and “Meditations” is a good read, esp. in the original; the translations lose something. Of course my greek is rusty and it never was any good, so reading a page is an all evening affair requiring a notebook and a dictionary and a lot of patience.

I like the person more than his writing, through his writing. He’s a temperate man, dedicated to his job and the people he commands and rules. Legendary stoicism. And his meditations, while they describe the optimal actions of a decent man, apply equally well to those who are not decent.

Pascal often opines in private about the malthusian nature of the left, and he’s absolutely correct; the left has made a crusade out of controlling energy, messing with food production, punishing “breeders”, etc. At the end, all of their agendas are about controlling the population in some way or another. But what about the beginning? What about Marcus Aurelius’ first principles?

That’s an easy one. Wealth.

The left has a very private in crowd of wealthy people, who have a clear and specific agenda, and that is to stay rich. Unlike sane people, they believe wealth is zero sum, and that if other people have money it somehow diminishes theirs.
To a certain extent they are correct; the more people keep their own money, the more they can do, and the less “Special” the wealthy are. It is much more desireable to have the only $3 million yacht in a harbor full of $20k boats than to have a $3 million yacht in a harbor full of $3 million yachts. At that level of stored wealth, nobody wants to be just like everyone else. Libertarian and conservative types want to have the right to keep their money and build wealth, and if they are allowed to do so, the “Special” become less special. So a system has been devised to separate the upstarts from their cash in the holy name of social justice and caring for the poor and downtrodden, which frankly, we used to do on our own as individuals.

The structure of this system imposes financial punishments for attempting to get out of the “Them” class and get into the “Us” class. And at the end of the day, the big lie is that they accuse their enemies of the most important thing to them, which is “Class warfare”. If everyone is really the same, nobody is special. So “Social” programs are invented, a huge rathole down which your money and mine is poured, not because it will “Help” anyone, because it doesn’t. The reason is simply to prevent our ability to keep it. Everything the left does is, at the end of the day, a tool to make this happen. They don’t give a shit about gays, they’re just a weapon to use against the church, which they consider an enemy because of it’s wealth. They don’t care about the poor, in fact poor people are one of their greatest methods of draining your wallet and mine. The only thing the wealthy are concerned with is maintaining the gap between them and us, so that their wealth will always set them apart and provide them with special privelege.