Defining the Indefinable, Defending the Indefensible
Posted on 27 January 2011
In reference to this essay here, a reader asks:
“This may be an odd point to ask this, but how are you defining ‘leftist’? For example, are you describing a garden variety member of the Democratic party or something else?”
This is not odd at all. A call for a definition is always in order, since most disagreement is based on improperly defined terms.
Alas, I am not defining the word Leftist. I cannot. They have spent so much of their time and effort to avoid, elude, evade, and weasel out of defining themselves, that no mere mortal has any ability to find a label that can fit on them.
I do not think the movement, for which I have no satisfactory name, can be defined.
We cannot call them “Progressives” since they oppose the progress of industry and human rights, and positively seek the regression of the fine arts to sub-barbaric levels.
And, at the moment, they are wedded to the failed political-economic policies of half a century or more ago. The New Deal of your grandfather’s day is rather old and gray. The irony of calling these antique reactionaries “Progressive” is too great to bear.
We cannot call them “Liberals” because they oppose liberty in every area except sexual incontinence, and the socialist Liberals of the Twentieth Century sought the direct opposite of the goals of the classical Liberals of the Nineteenth.
Where the classical Liberal sought to expand the franchise of voting to the lower classes, blacks, and women, the socialist Liberal sought to abolish the franchise except for a ritual casting of One Party Votes for the office of President-for-Life. Where the classical liberal sought to decrease the intrusion of the Monarchy into private life, the socialist sought to decrease private life, private property, privacy, and (to judge by resultinf Democides) sought the end of life itself.
Even the non-violent versions of socialist Liberals, the Fabians, support the expansion of unelected bureaucracies over increasingly detailed control of the populatoin, support eugenics and euthanasia, birth control, aborticide, and almost as if they seek to equal the death-score of their more violent Communist and Fascist brethren: but a private holocaust rather than a public one.
It is misleading even to call them “Leftist” (as I have done here) because the Left-to-Right spectrum as it is normally described runs from International Socialists or Communists on the Far Left through mild socialists like Fabians and New-Dealers in the middle, and the on the Right are Monarchists both limited and absolute, Imperialists, Plutocrats, and National Socialists or Fascists.
This spectrum is oddly deficient in its main point. There is no place on it anywhere to put the party of limited or federalist forms of government, where individual rights are protected against the encroachment of the state, where power is local and individual, and a man has a right to bear arms and speak his mind. Since the Monarchy of Great Britain was just as much a foe of the limited federalist government of the Americans as the National Socialists of Germany, it is particularly misleading — indeed, it is a insolent lie — to use a so-called spectrum of political opinion that mashes together all the foes of Marxism as one group. The only purpose of this so-called spectrum is to allow demagogues to call Republicans “Nazis.”
Other terms to describe the indefinable social and political movement are equally awkward. One can call them “Secular humanists” except that the atheists are a minority within the movement, and of them, most are not atheistic for sound and rational atheist reasons, they are atheist because of anger against God, and they make real atheists look bad. One cannot call them “brights” because they are, at least when it comes to one topic, quite dim.
One could use an accurate but obscure term, like “nihilist”, “postmodernist” or “laicist”, but such terms lack application to all members of the movement, and have other and technical meanings.
One could invent one’s own term for them, as I have on occasion, calling them Morlocks and Dehumanists. This is amusing in a petty way, but it can only be used amid a small circle who share the same secret vocabulary.
That exhausts the possibilities. I left with calling them “Leftists” even though the term is inaccurate, because no other word can serve.
I am not necessarily describing a Democrat party-member.
There are political Leftists who are not socialists but who accept the axioms on which socialism is based, and they promote ‘Interventionist’ or ‘Mixed Economy’ or ‘Regulated Economy’ policies without realizing (or caring) on what axioms their policies are based, or what results follow.
There are social Leftists who accept the axioms of the post-Christian world view, and who, like Marxists, analyze all human relationships and institutions in terms of power struggles between homogeneous power blocs, men versus women, Whites versus Blacks, Rich versus Poor, to the exclusion of anything else. Again, they are mostly unaware or unconcerned with the axioms of their thinking, but their policies and actions are (as logic dictates they must be) exactly in line with what a self-aware Marxist seeking to dismantle Western society would promote. But these innocent fellow travelers are not Marxists, merely “Useful Idiots” useful to the Cause.
There is an even larger group who are “Leftists” only the most general sense that they consider life to be a conspiracy of Ins against Outs.
In this political myth, the Ins are the “Haves,” imagined as overweight white Protestant cigar-smoking males in silk top hats who vote Republican, and who write the rules of the world to suit themselves. The Outs are the “Have-Nots,” the Dispossessed, the marching proles, and this includes everyone with a real or an imaginary grievance against the institutions and traditions of civilization. The Outs deem the rules of the world to be written to benefit the Ins and therefore imposing on them the no-win choice between obeying the laws or obeying their interests and consciences. Most adopt a rebellious attitude, but stop short of rebellion.
In the Twentieth Century, there were four political groups of “Outs” — 1. the Fabians, who seek (through peaceful means) to rewrite the “In” rules for the benefit of the Outs, and who therefore seek continuously to expand the role of government; 2. the Browshirts, who seek to enslave the “Ins” and exact a horrible vengeance upon them (the “Ins” are imagined (for the most part) to be Jewish bankers); 3. those who raise the Red Banner of Communism, who seek utopia by killing the “Ins” and abolishing all the laws and institutions the “Ins” have made, including the price system and the law of cause and effect; and 4. those who raise the Black Banner of Anarchy, who seek merely to destroy the institutions of the world, abolish Church and State altogether, foreseeing that the only way to prevent the “Ins” from capturing the laws is to do away with laws per se.
Brown, Red and Black have been thankfully reduced to insignificance in Europe, but the Fabians have grown to the point where even the so-called Rightwing embraces (or, at least, fails to oppose) Fabian policies, such as Social Security measures, wage and price controls, environmentalist measures, confiscatory levels of taxation, race quotas. All these policies have in common only that they are meant to help the “Outs.” Whether they are productive or counterproductive of that end is a question for another day.
But no particular member of the “Outs” is out for the same reason. A black Southern Baptist preacher who believes in strong families and opposes the normalization of sexual perversion is “Out” because he is black, and he sees an ingrained and institutionalized racism, either open, as in Democrat-backed Jim Crow laws, or hidden, as in the Good Old Boys networks that exclude him. His interests are quite different from a Jewish film-maker who is “Out” because he is not a Christian, or a New York lawyer who is “Out” because she is a woman bumping her head against a glass ceiling, or even a Catholic priest who is “Out” because he is a creepy pedophile.
The membership is not fixed. The Irish and the Italians used to be “Out” because they were not Anglo-Saxons, but in the modern day, they are considered White and therefore are “In” whereas Spaniards and Portuguese are “Outs” because they are non-White, or, at least, non-English-speaking. Why Spain is not “White” but Italy is, this I cannot fathom. The position of Orientals and Indians is ambiguous or, at least, I know of no public figure akin to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson speaking up for Hindus and Sikhs and demanding reparations, and I know of no political parties akin to La Raza demanding the annexation of California to the Empire of Japan, and marching under the flag of the Rising Sun. The relative success of these minorities in America gives them at least some of the qualities of “Ins” albeit, as the Jews do, most would still tend to vote Democrat.
And the vast majority of all these folk have no concern and no interest in the deeper philosophical issues or axioms that under-pin the goal and direction of the general movement in which they move.
For example, a group of concerned but economically-illiterate citizens who want to see the poor workingman receive a decent living wage will support a minimum wage law, unaware that this increases unemployment, and unconcerned that it intrudes a Federal power into local or individual affairs. There are social conservatives who favor progressive goals or “New Deal” interventions in the economy; and contrariwise there are libertarians on social issues who are conservatives on economic issues (witness, for example, Robert Heinlein, who was the author both of STARSHIP TROOPERS and STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND). And the vast majority of voters merely follow their local interests, the local Good Old Boys network, or vote as their parents voted. They certainly do not seek the dissolution of civilization!
But, as economic policies go, interventionism requires inflationary policies, which promote capital decumulation, which weakens the free market, creates misery, destroys wealth, and makes the common people prey to demagogues and would-be dictators, in addition to emptying the war coffers and destroying the civic spirit and public morale necessary to maintain civilization, decency, order, and law.
Those who think I exaggerate are welcome to examine the condition of Germany between the wars, and note how rapidly that great nation fell from civility and rule of law to barbarism, and note as well the role of intervention and inflation in the downfall. The thread leading from the well intentioned fool who votes for minimum wage laws all the way to the downfall of nations and peoples is long and convoluted as Ariadne’s thread leading through the Labyrinth, but rest assured that this thread is unbroken.
The Democratic Party can be imagined to consist of three smaller parties: an intellectual elite whose main purpose is antinomian, merely the disruption of traditional notions of decency and modesty, the corruption of language; a middle body of progressives, who want the state to check the excesses of industry, protect the environment, feed the poor, and make peace between the races; an even larger body forming a base of workingmen and pro-Union men who seek protection for themselves and their families against the shocks and uncertainties of the free market, as well as bureaucrats, teachers, trial lawyers, and other primarily dependent on the government for their status and employment.
(I should mention that the Republicans have a similar three fold structure: an elite of Laissez-faire economically conservative intellectuals; a main body of pro-military and pro-industry supporters; a larger base of social conservatives and populists, mostly Christians, disgusted with the corruption of morals and manners. The elite of each party is the direct foe of the base of the other.)
So imagine an army that has both regular and irregular troops, both a civilized and disciplined militia, who march in rank and file, and also a larger cloud of barbarian auxiliaries who merely snipe and harass when and where they would, but who do indeed aid the military effort of the regulars.
Imagine further that the troops and auxiliaries are an alliance of three different princes with different goals and war-aims, and that they march together for some purposes and for others, they do not: Antinomians, Progressives, Unionists.
So we are dealing with a crowd or cloud of people, a fog with no defined edges, a crowd that some individuals enter and some individuals exit, and whose specific movements from moment to moment contain counter-currents and back-eddies.
The primary thing to keep in mind is the role of philosophy in this movement. Only the elites of either side are concerned with intellectual justification or logical consistency of the justifications for their policies. However, since the general mass of either party follows the consensus opinion and adheres, without deep question, to the general moral atmosphere of their peers, the articulate philosophy of the elite of one generation becomes as if by osmosis the inarticulate background assumptions of the general mass of the next generation.
One irony is the role of mental and moral superiority in the justification. The elite of the Left claim a moral and mental superiority, a scientific clarity, as a core of their justification: the Nazis and Commies are allowed to kill lesser beings (Untermenschen, Bourgeoisie) because they are smarter than them. When, as a natural action of the articulate philosophy of one generation becoming the inarticulate moral atmosphere of the next, the common man of the Left soon comes to believe that he also is intellectually superior, because this is an assumption of the elite.
Soon large numbers of young men are strutting around as if they are scientists, scholars and philosophers who have never done any independent thinking on any topic, nor having the capacity for it: the lesser minds merely adopt the pose of their intellectual leaders and progenitors, and if the leaders are elitist snobs, the commoners become elitist snobs too.
The elite of the Right, having not yet wholly abandoned their Christian world view, do not use an intellectual superiority to justify inroads against tradition. This phenomenon of a pose of intellectual snobbishness by aggressively unintellectual know-nothings, the pose of moral superiority on the part of those whose only claim to morality is their loyalty to sexual perversion and drug abuse, is (at the moment) an uniquely Leftish phenomenon.
Despite all these generalities and all exceptions and counter-currents, the general flow of the modern thinking has, since the middle of the Nineteenth Century, been in one direction and directed against one object: the overthrow of Christendom and the Christian world-view, the overthrow of traditional institutions and virtues.
