Progeny

Light a cyber cigar friends and foes, old Troutsky is a grandfather once again. I was in dreary Portland all week helping my oldest so she could birth a beautiful daughter named Arya and so my efforts are re-doubled to end this corrupt carnival and get on with something more life affirming.

Speaking of carnivals, the Repub candidates were united in their sympathy for a "merit based society" last night, by which they must mean the thing which brought such stellar individuals such as themselves into the national limelight. Ah yes, merit, worthiness, dare we say it, superiority; an increasingly rare quality in this Age of Occupations and evil moral/cultural relativism.Lets just say you know it when you see it. If it's on a stage, behind a podium, you see it. Why,it's practically reflexive!

At it's core we have an insistence, a mantra even, going back to our Enlightenment Founders that "all are equal in rights but not in fact." Quantitatively, this is true, we do not all have equal AMOUNTS of each quality or attribute. For example, some people have far too much ambition, some people have an excess of work-ethic, some people are over-burdened with drive and so yes, they should be utilized. These people are "born" to toil and often seem to enjoy it so it is only right they should provide for those of us with better uses for our time. But qualitatively, we are all equal in worth and no one gets to judge lessors or betters. This is a question of value, to which Sartre replied: "Value haunts my being."

I wonder if someone should tell Newt that Americans are an "invented" people? Or that the free market all of the candidates proudly worship is a violent, barbaric invention? This is Curtis White's answer from his essay Take Back Your Emptiness:

"We are blind to how our freedom to believe actually masks the baseness of the way we live. To apply Tolstoy to our present condition, the principles by which we as a people live have far more to do with capitalism, with the freedom of the market, than with any ethical principles. But of course, capitalist principles ARE ethical principles. It is a moral system before it is an economic system. Unfortunately, these principles argue that violence is legitimate if one can benefit from it." (What is also called our "national interest")