Carolina Review Daily

Leaders of liberal student groups at UNC have circulated a petition to implement what they call the “common sense” requirement “that the UNC student health plan [offer] abortion coverage.”

UNC students who choose to opt out of elective abortion coverage may do so, but they’ll pay the same amount for their mandatory Pearce & Pearce health plan as students receiving coverage for election abortions (unless they purchase equivalent health insurance from another provider).

Students have been left wondering why opting out of abortion coverage doesn’t reduce the cost of the health plan.  It appears that the premiums of even those students who opt-in to the Pearce & Pearce plan that doesn’t cover elective abortion will, in part, go towards covering elective abortions.

The signers want to implement what is essentially a tax to fund elective abortion.  This isn’t always the same as abortion that is deemed medically necessary, and students who favor adoption over optional termination shouldn’t have to pay for such procedures.

A crazed environmentalist named James Jay Lee, who was ‘awakened’ by Al Gore’s Inconvienent Truth, has taken hostages at the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland (UPDATE:  according to MSNBC and Fox, all hostages are now safe).  Lee’s website, savetheplanetprotest.com, is down, but a cached version contains his Malthusian tirade against humanity.  He calls humans “parasitic [..] infants,” proclaims that “the planet does not need humans” and calls for the dismantling of the “dangerous U.S. world economy.”  Quoted below is the cached version of the front page of Lee’s website:

“The Discovery Channel MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet and to do the following IMMEDIATELY:

1. The Discovery Channel and it’s affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn’s “My Ishmael” pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other’s inventive ideas. Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!

2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.

3. All programs promoting War and the technology behind those must cease. There is no sense in advertising weapons of mass-destruction anymore. Instead, talk about ways to disassemble civilization and concentrate the message in finding SOLUTIONS to solving global military mechanized conflict. Again, solutions solutions instead of just repeating the same old wars with newer weapons. Also, keep out the fraudulent peace movements. They are liars and fakes and had no real intention of ending the wars. ALL OF THEM ARE FAKE! On one hand, they claim they want the wars to end, on the other, they are demanding the human population increase. World War II had 2 Billion humans and after that war, the people decided that tripling the population would assure peace. WTF??? STUPIDITY! MORE HUMANS EQUALS MORE WAR!

4. Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn’t, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??

5. Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)

6. Find solutions for Global Warming, Automotive pollution, International Trade, factory pollution, and the whole blasted human economy. Find ways so that people don’t build more housing pollution which destroys the environment to make way for more human filth! Find solutions so that people stop breeding as well as stopping using Oil in order to REVERSE Global warming and the destruction of the planet!

7. Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people’s brains until they get it!!

8. Saving the Planet means saving what’s left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population. That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies! You’re the media, you can reach enough people. It’s your resposibility because you reach so many minds!!!

9. Develop shows that will correct and dismantle the dangerous US world economy. Find solutions for their disasterous Ponzi-Casino economy before they take the world to another nuclear war.

10. Stop all shows glorifying human birthing on all your channels and on TLC. Stop Future Weapons shows or replace the dialogue condemning the people behind these developments so that the shows become exposes rather than advertisements of Arms sales and development!

11. You’re also going to find solutions for unemployment and housing. All these unemployed people makes me think the US is headed toward more war.

Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture.

For every human born, ACRES of wildlife forests must be turned into farmland in order to feed that new addition over the course of 60 to 100 YEARS of that new human’s lifespan! THIS IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FOREST CREATURES!!!! All human procreation and farming must cease!

It is the responsiblity of everyone to preserve the planet they live on by not breeding any more children who will continue their filthy practices. Children represent FUTURE catastrophic pollution whereas their parents are current pollution. NO MORE BABIES! Population growth is a real crisis. Even one child born in the US will use 30 to a thousand times more resources than a Third World child. It’s like a couple are having 30 babies even though it’s just one! If the US goes in this direction maybe other countries will too!

Also, war must be halted. Not because it’s morally wrong, but because of the catastrophic environmental damage modern weapons cause to other creatures. FIND SOLUTIONS JUST LIKE THE BOOK SAYS! Humans are supposed to be inventive. INVENT, DAMN YOU!!

The world needs TV shows that DEVELOP solutions to the problems that humans are causing, not stupify the people into destroying the world. Not encouraging them to breed more environmentally harmful humans.

Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.

The humans? The planet does not need humans.

You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world, and YET you encourage the exact opposite instead of discouraging human growth and procreation. Surely you MUST ALREADY KNOW this!