This movement is philosophical. It promotes nihilist metaphysics, non-Aristotlean logic, subjectivist morals and relativist ethics, socialist politics, absurdist aesthetics, and atheist theology.
The reason why the rebels against tradition (I am tempted to call them rebels against civilization) have no name is that they do not have in common anything other than their enemy. What they mean to erect in her place once Western civilization is done for, they cannot agree.
On the one hand, some are radically individualist, even to the point of saying, some of them, that every man can decide the nature of reality for himself; on the other, some are radically collectivist, even to the point of saying that the interests of all members of one race, one sex, or who participate in one economic activity are the same; some few urge the collective ownership of all factories and farms; most agree on collective entitlements to goods and services produced or provided by others, such as medical care and savings against retirement.
Despite the powerfully anti-clerical and anti-religious tone of their world-view, many are themselves religious, but regard religion as a private opinion not as a public institution, as if a person can be Catholic but not a nation. Those who are not outright atheists will say they place a very high value on “spirituality” particularly oriental-sounding or occult or theosophist fads, provided only that the spiritualism places no moral demands on the conscience or on society. I have never heard a person who calls himself “spiritual” say that adultery is bad, for example.
In the current world, the coalition or alliance against civilization has been joined by the Jihad. These violent troglodytes preach all the most conservative imaginable policies, hearkening back to the Seventh Century AD, including Theocracy and Holy War and conversion at swordpoint, including chastity to the point of murdering rape-victims, and piety to the point of killing Jews with suicidal bomb-vests strapped onto their own austic children.
The Jihadists believe in absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing that the Left believes. And yet, oddly, impossibly, the Left uniformly closes ranks and steps in to defend the Jihadists, and calls anyone who does not love the Jihad a racist.
The Jihadist are not “Out” because do not come from Western civilization at all: they are the heirs of the Umma, which is and always has been the violent, vehement, and devout enemies of Christendom. They have always been an outside invader, not, as the Left portrays all conflicts, a rebellion by the oppressed “Outs” against the oppressive “Ins.”
Rebels come from within one’s own land. Invaders come from without. The claims of the Jihadists to be the victims of race prejudice are laughable, if only they were not being taken so seriously and with such damaging effect.
With blithering historical ignorance, most moderns do not even realize that North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia Minor were once Christian lands under the Emperors of Rome then of Constantinople. These Eastern Christians have traditions as old as those of the Catholics, and far older than those of the Protestants, and have suffered martyrdoms and persecutions for over a thousand years, and which have been renewed with vehemence in the modern day, mostly notably and most shamefully in Serbia and Iraq.
Far from being the “Outs” on the oppressed and dispossessed margins of Christian civilization, the Christians were the ones invaded, raped, burnt, and left alive as dispossessed and hated underlings and serfs, and not just for decades and centuries, but for over a millennium.
The idea that Oil Sheiks or harem-born heirs of the Turkish Sultans lolling on the divan amid opiate fumes and the glittering wealth gathered from corsairs or the African slave trade would browbeat the Western powers for their racist oppressions is risible.
After the Battle of Lepanto, the emergence of Europe as a predominant seat of world power for a century so overshadowed the Middle-Eastern civilization that, for the first time in history, the conflict receded from the pages of history. The main conflict of the Twentieth Century was between Christendom, the Democracies, and the heresy of socialist Totalitarianism. We were so preoccupied with this civil war between totalitarian Eastern Europe and democratic Western Europe, that the eternal war with the Middle East receded into oblivion.
Now that the heresy of socialism has been soundly defeated in Eastern Europe, this secondary war is moved from the back burner to the front. The remnants of the socialists and the fellow travelers and useful idiots in the West have made, impossibly, an odd alliance with the Jihad, and the Progressives and Secular Humanists and others beholden to the Useful Idiotic Cause have followed suit.
This is not impossible nor odd at all, however, one we see the common thread or common principle behind the lunacy of the Leftist mind. They are not really “for” anything; they are merely against Christ.
You can see that they are not “for” what is called women’s rights, or else the Left would be in the forefront of protest against honor killings, genital mutilation, and the wearing of the veil. They would be demanding the vote for women in the Middle East. The Left would applaud rather than condemn flicks like SEX IN THE CITY 2, which had a scene where a modern, sexually-liberated demimonde berated the Muslims for their sexual conservatism.
The Left are not “for” democracy, or they would be marching and rioting in protest against the totalitarian theocracies and dictatorships in the Middle East, rather then offering themselves as human shields to stop Western bombs.
They are not even “for” homosexual rights, or else they would be in the forefront of protests, not against Mormons who want to keep traditional marriage in tact, but against Muslims whose tradition is to penalize sodomy by throwing the victim off a rooftop to a grisly death.
The main reason given, and endlessly repeated, for the alliance with the Jihad against civilization is a high-minded preoccupation with the principle of separation of church and state, or an even higher-minded preoccupation with combating race-hatred.
Since the Jihadists are all Mohammedan, and since, like the Christianity it is copying, the heresy of Mohamed is a universal and impartial religion, the preoccupation with race-hatred is a red herring. Cat Stephens and Cassius Clay are not members of the same race, even though they share the Muslim faith, and since not all Muslims are Jihadists, one would think that the Left would welcome strong and rigorous action against the Jihadists in order to protect Muslims from the violent zealots among them.
But no: every concession and every propaganda victory that can be handed the Jihad in the name of racial amity is awarded them. Race has nothing to do with this, and everyone knows it, including those embarrassingly unselfconscious Leftwingers most vehemently red-faced in screaming about racism. Their screams are about a well-meant and serious as those of the comedian Sam Kinison.
The lack of resistance to the creeping imposition of Sharia-compliant financial institutions and to Sharia law being allowed, for example, in Great Britain to govern Her Majesty’s subjects, and the dull silence and lack of protest or even comment from the Left makes a mockery of the notion that a concern for the separation of Church and State is of any concern.
The Left are working busily as beavers to remove microscopic crosses from images of Spanish missions on the city seal of Los Angeles, vandalizing crosses on World War One veteran memorials, and tearing down displays of the Ten Commandments in Court Houses, trampling the crucifix, spitting on it, dunking it in urine in the name of fine art; this leaves them with no time to be concerned that courts of law, including bankruptcy courts, and state-owned public institutions, such as Banks now owned by the Federal government, must comply with the rulings of foreign Imams according to the code of Sharia’s rules on usury.
The pattern is clear. The Movement, whatever we call it, favors gay rights when and only when the promotion of those rights harms the Church. If the promotion of those rights irks the Jihad, the Movement is silent, because at the moment the Jihad is a stronger weapon against the Church.
The Movement favors the rights of women to abort their children but not the right of women to remain the wives of unfaithful men seeking younger trophy wives. What is the pattern? The death of infants and the desecration of life offends the Christian world view, whereas the trivialization of the sacrament of marriage does also. The contempt of silence bestowed on veiled, battered, stoned, genitally mutilated and honor-killed women of the Middle East, who now suffer the same slavery in Europe (and cases have begun to emerge in America). This shows that the feminists are more concerned with aiding the Jihad against Christ than they are concerned with the conditions of women.
The Movement favors the rights of the poor, the needy, and the oppressed except when and where a Church is running a free hospital or a orphanage. Then, if the hospital refuses to perform abortions or distribute condoms or the orphanage refuses to place orphans with two men living together practicing sodomy, the Movement urges the state to shut down those institutions, and poor and the orphan can be hanged. The Movement wants the state, and not the Church, to care for the poor, and greets the idea of “faith-based” charities with frantic scorn and hate.
Most damning of all, the Movement favors whoever and whatever is the enemy de jour. The Movement favored slavery in the South. The Movement favored the Nazis until the day and hour of Hitler’s betrayal of the pact with Stalin, whereupon, with admirable party discipline, they performed an abrupt about-face. During the Cold War, the Movement was firmly on the side of the atheist Communists; during the Jihad War, on the side of the Jihad.
The Reds and the Terror-Masters have nothing in common, no common goals, no common rhetoric, no common values. The only thing in common is tactics, which include propaganda and political terror, and self-righteousness. But the Movement gives enthusiastic backing to political terror issuing from the Middle East, the same it gave during the Cold War to the Reds, and using the same rhetoric: To seek to persecute a serious war against the Terror-Masters is the new McCarthyism.
And here we come, finally, to the mystery of evil. Since it is insane for any man to work for the destruction of his own civilization, the death of himself and his loved ones, what can we conclude about the Movement?
Speaking to most members, one quickly realizes, if one can patiently shovel trough their double-talk and smugness and anger, that not one of them seems to know what he is doing or where the policies and values he supports are leading. They certainly are not being coordinated by any centralized conspiracy of Illuminati or taking orders from the Kremlin.
All they have in common is a world view that places the self above the community, the passions above the reason, Earthly things above heavenly things, and self-satisfaction above all. They have a right to everything, and Caesar, and reality itself, must bend to serve them: and they owe duties to none, honor to no one, not even their own predecessors. Thou Art God. It is all about you, Baby!
This commonality is enough to lead them, as a whole even if not each individual is so led, in the same general direction: against tradition, against law and moral norms, against objectivity, against reason, against nature, and against Christ.
The only common element I can see among the contradictions and conflicting interests of the general alliance, and the only consistent movement I can see over the century and a half since the Civil War days in the modern philosophical mind is what might be called antichristianism.
But very few, almost none, of the members of this vast modern social movement called themselves Antichrists. Even to this day, the self-proclaimed New Atheists pretend an indifference to all religions, as if they are not singling out one in particular for their enmity, and so call themselves a-theist, against gods, not anti-Christ, against Christ.
I am led to believe that they know not what they do. I do not think the march of the Movement is deliberate. I think they do not see the cliff and do not know or do not care that the long slow stampede of the modern Century is heading us all over it.
So, alas, I must call the Movement by some term, “Leftist” or “Modernist” or “Morlock” because the only real term that fits, “Antichrist,” is absurd, because not one of them is deliberately moving the Movement in that direction.
The Judas Goats are leading the innocent sheep, baa-baaing with their high minded oh-so-goody good intentions, down a well traveled and nicely paved road that descends by easy and unsuspecting gradual drops, without signposts, to the gates of Hell, where their abattoir awaits. But it would be nonsense to call this modern social and political movement or set of movements with their many dimensions and myriad factions by the name “Hell-bound” or “Pro-Hell” even if that is the only common chain linking all their fetters.
We must call them “Leftists” because there is no other word. Not all Leftists are in the Movement, and not all members of the Movement are on the political or social Left. Some, like the Jihadists, are not members of Western civilization at all, and are not on our political spectrum, Right or Left.
And we must keep in mind that those on the so-called Right, the Pharisees, the pedophile priests, the Dives who allow Lazarus to starve at their gates, the militarists who live by the sword and curse the peacemaker, the Patriot who tramples the Cross in order to raise the Flag, all of those who consume the widow and the orphan, the money-changers in the Temple, and all who praise God with their lips only and keep Him far from their heart, the Proud, the Envious, the Scornful, these damned souls are also bound for the hungry gates of Hell, and at an even more rapid march, but without the excuse that they do not know what they are doing and do not believe in Hell.
Let no one think that because condemn the Left as the tools and fools of Moloch and of Mammon that I do not condemn the Right as Pharisees and faithless.
If the Rightwing in America were serious about their principles, Abortion, that abominable crime which would make even Aztecs blush and weep, would be abolished from this nation in a single election cycle. If the Christians in this nation were Christians, the divorce rate among us would differ from the divorce rate of the pagans we live among.
If the Conservative Christians believed in Christ, they would believe what He said, and would know that the Leftwing here on earth are not our enemies. We do not fight against flesh and blood.
The Left is not the enemy. By and large, they are ignoramuses. Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.
O my fellow Christian and conservative Gentlemen, know ye that the Leftist pagans are our fellow inmates on Death Row, and only a call from the Governor who governs the universe can grant us a pardon.
