Regressive (not Progressive ) Idiocy dragging us back to the Dark Ages

By Jim ONeill, CFP

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.  —George Santayana “The Life of Reason”

Modern lefties refuse to listen to this central message of religion, that we fix the world by fixing ourselves, rather than fixing ourselves by remaking the world in our own broken image.—Daniel Greenfield “A Movement of Conspiracy Theories”

The “progressives” (a misnomer if there ever was one)—I mean regressives—they want to regress society back to a feudal-like lifestyle, if not pre-Christian paganism, are masters of pointing fingers and playing the blame-game.  It is always his, her, or its fault—never theirs.  They avoid personal responsibility like the plague.

As well they should.  I would not want to lay claim to regressive idiocy either.  Let us take a look at some of the more ridiculous regressive talking points, shall we?

Deception and trickery coupled with acid criticism of everything moral….as “reactionary” is a standard fare among them.  …By persistent permeation of the centers of information, education and government the deviates have been able to invest themselves with a “progressive” and “liberal” cover.  Actually, they are a throwback to the animal past of ancient primitive man whose sex habits operated on an infantile level.—Zygmund Dobbs “Keynes at Harvard”

Relativism

This is the imbecilic notion that all opinions are equally valid.  That is, the viewpoint of someone who tortures and rapes children is on a par with the viewpoint of a Mother Teresa.  It is all relative you see.  No one’s viewpoint is any more or less valid than another’s.

A bit of thought will show that relativism is a dangerously infantile philosophy.  For example, anyone that believes in relativism must of necessity believe that the following viewpoints are as valid as any other viewpoint:

• Torturing babies is okay.
• Blinding kittens is groovy.
• Genocide is fine.
• Murdering someone for grins is totally all right.
• Poisoning puppies is cool.
• Stabbing random strangers is no better or worse than helping the homeless.

Get the drift?  As I say, a dangerously infantile philosophy.  Yet it has gained popularity because it provides a sort of (third-rate) intellectual cover for jejune “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” type narcissism.

One of the more insidious subsets of relativism is “moral relativism,” which promotes the nihilistic concept that there is no right or wrong, good or bad.  So, for example, poisoning and polluting the environment isn’t bad or wrong—there is no wrong, there is no bad—so have at it, pollute all you want.

While moral relativism is in many ways a widely held view, when we go beneath the surface we can see that there are insurmountable philosophical problems for the view.  Given this, and given the problems of applying the view to daily life, we should reject it.—Michael W. Austin Ph.D. “Rejecting Moral Relativism”

Multiculturalism

Related to relativism, this foolishness contends that all cultures are equally legitimate, i.e. no culture is better or worse than another—there are no s—t holes.  Everything and everywhere is on an equal footing.

If you should find yourself in the boonies of Borneo suffering from appendicitis, don’t worry about it.  Just go see a local witch doctor and stop your whining.  You aren’t a patriarchal colonialist bigot, are you?  Well, are you?

For those if us who are not willfully blind and/or in denial to a pathological degree, it is blatantly obvious that some cultures are better than others.  For anyone who has traveled to third world countries with an open mind and open eyes the benefits of western culture are blatantly on display.

Go to the post office, and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp.  After paying the bribe, you still didn’t know it if it would be mailed or thrown out.  That was normal.

One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic.  One day, as the wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical aides—who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of working—collapsed to the ground.  They turned their heads so as not to see her and kept talking.  She lay there in the dirt.  Callousness to the sick was normal.

Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  It’s not.  It seems natural to us because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.

We think the Protestant work ethic is universal.  It’s not.  My town was full of young men doing nothing.  There was no private enterprise.  Private business was not illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world bureaucratic kleptocracy.  —Karen McQuillan “What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right”

Speaking of third world countries….the photos I have recently seen of the Left Coast homeless in cities such as L.A. and San Francisco remind me of the homeless I saw in Mumbai (then Bombay) back in the late 1970s—the biggest difference being that the American homeless tend to live in tents or RVs rather than cardboard boxes.  But hey, it’s all relative right?  One culture is as good as another.  So they say.

