Dennis Prager is one of my favourite talk show hosts. Here’s an example why:
“Truth is not a left-wing value. Feeling good is.”
Incidentally, if you’re interested to catch his show, you can listen to it here at 12pm ET (9am PT), Monday – Friday.
Dennis Prager is one of my favourite talk show hosts. Here’s an example why:
“Truth is not a left-wing value. Feeling good is.”
Incidentally, if you’re interested to catch his show, you can listen to it here at 12pm ET (9am PT), Monday – Friday.
Yes, truth is not a left wing value…must have picked that up from Pontius Pilate, another government official.
“What is truth?”
Let the public hand washing begin…
Dennis is a Jew with ‘moxy’, thanks for that posting Robert.
‘The great moral dividing line is the size of the state.’
Big government = big corruption = big evil
Or as is said, “Religion is for those who are afraid to go to Hell. Spirituality is for those who have been there.”
Psalm 37:27 Depart from evil, and do good; so shall you abide for ever.
But hey if you’re a lefty you can fight the great faux evil of global warming. Because then we can all be ‘equally poor’.
“Remember, life is not what happens to you, but what you make of what happens to you. Everyone dies, but not everyone fully lives. Too many people are having ‘near-life experiences!'”
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
If you don’t care about the truth (Da Twoof) – then what do you care about? which I think is the whole point behind his speech.
Prager’s point about the narcissism of citizens of the welfare state is incredible, particularly the point about South Korea.
When I saw it was 40 min long I almost turned it off. Glad I didn’t.
This guy points out some of the reasons why I have come to beleive that the GoC is the biggest terorist org in Canada
How many times have we heard that similar theme, about truth not being important? Bellesiles research proven to be fraudulent, but it is still recognized because it shows the right direction. Or that woman who claimed to be a South American native and wrote a book about her struggle, only to be proven false. It’s still taught in universities and she speaks to students, because ‘it could have been true’. It goes on and on, always saying the end justifies the means.
Amazing..
Obama gets a standing ovation for telling college kids/dependent men,
they can stay on mom and dads insurance until 26 years old..
Damn..
–
Your daughter wants to know what happened to all the men?
—
Sing!
*What happened to all the macho men?*
“Gone to become Democrat Wussies every one”..
That was deinitely one of the best presentations that I’ve watched in a long time.
Thank you for posting it.
A really great speech. Ain’t it the truth!
Thanks!
Thank you-
great post
The truth, backed up by facts, is the way to go.
For proof, look no further than the AGW scam. Truth wins out in the long run.
Hans, I wonder if this explaina the old academic motto, “Pilate higher and deeper”?
Eric Hoffer said;
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
This defines the left better than any bumper sticker can.
** IGNORE THE TROLL **
Robert, thanks for posting that video. A bit lengthy, but well worth the time.
Outstanding speech.
Yeah, who had all those one-word bumper sticker slogans in ’08. They said, ‘Hope’, or ‘Change’, or something like that.
Phil, tea baggers like yourself may look to Haiti for some reason, but the Tea Party simply looks back at their own country. What part of that are you missing?
To be fair, that quote about truth and the left also applies to conservatives. The difference being that what makes them feel good is very different than what makes people on the left feel good.
My first exposure to Dennis Prager was a very negative one. He hosted a tv show which was a flagrant imitation of The Rush Limbaugh Show, which itself was lousy (watching RL making faces while video clips are played is not very entertaining). I thought Prager was just an opportunist trying to associate himself with a tv show format which had the potential to hit it big. Prager’s show seemed to be yet another entry in the overstuffed catalog of tv copycatting.
Since then, I have come to view Prager quite differently. He has been a consistent, and I believe sincere, voice in an underserved segment of the intellectual market, making the case, in a populist way, of the importance of values in the discussion of political ideology. The left has been able to define the terms under which debate in that realm takes place. The world needs more people like Prager who can and will try to shape the terms of debate in that area in a way that doesn’t prejudge traditional values in a negative way.
That being said, there are a number of things that I think Prager gets wrong or discusses in an incomplete way.
He is correct that the bigger the government, the more corruption, but he didn’t point out that this is mostly due to the fact that there is a commensurate decrease in accountability as government grows. As government increase in size, it crowds out and, eventually, suppresses dissident viewpoints. As criticism of the government decreases, pols feel freer to exploit their positions for personal benefit.
Prager is correct that conservatives believe that the bigger the state, the smaller the citizen. Recognizing this immediately leads one to see that phrases like “big government conservatism” are nonsensical.
DP at one point says that both liberals and conservatives love America. This is true in only a loose way. It is natural for people to feel an affinity for the country, that is the territory, in which they grew up and, in that sense, liberals and conservatives both love America. However, the thing that makes an American liberal an American liberal is that they despise Americanism, the system of limited government specified in the U.S. Constitution. It is the ideas of the Constitution, along with the culture which reveres and supports those ideas that make the U.S. what it is. In that sense, American liberals detest America and are always trying to destroy the political vision of America’s Founding Fathers. American liberals are, in fact, anti-American. I don’t know why political pundits are so repelled by the idea of saying so.