The are our fellow inmates in the Terminal Ward of the hospital, and neither they nor we shall be healed save by the that Great Physician who heals with a word.
Our fate is no different from theirs, if we despise the source of our salvation.
I am a supernaturalist. I hold that human affairs are influenced, interrupted, and governed by spiritual entities superior to men in intellect and foresight: thrones, powers, principalities, dominations, archangels, angels, both fallen and unfallen. It is against them and only against them the real wars of this world, and the next world are fought.
In that sense, all war is The War in Heaven.
You need to distinguish between FDR Democrats, who know they are playing a game for a better paycheck, and post-60s Democrats, who rose through the Democratic party’s institutions in the 60s when the Dems had 3 out of 3 tv networks, the Supremes, the Supreme court, the other high courts, the lower courts, a 2/3 majority in Congress, and the Presidency 8 years out of 10. With a de facto one-party imperium in imperio, a whole generation of politicians grew up on orthodoxy-sniffing. Everyone was a Democrat, but some are more orthodox Democrats than others. Sure you’re a Democrat, but are you a GOOD Democrat? A GOOD Democrat would WANT to believe in Al Gore.
Post-60s Democrats play dominance games based on orthodoxy-sniffing. FDR Democrats play dominance games based on making money and living a nice life. Post-60s Democrats are genuinely shocked when a Democrat is blamed for stealing. FDR Democrats apply a smackdown on those who don’t steal in moderation.
Memory makes a mocker of us all. The FDR Democrats were more then happy to ethnically cleanse areas with “too many” Republican voters. They were more then happy to put citizens into concentration camps. They were more then happy to betray Poland at the end of WWII. They didn’t lift a finger to desegregate the military, Ike did that, after Wilson’s horrible and evil act to segregate the military. No, we don’t need to distinguish, because they were just as bad back then. Note, instead, that the Left is very good at “being nice” and joining coalitions, which they take over. You are just surprised to see them after they take the mask off….
You could say ‘machine Democrat’ instead of FDR Democrat. If you grew up living off workman’s comp, because your dad was killed on a crap job? And they stopped paying after age 18, so you don’t go to college, and you ask why, and they say it used to be 22 but, oops, Reagan? And you join a union and spend the rest of your life voting for dead yellow dogs if the option is a Republican?
Doesn’t make you a leftist.
Well, no, in your scenario, “you” would, perhaps, not be a Leftist. “You” would be a fool, supporting the Leftists for very little money and a lie of security. And, of course, your examples show how corrupting the Left has been to people’s souls. I can’t imagine a man with so little self respect that he would take his father’s workman’s comp past the age of sixteen. A man earns his own way, or used to, before the Left started turning men into pets…..
Was scorn your best possible response to what he wrote?
Of course not. I am human, and fallen. To see someone try to justify voting for the people who made the the Pennsylvania murders and the Vietnam genocide possible, just because they never forgave a Republican who made it so they would have to earn the money for college? Rubs me the wrong way. At least the Leftists think they are building a better world, wrong as they are. This strawman has killed millions for a petty grudge. So, what should I have said?
>To see someone try to justify voting for those who made the Pennsylvania murders and the Vietnam genocide possible? Rubs me the wrong way. . . So what should I have said?
Voting for workman’s comp to extend to 22 instead of 18? Or dropping it to 16 to build character? Not a close link to murder or genocide. They guy I’m thinking of was 18 in 1985- early for one, late for the other. Which Vietnamese genocide, anyway? The artillery and aerial massacres we paid for and committed, or the lefty national socialist ones we fought?
I don’t disagree about Machine Democrats (or FDR Democrats) being crooks. It’s all a game.
I do disagree with:
>At least leftists think they are building a better world, wrong as they are. This strawman has killed millions for a petty grudge.
1) Voting to improve the general welfare by a small payment to widow’s sons? Not killing millions.
2) Leftists washing clean the sins of society with the blood of the middle class? Not building a better world. Pol Pot did not focus on extending workman’s comp payments by 4 years.
3) >Petty? Depends on whose ox is gored.
4) >Strawman? Nope. Real guy.
I don’t know what you should have said.
Much to chew here. Lets start with the willful ignorance, the refusal to connect voting for the Democrats because you want a unearned payoff and the Democrats betraying the Honor of America and breaking our treaty with South Vietnam, leading to the deaths of millions of Asians. (How Leftist of the Democrats to poison the well of diplomacy in that moment, and to then decry the Republicans for not using that poisoned water!). The willful ignorance about the Abortion “doctor” in Pennsylvania who got caught last week after murdering children and killing women for, perhaps, twenty years. The arrest which caused the state political structure to “Lawyer up” almost to a man, because they know their guilt, their inability as Democrats to do anything to weaken the unholy sacrament of Abortion. These are not bipartisan issues, these crimes belong to the Democrats, and there is nothing on the Republican side to compare.
1. “Voting to improve the general welfare by a small payment to widow’s sons? Not killing millions.” Wrong on two counts. Widow’s sons? No, men. Eighteen is the age of manhood in America. Republicans made sure the widow’s sons got their money. It is the Democrats who try to keep men children by keeping them like zoo animals. Second, we don’t vote to “Improve the general welfare, etc”. We vote for representatives, and they vote on particular issues. He voted for the Democrats, who had killed millions of Vietnamese by 1985. Because he wanted money…..
2. No, but at least they had a goal they imagined would lead to a better world. Pol Pot was trying to build a Utopia. Tragic and wrong, for man is no longer fit for Eden, thus the mounds of skulls, as the Leftists tried to make their “New Man”, who would be fit for Eden.
Then we can talk about the attempt made here to equate the hundreds killed by us over the course of the War by accident with the Millions murdered after the War, the Genocide of the South Vietnamese, the Killing fields and Pol Pot, the Boat People. I can’t imagine a soul would be so wounded that it would do this, cheapening the term on both ends, but here you are. I confess my first thought reading it was “I didn’t show enough score”. But I hope you are not a Leftist, only laboring under the propaganda they have used so well.
Would it be fair, based off of your responses, to conclude that you believe that the US is a fundamentally evil nation? Rasmussen has 33.7% of the US population as affiliated with the Democratic party (37% Republican) — this is down from 41.6% in 2008. So from your responses we can conclude that at least a third of the US population is actively evil, and I’d think that at least some independents must be evil as well.
In 2007, the Pew Forum found that 78.4% of the US population self identified themselves as Christian. This would seem to indicate that at least half of the self identified Christians are not affiliated with Republicans — more since we should be able to conclude that some atheists have found their way into the Republican party. This suggests that at minimum a third of the US Christian population — and virtually anyone of an alternate faith if we don’t want this percentage to go up — is actively evil.
No. “”You” would be a fool, supporting the Leftists for very little money and a lie of security.” is the quote. Most of the Democrat voters are useful idiots who don’t pay a lot of attention to politics. Irresponsible, causing harm to themselves and others, not Evil. There is a group of people who vote almost 100% for the party that fought a war to keep them slaves. There is a group of people who vote with an almost religious passion for the party who sent the boats back to Germany in WWII. Stupid, but there it is.
Robert
The nesting has gotten out of control so I am posting above your response that I am replying to. I will try to make it clear but I can make no promise that a grue won’t eat us both.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, ‘No. “”You” would be a fool, supporting the Leftists for very little money and a lie of security.” is the quote. Most of the Democrat voters are useful idiots who don’t pay a lot of attention to politics. Irresponsible, causing harm to themselves and others, not Evil.’
By evil I was drawing on your quotes about the Democratic Party (and by extension Democrats) such as “Democrats were more then happy to ethnically cleanse areas”, “put citizens into concentration camps”, “betray Poland”, “evil act to segregate the military”, “how corrupting the Left has been to people’s souls”, “the Left started turning men into pets”, “made the the Pennsylvania murders and the Vietnam genocide possible”, “killed millions”, “betraying the Honor of America”, “poison the well of diplomacy”, “know their guilt”, “these crimes belong to the Democrats”, “Democrats who try to keep men children by keeping them like zoo animals”, “He voted for the Democrats, who had killed millions of Vietnamese by 1985. Because he wanted money”, and “the Genocide of the South Vietnamese, the Killing fields and Pol Pot, the Boat People”.
If we met in person and you drove a stake through my heart I wouldn’t be the least surprised. How couldn’t Democrats be evil? The freakin’ Democrats have more blood on their hands than the Soviet Communist Party.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “There is a group of people who vote almost 100% for the party that fought a war to keep them slaves. There is a group of people who vote with an almost religious passion for the party who sent the boats back to Germany in WWII.”
Did you know GEORGE WASHINGTON, THOMAS JEFFERSON, JAMES MADISON, JAMES MONROE, ANDREW JACKSON, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, JOHN TYLER, JAMES POLK , ZACHARY TAYLOR, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant owned slaves! The ones in caps owned them while President! George Washington owned slaves! Why is he is he on the dollar bill? Twenty-seven percent of US President owned slaves! Why would a black call himself an American?
If you found those statements and arguments somewhat facile, then perhaps you’ll appreciate my feeling for your own.
In all seriousness though, I would be grateful if you would answer one, perhaps two dependent upon your first answer, questions for me. Would you support the banning of the Deocratic Party in the United States and the arrest and prosecution of its leadership (Representatives, Senators, Governors, and Presidents — both past and present)? If not, bearing in mind the many crimes of the party, then why not?
No. I am no Democrat to attempt to criminalize the Opposition. There is no Constitutional requirement that the Opposition be loyal. Yes, the Democrats are responsible for the deaths of millions. More, if you think (as I do) their collusion with Stalin and Mao lead to the deaths of millions who’s only crime was to live in a Leftist regime. But criminal? While vote fraud is endemic to the Democrats, you are allowed to be Evil in a democracy, if you can get the votes, which the Democrats have. If you can get the votes to commit Genocide, it may be a mortal Sin, but it is Legal. And we have been told in clear and certain terms that God alone gets to punish sinners. I supported the banning of the American NAZI and Communist parties, not because of what they said, but because they were actively agents of foreign governments. The Democrats (as a party) are not. they get their say…..
Your example of Slavery is sad for two reasons. First, we have been lectured for over a hundred years about how bad we were to have slaves. It brings to mind the Medieval Flagellants at this point. If the Democrats showed a fourth that remorse over their errors and betrayals, I would sleep easy at night. It is not the Democrats sins that cause me terror, it is their refusal to confess those sins and avoid them in the future. Second, because Slavery is better, more moral, then Murder. It is a hierarchy. First, we murdered prisoners of war, then, as we became richer and more moral, we enslaved them. Now we take them prisoner until the end of the conflict. Except the Democrats sad attempt at moral preening has poisoned that well, and the military has been quietly encouraged to stop taking prisoners, putting us back at step one. As an example on another side, it would be better morally if we stopped the murder of millions of children by Abortion, even if the solution were to enslave them. Not, by any stretch, the best solution, but better then Murder, which the Democrats in Pennsylvania covered up for twenty odd years. So the Slavery thing is not a useful whip to use on me. Pretty much leaves you with McCarthy, but alas, we now know he was the wronged party. But please keep an eye out for the plank in my eye…
Robert
As many a time before — the nesting has gotten out of control so I am posting above your response that I am replying to. I will try to make it clear but I can make no promise that a grue won’t eat us both.
Be forwarned that I will be availing myself of your uncivil tone in this post. If I’ve come across as uncivil before this I’d like to apologize as it was not my desire to do so.
You display a remarkable inability to comprehend my posts, and since you seem at least reasonably intelligent I am beginning to wonder if it is a ploy on your part.