I want Discovery Communications to broadcast on their channels to the world their new program lineup and I want proof they are doing so. I want the new shows started by asking the public for inventive solution ideas to save the planet and the remaining wildlife on it.

These are the demands and sayings of Lee.”

It’s easy to see that ungrounded and violently misanthropic strains of environmental alarmism are especially bad for society.  Turning policy areas into ‘crisis’ areas may be useful for winning elections, but not for conducting rational debates.

As our readers might know, CR and the DTH rarely take similar stances on the issues of the day. Yet there are those moments of harmony where we at the CR, often critics of the DTH, ought to acknowledge when they do the right thing. Today’s example: calling out UNC for a lack of transparency for costs associated with abortion coverage in the new system-wide insurance policy. Read it here: http://tinyurl.com/28p3vop

“UNC’s inattentiveness toward those who are concerned about abortion coverage is not acceptable. UNC should release more information about how abortion coverage factors into the cost of student insurance plans.” Right on, guys.

I may have graduated already, but I started writing this post pre-graduation, so I think that’s a valid excuse for continuing to post on CRDaily.com.  Not to mention the fact that, otherwise, my last post ever would have been about goat sex. Needless to say, it wouldn’t look good when potential employers Google-searched my name and the first thing that popped up was so, well… unpleasant.

Eric Voegelin

A much better subject for discourse would be the great and fundamental question “What is the meaning of history?” It may not beat goat-sex for shock value, but it is certainly more significant, viz.:

Where did we come from? What can that tell us about where we are going? To answer these questions is the job of the historian-philosopher.

There are, generally speaking, four ways of looking at history, as pointed out by Russell Kirk in his essay “Eric Voegelin’s Normative Labor.” These different views reflect our ideas on the meaning of life and our place in the world and, thus, can influence the trajectory of our lives.

The first of these four holds that nothing ever really happened in history. There has simply been a  progression through time of largely unconnected events with no particular purpose or significance. This position has been the unspoken assumption of many of my biology professors: “everything has been ‘evolutionary development’ or mere flux.” History, in this framework, is reduced to no more than “the buzzing of the flies of a summer.” Indeed, “all the endeavors of famous men, and all the aspirations of great nations” have had and can have no real significance. The best one can hope for, in terms of achieving significance, is passing on your genes to the next generation (which would explain my biology professors’ obsession with reproduction), and even that, in the end, is little more than hollow vanity.

The second view, held by the Communists with their inside track to history, says that we are, in fact, going somewhere: specifically, we are progressing toward ultimate earthly perfection– utopia, if you will. The French Jacobins, Comte, and Marx had different visions for what this perfection would look like, but they are all agreed on the prospect and ultimate triumph of a terrestrial paradise. This view has generally been on the wane since the catastrophic events of the last century.

Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor

The cyclical view of history is held by the third school, which has included such prominent historians as Arnold J. Toynbee, author of Study of History, and Oswald Spengler, author of Decline of the West. According to this school, civilizations progress through stages of growth, maturity, and decadence, predictably and perhaps even inevitably.

The fourth school, revived of late thanks to the astuteness and scholarship of Eric Voegelin and others, has been seen in higher civilizations worldwide, though most highly cultivated in Christian society.  It is the idea that “history is the record of human existence under God, meaningful only so far as it reflects and explains and illustrates the order in the soul and in society which emanates from the divine purpose.”

Basically, according to this school, history has a point, and not some terrestrial utopia conceived in human arrogance and predicated on human perfectibility. Rather, “the aim of history … is to reveal to existing men and societies the true nature of being.”  This view cannot provide a basis for describing the “wave of the future,” nor can it provide “foreknowledge absolute,” but it does reveal

“a mankind striving for its order of existence within the world while attuning itself with the truth of being beyond the world, and gaining in the process not a substantially better order within the world but an increased understanding of the gulf that lies beyond immanent existence and the transcendent truth of being.”

These four schools of thought are competing for the minds of students here at UNC, often subtly, sometimes explicitly.  Are we merely a cosmological accident, as my biology professors seem to think, coming from nowhere and heading nowhere? Are we marching inevitably toward the uprising of the proletariat? Are we at the tail end of a great historical cycle, bound to share the fate of ancient Rome, driven under by the barbarian hordes and our own decadence? Are our lives guided and influenced by (and ultimately answerable to) divine Providence?

