[The fifth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

Inclusiveness and diversity help dissolve particular connections in favor of universal formal institutions like world markets and transnational bureaucracies. The effort is part of the general advanced liberal project, and its intent is to recreate human connections on a basis that is more rational and fosters freedom, diversity, and individual identity.

That may be the intent, but the effect is to destroy the normal ways in which people connect to each other and turn them into a mass of essentially unconnected individuals with interests that are assumed to be basically at odds with each other. More specific consequences include disorder, conflict, regimentation, mindlessness, and the breakdown of the understandings and arrangements that enable people to know who they are and run their own lives.

An account of such effects is therefore in order. The reader can gauge for himself how much those effects match trends in social life today.

This year Michelle Obama was put in charge of dealing with the nation's “obesity epidemic."  Of course, liberals love this as a public health initiative.  But how to sell government meddling in a new part of our lives to Red America?  Just call it “national security.”

WASHINGTON – School lunches have been called many things, but a group of retired military officers is giving them a new label: national security threat.

That's not a reference to the mystery meat served up in the cafeteria line either. The retired officers are saying that school lunches have helped make the nation's young people so fat that fewer of them can meet the military's physical fitness standards, and recruitment is in jeopardy.

A new report being released Tuesday says more than 9 million young adults, or 27 percent of all Americans ages 17 to 24, are too overweight to join the military. Now, the officers are advocating for passage of a wide-ranging nutrition bill that aims to make the nation's school lunches healthier.The officers' group, Mission: Readiness, was appearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack...

Although all branches of the military now meet or exceed recruitment goals, retired Navy Rear Adm. James Barnett Jr., a member of the officers group, says the obesity trend could affect that.

"When over a quarter of young adults are too fat to fight, we need to take notice," Barnett said. He noted that national security in the year 2030 is "absolutely dependent" on reversing child obesity rates.

In other words, the military for now has all the soldiers it needs, but it’ll be keeping its eyes on your kids just in case.  

If this kind of logic flies, what government activity couldn’t be justified on the same grounds?  

As a matter of fact, if you go to the Mission: Readiness website, you’ll see a report titled Young Virginians: Ready, Willing and Unable to Serve with the byline “75 Percent of Young Adults Cannot Join the Military: Early Education across Virginia is Needed to Ensure National Security.”  The idea is that pre-K will improve IQs and stop kids from getting in trouble with the law, thus making more of them eligible to defend Korea from Koreans and Georgians from Russians.  Let me guess, we also need mass immigration for national security, because otherwise we won’t have enough potential soldiers.  And militant feminism too because if women get any ideas about proper sex roles in their heads they won’t want to become soldiers and the number of potential reserves will be cut in half.  

Unfortunately, these strategies of wrapping up liberalism in the flag and having ex-soldiers as spokesmen for progressive causes tend to work on American conservatives.  Lovers of liberty must never forget that war is the health of the state and there's no easier way to sell big government than connecting it with "national security."  

From The Occidental Observer.

I heard Naomi Cahn and June Carbone talk about their book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (Oxford, 2010), on Commie Radio Pacifica, so you can be sure there is a “progressive” message. As summarized in their op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, the idea is that families in Blue State America are thriving, while families in Red State America are failing because they are too hung up on old fashioned ideas like sexual abstinence.

There is an obvious dishonesty in this approach because it completely ignores race in the analysis in an effort to pin the blame on traditional sexual beliefs and customs. Blacks and Latinos who live in urban areas and in very Blue States exhibit high rates of teenage pregnancy, non-marriage, and dropping out of the education process — much higher than Whites in Red State America.

So what they are really trying to explain is variation in family patterns among White people. And there they have a point. Red State White America is in a crisis. (Indeed, it’s no accident that Red State America is where most of the much-commented-on White anger is coming from.) The data they are summarizing really relate to some of the correlates of education which are in turn linked to IQ. But we have known at least since The Bell Curve that higher IQ people not only are more likely to go further in the  educational system, they are more likely to have stable marriages, they don’t have babies outside of marriage, and they begin child bearing later. These people are more likely to live in large urban and suburban areas where there are jobs for educated people.