I am a registered Democrat. My brother is a Democrat. My father is a Democrat. My maternal grandmother and grandfather were Democrats. My grandfather served in WWII and my dad served in the tail end of Vietnam. My brother is a regional loss prevention manager for a large drug store chain. My dad is currently the deputy chief of police for a small city. I work as a learning specialist with global responsibilities for a rather sizable corporation. I say this not to add weight to my words but so that you might comprehend in some manner the effect your continued vituperation might have on me.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “No. I am no Democrat to attempt to criminalize the Opposition.”
There is a seditious mass murdering group within your midst and you don’t have the courage of your convictions to work to have them arrested and their party illegitimized? I thought that you were a man.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “There is no Constitutional requirement that the Opposition be loyal.”
Fortunately there is an ammendment process to the US Constitution. A man would surely show more loyalty to their nation, endangered as it is from within. Man up.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “Yes, the Democrats are responsible for the deaths of millions. More, if you think (as I do) their collusion with Stalin and Mao lead to the deaths of millions who’s only crime was to live in a Leftist regime.”
Then you live in a monstrously evil nation. A nation that not only has been ruled by the evil Democrats, but is so currently. When you speak of the honor of the United States, what honor do you speak of? By your own words, the US is evil. Endemically evil. Flee to Antarctica and found your utopian community while you still can!
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “But criminal? While vote fraud is endemic to the Democrats, you are allowed to be Evil in a democracy, if you can get the votes, which the Democrats have.”
Vote fraud is illegal — though you must wonder why the Democrats haven’t changed that. That makes the Democrats criminal AS WELL AS evil! Why wouldn’t you arrest and prosecute evil seditious criminals who have murdered millions? Could it be because you reason like a child rather than a man?
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “If you can get the votes to commit Genocide, it may be a mortal Sin, but it is Legal.”
That’s what the Nazis said. So you’re sort of like a Quisling? Is that…you know…manly?
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “And we have been told in clear and certain terms that God alone gets to punish sinners. I supported the banning of the American NAZI and Communist parties, not because of what they said, but because they were actively agents of foreign governments. The Democrats (as a party) are not. they get their say…..”
This is going to come as something of a surprise to you, but we have something we call police. They take bad guys to prison. They can even use something called the RICO Act to arrest members of ongoing criminal organizations. Look it up, it’s totally real!
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “Your example of Slavery is sad for two reasons.”
I can only assume that you don’t understand the definition of facile. As when I said, “If you found those statements and arguments somewhat facile, then perhaps you’ll appreciate my feeling for your own.”
For the record, facile means: Appearing neat and comprehensive by ignoring the complexities of an issue. See what I did now? I was making an analogy between your facile arguments and assertions and a set of similarly facile arguments I put together for just such a purpose. Much like anything else that is subtle it seems to have slipped right past you.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “First, we have been lectured for over a hundred years about how bad we were to have slaves.”
I never had any slaves. See what I did there? I pretended to miss your point so that I could respond with an asinine remark.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “It brings to mind the Medieval Flagellants at this point.”
Medieval flagellants were against slavery? See, I am doing it again.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “If the Democrats showed a fourth that remorse over their errors and betrayals, I would sleep easy at night. It is not the Democrats sins that cause me terror, it is their refusal to confess those sins and avoid them in the future.”
I had something else funny to say, but instead I’ll just point out that either you’re a bit faint-hearted or that you like to engage in a little more than your fair share of hyperbole.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “Second, because Slavery is better, more moral, then Murder. It is a hierarchy. First, we murdered prisoners of war, then, as we became richer and more moral, we enslaved them.”
Yep, that is exactly how we enslaved Africans. Many people forget about the US-Zambian war and our tribute of slaves. But not you. Nothing gets by you.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “Now we take them prisoner until the end of the conflict. Except the Democrats sad attempt at moral preening has poisoned that well, and the military has been quietly encouraged to stop taking prisoners, putting us back at step one.”
Well as the party of evil, I really don’t know what you expected of us. I am a bit disappointed that we’ve only been quietly encouraging murder. I have a Demoncratic (haha) Party meeting this evening and I’ll see if we can’t, you know, pump up the volume.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “As an example on another side, it would be better morally if we stopped the murder of millions of children by Abortion,”
Oh my! You and I actually agree on something.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “even if the solution were to enslave them. Not, by any stretch, the best solution, but better then Murder, which the Democrats in Pennsylvania covered up for twenty odd years.”
Yeah I knew that agreement couldn’t last. At least all of those Democrats are going to go to prison for conspiracy, and a whole bunch of other things. Go RICO! Wait, this was probably another example of your hyperbole and studied ignorance of anything that doesn’t fit your worldview wasn’t it?
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “So the Slavery thing is not a useful whip to use on me.”
That is a relief! What I’d worry about though is if someone were to use it to illuminate your facile arguments by say, presenting them as facile arguments. Watch out for that one.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “Pretty much leaves you with McCarthy, but alas, we now know he was the wronged party.”
Yes, we all weep for Senator McCarthy.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “But please keep an eye out for the plank in my eye…”
This was the point that I realized that I too could be funny!
I think I understand your posts. I don’t understand your position. It was kind of obvious you were a democrat. And yet. “Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “As an example on another side, it would be better morally if we stopped the murder of millions of children by Abortion,”
Oh my! You and I actually agree on something.” Nothing snide, no backpedaling. Murder of children, I see it, you see it, we agree. It would appear to be the great moral question of the age, and the world has gotten it wrong. In the U.S., the Democrats are “Pro-choice” as policy, and the Republicans “Pro-life”. Not really an point to argue, they are “party planks”. So, what to the Democrats offer or promise, whatever, that you stand with them? Millions of babies murdered a year. Most issues are difficult. This one, we agree, is not. So, why? You have mentioned no great crime one the Republican side. Lord knows, they’re stupid. But it’s a two party system. Stupid and Evil are the choices. Why do you stand with Evil?
Robert Mitchell Jr said, “Pol Pot was trying to build a Utopia. Tragic and wrong, for man is no longer fit for Eden, thus the mounds of skulls, as the Leftists tried to make their “New Man”, who would be fit for Eden.”
Pol Pot’s conception of a Cambodian Utopia has no bearing on whether or not men are fit for Eden. In his mad scheme the “new people” (the urban population, the intellectuals, those with college degrees, etc) were the bad guys and needed to be eliminated so that the “old people” (the rural dwellers, the farmers, etc) could live in harmony.
Utopians always need an evil party that they struggle against. Because without this evil party everything would be rainbows and unicorns since everyone would draw the same conclusions and make the same decisions. Christians however, realize that humans make mistakes and have imperfect knowledge. Christians realize that humans require a government and that it will be imperfect because humans are imperfect. Christians also realize that there will need to be police and jails because people are imperfect.
Atheist Communists (a variety of Utopian) believe that government is evil. Once everyone thinks the right things then government will disappear. Jails will disappear. Police will no longer be needed. Communists believe you have to have a dictatorship to get past all of the evil people so that an enlightened anarchy can blossom.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. You seem to disagree with me, and then write a post confirming what I said. Utopias are impossible, and the attempt to get people to fit will only give us a mountain of bodies. The people who try to build them are great Sinners. But Church history has shown us that’s where many of our Saints come from, as opposed to the “Men without Chests” who do no believe in Utopia, but went along with the endless murders because they though (as your example did) there might be some money in it for them……
Robert
Same as before — the nesting has gotten out of control so I am posting above your response that I am replying to. I will try to make it clear but I can make no promise that a grue won’t eat us both.
Robert Mitchell Jr said, “I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. You seem to disagree with me, and then write a post confirming what I said.”
I am saying that Pol Pot’s attempt at utopia did not fail because men are not fit for Eden. It failed because Pol Pot was a genocidal psychopath and his idea of utopia had little to differentiate it from our idea of an abbatoir.
Robert Mitchell Jr said, “Utopias are impossible, and the attempt to get people to fit will only give us a mountain of bodies.”
That is not accurate. There have been attempts at utopias that simply failed without bodycount. However, I agree that utopias are surprisingly amenable to totalitarianism.
Robert Mitchell Jr said, “as opposed to the “Men without Chests” who do no believe in Utopia, but went along with the endless murders because they though (as your example did) there might be some money in it for them……”
I am not sure who you think my example was nor how you feel that Lewis’ essay relates, so I am rendered unable to respond.
Well, I did not say that trying to make a Utopia will give us a mountain of bodies, I said the attempt to make men fit the Utopia will. Second, the example I was talking about was Bruces, the guy who voted Democrat all his life because workman’s comp stopped being welfare under Reagan. This after the Boat people and the Killing fields. A “man” without a chest.
Robert Mitchell Jr wrote, “So much of what you say is true. But…”
How about we end on that note? The nesting issue is insane, and any arguments that I would make at this point would necessarily be involved and complex and not particularly suitable for the overall essay that we find ourselves hijacking.
Robert
If you could stop this incessant drum roll about evil Democrats I suspect you and I could be friends.
My position is this. I don’t believe that MOST people who support “a woman’s right to choose” believe that it is murder. I didn’t always believe it was murder. In certain circumstances I don’t know that I still believe it to be murder, but it is such a fine line that I believe it to be better that we don’t try to guess at it. Just as some people believe that it is better to not have a death penalty than to have the possibility that one innocent life might be lost. That is how I feel about abortion.
In a sense, you remind me of me. I am a very ‘excitable’ person and am prone to florid language and hyperbole. Over the years I have tried to shift this to comic effect rather than the pernicious sarcasm that is my wont. And here is why. I found that no matter how sound my argument I had a devil of a time (see once I get started I can’t seem to stop) convincing people to my side. What I did find however, is that if I practiced civility, empathy, and honor that I was actually quite a decent debater and could influence people. There is a point there if you think about it — that sounds a bit snide so I should explain. I believe that God asks us to behave in certain ways because they are actually good for us (on the whole if not in the moment) just as He asks us to avoid certain behaviors because they are bad for us (on the whole, if not every particular time).
I am not a ‘down the line’ Democrat. In fact, I used to be a Republican. I am probably more of an independent voter than anything else, but I still am on the Democrat roles.
Back to abortion. Over the years I’ve convinced a number of people that abortion is wrong — and believe it or not I’ve met some Republicans that thought abortion was okay enough that they went ahead and had one. There actually are pro-life Democrats — like the recently passed Sargent Shriver. There is even an organization: http://www.democratsforlife.org/. I really believe, and you may disagree, that there are Republicans who secretly support abortion and there are Democrats who secretly support pro-life. It just isn’t politically expedient for them to say so. In 2009, Gallup found that more Americans supported Pro-Life than abortion and that it was a growing number. I suspect inside a hundred years abortion will be illegal again.
If the Republican party were more centrally anti-abortion I might be more inclined to support them more often. But let’s be honest. Pro-life may be a plank, but it is far from their pressing concern and this is from a group that CLAIMS it is murder. This seems a trifle suspect to me, so I choose instead to work against abortion from inside the Democratic party.
I haven’t declared any great Republican crime because I don’t think that way. I think that the world is vastly more complicated than people think, or pretend, it is. Was Iraq a war that GWB needed to engage us in, to the detriment of Afghanistan? In my opinion, no. That said, I was peeved with Bush Sr that he didn’t overthrow Saddam and support the Kurds as they were being slaughtered. I voted against him, after having voted for him in his first campaign, precisely because of this. But you know what? In retrospect he was probably right, while I was this smart alec college kid who thought he knew better. The same may very well be true for his son, the second President Bush — maybe he was right and I am wrong.
I believe that there are some insanely unhelpful Congressmen — Alan Grayson [who you'd be happy to hear I voted against], Michele Bachmann, and Corrine Brown leap to mind. But I haven’t given up on the US and I don’t believe that most Congressmen have either. We, the American people, have simply helped create an untenable situation where the other party has to be the party of evil. And really, how can you work with evil? Instead Americans seem to believe that it is better to let America burn and China (who I suspect is overrated) ascend. After all, if the US is as evil as China then what difference does it make?
