Tabitha Alloway

118 posts

Tabitha Alloway

Tabitha Alloway

@AllowayTabitha

Christ-redeemed gal. Wife. Homeschool mama. Electrician. Lover of art, music, books, and books. And books. And did I mention books? 😉

शामिल हुए Mart 2019
69 फ़ॉलोइंग43 फ़ॉलोवर्स
Tabitha Alloway
Tabitha Alloway@AllowayTabitha·
"These topics are so widely disparate as to make a blanket discussion of 'Enlightenment Values' useless unless we can be more specific." Yes. Name the specifics of what it is you actually disagree with. Then, discussion can begin.
Cody Libolt@CodyLibolt

When people deride “Enlightenment Values,” what are they referring to? Perhaps they do not agree with some Enlightenment thinkers, such as John Locke, who believed that society can be improved based on appeals to universal moral ideals that should be obvious to everyone by reason (especially the concept of individual rights). Or perhaps they do not value “equality” (or, at least, not some version of it). The idea of equality is vague. It can be taken as meaning that people are owed equal legal rights—or that people are owed equal outcomes. Here are a few more things someone could have in mind by “Enlightenment Values”: -Rejection of tradition -Rejection of religion -Rejection of keeping a strongly “local” identity (with loyalty to countrymen or kin being a major factor in one’s value structure) These topics are so widely disparate as to make a blanket discussion of “Enlightenment Values” useless unless we can be more specific. There is a lot of discussion lately (coming entirely from incompetent men) about John Locke and Thomas Jefferson being wrong, especially about what was said in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Here are some of the main incompetent thinkers worth knowing about: Yoram Hazony, especially “Conservatism: A Rediscovery” RR Reno, especially “The Return of the Strong Gods” Patrick Deneen, especially “Why Liberalism Failed” Stephen Wolfe, especially “The Case for Christian Nationalism” Most of the contributors to “American Reformer” Most of the rest of the “New Right,” “Dissident Right,” and “Post-Liberals”

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Tabitha Alloway
Tabitha Alloway@AllowayTabitha·
A timely piece of advice.
Cody Libolt@CodyLibolt

Many people tolerate evil trends while they last and then shift in another direction once the incentives change. The moral positions held by a mob measure nothing but human gullibility and conceit. Mobs form when people stop thinking independently and start merely accepting and imitating the thoughts of someone else— especially someone who is exaggerating or mispresenting something. Misprepresentation and exaggeration create chaos. People start “just guessing” about what some other person or camp is thinking, saying, meaning, wanting, and doing. The members of the mob start looking to people they already like and trust in order to learn about people they don’t like and trust. They start believing the guesses of the loudest exaggerators in their own tribe. Then the other tribe grabs the exaggeration and publicly dismantles it, proving that they have been sloppily misrepresented. Then someone who is undecided sees this situation. In his eyes, it ends up harming the credibility of the side that committed the exaggeration. Thus lack of precision in words leads to chaos in society. These points help explain why social trends are cyclical. To the extent that people are imitating, rather than thinking, mob patterns form. Eventually, there is a “discernment bubble” similar to a housing price bubble. People realize that everyone was caught up in a pattern of imitation and exaggeration. Then “the bottom falls out.” That is when you see a sudden preference cascade. Some cycles and trends are inevitable, but large and destructive bubbles are not inevitable. They are the result of bad decision-making by specific people. The more that people tolerate baseless claims and exaggerations, the more chaos will occur in a system over the course of time. If chaos affects the movement that is broadly aimed at combatting the danger of radical leftism, this chaos is costly to the total movement. The competing movement (radical leftism) gains an edge. For this reason, we should treat our rivals with objectivity and in the way we would want to be treated if we were the ones committing evil. We should maintain standards of accuracy in order to not scuttle our own cause.

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Tabitha Alloway
Tabitha Alloway@AllowayTabitha·
“[DEI] demonizes hard work, merit, family, and the dignity of the individual. An ideology that pathologizes these fundamental human virtues is one that seeks to undermine what makes America exceptional." —Bari Weiss
Cody Libolt@CodyLibolt

Woke: “Sympathetic to Marxist analysis.” Specifically, a woke idea is one that draws from the Critical Race Theory and Diversity-Equity-Inclusion frameworks. Wokeness means accepting and teaching the same message that we lately have observed the media, school system, and state uniting to push onto the people—a message that unequal outcomes in a society are proof of an injustice. On this model, justice requires egalitarian outcomes. If you do not have egalitarian outcomes, you are a victim of injustice (or you are a perpetrator of injustice, or you are a complicit participant in injustice). Egalitarianism is the key moral concept in the woke movement. Distinguish equality under the law from egalitarianism. Ayn Rand wrote: “‘Equality,’ in a human context, is a political term: it means equality before the law, the equality of fundamental, inalienable rights which every man possesses by virtue of his birth as a human being, and which may not be infringed or abrogated by man-made institutions, such as titles of nobility or the division of men into castes established by law, with special privileges granted to some and denied to others.” The egalitarians, writes Rand, are seeking, “not political, but metaphysical equality—the equality of personal attributes and virtues, regardless of natural endowment or individual choice, performance and character. It is not man-made institutions, but nature, i.e., reality, that they propose to fight—by means of man-made institutions. Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the ‘unfairness’ of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts.” Wokeness is the spirit of the age. The main goal of the woke (or the leftists, the socialists, the social justice warriors, and so on) is to use the government to create equal *outcomes* for all people by policies that explicitly treat one person *differently* than another. This “woke” spirit is identical to the vision for society advanced in the book “A Theory of Justice” by John Rawls. It also bears strong semblance to the ideas of Karl Marx. Marx used egalitarianism as a key idea in creating his philosophy. For that reason, wokeism can be understood as a form of Neo-Marxism. While there are differences in all these terms, they are ways of talking about the same constellation of claims, all amounting in the final analysis to a morally indignant claim of: “Gib me dat for free.”

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Tabitha Alloway रीट्वीट किया
Bill Roach
Bill Roach@billroach_·
You will know them by whom they platform.
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Tabitha Alloway
Tabitha Alloway@AllowayTabitha·
"If tariffs didn't work, why would so many other countries impose them?"
Cody Libolt@CodyLibolt

Here’s how to think about tariffs. This is via @WalterHudson: You may think, when it comes to tariffs, that it's "only fair" to charge other countries for doing business here when they first charged us. In a sense, that's true, just like it's fair to shoot yourself in the foot after watching someone else do it. When other countries "charge us," they're really charging their own citizens. Consumers ultimately pay any tax on business transactions in the form of higher prices. This artificially degrades the economic value of the product, making consumers in the *importing* country less productive than they would otherwise be. If you could get gas from the next town over fifty cents cheaper, and your city choose to tax you that amount to "protect" stations in your town, you would end up with less in your pocket, and thus have a diminished productive capacity (you literally couldn't drive as much). This may appear to help the local stations, but at your expense, and not even then in actuality. All it does is distort the price signal and keep inefficient market actors from making necessary business choices. That's the thing. Sometimes, the best economic choice a business can make is to end. Sometimes, the best economic choice a business can make is to layoff workers. This happens when the activity in question is no longer *profitable*, which is the whole point of economic activity. It's immoral to continue an unprofitable activity, as it quite literally destroys value. That's precisely what tariffs and similar price controls do, they perpetuate unprofitable economic activity, destroying value and staggering productivity. They're a tax on you and me, not "them." I'm perfectly comfortable letting other countries impose this burden on their citizens. I'm not willing to support Trump or anyone else imposing it on ours.

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