding of the present, the vision of the future generally precedes whatever social analysis is undertaken and occupies a central place in the thinking process.
5. The future, so constructed, then serves as an independent standard for making evaluative judgments of whatever conditions and events come into one’s study of the present and the past.
6. Finally, as a result of all the foregoing, there is a serious overestimation of the role that moral arguments rooted in this conception of the future play—and can play—in bringing about the desired reforms. Of all these interlinked characteristics, it is the first one that is decisive, since it engenders all the others.

If this is utopian thinking, then, who are the utopians? Three groups deserve this name. First, and foremost, there are the creators who set down, often in considerable detail, the vision of an ideal society that they had captured in their mind’s eye. The contents of these ideals vary a great deal as do the proportion of fact to fantasy, but the brotherhood of man, equality between the sexes, sharing of most earthly goods, checks against tyranny, and an emphasis on education as the chief means of producing good human beings appear often enough for these utopian visions to have been a major springboard for all the socialist thinking that came after. Whether a particular ideal was meant as a blueprint from which a new society (or world) was to be constructed, or as a standard from which existing institutions could be judged, or simply as an aid to philosophical speculation—or some combination of these—is not, in the last analysis, as important as the central lesson set out in all utopias, which is that society is a product of human beings and that if they don’t like the one they are living in, they can remake it. In a world where most people have always taken their society as given, what an extraordinary impetus this must have been to think critically and to act.

The second group of people who deserve to be called utopians are the settlers who came to live in the hundreds of communities—mostly in Europe and America, and mostly in the nineteenth century—that were inspired by these visions. And, third, there is the much, much larger group of people, then and now, who have adopted most of the utopian mode of thinking that we described above.

...
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Fun stuff

The Utopian Vision of the Future (Then and Now): A Marxist Critique by Bertell Ollman | Monthly Review

Cradle to Grave...