Well, different people come at problems from different directions. Why do I harp on “Because Democrats are Evil!”? because when I talked to people about why they were Democrats, I always got “Because Republicans are Evil!”. Witness the mess in Arizona for a national example of this. I did some research, and the examples given (McCarthy, Civil Rights) turned out to be wildly wrong, to the point that I have heard people say Lincoln was a Democrat. So, I threw it back at them. It makes a lot more sense. The Democrats have chosen poorly on most of the Great Moral issues that they have had to deal with. Once they have been stripped of their trump card, I find it easier to talk about issues. And I am pretty good at tying evil events to Democrats, in a “Connections” way, to the point that people will come into the store to ask “How are the Democrats responsible for this?”, in a fun way. It works for me. And I do think that the Democrats are EVIL about two issues. They went to to mat to keep the vile practice of “Partial Birth Abortion” legal. And I really hate abortion. It is a special sin, in that it drags down the innocent as well as the guilty. I don’t just mean the murdered baby, but while I am too much a coward to even touch a woman, I have still been asked multiple times to “help” the couple when she had missed her period. Because I was the most responsible non family adult they knew. It turned out to be a false alarm both times, but I still burn with shame that two boys I helped mentor to adulthood would ask be to help murder their children. Not that either of them wanted to, but this is America, and women have “The Right to Choose”. Men have only the responsibility to pay…..
Second, I was serious when I talked about the Honor of America and the Democrats betrayal of that Honor. Breaking the treaty with the South Vietnamese was vile morally, and stupid politically. It’s a sore point because the Democrats attacked Bush for years for not using Diplomacy to deal with Saddam, but Diplomacy only works if you will live by the treaties you commit to, and the Democrats showed the world that they wouldn’t, when push came to shove. So it goes.
I don’t believe that MOST people who support “a woman’s right to choose” believe that it is murder.
Surely not. The idea can’t survive if the people pushing it believed it was wrong. It’s hard enough to get them to agree that a human life is ended. They devise all sorts of think-arounds like “potential person” or “potential human.” I’m waiting for “three-fifths human” but they might catch on.
Robert
Soon I will not be here to bedevil you as undoubtedly my wife will be smashing my router if I don’t complete some house chores rather than posting to John’s blog — but perhaps I can sneak away for a few more moments.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “Well, different people come at problems from different directions.”
I agree wholeheartedly and without reservation. And so we find that we are not all that different.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “Why do I harp on “Because Democrats are Evil!”? because when I talked to people about why they were Democrats, I always got “Because Republicans are Evil!”"
I would like to, at this point, state for the record that I don’t believe that Republicans are evil. I believe that SOME Republicans are evil, much as I believe that SOME Democrats are evil. In fact, not that long ago we had what I suspect was a brief visitation from an evil crypto-fascist calling himself ‘Ascendant’, who was neither a Republican nor a Democrat.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “So, I threw it back at them.”
I have a certain…susceptibility to the same behavior that I try to thwart.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “And I do think that the Democrats are EVIL about two issues.”
It is a very broad brush that you are choosing to use. A strength of our political system is that we have only two major national political parties. A significant challenge with our political system is the self same constraint of having only two major national political parties. Both the Republican and Democrat party are essentially coalitions of disparate interests that at some point come together around a common theme or out of a marriage of convenience. A problem that occurs with a two party system, especially with the primary system that most states have, is that to have political influence it is better for people who support a particular position to rush to one party, and once they are entrenched it is challenging to unseat them. Let us use abortion as an example. If everyone who holds abortion to be a heinous act under most or all circumstances joins, let us say, the Republicans then one of two things will occur. Either the vast majority of the population will become Republican and the Republican party will balkanize and probably disintegrate into multiple smaller political parties OR the anti-abortionists will find that while they have a significant presence there is also a significant population within their party that are only vaguely anti-abortion (not a top priority), pretend to be antiabortion for political expediency, or are actually proabortion. As of the last poll that I saw, 70% of Republicans are Pro-life (26% Pro-choice). This is up from 59% in 2001.
Conversely, the same is true for the opposing party. Radical ‘Pro-choicers’ rush to the Democrat part with similar results — 61% ‘Pro-choice’ with with 33% Pro-life. This ratio has held remarkably steady for the last decade. The problem that you are then faced with is that 44% of the voting population supports the Democrat party while 41% of the population supports the Republican party — a rough parity of support. This means that the parties cancel one another out because Democrats that are radicalized over abortion try to push the Pro-Life members out of their party and marginalize the ones who remain. When a Pro-life Democrat runs the ‘Pro-choice’ Democrats try to find someone to run against them. If the Pro-life Democrat wins (which tends to be unlikely) they often then lose to a Pro-life Republican who can often draw on some of the same base that the Pro-life Democrat, resulting in further marginalization. You can then rinse and repeat for the Republicans.
Neither side can then come to a reasonable political compromise because both sides have the most extreme examples of their position having at one another and cowing those who don’t care much one or the other from acting and providing cover for people who just use the issue for political gain to, well gain influence and power. My hope is that either the most radical voices can be calmed so that a more sane compromise may be reached until America grows out of this abortion ‘phase’ which I really believe has a lot to do with an attempt to provide a ’60s version of female equality and liberty.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “Because I was the most responsible non family adult…”
While I have not had the particular requests that you have had, I was usually the person who was sought out to care for strays who were abused or kicked out (in this instance because of a ‘false alarm’) by their boyfriends.
Robert Mitchell Jr. said, “Second, I was serious when I talked about the Honor of America and the Democrats betrayal of that Honor.”
I am honestly more of an early American history guy with the occasional foray into Byzantium or (at the moment) revolutionary Russia, so I am not particularly conversant on the Vietnam war. If it is something you’d like to argue over let me know and I’ll read up on it — sadly putting off yet again Maier’s RATIFICATION: THE PEOPLE DEBATE THE CONSTITUTION 1887-1788. I can setup a blog or exchange emails so that we don’t everyone daffy.
At the end of the day I am a patriot. I know enough of history to realize that we have always been a contentious people, and I may be something of an alarmist when it comes to the modern partisan divide. But I really do worry that when we throw around words like ‘evil’ to describe people with mainstream political or economic views that differ from our own that we are making ourselves easy marks for those who would see the US fail. I can understand someone saying that Fidel Castro is evil, that the Chinese government is evil, etc. But for an American to claim that half or a third of Americans are evil…or belong to an intrinsically corrupt and evil organization that at many points in our history is the organization of the majority government just really bothers me. To me it says, I hate America.
…and here comes the wife with a hammer.
So much of what you say is true. But I was not talking about abortion, on which, we both agree “If you don’t know when life begins, don’t do it” but many disagree, and so we have to work to convince them. I was talking about Partial Birth Abortion, which is no Gordian knot moment. It, the inducing of a birth so that the baby may be murdered as he comes out, is just vile. And the Democrats, in their efforts to “protect a woman’s right to choose”, went to the mat to keep it legal. If I may leave your blind spot for a moment, it’s like being so protective of premarital sex that you will not outlaw cutting the head off the woman so that her “date” can f**k the stump. Both are technically “premarital sex”, but who, other then a psychopath, would equate the two?
As to South Vietnam, there’s not much to discuss. It’s all public. They were our ally, publicly, It is common knowledge that we dragged them to the “Paris Peace Accords” by promising to secure the peace if they signed, and the Democrats refused to provide material support when the North attacked. Bizarrely arrogant about it too. They didn’t just deny them material support in the dark of the night, they passed laws saying they wouldn’t. It was vile, evil, on multiple levels. Betrayal of an Ally, Betrayal of a treaty we secured, and a bloodbath. Predictable to many, but maybe not all. But we have “The Lion of the Senate”, the public vote of the Democrats on a national level for years, denying the bloodbath after the fact. http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2007/01/its_senator_ted_1.html Just surreal.
As to saying “a third or a half of America is evil”, well, no. I am well aware the rank and file democrats are not evil. Which does not change the fact that the Democrats seem to be in their every action, evil. The Democrats (National Leadership) seem to have a magic box that turns sane, moral local democrats into monsters. Al Gore was once sane, and pro life. Then he went national. Jesse Jackson was once sane and pro life. He went national, and seemed to loose his mind, soul and morals. But I hear his mistress is nice. I could go on. Good people have been captured by Evil leaders before. But those leaders only have power because of the people backing them. As we are watching right now in Egypt. What, I think, we are arguing over, is when does the desire for civility (so important for a democracy) become cover for Evil? Made particularly tricky in the U.S. because the press (“The Forth Branch of Government”) so favors the Democrats, as does the Civil Service (“The Five Branch of Government”). Neither goes up for elections or are really affected by them, making “Republican control of Government” more figurative then actual. Witness the hit job the CIA did on Bush, or the hit job the Justice department did on Ted Stevens. The Civil Service was created by the Democrats, but it seems to be slipping from their control. I think we agree that if this gives us a permanent Mandarin class, that will, in fact, be EVIL.
It depends, I suppose, upon the reaction that you were hoping to elicit. If it was to change his, or someone else’s mind then I might have suggested a more compassionate response.
A “Compassionate response” is tricky. Lets look at the example he gave and I responded to. “If you grew up living off workman’s comp, because your dad was killed on a crap job? And they stopped paying after age 18, so you don’t go to college, and you ask why, and they say it used to be 22 but, oops, Reagan?”. How compassionate, right? Not your fault, Reagan did it. Giving us a mindless, lifelong Democrat voter bent double by the chip on his shoulder. Sounds like an angry, bitter soul. Perhaps the more compassionate thing would have been to knock some sense into him, tell him it was time for him to act like a Man and stop acting like a beggar. Sometimes the “Mercy of the Executioner” is what is called for. Do you accept that it’s fine for someone to be treated like a boy at the tender age of twenty two? When do you think he stops being “a widow’s son” and starts being a man?
>I can’t imagine a man with so little self respect that he would take his father’s workman comp past the age of 16.
I can. Hard worker, dead honest, reads a lot. He’d kick your ass. Maybe his political opinions would be a more nuanced reflection of his personal experience if he’d gone to college.
>when do you think he stops being a ‘widow’s son’ and starts being a man?
A man who commands masculine respect? I’d rate highest a fellow who starts out with no daddy and no help, and measures up because he must. They are impressive.
Then, at some distance, but still impressive, a fellow who could have had help, but turned it down out of pride. Seen a few. Fools? Some. Others, not. And even the jackass laid it on the line, not like some internet blowhard.
But who is the “Internet Blowhard” here? It was not I who dragged your friend into this. You brought him up, as the barest outline of a man, a creature who voted Democrat all his life for no other reason then Reagan denied him a workman’s comp payoff he hadn’t earned past the age of eighteen, implying he was so thick he could thing of no other way to go to collage. Now, I graduated from High School in 83, very close to the 85 you mention, and I had plenty of ways to go to collage, none of which involved workman’s comp. It seems to me that you set this up so that we would see your friends sad story and throw a pity party. But your friend’s story isn’t particularly sad, and he ends up looking like a weenie. So I’ve hurt your feelings because your friend is better then that, as you now see fit to tell us. I’m sure he is. Perhaps he would have been better served if he had be presented a functional human being, as opposed to being used by an “Internet Blowhard” as bait for a pity party.
I welcome such a distinction. FDR Democrats were basically (by modern standards) Republicans who mistrusted Big Business and wanted some Mussolini-style solutions to the Great Depression. (It must never be forgotten that the unity sought by the name and image of the Roman fasci was a unity of economic, military, cultural and national interests, but primarily economic.)
The remnant of this group, to the degree that they still have any influence on modern politics at all, I list as part of the base of the Democrat Party, the trade-unionists and family men who fear the shocks and commotions of the free market.
