As if there was any Doubt

I tell them to stand in the corner. Michael Phillips equates middle-minded “pleeeeeeze-please, Universe, like me” leftism with being a child.

Today, I concluded that the new Leftism, which passes laws to control the behavior of ordinary citizens, what we eat, drink, smoke, wear, sit in, sit on, burn, put in the trash... etc are premised on the Left's desire to be goody-goody children.

With the added wrinkle of things like all of those women who blame their parents for their behavior well into adulthood, and men who act like feral children who were raised in a barn... somehow knowing that doing what their parents found normal (say, getting into your car to run an errand,) are conditioned into believing that they are being naughty, 37 year old children.

The Left has already filled our lives with a thousand laws, rules and suggestions for being goody-goody to satisfy the need of lefties to know what good behavior is expected of them.

To be goody-goody and legal: Don't smoke, wear a helmet, put on seat belts, drive a Prius, sort your garbage, shop at Whole Foods, eat local organic but not fish-farmed, send your kids to Waldorf schools, hate TV, love Al Gore, love Doonesbury, hate Bush, Cheney, Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, ride a bike, wear hiking boots, hate the sun, hate big corporations, drink bottled water, be pro-vegetarian etc...

The dichotomous nature of dramatic swings between good and bad, an apocalypse dangled in front of you for “behaving badly”, figures we are supposed to be thankful suffered for our enlightenment...

Is the mushy-middle-minded left not starting to resemble something it did so much to rebel against in its’ youth, except without the philosophical depth?

Cheeky imps or Cowering in Fear

A similar discussion has been taking place among Europe’s Libertarians (both of them), about the loss of much of the population’s capacity at moral reasoning in the light of merely living by an endless supply of rules in their stead. Rather accurately, the argument goes that living in fear of rules signifies a kind of emptiness of modern and post-modern life which largely reduces the need to reason enormously, even when it comes to decisions related to family life. That this century development in the developed world has amusingly drawn in the past the criticism by the former Communist to call Western populations “weak” and “unwilling to fight” particularly amusing since virtually ALL of public life under Communism was defined by the behavior of people fearful of crossing the line and defying authority.