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Good Thoughts
Follow @TJSumpter has some great insights on the recent debate: CLICK HERE TO READ
And Follow @benzornes has some good food for thought on “The Election” as well. CLICK HERE TO READ
I Love What People Get Good At
Grandkid Approved
Kevin DeYoung has written a fine book for children called The Biggest Story. But I wanted to let you all know that The Biggest Story is now out as an animated short film. This has been road tested by some of my very own descendants. Good stuff.
Some Staggering Statistics
Ligonier Ministries recently commissioned LifeWay research to conduct a survey of American Evangelicals…and it would seem heresy abounds in our ranks. I’d say this makes a great case for Christian education… CLICK HERE TO READ
A Little Something Kirk Cameron is up to…
Our friend Kirk Cameron is organizing a “national family meeting”; worth your while to check it out, and join in.
A Real Page-Turner
At Least There Are Clinton Memes
Maybe the only good thing about the 2016 election…. 
Dig the three string shovel.
I suppose a post hole digger would make a nice double neck!
The third meme seems like the inspiration for “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
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Shovel? As the youtube commenters said, even though it “sounded so shovely”, we must call “a spade, a spade”.
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He also does Amazing Grace on the diddley bow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eAqyC7PP4g
????????. “freeeeeebiiiiiird!!
Wait a second.
Owners of ‘merican movie theaters are gonna host these hate meetings and still be allowed business tax deductions?
Here’s a good talk about the election and the current political situation.
https://youtu.be/0mH_-lHM4so
The glorious thing about this season of The Election Show is not that Trump is especially good, but that all his enemies really are that bad.
“Our unconstitutional” enemies are that bad! ????
By “unconstitutional” do you mean something other than “thing I don’t like”?
Well, I don’t like crimes, like perjury for instance!
And criminal behavior, is by its very nature, unconstitutional.
Finally, I am from a military family, much of our family life was dedicated to my Dad’s Naval Commission, which was to uphold and defend the Constitution, from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
In our case, the Clintons, and their conspirators, are “domestic” enemies in every sense of the term.
Not even cigars are safe from them, never mind people!????
Do you like the Clintons ash?
Does it matter? Clintons are the natural product of the American system of government.
Oh ash! When are you going to get your semantics right? The Clintons are a natural waste product of the left side of the American system of government, ???? they are not “the” only product of the American system of government.
As government products go , the federal prison system would be a good thing for HRC, and the rest of us!
Popular government selects for ambitious sociopaths.
How dare you suggest that Anthony Weiner was “ambitious”! ????
And monarchy just throws up sociopaths .. and imbeciles … like clockwork.
LOL. Yes, Christendom was ruled for a thousand years exclusively by imbeciles and sociopaths. Obviously.
LOLZ, and you’re intellectually dishonest. Obviously.
Is that different from actually being dishonest?
Obviously, it is, else I’d not have phrased it that way.
So in other words, I just made you feel bad. Cool story.
And yet… there were a lot of not-very-virtuous kings. Would you argue that kings and dukes and such-like are usually less wicked than citizen governments? It seems unfair to compare a degenerate republic with Charlemagne. On the other hand, I submit that Washington would do us proud if his competition were Ivan the Terrible or Caligula.
There are certainly plenty of good or bad examples you can discuss at any point in history. The question is what the system selects for. Ivan the Terrible threw Russia into turmoil by killing his chosen heir. However, the usual form of succession reduces or avoids competition for the throne. Choice of rulers by election fosters regular competition for spots in the power structure — which means that there are no people in it who have not devoted their lives to ambition for power.
That’s generally true, although a lot less simple in practice – how many bastard sons of kings have gone to war over the throne?
Still, you’re on firm ground proposing that the sort of people who seek power are generally the sort who shouldn’t have it. On the other hand, you don’t actually escape the problem of rule by ambitious sociopaths merely by putting the king’s son in the top slot. The ambitious sociopaths merely become courtiers.
On average, I think wars of succession in Christendom happened to no greater degree or frequency than battles for legitimacy in democracies. (I can’t recall any that involved illegitimate issue claiming the throne, currently.)
As for courtiers – certainly. I’m not saying that people with ambition were entirely excluded, simply that it was possible to gain power without it, and that they were subordinated to someone whose power they couldn’t directly threaten in the same way as exists today.
I happened to have in mind the Italian wars of Manfred, bastard son of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor. I was also thinking slightly of the complicated justifications for the Hundred Years’ War, some of which (I believe) had to do with questions of succession. I could probably find some other examples if you want. But I am prepared to grant that wars of succession aren’t much more frequent than democratic civil wars – once every few generations or so, depending on a lot of factors. Sure, the power of vicious courtiers is limited by a strong and virtuous executive.… Read more »
Sure. There’s no political solution to the sinful use of power, but some political systems are obviously worse than others.