The Post-60 Democrats were much more influenced by the intellectual elite of their party, the group I called Antinomians, and adopted at the same time (and with no awareness of logical paradox) the values and rhetoric of semi-anarchic libertarianism in the social sphere, and semi-Marxist totalitarianism in the economic sphere.
The Post-60 Democrats also successfully and utterly captured the all the credit for the fight for the abolition of slavery, the fight against the KKK, and the fight for the Civil Rights Act and against Jim Crow laws, all of which had been inspired and led by Republicans over the ferocious, sometimes mortal, resistance of the Democrat Party. How this can be, I cannot fathom.
I believe it was because the president during the civil rights movement was Democrat and after the civil rights movement large portions of the Southern Democrats switched to being Republicans. This meant that a short time after the civil rights act was signed into law most of the vocal opposition to civil rights were Republicans. The Republican party has also had for many decades now a South centric strategy with the inter-mountain west and plains states being carried on similarities. In the south what was meant by states rights was the ability to segregate so when Republicans started complaining over the expansion of federal power by claims of states rights it gets tied to the idea of Jim Crow laws and segregation.
This is whay I refuse to label myself as either left or right, liberal or conservative. I find that once you label yourself, you are psychologically driven to adjust your opinions to what is perceived as the orthodoxy of your movement. It is a good way to avoid having to think, but that is its only virtue. I have noticed this, too, with the term. “feminist”. A lot of women tie themselves in knots asking themselves whether a particular position is “feminist” or not, instead of accepting that the term covers a wide variety of views, some of which are easier to defend than others.
I think, however, that we must realise that there are two axes of opinion involved: economic, and social/moral. Hence, we find people who are economically conservative but socially liberal, and vice versa.
There are also broad trends in opinions, and at some point you have to put a name on them. The big mistaake is to assume that they are sharply delineated categories.
Yes, but on the other hand, how do you stop dancing to the tune of the age without orthodoxy to guide you? I have seen many people who thought they could…….
Oddly, I found orthodoxy by not letting current political trends influence. My main concerns have always been what is true, and what is the good life. I maintain there is a way to be a sensible non-conformist. Anti-conformity, or the position that we must not do what they do lest we be sheep, is an illogical position. It contradicts itself, in that actions are still being dictated by the crowd. The only way forward and to remain consistent one has to adopt a philosophy of pursuing the “true, good, and the beautiful”, in whatever form they may take (even if find we do not particularly like the people who practice those things at the time). That is precisely what I did, and found more than I bargained for.
I agree. The problem with any label, any name, is that the world has fuzzy edges rather than sharp edges. In mathematics one can define a term precisely, but in the real world, things like mobs, sand dune, mountains, storms, sunsets all have ambiguous definitions. You might be able to tell me the highest point of Mount Everest, but which of the hills at its base holds it lowest point? The answer has to be somewhat arbitrary. We all know the difference between night and day, but dusk is a gradual reddish darkening, and deciding the exact split second when day ends and night begins is arbitrary, and a reasonable man can find another split second earlier or later and argue that his, and not yours, should be the definition.
Oddly enough, this knowledge of the limitations of language was introduced to me at an early age — younger than a teenager, if I recall — not from a work of science or philosophy, but from space opera writer A.E van Vogt. The Non-Aristotelian philosophy of Korzybski was used as one of the gadgets or gimmicks of his story, where the author was proposing that a philosophical rather than a technological improvement would form the strangeness and wonder of the future world. This was at a time when every other SF story was proposing the future people would think and talk just like modern (circa 1940) Americans, but just have different tools and gimcracks. Van Vogt proposed a revolution in linguistic psychology.
The main point of the philosophy is that reality is always more complex and graduated than our words we use to define and conceptualize it. This process is particularly acute in legal thinking, because the laws have to be simple enough than a reasonable man can use them to guide his actions and stay within the law, but complex and nuanced enough to take care of exceptions and mitigating circumstances. How a term like “homicide” is defined in one case or one statute has enormous implications for bodies of cases in those dusk areas where a reasonable argument can be made on both sides of the issue.
Technically speaking, I am “feminist” — no one who holds, as I do, that the only perfectly sinless fully human person ever to be created was the Virgin Mary can support the idea that women are inferior to men. But no one in his right mind would apply that word to me, since I hold that sexual differences are both romantic, useful, beautiful, and psychologically healthy, and ought to be reflected in our customs and laws.
Unfortunately, the main weapon used by the enemy to advance his goals is the corruption of language, and the obscuration of distinctions that ought to be clear. A person calling himself a feminist and supporting the rights of women is merely mislabeled when a second person holds that the rights of women includes, not merely the right to own property, serve on a jury, carry a firearm, and vote in elections, but also to murder her own children in the womb, serve as soldiers in combat where no military considerations is served, serve as firemen when they cannot physically perform the needed tasks, or demand that the gender-neutral pronoun, “he”, be considered a male-only pronoun, and all previous books and writings be misinterpreted to be exclusive of women.
I am convinced that “feminism” has become a term with *negative* meaning — it is used mainly to stir up emotions and blur distinctions, rather than to distinguish.
Similarly with “patriarchy”, etc.
I think the misleading use of words is perhaps more a feminist/gender-theory/etc thing than a generalized leftist one. It seems absolutely dependent on, or at least inseparable from, equivocal use of words and meaningless concepts.
Aha! Then you are a Nolabelist!
Since their entire philosophy is based around self-contradiction (social virtue must be compelled/you have no right to impose your “virtue” on me; all cultures are equal/my culture is evil; humanity is infinitely perfectible/all relationships are power struggles; war and coercion are always evil/revolution and deception are always justified, etc.) and ultimately self-negation…
…why not call them the Oxymorons?
I was thinking “lemmings”, but I like yours better.
Mr. Wright, when you write like this, so that you sort out the tangle of something political (or social, philisophical, economic, etc.) into sensible patterns, I really wish I could buy you a beer, or coffee, or whatever your beverage of choice is.
Well, duh. Buy his books, spread the word, and he will feel well paid.
Oh, well said. Well said.
By all means buy my books. I don’t drink spirits, merely worship them.
The thread leading from the well intentioned fool who votes for minimum wage laws all the way to the downfall of nations and peoples is long and convoluted as Ariadne’s thread leading through the Labyrinth, but rest assured that this thread is unbroken.
Since you also mentioned Heinlein, this puts me sharply in mind of his definition of a liberal: One who knows that water runs downhill, but thinks it will never reach the bottom.
John,
“… since the general mass of either party follows the consensus opinion and adheres, without deep question, to the general moral atmosphere of their peers, the articulate philosophy of the elite of one generation becomes the inarticulate background assumptions of the general mass of the next generation.”
How true.
During my wilderness years I prided myself on my right-wing clarity of thought. It was only after I finally glimpsed ever-patient Grace, which illuminated my path back Home, I began to understand how much of what I believed was premised on leftist assumptions that had infected our culture, especially the plagues of materialism and antinomianism.
Although it would have been better to never have wandered into the wilderness, where pride stalked and nearly devoured me, I have to wonder if being a chastened soul has helped to me see more clearly the spiritual warfare that is ravaging the land — as you have written about with great gusto and clarity.
Do you believe that your deliverance from the belly of the beast has given you a better insight into the assault upon Christendom than you would have had if you had been at Home all along?
Regards,
Bill Tingley
“Do you believe that your deliverance from the belly of the beast has given you a better insight into the assault upon Christendom than you would have had if you had been at Home all along?”
Who knows? Aslan never tells the story that might have happened. Only science fiction writers do that.
As much as I enjoy the might-have-beens of science fiction writers, I cannot give them the distinction you do, John. The Prophets warned the Israelites of what will come to pass if they didn’t shape up. So the Old Testaments has some might-have-beens in it. But that gets us into matters moving away from the message of your post. Thanks for responding to my curiosity.
“Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. …[T]he Leftist pagans are our fellow inmates on Death Row, and only a call from the Governor who governs the universe can grant us a pardon. They are our fellow inmates in the Terminal Ward of the hospital, and neither they nor we shall be healed save by the that great physician who heals with a word.”
All this is true, and it is the shame of many that we forget it. (I say “we” because I know I do, and I think it safe to bet others do; let that not include any reader here who knows with a clear conscience that he or she does not.)
All the same…. It is very very hard not to treat our co-inmates as enemies, when they would happily deprive us of the community we need to help stay ‘alive’ until that phone call comes; or when our co-patients, as we hold on awaiting the Physician, would happily smack the medicine we need meanwhile from our hands and trample it, claiming to be doing us a favour by saving us from false placebos, but in truth simply enjoying our obvious dismay and loss as a vengeance against those who made them take this medicine in the past — because they could never mature enough to appreciate the good the medicine does, and are perpetually caught in childish resentment of having to endure how bad it tastes compared to candy.
We must never hate, but I do not think a vigorous and angry resistance is out of place. Even the Apostles were instructed to shake the dust of certain towns from their shoes.
As with so many of your essays, I find little to criticize in your arguments…..for the simple reason that you have presented no arguments. Merely a long stream of unsupported assertions. I will, however, briefly address a small sampling of those assertions:
“The Jihadists believe in absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing that the Left believes. And yet,
oddly, impossibly, the Left uniformly closes ranks and steps in to defend the Jihadists, and calls anyone who does not love the Jihad a racist.”
Really? Uniformly?
The above being from Sam Harris. And of course there are the well-known criticisms of Islam by Christopher Hitchens. Or check out this page of post from the popular liberal atheist blog Daylight Atheism on the subject of Islam:
http://www.daylightatheism.org/tag/islam
Yes, there are accomodationist liberals who are far too careful not to criticize Islam. However, there are plenty of us liberals who don’t hesitate to do so openly and forcefully. The above is only a tiny sampling of what you might find if you bothered to do any research before writing your essays.
” The contempt of silence bestowed on veiled, battered,
stoned, genitally mutilated and honor-killed women of the Middle East, who now
suffer the same slavery in Europe (and cases have begun to emerge in America). ”
Criticism of islam’s treatment of women (and Islam in general) is a frequent occurrence in the writings and on the blogs of liberal atheists. Something you might be aware of if you did anything more than pulling your “facts” out of thin air.
You seem to have missed where he said of the Left, “I am not necessarily describing a Democrat party-member.” Then again, I’m not surprised to see someone quoting Sam Harris, of all people, mischaracterizing someone else’s argument.
You might also have noticed that Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Sam Harris both allude in the very quotes you use to the exact phenomenon Wright referenced.
“You seem to have missed where he said of the Left, “I am not necessarily describing a Democrat party-member.” ”
And you seem to have missed the fact that my comment does not so much as mention the Democratic party.
“Then again, I’m not surprised to see someone quoting Sam Harris, of all people, mischaracterizing someone else’s argument.”
What I quoted and responded to from Wright’s essay were not arguments. They were merely assertions. Are you familiar with the difference?
And I suspect Wright would not hesitate to describe the four individuals, if he’s familiar with them (or reads them supposing he’s not), as leftists in the sense he’s using the term. Are you saying they aren’t?
I rather expected an assertion in John’s response to my question of how he defines a leftist. I haven’t really commented because I am not sure how to interpret what he wrote.
Herein is my problem. I am taking Leftists to mean, for example, my maternal grandparents and me. When John writes, “The horrible thing about Leftists…..Is Leftists are horrible things…..Their tops are made out of nihlism…..The bottoms are made out of totalitarians…..” This always serves to agrravate me because I feel it to be inaccurate.
I don’t find support in believing Social Security to be a satanic ploy when I read Paul VI writing:
“He who has the goods of this world and sees his brother in need and closes his heart to him, how does the love of God abide in him?” (21) Everyone knows that the Fathers of the Church laid down the duty of the rich toward the poor in no uncertain terms. As St. Ambrose put it: “You are not making a gift of what is yours to the poor man, but you are giving him back what is his. You have been appropriating things that are meant to be for the common use of everyone. The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich.” (22) These words indicate that the right to private property is not absolute and unconditional.