“Art”

Regressive art pundits proclaim the “virtues” of vacuous pieces of c—p using comically over the top hyperbole, while at the same time subjecting real works of art to leftist ideological Fata Morganas—that is, illusionary interpretations that are intentionally designed to confuse and intimidate the politically naive while advancing one leftist agenda or another.

There is something unutterably depressing about wading through this sort of academic gobbledygook.  It’s not just the [ugly] pseudo-thought, the cliched political sloganeering, and all-knowing tone.  That’s bad enough.  But the real tragedy of this reader-proof verbiage is that it acts as a prophylactic, effectively sealing off students from any direct contact with works of art.—Roger Kimball “The Rape of the Masters” p.27

In short, we get it coming and going.  On the one hand, regressives vociferously flog vapid unattractive garbage as great art, and on the other hand inappropriately reinterpret great art through distorted leftist lenses.  It’s a scam folks. A scam designed to damage and eventually destroy western culture.

If some art is really better than other art, your art may be judged inferior. The narcissism of left-wing thought does not allow for anyone to be better than you artistically or in any other way.  —Dennis Prager “Why the Left Loathes Western Civilization”

Fascists/Nazis

The late Italian journalist, author, iconoclast, Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006) was an anti-fascist partisan during WW II.  It took her quite some time to figure out that the communists and fascists (including Nazis) were not ideological polar opposites, but were instead variations on a leftwing Marxist theme.  Once she figured things out, she was not shy about letting the world know.  She compared the communists and fascists to two soccer teams that appeared to be to be on opposite sides, but were actually playing on the same team.

There are moments when I curse myself for not having understood it earlier: for having let myself be fooled by the two “soccer-teams” for so long.  ….It is a long-term ruler this left that gave birth to Mussolini then Hitler….this left that has always given trouble with its excesses and ambiguities, its brutalities and duplicities.  [bold added]—Oriana Fallaci“The Force of Reason”

Benito Mussolini, who coined the term fascist, was raised on Marx with mother’s milk.  But Russia’s Stalin did not approve of Mussolini’s competing form of Marxism and told his communist followers that fascism was to be considered anathema—and what better way to discredit another leftwing ideology then to call it rightwing (gasp!).  And so was born the myth of rightwing fascism.

The Fascist conception of life accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. ….Fascism reasserts the rights of the state. If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government.  [bold added]—Benito Mussolini “Doctrine of Fascism”

Fascists/Nazis are, always have been, and always will be, a leftwing big government ideology.  The operative words in Hitler’s political party were “Socialist German Workers Party”—hardly the name for a rightwing limited-government group.  Various media have recently become fond of calling patriotic nationalists “far-right fascists.”  In point of fact there can be no such thing as a rightwing fascist, let alone a far-right fascist.  Fascists are leftwing, leftwing, LEFT wing.

A fact not widely understood: Mussolini learned from Lenin, and Hitler learned from both. It’s no mere coincidence that the Nazi Party was an acronym for National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

Under Communism, Fascism and Nazism, the means of production and other forms of wealth were either owned outright or largely controlled by the state. Those who held political power decided who got what, and for what purposes.—Clifford May“Socialism rises from the grave”

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I see Antifa’s regressive idiots copying Hitler’s Brown shirt bully-boy tactics in order to “fight fascism.”  Do these morons have any clue?  No, of course they don’t.

I find it disgraceful….and see in all this the rise of a new fascism, a new Nazism. A fascism, a Nazism, so much more grim and revolting because it is conducted and nourished by those who hypocritically pose as do-gooders, progressives, communists, pacifists….who have the nerve to label a warmonger anyone like me who screams the truth.—Oriana Fallaci “I Find It Disgraceful”