George Will did a good little column on the death of Robert Conquest that mentions Sander's honeymoon in the USSR in 1988. I'd never heard that, so I did a bit of Googling ... noted right wing news source MSNBC reports (linked above) that this is covered in Bernie Sanders now very hard to get book:
19. Sanders honeymooned in the USSR. Sanders married his current wife, Jane, in May of 1988 and the next day left for their “romantic honeymoon” to Yaroslavl, in the then-Soviet Union. The trip was an official delegation from Burlington to cement the two cities’ sister-city relationship. “Trust me. It was a very strange honeymoon,” Sanders writes.However, if you live in the strong "anti-Fox" area of the left wing universe, Bernie never went on his honeymoon in the USSR and it is all made up by "Faux News":
The problem is that, with Fox News, what you learn each day just makes you more stupid than you were the day before.
The origin of the this made-for-Fox fallacy was a 2007 interview of Sanders’ wife, Jane, by Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. In the interview she was describing how she and Bernie met and some of their early engagements which were almost entirely related to their shared interest in community affairs. They were so involved in these sort of activities that she joked…
“The day after we got married, we marched in a Memorial Day Parade, and then we took off in a plane to start the sister city project with Yaroslovl with 10 other people on my honeymoon.”
The context was obviously humorous. Who could possibly read that and come away thinking that she seriously meant that they honeymooned with ten other people who were implementing a sister city project? Well, apparently Weinstein and others of his ilk came away believing just that. Weinstein likely picked up the lie from uber-conservative John Fund who wrote an article for the National Review containing the same misrepresentation of Sanders’ diplomatic trip.
We are going to have to get used to wingnuts hyperventilating over the political labels attached to Sanders.While I'd love to say that more right wing news sources are never wrong, I'd by lying. I'm sure there are some fables on even Moose Tracks, although I try very hard to check accuracy from multiple sources. I'd say that in general if you listen to a single source for your news -- ANY single source, or even just CURRENT news you will have a bit of the effect that the "Faux crazies" point out above ... "The problem is that, with Fox News, what you learn each day just makes you more stupid than you were the day before."
All sources are biased, and the MOST insidious bias is the progressive bias -- the idea that knowledge and history are moving somehow directly toward "better / smarter / fairer / more enlightened" (Whig Theory of History). The secular universe claims to be created by randomness -- random means random. It CAN'T have a direction! Not ANY direction!
We used to live in a teleological (directed ... by God) universe. In THAT universe, one could say that the future was at least part of "God's Plan" ... but a cursory study of eschatology (end times) tells the faithful that "Gods ways are not our ways" ... outside of the admonition to seek to assist in God's plan, there is ZERO reason to subscribe to "progress" = "better". It is a stated equivalence of two unknown terms.
Philosophy and Religion were once the center of what it meant to be an educated human. They were the center, because living every day without a creed of any sort is like travelling with no destination -- you have no idea of what transportation to choose, which way to go, or even to move or sit still. You are directionless.
The vast majority of modern man lives with no thought of where they are going nor what they seek -- except possibly "pleasure", or "ease" or some such vague awareness. No matter where they get their "news", they to a great degree "get stupider every day" simply because of information overload. They are bombarded with supposed "crisis", "breaking news", "historic events", etc, but they have no context in which to place these supposed momentous events.
So mostly, left and right, they assert the superiority of their tribe. Man without civilization is tribal, and civilization **IS** Religion and Philosophy -- FOLLOWED by literature, music, art, politics science, etc. Even carefully studied and varied sources of "news" are only fitted into a tribal context of the kind from the "anti-Fox" source above -- one more opportunity to call the other tribe "stupid", while having no concept of what it really is that supposedly makes your own tribe "intelligent".
The saddest thing to me is what I slowly discovered starting in the '80s -- that Western civilization wasn't "declining" for me personally, it was DEAD -- or more accurately, it did not exist since I did not understand it!
When I first opened "The Closing of The American Mind", I realized I lacked the most basic of tools -- vocabulary, exposure to classic literature, basic concepts of meaning and philosophy, etc in order to even BEGIN to understand the very basics of the greatness of Western civilization that was supposedly my civilization. I was a college graduate, but really just a technician in a tiny corner of a very specific modern technology.
I've slowly clawed my way to a rudimentary (mis?)understanding of "a little", but it is all self-taught with all the dangers that entails ... and it is generally a very lonely road. Especially lonely because part of "liberalism" is to cut off people that disagree with you. The forces of "progressivism" are so powerful they have thoroughly wrecked most of the community of wisdom -- a few lists of "great books", biographies of great men, and of course The Bible, are all that remain -- and memories, lots of memories.
Progressivism will continue to root out all of civilization it can -- for it primarily lives by stealth. Destroy meaning, destroy wisdom, return humans to blind tribes of savages -- all be it with Internet, MSM and public "education" (indoctrination) , rather than drums, witchdoctors and spears -- but tribal savages just the same. When life has no meaning beyond at most your tribe, then people are very easily led.
I'll report, you decide.
'via Blog this'
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