If we are to make any sense of history, these questions must be answered and a point of view must be taken. But be warned, dear reader: choose wisely. The fate of the world– at least in your own mind– depends upon it.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

From the illustrious, audacious Justin Crowder about a year and a half ago comes this post, the most highly visited post ever on CRDaily.com.  It is, in fact, in reference to a real play.  A little bit of zoophobia on the part of Mr. Crowder?  You make the call.  Read and be amazed:

Sylvia the Goat

I have a great idea!  Let’s write a play where a business man has a family and a seemingly perfect relationship with his wife.   But (and here’s the kicker!) it turns out he is having a sexual affair with a goat.  Yes, as in “baaahh.”

Dadgumit!  I just got word that the idea is already taken.  LAB! Theater, a UNC student organization, has produced the play “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia,” a drama which seeks to shock.  The playwright, one Edward Albee, denies this, however.  According to him, the play was written in order that the audience may “imagine how they would respond if they were in such a situation.”  Um….

And, as exciting as the whole goat sex thing is, the depth of the art does not stop at that.  No, that would be much too urbane.  The business man’s son has recently announced that he is gay.  But, that’s not all folks!  There is an awkward scene in which son and father exchange a kiss.  Albee expressed in a Los Angeles Times interview that he was surprised that it was at this moment that people began to walk out.  In other words: sex with goat, okay; making out with the son, not okay.  Well, at least we’ve got that going for us as a society.

Imagine if this play had been one that made light of homosexuality or some other obsession dear to UNC.  Imagine the review that it would receive in the DTH and the offense that would be taken by the general student population.  There would be much investigation.  The Young Dems, the BSM, and the Campus Y would probably all protest the play.  There would be a call for an ethics query due to Student Congress having supported the organization.  And, after a week of hoopla, the director would apologize and resign, be charged with a hate crime, and end up in prison.  But sex with a goat?  Eh.  Whatever, dude.

Now, I have it on pretty good authority that student fee money was not used to fund the play, but that is irrelevant.  Lab has been funded by student fees before and it has asked to be funded again next year.  I also have it on pretty good authority that the acting by our fellow students was superb.  I do not doubt that it was.  Actually, I helped out with LAB! once last year, serving as an assistant stage manager.  During my time there I was very impressed with the talent  of those whose acquaintance I was pleased to make.  Nevertheless, when I think of the lack of outrage and offense taken by the student body over events such as this one (the “I Heart Female Orgasm” event is another example), I cannot help but feel rather like I live in a parallel universe.

Here’s the rest of that article from yesterday. I hope you enjoy it! Here‘s a link to Dictionary.com in case you need it. Good luck with the rest of exams!

Also, tomorrow we will re-post the most-viewed CR Daily post ever (hint: it involves furry barnyard critters).

Inveighing We Will Go

WFB was not only important for what he brought into the Conservative Movement, but also for the riff-raff he discarded from the Movement. As he wrote in Up from Liberalism (1959), “The intellectual probity of a person is measured not merely by what comes out of him, but by what he puts up from others.”

Chief among this irresponsible faction of the Right was the shrill John Birch Society, a frighteningly active group of anti-Communist conspiracy theorists. They went so far as to claim that Eisenhower was a puppet of the Communists. In WFB’s words, the Birch fallacy was “the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: We lost China to the Communists, therefore the president of the United States and the secretary of state wished China to go to the Communists.”

In 1962, he scorned the Birch Society and especially its founder, James Welch, in the National Review and other writings (with the public agreement of Barry Goldwater), thus expelling them from the movement. The John Birch Society retaliated by realizing that WFB must be a stooge for the liberals, if not for the Communists themselves.

The Jeweler’s Eye

Whereas one might feel satisfied with one’s knowledge of, say, Napoleon after merely reading a summary of his accomplishments, one would be wrong to feel similarly of WFB. He was an even more interesting character than the mechanical facts would suggest. Nothing about WFB was cliché, though his style was the result of his natural inclinations rather than any intentional or deliberate attempt to “be his own person.”

He had charming mannerisms and a lambent wit which he flashed both in his writing and in his off-hand, on-camera comments. His vocabulary was breathtaking. Many have called him a “sesquipedalian” because he was, in the words of Jonah Goldberg, the “Prince of Polysyllabism.” But he was not a one-horse pony: his range of words went from the highfalutin to the everyday. As Jay Nordlinger of National Review noted, “Buckley will use the word stochastic, but he will also use the word Wow! And middling writers never use either.” Having learned English in England, he had an aristocratic accent which must be experienced to be understood.

