4est_4est_Gump
Run Forrest! RUN!
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2011
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In which one President denigrated his culture and one President praised his culture.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/449361/print
Victor Davis Hanson, Trump's Anti-Cairo Speech
A pull quote:
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/449361/print
Victor Davis Hanson, Trump's Anti-Cairo Speech
A pull quote:
From the pessimistic Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle to the glum Roman critics like Petronius, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Suetonius to the German nihilists such as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Spengler, the inherent challenge of the West was rarely the permanent end of freedom and material wealth. Instead, the difficulty has been largely that we have the burden to use properly our bounty and must decide how to handle unchecked personal liberty and comfort.
Capitalism enriches a society but also risks enervating the senses and the spirit by shrinking human aspirations into material acquisitiveness. Consensual government entails responsibilities as well as rights — if it is not to descend into individual excess as citizens forget that they often should not do what they are legally entitled to do. In the Western war between personal liberty and mandated equality, hoi oligoi struggle to convince hoi polloi that they are not the enemies of the people but their co-benefactors, even when many among the former care little for the interests of the many.
Trump is president at a time when only about 63 percent of the American work force is employed. Entitlements are at unprecedented levels and are increasingly divorced from demonstration of undeniable need. Fury breaks out not from cutbacks in largess, but from modest decreases in promised but unsustainable increases.
The law is seen an encroachment on personal expression and thus ignored when it demands sacrifice. Poverty is redefined not so much as material want but as coveting something that someone wealthier does have but otherwise does not need.
Logic is the key to knowledge, but when it poses as the final arbiter of all natural inquiry without deference to the mysteriousness of god, it creates a self-destructive Oedipal arrogance that man can become his own deity. In such a landscape, how does such a civilization of individuals so eager to live the good life defend itself against a wretched jihadist so ready to die in order to welcome a sexual paradise to come?