I thought Prager was very unjust in suggesting that Americans are willing to die to protect others while Europeans worry about nothing but their time on holiday. The American willingness to die to protect others is a result of America becoming a worldwide empire and attempting to be the world’s policeman. When the U.K. was the dominate world power, it’s citizens and the citizens of the Commonwealth fulfilled much the same role. No one can honestly look at WWII and suggest that New Zealand, Canada, Australia or the denizens of the British Isles didn’t do their share, and more, to defeat the Axis Powers. It is true that Europe has relied and still relies heavily on the U.S. for its defense, but that is largely the result of American pols clamoring for the U.S. to fulfill that role. Although a large U.S. involvement in Europe was critical as a counterweight to the Soviet Union, the Europeans would have spent more on protecting its own interests if the U.S. hadn’t been so eager and hadn’t been so well situated economically after WWII to do so instead. Prager was particularly unfair to mention Germany when talking about the U.S. casualties in Korea. With WWII so fresh in everyone’s minds at the time, nobody would have been comfortable with major military action being taken by Germany, even if the Germans themselves had been inclined to re-militarize.
Prager is right to praise the willingness of U.S. citizens to send aid to other countries, which I believe is a direct result of the best traditions of American civil society, but the whole “dieing to protect others” meme is a bit much.
I forget to mention the biggest thing that Prager got wrong:
Truth is not a left-wing value. Feeling good is.
No. The one and only virtue recognized by the left is obedience to the political leadership running the leftist State. Honesty is not a virtue. Personal responsibility is not a virtue. Fair play is not a virtue. Even “feeling good” is not a true leftist virtue. Does anyone think that “feeling good” was promoted as a virtue in the Soviet Union or is promoted as a virtue in Cuba?
In western democracies, the leaders of the left demand loyalty from their followers above anything else. How else can one explain the leftist propensity to uncritically spout whatever the talking point of the day happens to be, with no regard to the facts? The leadership of the left has cleverly constructed an elaborate mental framework that allows their followers to engage in slimy, sleezy, underhanded political activity and to accuse their opposition of being bad people and to feel good about themselves while doing so. The “feeling good” part is just to make the political ground troops more motivated. The core value, though, is obedience.
@10:50 – “Ponzi is the quintessential liberal: Means well, and creats something destructive…. remember… being left means never having to say you’re sorry.”
http://ca.shine.yahoo.com/epic-t-shirt-fail—i-m-too-pretty-to-do-my-homework-so-my-brother-has-to-do-it-for-me-.html
I am sure the writer is from Right wing and conservative party of US !
THANK YOU very much, Robert.
Ditto the cat above who said he didn’t expect to watch the full 40 minutes, but did. Ditto the cat who said that this was one of the best clips in recent memory.
Amusing his exhortation to his co-religionists to “preach what they practice” and his bewliderment about Jews voting overwhelmingly liberal.
“Getting something for nothing” – character destroying. Indeed. I’m thinking of a similar phrase, “never may a man more than he’s worth”, which I also thought of when contemplating the Circus of St. Jack. Here was a man who was paid way way more than what he was worth in life and in death: he clearly did not EARN a state funeral!
As a amateur searcher in the realm of economics I was delighted by Michele Bachmann’s suggestion that EVERYBODY should pay some, even just $1 of federal taxes. That is wisdom.
Which reminds me: in that interminable debate about the HST, I remembered that Friedrich Hayek thought that the best tax system would be one in which the entire cost of government was divided evenly on a per capita basis. This way of course, even people paying only $100 would have a stake in taming the excesses of Leviathan, and such a “small” stake would be actually large for that low income person.
Sadistic Eristic
I sincerely believe you have nailed it…
Sadistic Eristic, you are so right, particularly when mentioning the Soviet Union and the regulars here know what I mean. The second part of my name is a clue.
Welcome here.
Re: sasquatch at September 2, 2011 7:26 PM
Re: Ken (Kulak) at September 2, 2011 7:46 PM
Thank you for your kind words.
I expected someone would, quite justifiably, point out that I am conflating the left in totalitarian states with the left in free societies. I suppose I was reverting to habit as I have long considered that full-blown communism is the inevitable end state of European-style democratic socialism. The political incentives of democratic socialism are to confiscate ever more private wealth to use in buying ever more political support so that, eventually, the state owns most of everything.
Recent events in Europe suggest to me that I have been wrong. Here are a few predictions extracted from the current visions in my crystal ball:
1. Within 4 yrs., several nations will leave the EU.
2. Nationalism will dramatically rise within the member states of the EU in the near term.
3. There will be revealed a large political will to curtail immigration to the EU, particularly Muslim immigration. This political will will be tapped into by sincere reformers and scrofulous opportunists alike. The battle with the current establishment will cause much political turmoil.
4. There will be much shrieking about the rise of fascism in Europe. Some, but not most, of the shrieking will be justified.
5. The euro will survive, but there will be significant weakening of EU institutions as the citizens of member nations express their discontent with the weight of EU rules.
6. Riots, unrest and acts of civil disobedience will spread and intensify, fueled by many factors including dissatisfaction with the current political order, the measures taken to deal with debt and spending, ethnic animosity, economic frustration and a desire to have a little anti-social fun on the part of those whose characters have been malformed by leftist policies.
I hope I am wrong about all the civil unrest, especially since there will be people killed, but, sooner-or-later, the current unsustainable system must undergo an adjustment.