"THOUGHT CRIMINAL" means what it says, but within the context of my chosen theme. The reason I got into this about fifteen years ago was to investigate why the American "left" was mired in a period in the political wilderness longer than that which Exodus had the Children of Israel wandering in for forty years. Along the way I've learned a lot, including that a lot of that "left" were, in fact, one of the problems, either not being nearly egalitarian enough or really concerned with the people who had to be the primary beneficiaries of any genuine "leftist" politics, the least among us.
I gradually saw that one of the biggest reasons for the failure of the "left" was due to hijacking of the left by ideologues of various stripe, most of the most damaging ones college-credentialed snobs, atheist ideologues, those who were really more interested in looking down on parts of the underclass, maintaining a class system every bit as much as the right is, just defining it differently, a hole host of various -isms and cults and sects and other ideologues were to blame for that. Some of the worst were the "civil libertarians" whose notion of equality started and ended at the courthouse door and who really didn't care at all about the actual physical, material and spiritual equality of anyone. The "leftist" media were among the worst in all of those categories, I had learned from reading the media to not trust them well before I started this, well before the Media Whores Online of fond memory started, then finished posting criticism of the media whores online.
Because of what I concluded by looking hard into the failure of the American left - and other "lefts" - I was constantly told that I was thinking forbidden thoughts and saying forbidden things. I still am. But the allowed ideas weren't getting us out of the wilderness.
So when I can see a problem some theory or far fetched program for the actual pursuit of effective equality such as I wrote about yesterday, something far more likely to generate an effective and fatally damaging backlash against equality, I don't care what academic who has staked his career on it or some scribbler who, likewise sees supporting it as a good career move or those who sign on to it as an issue they will support if I think it is not going to produce real equality for real people in real life.
I have always been a supporter of egalitarian democracy, though the history of the word "democracy" starting in a patriarchal, slave society of radical exclusion, classical Athens and extending into racist, exclusive modern life, modern usage makes that word dangerously imprecise. I have come to the conclusion that even above notions of "freedom" and even more so what is called "liberty" the foundational principle of any good government must be equality.
AND I DON'T MEAN THE "EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY" THAT IS THE REPULSIVE SLOGAN OF THE CIVIL LIBERTIES INDUSTRY MANNED BY IVY LEAGUE EQUIVALENT HACKS IMPRESSED WITH THEIR OWN CLEVERNESS, THOSE WHO ALREADY HAD THEIR OPPORTUNITIES, BUT EQUALITY OF RESULTS IN REAL LIVES, FOR THE "DESERVING" AND THE "UNDESERVING" THE SMART AND THE NOT SO SMART. God makes the sun shine and the rain fall on all, why should our goal be any less generous?
In that I am in total agreement with the supporters of reparations, that is the goal, equality of results, real lives lived on the basis of equality, real government determined by and with the goal of maintaining and protecting that equality and an equally decent life for everyone, to the extent that is humanly possible. My problem with the supporters of reparations is not the goal, it is that their means of obtaining that, based on some kind of imaginary repair of lives long ago blighted by long ago dead people is to be accomplished today by people who are not to blame for that is simply never going to happen. It is a pipe dream of the kind that so many of the past -isms and ideologues and academics and scribblers and those they convinced smoked and died even as their dreams never had a chance of happening. I'm interested in what's real, not in what is imagined by clever, articulate people.
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