No one may appropriate surplus goods solely for his own private use when others lack the bare necessities of life. In short, “as the Fathers of the Church and other eminent theologians tell us, the right of private property may never be exercised to the detriment of the common good.” When “private gain and basic community needs conflict with one another,” it is for the public authorities “to seek a solution to these questions, with the active involvement of individual citizens and social groups.”
Social Security may be mismanaged, poorly thought out, or better realized in a different way but I don’t see it as a satanic economic ploy designed to lead men to hell.
The problem that I have with John’s essay is not that it is an assertion, but that I can’t use it to understand if he would consider me a leftist, Pope Paul VI a leftist, or my grandparents leftists. He might very well believe anyone who has a substantive disagreement in politics, art, theology, or economics with him to be a leftist. I wouldn’t even have issue with that if they weren’t spoken of with such scorn.
Maybe a list of five prominent leftists, and why they are leftists would be useful. I might find that I’m not a leftist at all but one of the good guys.
“Maybe a list of five prominent leftists, and why they are leftists would be useful.”
Not a bad idea. Though I think he made it fairly clear who he was talking about in a roundabout way. Basically people who, in this country, would probably self-identify as liberals, progressives, secular humanists, and/or socialists.
Consider the difference between
a) exhorting people to be generous to those in need and
b) the coercive power of the state forcing them to give money to the government to use on what it wishes, some of which may eventually make its way to those in need.
Caesar is good for bread and circuses, not so good on actually helping people.
You talk about the coercive power of the state, but the United States is a representative democracy. The state is supposed to be an extension of the people. When Pope Paul VI writes, ‘When “private gain and basic community needs conflict with one another,” it is for the public authorities “to seek a solution to these questions, with the active involvement of individual citizens and social groups”’ isn’t he explicitly suggesting that the government has a role to play?
I am not suggesting that Social Security is the best method for its aims, or that it has been appropriately run. I am simply suggesting it is not so far out of keeping with the Catholic church that it can be blithely regarded as evil, and those who support it as supporters of evil.
I can not speak to Catholic theology on the issue of social security and forced charity. That is there own problem.
Here is what the leaders of my church have said on the subject:
“There is nothing truer than Brigham Young’s statement, that we should give nothing to people, unless they are not able to work, without requiring them to do something for it…. Let every Latter-day Saint who has a farm, farm it, and not try to borrow money to be paid back by the government. Let every man feel that he is the architect and builder of his own life, and that he proposes to make a success of it by working. “Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work,” and rest on the seventh. Do not be willing to labor four or five days and then only half labor. Let every Latter-day Saint give value received for everything he gets, whether it be in work, or whatever he does”
“The aim of the Church is to help the people to help themselves. Work is to be re-enthroned as the ruling principle of the lives of our Church membership”
Conference Report 1936
“Socialism cannot work except through an all-powerful state. The state has to be supreme in everything. When individuals begin to exert their God-given rights, the state has to suppress that freedom.”
” If we continue to follow the trend in which we are heading today, two things will inevitably result: first, a loss of our personal freedom, and second, financial bankruptcy. This is the price we pay when we turn away from God and the principles which he has taught and turn to government to do everything for us. It is the formula by which nations become enslaved.
This nation was established by the God of heaven as a citadel of liberty. A constitution guaranteeing those liberties was designed under the superintending influence of heaven”
“Americans have always been committed to taking care of the poor, aged, and unemployed. We have done this on the basis of Judaic-Christian beliefs and humanitarian principles. It has been fundamental to our way of life that charity must be voluntary if it is to be charity. Compulsory benevolence is not charity. Today’s socialists–who call themselves egalitarians–are using the federal government to redistribute wealth in our society, not as a matter of voluntary charity, but as a so-called matter of right”
A Vision and a Hope for the Youth of Zion, Ezra T Benson
I am not looking to argue the truth value of your prophet. I supplied the quote from Pope Paul VI simply because John and Michael are both, I believe, Catholic and I have been reading encyclicals recently.
That said socialism is commonly defined as a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.
I am not sure how that definition would have anything to do with social security unless we grant that all non-voluntary taxes are socialism, at which point the word Socialism ceases to mean anything at all.
It is socialism in that it is the redistribution of wealth by the government. When the government taxes for the military it is providing a service to the citizens. When the government provides social security or any other welfare or transfer payment program it is taking money from those that have and giving it to those that do not have it without the consent of the people being taxed, while providing no current service to those that have the money taken from them. It is socialism because the government has taken over the business of retirement planning and the distribution of resources to the retired and those deemed unfit for work.
Hope that helps in the understanding. I know that the other people are catholic, but I am not so if I see something I disagree strongly with or think that my perspective is significantly different I tend to bring it up.
It appears that I may have been unclear before. My original response was directed to John, who is a Catholic so, since I’d been reading encyclicals on the Vatican’s website and had recently read one that I thought appropriate, I mentioned it. Michael, another Catholic, responded so I tried to clarify my point by continuing to direct attention to the encyclical. I make no claim that this would, or should, impact the thought process of a non-Catholic — excepting maybe somone like myself that is considering converting.
Bringing up LDS teachings or religious documents doesn’t impact my view of my argument because I don’t recognize the aforementioned authorities. It is interesting in a vague way and if you were explaining to me why you believe the way that you do, it would be relevant — though perhaps not for that particular thread. Maybe this was your intent. How I read it however, was that you were offering the Apostle Ezra T Benson as a countervailing opinion to the one I quoted. This is only useful if both agree on the authority of the figure being quoted. This is why I mentioned that I didn’t want to argue the truth value of your quotations, because I didn’t want to seem offensive. It seems that I may have failed in that effort.
You seem unclear on what a service is. If there is a fire at your house and the local tax funded fire department arrives and puts out the fire you have been rendered a service. Your fellow municipal citizen across town who did not have a house fire, has never had a house fire, and may never have a house fire has also been rendered a service — or even a series of services. The primary service, in this instance, for the other home owner is that the fire department will come and try to put out his fire as well IF one should ever occur. The trucks may arrive late at his house and it is lost, they may be unable to contain the blaze, they department may even be closed down by the city (which has gone bankrupt) the day before his house burns to the ground.
Now apply my analogy to whatever welfare system you desire.
You asked how it was socialism, I responded, I don’t see how that is arguing truth value of the quotations. Obviously, you either have no opinion on the matter or think they are false as otherwise you would most likely be LDS that has to be a given. However I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up the words of two Prophets of God in warning on the subject of social security, especially when the recognized authorities of those on this thread are saying something different. Benson was the President of the Church when he said what I quoted, I made sure of that, as was Grant who the other quote was from.
John Hutchins said, “You asked how it was socialism, I responded, I don’t see how that is arguing truth value of the quotations.”
You either have your chain of events backwards or you continue to misunderstand me.
I said that I didn’t want to argue over the truth value of your church’s statements.
You then responded with “I know that the other people are catholic, but I am not so if I see something I disagree strongly with or think that my perspective is significantly different I tend to bring it up.”
This seems to be a reference back to why you supplied the quotes. You further bolster this perspective by bringing up the fact that they were presidents of the LDS church when they made the statements.
This next part may seem a trifle offensive but I am trying to draw your attention to my point.
If I said, “John Lennon wrote ‘Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary’” as an example that Christianity was false, and then I further said, “He said it while he was a Beatle. I double checked.” I would fully expect for you to ask me what this has to do with the price of tea in China.
Just because I might believe that John Lennon was a sage theologian doesn’t mean that you do. We have no agreement on this. My using him as a source of theological wisdom in an argument with someone that doesn’t accept his authority would be a bit clumsy.
To continue doing so strikes me as daft.
I got that you disagree with me. You seem like a really devout follower so I suspect you accept the doctrines you have supplied. But they have no truth value to me — you could as well quote Lady Gaga lyrics to me. You would be better off supplying me with a Papal encyclical to make your case — even if you don’t believe the Pope to have any particular authority because you have reason to suspect that I might.
And?
I am not trying to argue the truth value, I accept them as true, you do not, we have covered this. Given that I accept them as true it is my duty to point them out. When Elijah was telling the people not to worship Baal the people did not accept him as an authority figure and did not believe he was true, yet he still warned them. Pharaoh did not, at least at first, accept Moses as a messenger from God yet Moses still told him what would happen to his nation. I am not trying to convince you that they are right, that would be something that only God can do, I am just letting you know.
Theological authority comes from God in my opinion and the Spirit of God testifies of truth therefore if someone authorized by God has spoken truth and I pass it on then I expect the Spirit to testify of the truth of what is being said. Having the Spirit testify of the truth would then grant authority to what was said, if it is not for you to hear or you decide not to listen then they are just the opinions of some guy. This is completely different from a logical debate where truth comes from basic assumptions that are held by all parties in the debate.
Liberalism is a form of Christianity that substitutes Caesar for Christ. What is wrong with Social Security is that it takes money from people by force not as a form of assisting people to save for their retirement, but simply to put more money in the general fund, to be used for whatever project campaign contributors find most profitable. If there really were individual accounts funded by these payroll taxes, they would be little more reprehensible that starting a Christmas account or a college fund.
The OFloinn said, “Liberalism is a form of Christianity that substitutes Caesar for Christ”
A pithy remark, that I disagree with nonetheless.
You and I have argued about this before. I submit that liberalism gives much greater empasis to justice than conservatism does, which is primariliy concerned with liberty. Recently I’ve read that Professor Milton Rokeach reached a similar conclusion though he framed it as freedom and equality rather than liberty and justice. Sadly the book, THE NATURE OF HUMAN VALUES, is out of print and goes for over a $100, so it wil be some time if ever before I can read it.
In Rokeach’s system, freedom and equality are both terminal values, values describing what you want to get out of life. There are 18 terminal values that would be listed 1-18, meaning both freedom and equality could rate highly in an individual but one would need to be ascendant.
This is what his research showed:
Socialists (socialism) – Freedom ranked 1st, Equality ranked 2nd
Hitler (nazism) – Freedom ranked 16th, Equality ranked 17th
Goldwater (capitalism) – Freedom ranked 1st, Equality ranked 16th
Lenin (communism) – Freedom ranked 17th, Equality ranked 1st
Justice and equality are by no means the same thing. Equality is related to fairness which is a mixture of justice and mercy. Mercy in the criminal system deprives the victim of the crime the justice that they require. Mercy in the economic sphere deprives the risk takers of their rewards and rewards those that never try.
Justice is a much harsher mistress then what liberalism favors. Conservatism tends to favor justice, liberalism favors mercy. Fairness can not be achieved and have all parties be satisfied as either the criminal is not given a second chance or the victim is deprived of their rights.
Clearly your ideas of justice, mercy, the law, and the proper role of government are very different from mine if you think that liberalism favors justice.
John Hutchins wrote, “Justice and equality are by no means the same thing.”
Which is probably why I wrote, “Professor Milton Rokeach reached a similar conclusion” rather than, “Professor Milton Rokeach reached the same conclusion.”
John Hutchins wrote, “Equality is related to fairness which is a mixture of justice and mercy.”
At this point, for I suspect uncharitable reasons, you begin to provide your own eccentric defintion of equality. Perhaps it is because I left off Rokeach’s defintion. I would have thought a normative, non-technical, defintion would have equality being defined as the state of everyone having the same privileges, status, or rights. For instance, if I were to say, “I treated everyone at the table equally”, I would be more than a bit surprised if you concluded that I was being merciful. However, I would certainly understand if you thought that I was being just. Instead you took the opportunity to inject your personal hobby-horse of why liberalism is inferior to conservatism by clumsily injecting mercy as a cognate of equality.
