Fria Tider om regeringens beslut om subventionerad vård till illegala invandrare

Jätteneddragningar i vården när Reinfeldt satsar på illegala invandrare

“Personer som olovligen uppehåller sig i landet ska till okänd kostnad få helt gratis sjukvård, tandvård och läkemedel. Samtidigt kommer rapporter om kraftiga neddragningar på landets sjukhus, vilket kan leda till att vanliga svenskar blir tvungna att betala allt mer ur egen ficka för sin vård.”   Läs mer

Läkare: Reinfeldtcare öppnar för storskaliga bedrägerier

“Regeringens beslut att erbjuda skattefinansierad vård till illegala invandrare kan innebära att fler aktörer startar bedrägeribolag i stil med bluffverksamheten Flyktingmedicinskt Centrum, som avslöjades 2010. Det uppger vårdpersonal för Fria Tider.”   Läs mer

Så funkar Reinfedtcare: Hela listan på förmåner till illegala invandrare

“Regeringen Reinfeldts uppgörelse med Miljöpartiet om skattefinansierad vård för illegala invandrare blev mer generös än vad många befarat. Även utvisningsdömda våldtäktsmän ska nu få skattefinansierad vård – trots att de inte har rätt att uppehålla sig i Sverige.”   Läs mer

Nu klart: Illegala invandrare får gratis vård, tandvård och läkemedel

“Idag presenterades överenskommelsen mellan Miljöpartiet och regeringen om att ge illegala invandrare rätt till gratis sjukvård, tandvård, läkemedel och skola. Det är som vanligt de svenska skattebetalarna som står för notan.”   Läs mer

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Är FTs framställning felaktig, populistisk (i lägre mening), förenklad, vinklad, ensidig, förvrängd? Synpunkter är välkomna.

Vad invandringsfrågan handlar om

Roger Kimball: The Long March

How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

Encounter Books, 2000     Amazon.com

Book Description:

In The Long March, Roger Kimball, the author of Tenured Radicals, shows how the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s and ’70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and affecting our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. Believing that this dramatic change “cannot be understood apart from the seductive personalities who articulated its goals,” he intersperses his argument with incisive portraits of the life and thought of Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and other “cultural revolutionaries” who made their mark. For all that has been written about the counterculture, until now there has not been a chronicle of how this revolutionary movement succeeded and how its ideas helped provoke today’s “culture wars.” The Long March fills this gap with a compelling and well-informed narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and debate.
Front and Back Flaps:
“The Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock”, Roger Kimball writes in this controversial look at America’s cultural revolution. “The 1960s continue to reverberate in our national life today. This decade transformed high culture as well as everyday life in terms of our attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality.”
Others may think of the 1960s as The Last Good Time, but Kimball – author of Tenured Radicals, a brilliant and acerbic study of the radicalization of American universities – has no patience with such nostalgia. He sees this decade as a seedbed of excess and moral breakdown. He argues that the radical assaults on “the System” that took place then still define the way we live now – with intellectually debased schools and colleges, morally chaotic sexual relations and family life, and a degraded media and popular culture. “This inheritance has addled our hearts and minds”, Kimball writes, “and perverted our dreams while also preventing us from attaining them.”
How did we get from there to here? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, after fantasies of immediate political revolution faded, many student radicals urged their followers to begin “the long march through the institutions”. Radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse characterized this approach as working in the institutions of American life while also working against them. Kimball says that to see how well this strategy succeeded, “you need look no further than your local museum, your children’s school, your church (if you still go to church) and your workplace.”
The Long March is organized around incisive portraits of the architects of America’s cultural revolution – among them, Beat figures like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and celebrated or once celebrated gurus like Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and Charles Reich. In examining the lives and works of those who spoke for the 1960s, Kimball finds a series of cautionary tales, an annotated guidebook of wrong turns, dead ends, and blind alleys that, tragically, became the roadmap to the present.
For all that has been written about America’s counterculture, until now there has been no chronicle of how this revolutionary movement succeeded and how its ideas helped to provoke today’s “culture wars”. The Long March fills this gap with a witty and intelligent narrative that transforms the subject from what it was before Roger Kimball discovered it.
Amazon.com Review:
The 1960s, writes Roger Kimball, “has become less the name of a decade than a provocation.” This incisive critique of that turbulent time won’t calm the debate. The Long March will enthrall conservatives who think of themselves as culture warriors and infuriate liberals who still celebrate “the purple decade.” Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion and author of Tenured Radicals, is one of the Right’s most articulate writers. He argues forcefully that the pernicious influence of the 1960s can still be felt: “The success of America’s recent cultural revolution can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values. If we often forget what great changes this revolution brought in its wake, that, too, is a sign of its success: having changed ourselves, we no longer perceive the extent of our transformation.”The Long March proceeds as a series of stimulating essays on important cultural figures and movements, beginning with the Beats. Norman Mailer comes in for an eloquent trashing (“From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania”), as do any number of counterculture icons. I.F. Stone’s articles, writes Kimball, “read like neo-Stalinist equivalents of those multipart articles on staple crops with which The New Yorker used to anesthetize its readers.” And of The New York Review of Books, that bastion of elite liberal opinion, Kimball says: “Quite apart from the irresponsibility of the politics, there was an intellectual irresponsibility at work here, a preening, ineradicable frivolousness toward the cultural values that the journal was supposedly created to nurture.” There’s a distinctly conservative crankiness to Kimball’s writing; the jazz of Miles Davis is inevitably “drug-inspired” and rock music “was not only an aesthetic disaster of gigantic proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive.” Yet this inclination can lead to fascinating, if arguable, insights about modern American culture: “Everywhere one looks one sees the elevation of youth – that is to say, of immaturity – over experience. It may seem like a small thing that nearly everyone of whatever age dresses in blue jeans now; but the universalization of that sartorial badge of the counterculture speaks volumes.” Kimball’s writing is at once highbrow and accessible. Fans of Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind – or readers who have never quite believed all the English professors proclaiming Allen Ginsberg a poetic genius – will find The Long March engrossing and indispensable.
John J. Miller

Booklist Review:

Despite naming his book after Mao’s protracted war against Chiang Kai-shek, Kimball spends less time demonstrating that ’60s radicalism won its long march and became turn-of-the-millennium orthodoxy than he does denouncing the usual suspects. His targets – the Beats, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, liberal university presidents, the Berrigan brothers, Norman O. Brown, Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver, the New York Review of Books, etc. – are relatively easy, for they were often contradictory and illogical. Recalling just how outrageous they were is a sobering corrective to ’60s nostalgia. But Kimball also scores his betes noires for sexual misbehavior, which for him means anything except conjugal rights. This obsession leads him to rope the bisexual Paul Goodman into his rogues’ gallery, even though Goodman disagreed with nearly all the others. Goodman did, however, place sex at the center of his social and psychological thought. That Kimball can’t abide, at some cost to the cogency of his rebuttal of David Allyn’s Make Love, Not War, and other wistful backward glances.

Ray Olson

Back Cover Blurbs:

“How deeply rooted are our nation’s cultural problems? What is the legacy of the 1960s? Where are America’s culture wars going? Few people take these important questions more seriously than Roger Kimball. And few write about them with such clarity and eloquence.”  William J. Bennett

“I think it is terrific…We haven’t had a radical analysis like this – ever.”  William F. Buckley, Jr

“Deftly and with memorable wit, Roger Kimball shows how banal and derivative, how intellectually trivial cherished Sixties icons like Susan Sontag, Norman O. Brown, Allen Ginsberg, and all the rest of the really are. Kimball is as astute as he is amusing.”  John Ellis

