I’m not the first to address this meme … but I wanna do it my way. And pile on, while I’m at it.
Holly Fisher, who posted this photo of herself after the Hobby Lobby decision, was … advised by her, ahem, “intellectual betters”, that all it was missing was a flag, a gun, and a Bible.
So Holly posted this.
To which her, ahem, “intellectual betters” responded:
So … sure. For those who have been intellectually impaired by moral equivalence …
Talk about Serendipity. I will swear on a stack of Bibles that I had no idea Severian’s latest post was on the same topic I’ve been kicking around since I got in a bit of a discussion over on facebook last week. I had literally typed this post up in notepad and came over here to paste it in and post when I saw his latest post. So … consider this is an unintentional but extremely timely follow-up to his post
On the left and increasingly on the far right, I constantly hear complaints, usually expressed with righteously indignant sarcasm, “well, Corporations have rights, Corporations are People just ask the Supreme Court!”
Just yesterday a letter to the editor of our local paper asked in what seat in what pew in what Church does Hobby Lobby sit?
People seem to have this idea of a Corporation as a Big Crime Syndicate Cartel Machine that somehow wills itself into existence and manipulates our lives in some sterile, unfeeling manner.
I think the problem boils down to one of understanding what a Corporation really is. Corporations have been demonized, Alinsky style into the perception way too many people have of them today.
Let’s take a look first at what a corporation is according to Webster’s:
Corporation:
It’s that second definition we’ll focus on as it is the most general and actually covers the other two.
It’s a body formed and authorized by law to act as a single person.
Either a corporation is owned by everyone, or it is owned by the government, or it is owned by … a person or group of persons.
The first case is communism. That’s not what we have. The second case is basically fascism or some other form of socialism. The third is what we have here in America.
In the case of a business, a corporation is joined voluntarily. By people. It can be sued. Just like people. And it consists of … people. Whether democratically run or top-down dictatorially run, a corporation is a group of people exercising their liberty to act as a part of a whole toward a certain goal or goals … making brass bolts, building strip malls, serving food, selling craft supplies. There are for profit corporations, and non-profit corporations.
One of the goals of a for-profit corporation is obviously to make a profit. But it has other goals, too, and those goals are decided upon and guided along their way by … people.
In the end, it’s not the corporation itself whose rights are being protected, it’s the rights of the people who own it that are being protected — and in the case of a corporation itself being sued … it’s profits from the people who own it being taken. In the end, it IS people — they just decide by a set of internal rules how to pool their will collectively. And since ownership in (and employment by) a corporation is voluntary, there is no problem here.
The Supreme Court got it right. Corporations are people, and people have rights.
If a corporation wants one of the goals to be to build affordable housing for low-income people, that’s fine. If a corporation wants one of the goals to be to build luxury cars for the 1%, that’s fine, too. If a corporation wants one of its goals to be to promote reading, or gardening, or a clean environment … that’s fine, too.
And if a corporation wants to make it one of its goals to produce a documentary about a political candidate — or even to help get a political candidate elected — that’s fine as well.
People complain that a corporation has way more money than the average person and so the corporate “person” can has more to contribute and therefore has a louder voice … but … the same is true of a middle-class person over a poor person. And again, a corporation is typically a collective of people anyway. But since it acts as one entity, it is treated as one entity. The rights and responsibilities projected into it are the collective rights and responsibilities of its owners. Who are people.
I hope that clears things up.
As far as political influence goes, they are not the big bad wolves they are made out to be. (They CAN be, but so can any individual person.)
Loading Likes...The Court had given corporations the power to “overwhelm elections,” fumed the New York Times corporation. A commentator from another corporation (MSNBC) declared the case the worst ruling since Dred Scott, which upheld slavery. President Obama said Citizens United “strikes at democracy itself.” Others called the ruling a “constitutional Frankenstein moment,” a “corporate takeover,” “radical,” “absurd” and “terrifying.” Some progressives launched a campaign to rewrite the First Amendment. Really.
How did the predicted hostile takeover of democracy by corporate America turn out? In the aftermath of the 2012 elections, the Times reported: “American Crossroads, the super PAC founded by Karl Rove, spent $104 million in the general election, but none of its candidates won. The United States Chamber of Commerce spent $24 million backing Republicans in 15 Senate races; only two of them won. Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul, spent $53 million on nine Republican candidates, eight of whom lost.” It was, as the paper noted, “A Landslide Loss for Big Money.”
I saw this New York Times headline this morning, and I thought it was the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. But it’s not true, I’ve seen several things just like it over the years exactly as dumb. And it’s no accident.
A few years ago, Severian here brought to my attention to Frankfurt Critical Theory. It explains a lot. You can actually buy a Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory … there’s one on Amazon. Not a bad thing to have in your library for translating things the Left comes up with.
D’Souza’s book/film “America” brought something into focus I had been unable to put my finger on … and what it is is the core, basic building block of Alinsky’s tactics. They use shame.
