Posted on 01/16/2011 10:58:47 AM PST by EveningStar
We would all like to think that humankind is getting smarter and wiser and that our past blunders won't be repeated. Bookshelves are filled with such reassuring pronouncements, from the sage advice offered by Richard Neustadt and Ernest May in Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers to the rosy forecasts of Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, not to mention Francis Fukuyama's famously premature claim that humanity had reached "the end of history." Encouraging forecasts such as these rest in part on the belief that we can learn the right lessons from the past and cast discredited ideas onto the ash heap of history, where they belong.
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...
History repeats itself because human nature is static.
Where have I seen that before?
Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.
Those who want to be slavemasters will use any means to attain their power. Democrats want everyone on the Liberal Plantation.
“Those who want to be slavemasters will use any means to attain their power. Democrats want everyone on the Liberal Plantation.”
Not everyone. Some of us are too uncooperative:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/election/480
The Left, because they want to destroy us so that they can rule.
And why don't they go away?
Because they have free promotion from every institution of public education, whether media, schools, or universities.
Looks like Walt is up to his old tricks - “It’s DA JOOOOOS fault!”
Stupidity is free. That is why so many people have so much of it.
Every day, new people who don’t know anything are being born. They will make the same mistakes everyone has always made.
"The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’
‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome." — Robert A. Heinlein
We can learn from our own mistakes, but only if we do something different does it matter, but if people did accordingly to profit from their mistakes and the mistakes that have been made in the past we would not be making these comments, there would be no such thing as socialism, communism, Nazism.
The tax gatherers would be sending thank you notes to all tax payers, the highway patrolmen would be washing peoples windshields, and in general the public servants only concern would be to keep this country FREE.
No, this world does not learn from mistakes, because we all
do not think alike.
Except that in a sense we are all like Hitler and Obama, we think we should be the ones to tell other people how to live.
He lost me in the first sentence by writing “humankind” instead of “mankind”. I know that due to women’s lib, some words such as mankind are considered offensive to feminists, but, certainly a serious writer will not give into political correctness.
This gives me good reason to doubt his analytical abilities. No, I did not finish the whole article.
So follow the dots. They aren't going away - probably getting more entrenched & with an oligarchy controlling the masses bankrupting us to enslavement.....well you get the picture.
A. Stephen Walt
Q. And why don't they go away?
A. I don't know, but I sure wish that Walt would go away.
It is possible to undercut their support, which I do with my native plant habitat restoration projects (all private). My results give me the moral authority with those greenies who care more about results than they do about political loyalties. When I connect those dots for them, explaining that they are dupes for global corporate intrigue, showing the money trail through tax-exempt foundations and the payoff in selective regulation, they do listen.
.....And why don’t they go away?....
Because there is a nearly endless supply of young girls who think they are on earth to make a difference and have not a clue
Bad ideas come from hatched bad eggs, of course. Eliminate the bad eggs before they hatch (Bad Socialist Idea)... Here is my bad idea: Mandatory Spinal Taps ONLY for all future drug testing for EVERYBODY... period & if you use or have every used or have an ancestral linkage back to the pot smoking “Ice Man”, your license for breathing “shared” oxygen, procreating, & future thought will be revoked! Drug Testing Controversy. CURED! Once & for all.
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