“The extent of the cultural revolution we have lived through since the Sixties is still not clear to us, nor is its meaning. Roger Kimball has produced a searching and comprehensive study that brings it alltogether, high and low, from Herbert Marcuse to Monica Lewinsky. His well-told story is equal to the amazing event. It shows the routinization of exciting ideals, and the power and impotence of ideas.”  Harvey C. Mansfield

“Roger Kimball is among our most intelligent, thoughtful, and provocative cultural critics. He also is uncommon in that he writes lucidly and persuasively.”  Irving Kristol

 About the Author (from the Back Flap):
Roger Kimball is managing editor of the New Criterion and an art critic for the London Spectator. He is author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education [and many more – JOB] and editor (with Hilton Kramer) of several books on art and politics. Mr Kimball lives with his wife and son in Norwalk, Connecticut.
JOB’s Comment:

Leibniz och traditionen

Elementet av traditionell kontinuitet och den partiella distinktionen gentemot den frambrytande panteismen gör det möjligt för Lindbom att behandla Leibniz i lovordande vändningar som ett modernitetens undantag. Trots att han liksom Thomas söker en ny syntes, undgår han t.o.m. Thomas’ och högskolastikens misstag och förmår i snarare nyformulera vissa av den mer “traditionella”, platonska andlighetens grundsanningar. Vad som vanligen räknas till den moderna rationalismen accepteras här som i verkligheten utgörande en öppning mot andlighetens stora tradition.

I hög grad är det antagligen Leibniz strävan efter en universell filosofi, hans starka inspiration från andra traditioner, inte minst den kinesiska, och hans användning av termen philosophia perennis, som förklarar Lindboms beskrivning och värdering, och det är ju förvisso också sådant som direkt anknyter honom, om än på ett allmänt plan, till aspekter av den västerländska “esoterismens” strävan i samma avseenden, såväl som till dagens “traditionalistiska” skola som Lindbom själv tillhör. Fastän det kan synas som om hans egen monadologi uppvisar en del anmärkningsvärt egenartade drag i ljuset av andra formuleringar eller definitioner av philosophia perennis, etablerar han utan tvekan ett viktigt exempel i filosofins historia i sitt sätt att gå utöver den västerländska filosofins och teologins högst ofullständiga “traditionella” ramar, som en sen representant för renässansens ansatser i samma riktning.

Leibniz erkänner, betonar Lindbom, inte bara en intellektiv direktkontakt med den transcendenta verkligheten och sanningen, ett naturligt inre ljus, en prerationell kunskap och icke-diskursiv medvetenhet som det mänskliga förståndet sedan bearbetar. Han återupprättar också den teleologi som omöjliggjorts alltifrån Occam. Contra Occam hävdar han att Gud inte är skild från världen på det radikala sätt som denne lärde. Människan är delaktig i den gudiga verkligheten, en andlig enhet förenar Skaparen och skapelsen. Och individen “är inte sin egen suveräna lagstiftare, ty Guds ande bor inom oss och därför står vi under ett högre sanningsbud”. [Fallet Tyskland (1988), 53.] Med allt detta har Leibniz inte bara vederlagt hela Lockes atomistiska och empiriska sensualism med alla dess av honom snabbt uppfattade svagheter, utan även, antecipatoriskt, den moderna folksuveränitetsdoktrinen:

“Guds sanningar finns orubbligt inskrivna i människosjälen och hela universum är genomträngt av den gudomliga andliga substansen. Förhållandet mellan ande och materia är inte en inomvärldslig dualitet – här kommer Leibniz i konflikt med Descartes – och materien är ej motsatt Gud, ty över allt och inneslutande allt står Gud som det högsta Varat. Men detta vara är en universell andlighet…Leibniz skapar ett tankesystem, som direkt anslutande sig till medeltidens andlighet hävdar en enhet, en gudomlig totalitet, som i sig innesluter och samtidigt genomtränger ett harmoniskt makrokosmos och ett andligt såväl som materiellt mikrokosmos. Leibniz ställer upp sin lära som ett alternativ till såväl cartesiansk rationalistisk dualism som empirisk atomistisk sensualism.” [Ibid. 53 f.]