Not the shame of “you know you’ve done something wrong”, but the shame of “other people will think you’ve done something wrong”.
This is why all the charges Klavan mentions in “Shut Up” and the ones D’Souza outlines in the book/film actually work.
They use shame because it targets the thing that is most valuable to an honest, decent, thinking person, and that is his reputation.
Since most people don’t know any particular individual, when they pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and demonize it… it works so well. All most people know about a person (or an organization) is what they hear from the people bashing them in the media.
So every day, these people scour the headlines and think, “how can I rationalize an angle on this story and twist it to make the people I want to discredit (in this case, The West) look bad?”
And they don’t care if it unravels upon inspection, because they know most people will never inspect it, and tomorrow they’ll level the charge again in a different context, or a new charge with the same kind of reason-defying rationalizations in a constant Critical drumbeat of propaganda, until enough people have heard so much of it they can’t believe it’s not true.
Loading Likes...I went to see D’Souza’s “America“.
It was just what America’s doctor ordered.
It is a pantheon of Echo Stoppage presented in a way most 5th graders can grasp. If viewed by enough of the squishy middle, it is devastating to the Critical Theory attack that has so successfully brought us to this point in our history. An innoculation, if you will. If you have friends in the squishy middle, you should encourage them to see it as presenting a side of the argument they’ve never heard — and it includes both sides of the argument — and actually makes one. A coherent one.
And if you have kids from about 5th grade on up … you should take them. It would easily be the most effective inoculation they will get against their current and future “instructors” purposely skewed version of history. At least there will be questions in the backs of their minds.
I also got D’Souza’s book after seeing the movie. And I ran across this little passage, which reiterates “Stop An Echo” and its necessity and purpose … probably better than I did it:
“It should be emphasized at the outset that the domestic champions of American decline are not traitors or America-herers. They are bringing down America because they genuinely believe that America deserves to be brought down. Their actions are the result of a powerful moral critique of America, one that has never been effectively answered. Nor is it easy to answer. Most people, when confronted with the critique, go mute. Some respond with bluster; others want to change the topic. The ineffectiveness of these rebuttals makes independent observers believe that this critique cannot be answered.”
This is the driving force behind “Stop an Echo”. Answer, and answer effectively. Don’t Shut Up. Don’t bluster (makes you look out of control and hurts your persuasive power). Don’t change the subject. Answer it. Calmly. And know your sh*t. So read up.
And for people who haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it, this movie (and probably the book but the movie is easier and more accessible) is a fantastic starting point.
If enough people see this movie, it could be devastating to the cause of “Fundamental Transformation”.
Hell, even Peggy Joseph (the ebulent “gas in my car, “mortgage” woman) has apparently had a change of heart and worldview.
Wake up America. Send her to see the movie.
Loading Likes...Alinsky #4 is “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
Hence a group like “LOLGOP”.
Well, I’m going to ridicule the ridicule. Ran across this meme today …
The obvious question being begged here is … exactly who is saying that these kids aren’t people? I’m pretty sure exactly nobody. It’s a giant strawman.
And believing that a fertilized egg is a human being isn’t necessarily religious, though when arguing the “separation” angle our leftist friends insist that it is that and only that and therefore must it be excluded from public debate. But there are even atheists who believe it philosophically. A compelling argument can (and often is) easily made that it is a human being without bringing God or Gaia into it. So again … that’s a stupid “argument” for LOLGOP to make. The other insult here is that they are suggesting that people only “pretend” to believe it — insinuating that they really have ulterior motives (likely along the lines of “oppressing” Sandra Fluke).
If you would post this meme, you’re going to have to stop pretending you have a shred of intellectual honesty.
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Update: another very similar dishonest gem:
There are two kinds of socialists — the ones who want to be in charge, and the ones who want to be taken care of.
You can bet the ones who want to be in charge, even if they started out all altruistic and sh*t, eventually feel entitled to more because of their important positions and they are handily enough in the best positions to get it since they’re in charge of the siphoning and re-distributing. And of course there are those who are already full of themselves and are kidding themselves that they actually had any altruistic designs in the first place.
And the second, of course, are the people who want to be on the receiving end of redistribution. I was thinking about this earlier this morning — about when a co-worker asked me “well, what’s wrong with Socialism?” (This is a born and raised American, by the way… the people I work with that came from socialist countries know exactly what’s wrong with it).
What it is is not so much a phobia against it, but a sense of entitlement for the mere fact of existing. They think a certain level of happiness should pursue *them*, a kind of “good enough” – beer, flat screen TV, rubbers and morning after pills, and no real threat of losing any of it if one doesn’t, let’s say, fully participate in society by pulling his own weight.
It encourages mediocrity, and discourages excellence. Everybody gets the mediocrity, and nobody wants to put in the extra effort for excellence because the reward dividend for it is negligible when spread out over the population.
Pursuit of Happiness is just that – pursuit. You don’t have an inalienable right to be happy, just an inalienable right to try to make yourself happy.