I’ll rephrase: in what precisely does the obvious worseness of republican government consist? It doesn’t protect us less from wickedness, it isn’t obviously less productive of virtue, it isn’t necessarily more bellicose. As it becomes less Christian it declines morally, but that’s not shocking, and I imagine it still compares favorably with pagan monarchy like that of the Aztecs.
In the modern form, lack of stability and responsibility. (Ancient democracies like Athens and medieval republics were sufficiently different to need separate discussion.) A government by a wicked king would be quite preferable to the modern structure where wickedness is upheld without any particular person’s desire or ability to do so. At least our churches would have someone to preach against and pray for. A good article on that recently: http://freenortherner.com/2016/10/14/chronic-kinglessness/ Modern liberal democracies have a tendency to collapse into Caesarism, and the USA has flirted with it a couple times in the reign of Lincoln and FDR. But even… Read more »
Interesting read. So I take it you reject the Gramscian account of leftist infiltrators slowly taking over and lying about their power until they feel secure? Because that would also seem to account for the “powerlessness” referenced there. I think there are a lot of similarities between the Founders and old Florence – both attempted to be republics on the Roman model without sufficiently robust mechanisms to limit franchise, and wound up oscillating between mob rule and a tyrannical ruling class. In the latter case, of course, you wind up with a proper hereditary dukedom (the Medici) in about two… Read more »
The problem with the leftist-infiltrators account is that it implies getting rid of the infiltrators, who illegitimately hold the real power, is sufficient to return the power to its proper place. I’m saying the problem is structural, and removing or replacing any particular group of people within the structure is about as effective as shooing away flies at a picnic – as long as the incentives exist, people will arise who respond to them. Re Caesarism, I don’t mean it as a value judgement, necessarily. Napoleon was better for France than the Committee of Public Safety was, and the northern… Read more »
It does imply that. The argument regards that sort of leftist infiltration as beginning sometime around 1900, or a little later. There were certainly bad things about America back then, but I don’t know that it was much less stable or less just than most countries at the time. The argument would be that the basic social structure of the 1900s would more or less persist today, absent Marxism. Granting the premises, does that sound so bad? So in your view, is the main goal of a political arrangement to preserve stability? There is certainly a biblical sound to that… Read more »
It is better to patiently suffer injustice and bad rulers than to introduce chaos by breaking down the institutions of society. I don’t find the leftist-infiltration story to be sensible historically either. The American founders were the far left of their day. Communism has always had friends in the USA. The ball of societal/governmental entropy had been rolling for a while when Marxism arrived on the scene, and it got a favourable reception because it was in concord with existing elite sentiments. It’s certainly true that Communists were part of the federal government and elite society for much of the… Read more »
Not unreasonable. So it’s not monarchy as such – I suppose you’d be all right with a rigorously limited republic, or something similar, so long as it could maintain itself, right?
This is an area of a lot of fuzzy thinking, because the question that a phrase like “limited republic” invites is “limited by whom or what?” Power can only be limited by superior power. So my objection would be more practical rather than moral. (Though I’ve always enjoyed this bit on Christian republicanism vs Christian monarchy: https://arkansasreactionary.wordpress.com/2015/11/22/the-solemnity-of-christ-the-president/ )
Limited, at least, by the self-interest of the ruling clique. I have Venice principally in mind here – maintaining one’s state in independence, prosperity, and general social harmony from Attila (or at least Totilla, which is nearly as good) to Napoleon is pretty impressive.
On the other hand, I might equally ask what you think keeps a kingdom from metastasizing into an empire? At the end of the day, there’s no surefire means of restraining a king’s ambition. Sauce for the goose.
Sure. I’ve been reading Bertrand de Jouvenel on this and one thing he points out is that power (no matter how it’s organised or justified) necessarily lives for its own ends, and its nature is to try to grow. Historically the best prevention of kingdoms turning into empires has been strong neighbours, it seems. I’m not deeply familiar with Venice’s history but my impression is that its success came from votes being restricted to major families with significant investment in the wellbeing of the city — more like a CEO being selected by a board than a president by the… Read more »
Right, exactly. They were an oligarchical republic, with strictly limited franchise. Of course, their success also came from being very clever and utterly unscrupulous – like shanghaing a Crusade to sack Constantinople. But I think that’s one model of republican stability (because it avoids the chaotic element entailed by empowering the mob) that seems to meet most of your desiderata.
When? Never.