An Open Lette To Open Minded Progressives

Points

There is one difference, though. To be a Catholic, you have to have faith, because no one has ever seen the Holy Ghost. To be a progressive, you have to have trust, because you believe that your worldview accurately reflects the real world—as experienced not just by your own small eyes, but by humanity as a whole.

None of them hates Washington as a whole. So they can never unite to destroy it, and the whole machine is stable. See how beautiful this is? By separating voters into two competing but cooperating parties, neither of which can destroy the other, the two-party system creates a government which will survive indefinitely, no matter how much happier its citizens might be without it.

Sentences

And the world changed. Before the 1960s, colonial governments and companies fought malaria because their officials often lived in remote outposts like Nigeria’s hill stations and Vietnam’s Marble Mountains. Independence movements led to freedom, but also often to civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care.

What we see here is that independence movements—which the writer clearly believes are a good thing—led to some very concrete and very, very awful results, in addition to this curious abstraction—freedom. Clearly, whatever freedom means in this particular context, it’s such a great positive that even when you add it to civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care, the result still exceeds zero.

And what does it mean for a government to be “free,” anyway? Is the government of North Korea “free?” What about ExxonMobil? Or the Democratic Party? I have a fairly good understanding of what it means for a human being to be “free.” When it comes to an organization, especially one which claims to be a “government,” I’m quite without a clue.