Tag Archives: politics

Rand Wants Spotlight, Ron Approves, Says Rand Staffer

Posted on by

Update 3 July 17:

OK. Apparently Ron Paul’s staff/campaign people are making statements at odds (deliberately? accidentally?) with what Ron Paul’s saying. Not the first time, either. Weird.

Here’s a link confirming that Romney did deny Paul a place to speak at Tampa.

Update 1: I noticed a link at LRC saying that Ron Paul would not be allowed to speak at Tampa, because Romney is terrified of him..but clicking it on it send me to an article at Jeff Berwick’s Dollar Vigilante (Berwick seems to be a Casey friend) talking about an anarcho-capitalist meet with Murphy, Woods, Casey and others. I couldn’t find anything about it at all about Romney preventing Paul from speaking, or anything about Paul on it at all. Maybe it’s a wrong link?

Update 2 (July 15) OK. I just noticed this, where it’s Ron Paul who’s claiming that Romney is too terrified to let him speak.  Maybe, but then why was he so soft on Romney for the last six months?

Sorry. All of this sounds like good marketing to me….including the Berwick stuff…directed at college age kids.

ORIGINAL POST

A report at Business Insider says the Rand endorsement shows he wants star status  in the GOP and a serious shot at the Presidency in 2016:

“For more pragmatic Paulites, however, the surprise endorsement was a shrewd political ploy that puts the younger Paul front and center in the national spotlight, and positions him as a leading figure in the Republican Party, with his eyes set on 2016.

James Milliman, Sen. Paul’s state director, explained the logic to a group of Young Republicans in Louisville, Ky., last week:

“As a practical matter, you have to endorse a candidate before the convention — Romney is going to get the nomination, no doubt about that at all, so it behooves everyone to have Sen. Paul to endorse him before the convention,” Milliman said. “It could enable Sen. Paul to have a prime speaking role at the convention, and his dad to have a prime speaking role at the convention. I think those things factored in.”

The remarks — the Paul team’s most candid comments yet regarding the endorsement — appear to suggest that the younger Paul is more concerned with attaining star status within the GOP than with retaining his father’s army of diehard fans.

Even more interestingly, the same report  quotes Milliman, Rand Paul’s state director, as saying that Ron Paul is OK with the endorsement.

“Rand would not have done this without his dad’s okay,” Milliman told the Louisville Young Republicans. “So if his dad is fine with it, I think everybody else will be fine with it.”

That’s not what Lew Rockwell has been saying.

So who’s right?

Solzhenitsyn On Conscience

Posted on by

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn on developing a point of view:

“In First Circle, the young diplomat Innokenty Volodin lived a life of prosperity and comfort. As the privileged child of a hero of the Revolution he had married into a prominent family and advanced in the Soviet diplomatic service. But he became alienated from it all: he “lack(ed) something: he didn’t know what” (p. 341).
Upon examining the old fashioned ideas of his deceased mother in her diaries, his perspective on life changed from one of an Epicurean pleasure-seeking to one of ethical regard. He developed a “point of view”: Up to then the truth for Innokenty had been: you have only one life.

Now he came to sense a new law, in himself and in the world: you also have only one conscience. And just as you cannot recover a lost life, you cannot recover a wrecked conscience [p. 345]

Moral choices are often the consequence of accumulated culture, happenstance or social institutions, and as such judging others’ moral choices must be done with compassion and humility. Solzhenitsyn contemplates rather extensively his rejection of an offer to join the Soviet internal police force, the NKDV, when he was a young communist in Rostov in the late 1930’s:

“The NKVD school dangled before us special rations and double or triple pay …
It was not our minds that resisted but something inside our breasts. People can shout at you from all sides: “you must!”… inside our head can be saying also: “You must!” But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it …. Without even knowing it ourselves, we were ransomed by small change in copper that was left from the golden coins our great-grandfathers had expended, at a time when morality was not considered relative and when the distinction between good and evil was very simply perceived by the heart.” —

[Gulag Archipelago, p. 160].

This leads to a rather subtle and non-judgmental view of good and evil. Evil is very real and very wrong, but no human being is authorized to become too self-righteous in its condemnation: but for the grace of God go I.

In Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn says quite emphatically:

“So let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now. If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself!

“Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t.” [p. 169]

“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of
Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”