Gratitude

As opposed to continuing to try to improve upon the work of abler pens who have tried to pay tribute to WFB, it might be more profitable to recount my personal attachment to beloved Buckley. I was born into a nuclear family that- excluding me- leans to the radical Left. I shudder to admit it, but my first political affiliation was with adolescent Marxism.

Upon hearing that confession, people tend to respond by asking what turned me Republican. I typically stumble around; it’s nearly impossible to satisfactorily describe my “Saul-becomes-Paul” moment. It’s more worthwhile to describe what sustains my conservatism – WFB.

I initially encountered WFB when I was first turning Right, and was so enraptured that I spent the next month devoted to reading back issues of National Review and every book of his I could find. At that early stage, his work succinctly articulated the threat that statism poses to freedom, and cohered a lot of notions of mine that had previously been resolutely nebulous. If ever I waver, I have his immense oeuvre (his collected papers weigh seven tons) to turn to for succor.

A paragon of gentlemanly conduct, Buckley was an example of the heights to which a thoughtful, gracious man can aspire. Buckley believed that circumstances could be shaped by individuals, and he proved it single-handedly. In an era of entrenched relativism, desperate nihilism, and especially during the tumultuous and doubt-plagued years that college can become, WFB’s is perhaps the best example to which to anchor oneself.

Buckley asserted that there are truths which are self-evident and steadfast. His spirit of high-minded deviance of, well, the Modern Age, his counter-revolutionary political philosophy, unwavering conviction and unprecedented vigor should serve as a clarion call to all generations that follow.

… so please forgive the laziness. I mean, I would like to talk about the Iranian nuclear situation or the looming doctor shortage or how the healthcare bill is hurting our country’s agriculture industry or zombie awareness month (be sure to wear a gray ribbon), but unfortunately I have exams to study for.

So, here’s some more vintage Carolina Review, from our august skipper Nash Keune (aka The Man Who Was Thursday) back in 2008, remembering William F. Buckley, Jr.:

Some wide-eyed youths have John Lennon, some have Kurt Cobain, some have Tupac, or some other figure to whom they feel personally attached, whose entire oeuvre is in their stock of accessible knowledge, whom they have never met yet nonetheless feel like they know as well as a best friend, and whose passing therefore elicits intense grief.

I have Bill Buckley.

Miles Gone By

William F. Buckley Jr. (known simply as “WFB” to the initiated) was born in 1925 in New York City and was raised in a Sharon, Connecticut home frequented by such superfluous men as libertarian writer Albert Jay Nock.

His father was a lawyer and oil-man born in Texas. In 1913, he founded an oil company based in Mexico where he was active in politics until, in 1921, he found himself on the wrong side of a revolution (a frequent experience for the Buckleys). He set the precedent for Buckley men to be counter-revolutionaries. WFB once said, “Father had been a dissenter all his life. Had he been an establishmentarian, there might have been a greater impulse to rebel.”

WFB’s youth was noted for evincing a degree of cosmopolitanism which many liberals would figure anathema to conservatives. WFB was fluent in French and Spanish at a young age (even before he had mastered English). His father imparted a life-long appreciation of classical music to him (his favorite composer was Bach).

Apparently a proponent of fiscal responsibility from birth, WFB wrote the King of England when WFB was eight or so, demanding that the King pay his war debt. He was educated in France and England before attending prep school in New York. His plans to go to Yale were postponed by World War II. Serving in the infantry, he ironically was a part of the honor guard for the FDR funeral.

After the war, he finally went off to Yale where he became the intellectual gadfly to the secular, liberal faculty. According to John Chamberlain, “Both undergraduates and professors were fascinated by Mr. Buckley. Some of them called him a ‘black reactionary;’ others said he was a true liberal in the old, traditional sense of the word… Clearly he was someone.”

He served as Chairman of the Yale Daily News, was active in the Yale Political Union and was elected by his peers to give the prestigious Class Day address. His address was devoted to the wayward faculty (which he would fully expose in his inaugural book, God and Man at Yale; mutatis mutandis, it is easily the most brilliant book on that topic), which shunned both God and individualism. It was so acicular that the devoutly open-minded, tolerant administration at Yale, who fought tooth-and-nail for academic freedom, decided it should not be given. He graduated in 1950 with honors.

