(via Instapaper)
This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while.
"The more I thought about this conversation, the more I realized that the youthful support that Ron Paul is getting down in the Republican Primaries is really not all that unusual at all. My generation has a right to be scared. Very few of us vote, most of us gave up on government efficiency and democracy in general a long time ago. These negative citizenship habits just get reinforced every time we see our money gets taken from us by the bigger voting block that precedes us and we can see no end in sight."
"At the very least, American conservatives are hardly crazy to reject a model for sex, marriage and family that seems to depend heavily on higher-than-average abortion rates. They’ve seen that future in places like liberal, cosmopolitan New York, where two in five pregnancies end in abortion. And it isn’t a pretty sight."
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He said of this nation-building effort: “When you consider what a mystery the East Side of New York is to the West Side, the business of arranging the world to the satisfaction of the people in it may be seen in something like its true proportions.”
But Progressives, especially intellectuals, are the least likely to suspect that they are in fact ignorant of the things they are intervening in, whether back in the Progressive era or today.
""The rhetorical transformation of government into “society” is a verbal sleight-of-hand trick that endures to this day. So is the notion that money earned in the form of profits requires politicians’ benediction to be legitimate, while money earned under other names apparently does not."
"Whatever the vision or rhetoric of the Progressive era, its practice was a never-ending expansion of the arbitrary powers of the federal government. The problems they created so discredited Progressives that they started calling themselves “liberals” — and after they discredited themselves again, they went back to calling themselves “Progressives,” now that people no longer remembered how Progressives had discredited themselves before."
I considered myself somewhat knowledgable about Mormon teachings and practices, but I didn’t know about this.
Here is more information about the ritual.
