Greenfield: The Solution is the Problem

Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog ^ | Sunday, January 26, 2014 | Daniel Greenfield

[Albion Wilde]

Some problems are unsolvable. Others shouldn't be solved. Think about that bookcase you want to move to the other side of the room. What are the odds that the thin pasteboard is finally going to give way and spill all those medical journals all over your rug if you try to do it? A lot of problems are like that. Tackling them sounds good at a fundraiser, but then it breaks your furniture.

LOLL!! Writing from experience? IKEA specials?

This man is surpassing brilliant.

[Albion Wilde]

Almost every line of this essay is eminently quotable. I love this one, so seemingly at odds with Daniel's persona, which is more akin to an Orthodox rabbi than the guy in this image:

"Ask a modern progressive to name what his politicians did wrong and the usual answer is that they weren't radical enough. ObamaCare was bad because it wasn't Single Payer. If it had been Single Payer, it would have been bad because of medical tourism....Like the guy trying to fix a television set with a hammer and twelve beers, the progressive review board's conclusion is always that he didn't hit the broken pieces of the television hard enough."

[Albion Wilde]

Solutions and problems aren't polar opposites like heaven and hell or Beethoven and the sound a broken fax machine makes when you try to call it...

This is so true. In every broadcast by an MSM commentator or debate with a progg, they always seek to make moral equivalence between "left" and "right", as if they are two equal wings of the fusilage of state; when in fact, the "right" is the large trunk of a tree and its root system, and the "left" are a lot of the branches and twigs, some dead, that often need to be pruned back.

[Albion Wilde]

...try to fix things knowing that many things can't be fixed. Many things can be controlled somewhat, but fixing, making them perform the way we would like them to perform, is often not possible.

Ask anyone who has ever gone into marriage with the idea of "changing" their partner.

[Albion Wilde]

You get more of what you focus on. We, as a nation, have increasingly focused on “poverty” and hardship to the point of obsession and have pored trillions of dollars after that obsession. The nmore money you soend fighty “pverty” the more you will get. Guaranteed. What you resist persists.

The same can certainly be said for public education. We have huge per pupil spending, but the results, often in the biggest-spending areas, have been a devolution into PC indoctrination and a morass of anti-intellectual, anti-creative, anti-freedom and anti-individual dogmas more conformist and oppressive than the Christian social theocracy against which Marxist do-gooders routinely rebel.

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. --Friedrich Nietzsche

[GeronL]

Daniel is a really good writer

[Lurker]

Times change. People dont.

[Louis Foxwell]

...the "right" is the large trunk of a tree and its root system, and the "left" are a lot of the branches and twigs, some dead, that often need to be pruned back.

WOOPS! You have stumbled into a major maxim. Root and branch. That's the ticket. Conservative is the root, the source of nutrition, stability and growth. Progressive are the branches, leaves and flowers. Pretty to look at but requiring constant pruning and cleaning up.

[Albion Wilde]

You have stumbled into a major maxim. Root and branch.

No stumbling. Informed conclusion after 1) going to liberal arts college where I learned to envision; and 2) intense grad school study of the negative effects of post-60s Constitutional law on society, including grad thesis.

That's one reason I so fear for our youth, who not only have not had the chance to study history as older citizens have; but were denied basic civics and have been deliberately misled in the classrooms. Someday someone will discover a dusty volume in someone's attic and learn about our "experiment" in freedom that lasted a little over 200 years. It will seem as unreal to them as John Lennon's "Imagine" seems to our generation.

[SunkenCiv]

Our War on Poverty has spread poverty. Our attempts at fighting racism have perpetuated it. Our campaigns for energy efficiency invariably waste more energy than they save... The more resources we put into education, the more the educational system runs backward. Every attempt at creating jobs seems to vaporize more jobs than it creates.

The reason? That was the intent of the Demwits who overwhelmingly brainstormed the policies and pile-drivered them into law. Thanks Louis Foxwell.

[Louis Foxwell]

Shades of Dark Crystal.