Overdrive

Any list of WFB’s post-graduate activities is bound to be either overly truncated or overly cumbersome. WFB founded the National Review in 1955, wrote 55 books (starting in 1951 with God and Man at Yale, that works out to about one per year until his death) ranging from non-fiction to spy novels to general fiction, hosted 1,429 episodes of his television show Firing Line, gave 70 speeches and lectures a year, wrote upwards of 5,600 biweekly newspaper columns, not to mention thousands of lapidary articles, critiques, etc. published in outlets ranging from his own National Review to Commonweal to Popular Mechanics to Playboy (when asked why he would stoop to write for such a rag, he explained that contributing to Playboy was the best way for him to communicate with his 16 year old son). He served briefly as a CIA agent, was a delegate to the UN for Nixon, sailed across both the Atlantic and the Pacific and was an occasional concert harpsichordist.

WFB campaigned for countless conservative politicians and even entered the ring himself. In 1965, he ran for mayor of New York on the Conservative Party ticket, in the middle of that city’s grand liberal experiment (which would lead them into bankruptcy a decade later) against John Lindsay, the liberal GOP candidate. He himself called the endeavor quixotic (to wit, when asked at his first press conference what he would do if elected, he responded, “Demand a recount.”), but it did lead to the election of his older brother, James Buckley, to the U.S. Senate on the Conservative ticket in 1970, and the re-orientation of New York’s party politics.

Always willing to oblige his young admirers, he co-founded Young Americans for Freedom (a conservative college organization that provided the ground-swell for the Goldwater nomination and whose Founding Document, the Sharon Statement, was named after WFB’s estate, where it was formulated) and served as President of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (then called the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists; the ISI is the parent organization of the Collegiate Network, which is the parent organization of the Carolina Review).

It’s hard to peg WFB. He wrote, but was more than “a writer.” He hosted a TV show, but was not merely a TV host. He was… well, as with most things, WFB put it best himself. In 1986, he said, “I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon.”

Up from Liberalism

His efforts were hardly Sisyphean.

Many have credited Buckley with wedding economic libertarianism with a strong foreign policy and reverence for traditional values. Such people do not understand that economic libertarianism was a moribund ideology. In the post-World War II period, it was deemed “extremist” to assert that the federal government should withdraw from any social program, or even to propose that we need not add any new ones.

Thoughtful observers have recalled Lionel Trilling’s 1950 quote, “In the US at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”

What with FDR’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal, that quote was frightfully accurate. Put bluntly, our nation had been founded on individualistic principles, but was now been run by “progressive” collectivist ones.

Beyond that, the post-World War II Republican Party had become the “me-too” party, indulging statist impulses as decadently as the Democrats. One need go no further than Eisenhower, President and ex officio most eminent figure in the Republican Party, to see this phenomenon.

Eisenhower’s foreign policy was accommodating to the Communists and his domestic policy was liberal through-and-through. He expanded Social Security, increased the minimum wage, created a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and extended aid for low-income housing. In 1953, domestic spending had been 31 percent of the federal budget. Seven years later, it had risen to 49 percent. History had seemingly orphaned the belief that a society should be planed by individuals rather than a centralized and coercive government.

WFB’s objective, as he wrote in the inaugural issue of National Review was to “stand athwart history yelling Stop!” He countered the rote, turgid rhetoric of liberalism with his relentless logic, winning many converts to the formerly meager Right. Many commentators have attempted to sum up his importance. Also, in that inaugural issue of National Review, WFB wrote, “Let’s face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did National Review not exist, no one would have invented it;” perhaps the best way to measure his significance is to imagine that no one had invented National Review, or William F. Buckley Jr. for that matter.

“Without Bill Buckley, no National Review, no Goldwater nomination,” George Will once said. “Without the Goldwater nomination, no conservative takeover of the Republican Party. Without that, no Reagan.” (Will went on to credit Reagan, and thereby WFB, with winning the Cold War, but that’s another topic for an entirely different discussion).

As if George Will were not enough, we have the testimony of Ronald Reagan who, at the 30th anniversary of the National Review in 1985, said, “If any of you doubt the impact of the National Review’s verve and attractiveness, take a look around you this evening. The man standing before you was a Democrat when he picked up his first issue in a plain brown wrapper; and even now, as an occupant of public housing (the battle between Reagan and WFB over who was wittier is determined by inches rather than miles) he awaits as anxiously as ever his biweekly edition- without the wrapper.”

It might be a tad hyperbolic to declare that Buckley, the Giotto of the Conservatives, “dethroned regnant Liberalism.” Anyone who has heard a reporter wonder whether the President can “manage the economy,” knows this isn’t completely true. Buckley did, though, provide an attractive (we would tend to say irresistible) alternative that frankly did not exist in 1955 and that, with Reagan’s election, had at least one day in the sun.

(Don’t you hate it when they say) TO BE CONTINUED tomorrow.