Patrick Ford's recent discussion of the "libertarian problem" observed how resistance to the neoconservatives had produced an unusual alliance on the Right between such divergent elements as "hedonistic anarchists and medieval Catholics." Patrick expressed skepticism of whether the libertarian-traditionalist alliance can be a durable one, given the sharp differences to be found among the respective philosophical foundations of the two camps. Traditionalist objections to libertarianism are usually rooted in what is often described as libertarianism's "atomistic individualism" whereby an ideologically constructed conception of "abstract liberty" is elevated over and above more concrete and immediately tangible matters of culture, history, tradition, community, family, religion, and so forth. Libertarians are accused of deifying the economy as an end unto itself, rather than as a means to the end of meeting human needs and irrespective of the impact of economic forces on non-material values. The traditionalists will say that while libertarians may deny the innate equality of individuals, libertarians implicitly endorse an egalitarian ethos regarding human groups such as nations, cultures, religions, regions, races, and genders. Libertarian economism simply regards these things as interchangeable commodities, and no more significant than different brands of deodorant or fast food. In other words, libertarians are simply liberals who reject the welfare state, according to the traditionalist critique. For this reason, many libertarians see mass immigration from the Third World into the West as no big deal, as human cultures and ethnic populations are interchangeable, with economics and political ideology being what really matters.

[The first of a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

Liberals believe that the benefits of society should be equally available to all. They have recently come to hold that it is a basic responsibility of government and indeed all institutions to make them so. Failure to do so is support for oppression through participation in a system of inequality.

The demands of the resulting campaign for equality have broadened with time. They now include inclusiveness, which can be understood as an attempt to achieve comprehensive political, economic, and social equality among groups by integrating each of them into all social activities at all levels.

Specifically, inclusiveness requires that persons of every race, ethnicity, religious background, sex, disability status, and sexual orientation participate equally in all major social activities, with roughly equal representation and success the measure of equal opportunity to do so.

Though the word "historic" has been thoroughly drummed into my head by the cable news cretins, tonight's healthcare vote didn't in the least mark a turning point in American history. It was instead a last shovel of dirt on what was once a decent and free country. Or perhaps it wasn't quite the last. Some patriots might hope that this most recent outrage in Washington will finally "wake up" the American people to socialism ... but if they weren't awaken by the earlier thefts of liberty and bureaucratizations of their lives over the past century, which were comparatively more dramatic, then there seems little reason to believe that they're in a better position to awaken now. I have no doubt that basic healthcare in this country will become dreadful over the coming decade -- imperceptible at first, of course, a dumb doctor here, a waiting list there... However,  I can say that at no time in my life could a man freely contract with a physician for his services and not have this relationship mediated by countless layers of governmental-corporate paper-pushing and price-fixing. There comes a point when every traditionalist moves from searching for remnants of a moral and constitutional order to conserve and begins instead to long for the collapse of the current system.       

I just saw Anita Dunn on Meet the Press say we have to pass health care reform because we need to cut costs.  How is the bill that’s being voted on tonight supposed to do this?  According to CBS News’ report on the legislation, 

Major consumer safeguards take effect in 2014. Insurers prohibited from denying coverage to people with medical problems or charging them more. Higher premiums for women would be banned. Starting this year, insurers would be forbidden from placing lifetime dollar limits on policies and from denying coverage to children because of pre-existing medical problems. 

This means that insurers will have to charge everybody equally, regardless of health.  The healthiest individual will pay the same amount as the most gluttonous pig.  This is socialism, no matter how you look at it.

While I get that, how does anybody even pretend that this will reduce health care costs?  Obviously forcing a lot of people that the insurers don’t consider good risks into policies at the same price per head as everybody else will only make things more expensive for those who currently have coverage.  This is why Massachusetts has the highest health care premiums in the country.  

Democrats seem to disagree on whether they have the votes or not so there's still hope.  

There are two possible explanations of what the Democrats are doing here.  Perhaps they're trying to destroy the insurance industry so that government will have to step in and "solve" the latest problem its created with an actual public plan.  Or, they're so ignorant of economics they don't understand what causes prices to rise and fall. They simply believe that what we pay for things depends on how much state benevolence there is to counteract corporate greed.  I believe that the smarter ones are banking on the former, while the majority don't really know what they're doing.  

 

Much as has been said of me, I know Larry Auster, he's very intelligent, and I respect him. I read his blog just about every day and find him an engaging presence in person. And I hope he takes the following criticism in the constructive spirit in which it is written.

I often get the sense that Larry has turned himself into a kind of Ayn Rand of the paleo Right. So often, do I see him expelling others from the circle of "conservatism" -- to the point that the only conservatives left are himself and a handful of intimates -- inflating a single issue or difference of opinion into an existential Either/Or, and proclaiming the absolute consistency of his philosophy (while in actuality it's full of the elisions and willed forgetting characteristic of an ideology.)¹

His recent comments on AltRight follow this trend...