Lindbom konstaterar t.o.m. riktigt att Leibniz därmed föregripit den tyska romantikens kritik mot dessa strömningar; litet märkligt är därför att han när han själv senare i samma verk behandlar denna romantik och den tyska idealismen inte tycks se några som helst förtjänster av den typ han rikligen tillskriver Leibniz.

När Lindbom beskriver hur Leibniz utvecklar denna syn i sin från naturmekaniken helt skilda lära om den preetablerade harmonin, lägger han, trogen den förening monismen ingår med generalismen i hans egna åskådningsmässiga utgångspunkter, tonvikten vid enheten och det universella på ett sätt som förbiser några av de drag i nyplatonismen och delvis i den kristna platonismens huvudströmning som jag framhållit. Leibniz hävdar att det är en grov materialistisk föreställning att “likna universaliteten vid en ocean, sammansatt av ett oändligt antal vattendroppar. När han talar om monaderna, är dessa ej att förväxla med atomteorins materiebildningar, ty monaderna är till sitt väsen andliga…och de är framsprungna ur den gudomliga Enheten…Dessa monader kan därför fattas som himmelska arketyper, som sedan i en skapelseprocess träder in i jordisk skepnad.” [Ibid.]

Det är på många sätt klart att Lindbom inte alls delar den typ av kristen analys och kritik av den tyska panteismen och dess framväxt som, som vi sett, under 1900-talets första hälft framfördes av Groos. Men både för frågan om hans framställning är historiskt rättvisande ifråga om Leibniz och frågan om den metafysiska innebörden av den beskrivna ståndpunkten i sig skulle här förhållandet till de i Lindboms verk utelämnade eller förbisedda aspekterna av nyplatonismen och av den kristna påverkan på den vidare platonska traditionen behöva utförligt utredas. Det blir inte tillräckligt klart hur Lindbom, även om han inte exakt följer Leibniz’ terminologi, förenar sin andliga universalitet – som förvisso höjer sig över den blott rationella generalismen – med vissa typiska individualitetsorienterade leibnizka läror som i övrigt inte spelar någon större roll eller kanske någon roll överhuvudtaget i Lindboms verk.

Exempelvis kan han här sluta upp kring försvaret för det personliga mot “ett universellt kaos”: “Människan har för Leibniz inte förlorat sin personliga egenart, hon utplånas inte i ett universellt kaos och – vad viktigare är – hennes posthuma liv innebär inte ett personligt utplånande.” [Ibid.] Det förefaller som om Lindbom här kanske åtminstone inte använder ”personlig” i full överensstämmelse med det sätt på vilket han på annat håll använder termen persona. Men detta endast bekräftar hans intressanta positiva värdering av Leibniz som undantag mitt i en enligt Lindboms analys sedan länge i enhetligt felaktig riktning framrullande historisk utveckling.

Juan Manuel Burgos: Introducción al personalismo

Biblioteca Palabra, 2012

La filosofía personalista surgió en la Europa de mediados del siglo XX proponiendo un concepto de persona digna y solidaria frente al colectivismo y al liberalismo. Este proyecto tomó cuerpo gracias al intenso trabajo de E. Mounier y se consolidó a través de las aportaciones de filósofos como Maritain, Buber, Wojtyla, von Hildebrand, Marcel, Guardini, Julián Marías y otros. Su influencia ha sido grande.

Juan Manuel Burgos, reconstruye lúcidamente en este libro la génesis de esta filosofía a través de la vida y pensamiento de sus principales representantes. Además, propone también una síntesis personal con la que pretende consolidar las bases del personalismo del siglo XXI. El reconocido prestigio del autor en este terreno y su capacidad de síntesis convierten a esta obra en un texto imprescindible para quien quiera introducirse en el pensamiento personalista.

Juan Manuel Burgos es Fundador y Presidente de la Asociación Española de Personalismo y de la Asociación Iberoamericana de Personalismo. Es profesor titular de la Universidad CEU-San Pablo y ha publicado numerosos libros sobre antropología y personalismo entre los que destacan: Antropología: una guía para la existencia (4ª ed., 2009), Repensar la naturaleza humana (2007) y Reconstruir la persona. Ensayos personalistas (2009).

Idealism as Alternative Modernity, 4

Idealism as Alternative Modernity, 1

Idealism as Alternative Modernity, 2

Idealism as Alternative Modernity, 3

I was in fact alerted to the problems – not least the moral ones – of the pantheistic revolution not primarily by Christian orthodoxy, but by that form of idealism that in the “empire of idealism” was called personal idealism and that in one version dominated Swedish philosophy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, later, by the creatively renewed classicist criticism of the American new humanist Irving Babbitt and two of his Swedish philosophical successors who were not disinclined, as he himself was, to connect his ideas with idealism, in the footsteps of no less an idealist than Benedetto Croce.

If we consider the problematically revolutionary aspect, Christianity too, of course, as well as Judaism, have in their own ways, and mainly through their ever newly interpretable eschatologies, contributed quite as much to it. But, building also partly on the work of Eric Voegelin and some Christian historians (Voegelin was not an orthodox Christian) I also accept that traditional Christian orthodoxy does have valid general points to adduce against the pantheistic revolution, although they are not exclusively its own contribution. They are primarily the ones relating to transcendence, the general nature of the order of the world, freedom, moral responsibility, and individual personality. Through the emphasis on them, it has provided a needed counterbalance.

But broader idealism itself, properly conceived, is not identical with or reducible to the pantheistic revolution that generated problematic modernity. That it is not per definition revolutionary in the immanentizing metaphysical and moral sense I discussed in Greece is obvious, to the point of supporting almost an opposite understanding of it, when we consider the various historical implications and applications of Platonism, and, a fortiori, the social structures supported by Eastern idealisms.

This of course highlights the problems with bracketing the vast differences between modern and other forms of idealism, but, as some of the mentioned idealism critics are of course well aware, modern idealism too often manifested explicitly non-revolutionary forms, and already in Hegel. Moreover, the tension between the conservative and the radical versions is also clearly discernible throughout the history of Western esotericism.

Alongside the often closely related esotericism, idealism represents the long neglected third main avenue of Western thought, distinct from both fundamentalist religion and modern materialist or nihilist secularism. Rightly conceived, it provides in itself many of the resources of the requisite alternative modernity, not least with regard to the metaphysical, moral, and political dimensions of the question of the relation between the individual and the larger wholes which was a central theme in my Greece paper.

And in so-called personal idealism or idealistic personalism in its most advanced forms, the correctives with regard to the mentioned valid points of criticism, and indeed some further and no less important points, are, as I always suggest, already available, independently of the mythological peculiarities of Christian dogmatics and even to a considerable extent independently of general Christian theology.

The main weakness of nineteenth-century absolute idealism from this position is not that it is absolute, but that it is not fully idealistic. With this I reiterate my in-house idealistic challenge with which some of you are by now familiar. For all the important partial truths I defended at Oxford, Bernard Bosanquet’s position that “consistent realism and absolute idealism differ in name only” epitomizes for me the philosophical confusion and error of the pantheistic revolution of the modernity to which an alternative is needed.

The optimal resources for the formulation of the idealist contribution to an alternative modernity therefore seem to me to be those of personal idealism or personal absolute idealism in its most advanced forms. And as I always point out – both because of the way in which I myself became an idealist and for the sake of corroborating my argument for the universality of these issues – there are from the beginning, despite, or beyond, the obvious difficulties of translation and interpretation, striking similarities with the Western debates between absolute and personal idealists in the Vedanta tradition in the East.