At any rate, Professor Rokeach defined equality for the purpose of his survey as “brotherhood and equal opportunity for all”. Once again, you should bear in mind that this was a terminal definition, meaning that a liberal (conflating for the purpose of this discussion liberal and socialist) would desire equality, so defined, as high on what he would want to “get out of life”.
John Hutchins wrote, “Justice is a much harsher mistress then what liberalism favors. Conservatism tends to favor justice, liberalism favors mercy.”
I am certain that you think so. Mercy doesn’t really work as a terminal value but Professor Rokeach listed a SIMILAR insturmental value, or way you you go about achieving your terminal values, that he called ‘forgiving’. I am assuming from the tone of your remarks that the LDS church does not place much of a premium on mercy or forgiveness, but it is probably unfair to ascribe your sentiments to your church.
John Hutchins wrote, “Clearly your ideas of justice, mercy, the law, and the proper role of government are very different from mine if you think that liberalism favors justice.”
Since you define words whichever way suits your current purpose, you are undoubtedly correct.
Ok, you had been doing really well until you decided to get snarky.
Justice: the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments
Mercy: compassion or forbearance shown especially to an offender or to one subject to one’s power; also : lenient or compassionate treatment
Those are the definitions. Equality can not come from justice as justice requires merited rewards and punishments, as people merit different awards and punishments they will not be equal. I wasn’t trying to redefine anything, just saying how I see it under the definitions given. When Starship Troopers (which is usually identified with a some what conservative view point) gives it description of harsh punishment it is advocating justice, you broke the law you receive the punishment. When President Clinton gets excused for lying under oath that is being merciful.
Not sure what personal hobby horse you are talking about.
In the LDS tradition when we break the laws of God we are consigned to justice. If we rely on the grace of Christ then we obtain mercy. Only by the atonement of Christ can we obtain mercy, the atonement being something infinite so is able to satisfy the demands of both justice and mercy. As people we are to be merciful to all but in government practice justice.
John Hutchins wrote, “Ok, you had been doing really well until you decided to get snarky.”
I may not be the droid that you are looking for.
You decided to redefine terms that I used from their normal meaning so that you could arrive at the definition that you wanted.
Let’s watch. I say justice is similar to equality.
You respond with, they aren’t the same thing. Note how I never said they were, but that doesn’t stop you.
You then say, equality is related to fairness. Not sure why you have decided to find a synonym for equality other than you feel that it will help in your redefiniton.
You then say, fairness is a mixture of justice and mercy. You have now moved from equality means fairness, to fairness mean justice and mercy even though that is not it’s defintion in the US.
You now stop talking about justice, and focus on mercy which if I fully understand you is a nondesirable trait.
You then talk about the harsh mistress that is justice. You never define justice but you seem to believe that is a cognate for severe.
Now you talk about how justice can not be fair because fairness is defined as justice + mercy. This is such a radical redefintion of justice that I am staggered. I gather you are saying that justice is the unfair application of law in a merciless manner. I am not really sure. I am not sure that you are sure because you seem to be making this up as you go.
You now respond that equality can not come from justice. I am not completely sure what you mean. Is it a reference to something that I didn’t write?
If someone hands you a book and says, “Hey I think you’ll like this. It is similar to Zelazny’s LORD OF LIGHT.” do you think that they are loaning you a copy of the LORD OF LIGHT?
When you look at the words EQUALITY and JUSTICE you can’t make any connection between them? Set aside for the moment your disdain for liberals. Pretend instead I was referencing conservatives.
John Hutchins wrote, “as people merit different awards and punishments they will not be equal.”
Another instance of my having no idea what you are on about. If you were a teacher with two students and you were to tell them you will treat them equally, how does that translate into that if one breaks a rule both will be punished? Even more frustrating, I give you Rokeach’s definition and you still act as if I were writing in Enochian.
John Hutchins wrote, “When Starship Troopers (which is usually identified with a some what conservative view point) gives it description of harsh punishmentit is advocating justice”
Harsh punishment is not a synonym for justice in American English. Maybe I am misunderstanding your usage because English is not your first language or maybe you are Australian or something?
John Hutchins wrote, “Not sure what personal hobby horse you are talking about.”
Are you serious? I pointed it out right after I wrote those words. Or do you believe that you just wrote that you disagree with my characterization?
I quoted the definitions and I have tried to explain how I understand them. I am using the meaning as given in the dictionary of all terms, which I quoted. Unless you are using a different dictionary that redefines them according to what you want, I am not defining them any different then the dictionary. I may be interpreting them different then you, which I said. You seriously have chip on your shoulder. I have already attempted to explain how both justice and mercy are desired traits and will not do so again.
Using your way of defining equality (which I must point out is not the dictionaries way of defining it, mister high arbiter of the standard meaning of terms) of “Brotherhood (what does this even mean in your world of meanings?) and Equal opportunity” is impossible without further understanding of what you mean by equal opportunity. Does equal opportunity mean that everyone is exactly equal so the strong should have weights placed on them and the beautiful be forced to wear masks so that no one is unfairly advantaged in any endeavor? Does it mean making using your families connections (or business) so that you have employment illegal because not everyone has those connections?
Anyways if you aren’t going to respond to what I am actually trying to say but willfully misinterpret (as you have claimed others have done to you) then I don’t think we can have a conversation that is going to be productive.
Please read and respond to what I have actually written instead of assuming you know where I am coming from or what I am saying, quoting what I just said, and then going off on some strange tangent based on your assumptions of what I said. For instance, if you noted with the Starship Troopers I clarified what I meant by it is advocating justice in the same sentence that you quoted being if you broke the law you get the punishment, which post I must add also very clearly has a justice defined at the top. Calm down, Take deep breaths, perhaps take a walk around the block, put away the sock puppet and straw-man, and then read what I actually have written with the understanding that you are not going to like it and will have cognitive dissonance over it. Then if you feel you actually understand what I am trying to say, not what you think I am saying beforehand, but what I actually said then respond.
Not particularly, but you can’t seem to follow my argument at a basic level, and don’t engage what I write so it should be unsurprising that my responses would be unhelpful to you.
A perfect example is your response, “Using your way of defining equality (which I must point out is not the dictionaries way of defining it, mister high arbiter of the standard meaning of terms) of “Brotherhood (what does this even mean in your world of meanings?) and Equal opportunity” is impossible without further understanding of what you mean by equal opportunity.”
Now, did I say that was MY definition of equality? Seriously, reread what I wrote — it might be helpful to start at the beginning of the string — and let me know.
I think that you will find that I did not even originally define equality. I made a statement that I had read that a Professor Rokeach had written a book about political values and reached a SIMILAR conclusion to mine. I then explained that I used justice and liberty while he used equality and freedom. I then gave a brief overview of his system (without having had the opportunity to read his book) which clearly had another variance to mine when I indicated that he had 18 terminal values that would be arranged in a progression. This is not even to speak of the 18 insturmental values he used.
Then you proceeded to change equality into fairness (why?) and then fairness into mercy and justice to explain why I was wrong to select the term justice. Think about that for a moment. I never selected equality or fairness. You built this chain on your own so that you could arrive at mercy and justice.
So you might write, I believe the terminal value for liberals is mercy (which for Rokeach would likely be the insturmental value of forgiveness) and the terminal value for conservatives is justice. We can’t honestly compare this, or at least I can’t, to Professor Rokeach’s 18 point model (36 point if you count the insturmental values) because I haven’t read his book. I do know that how it was supposed to work is that the surveyee places each list of 18 values in order from least to most and then a graph was made.
John Hutchins wrote, “When Starship Troopers (which is usually identified with a some what conservative view point) gives it description of harsh punishmentit is advocating justice”
I am still not sure how you keep relating Starship Troopers (the movie? the book?) description of harsh punishment to justice. The definition of justice that you supplied (the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments) does not make this leap. Since you don’t provide any further context I can only assume that you are intending its inclusion to further your thesis that justice and mercy are different, and when combined they create fair which can then be equated with equality. You are at this point arguing with yourself again.
If someone is brought to justice it is implicitly ‘fair’. Because justice is supposed to be just.
I attempt to engage when we are talking about the same things. It isn’t that I can’t follow your argument or that you can not follow mine it is that we are coming from very different world views such that the usage of terms are conflicting and the base assumptions of things are different. I already pointed that out.
You gave his definition of equality and then complained that I didn’t use it, therefore you have claimed that definition.
You have complained that I originally did not give definitions of my terms and then ignored when I quoted the dictionaries definition. Why is you doing the same thing a defense on your part?
Similar means that there is some relation in your mind between justice and equality. They are in my mind completely different concepts which I was attempting to show. I changed to fairness because to me equality is somewhat ambiguous, as I have tried to point out.
Again with the ignoring the clarification of Starship Troopers, the law was given, everyone was taught the law, and when the law is broken punishment was applied. That is all I meant, not that the punishment was a just punishment but that according to their understanding of the law the punishment was just. I find those punishments harsh, which is why I pointed out that they were harsh. Seriously are you trying to misunderstand when I keep explaining this point? I gave further context, this is the third time I have done so.
This whole argument comes from your claim that socialism is more just, which you then claim is similar to equality. Got that? I disagreed with that statement by trying to show how equality is not that similar to justice. That is all I was trying to do.
What usage of equality are you giving? How are you defining it? You have apparently repudiated the one that I thought you had claimed, and clearly disagree with the way I am trying to understand the term. So what is your definition of equality? If equality means impartiality then there is some connection between them. If it means equal opportunity then already we have moved away from justice, depending on what is meant by equal opportunity. If it means equal outcome then there is almost no relation to justice.
John Hutchins
We should probably just let this go.
I want to give you three examples of why I find you confusing. You have responded to me 4 times in this thread. You have mentioned STARSHIP TROOPERS 3 times. I have never read Heinlein’s STARSHIP TROOPERS and I watched the movie, which I didn’t enjoy, over twelve years ago. Below is exactly what you have written.
“When Starship Troopers (which is usually identified with a some what conservative view point) gives it description of harsh punishment it is advocating justice, you broke the law you receive the punishment.”
“For instance, if you noted with the Starship Troopers I clarified what I meant by it is advocating justice in the same sentence that you quoted being if you broke the law you get the punishment, which post I must add also very clearly has a justice defined at the top.”
“Again with the ignoring the clarification of Starship Troopers, the law was given, everyone was taught the law, and when the law is broken punishment was applied. That is all I meant, not that the punishment was a just punishment but that according to their understanding of the law the punishment was just. I find those punishments harsh, which is why I pointed out that they were harsh. Seriously are you trying to misunderstand when I keep explaining this point? I gave further context, this is the third time I have done so.”
You will probably think that this is me being silly but when you write, “Seriously are you trying to misunderstand when I keep explaining this point? I gave further context, this is the third time I have done so.” I think, no you have not given further context THREE times. You have restated your point TWICE. There is a difference. If this was the first time that you did this that would be one thing, but your writing is riddled with this and maybe that is what confusing me and leading me to believe that you are having a go.
Let me provide an example. I say John Smith stole something and was punished harshly. This was justice. You ask for additional context. I say John Smith stole an apple to feed his hungry son. The theft was discovered and John Smith had his right hand cut off for taking the apple and his son was executed for eating the apple. This was all in accordance with the law. This was justice — though harsh. At some point as I relate the context you hopefully think this isn’t justice at all.
My second example is something you have done several times as well. “…not that the punishment was a just punishment but that according to their understanding of the law the punishment was just.” You appear to be essentially saying that the punishment may not have been just, but that the characters in the story thought that it was and so it was just. This is contradictory at best and moral relativism at worst. It is also an extremely odd way, in my opinion, to describe justice. You are essentially saying that justice need not be just. This is very similar to when you have said that justice can not be fair.
When I provide illustrations of why I disagree you simply ignore them without comment.
My third example is when you write that you are using fairness rather than equality to eliminate ambiguity as you try to show that justice is disimilar to equality. This is convoluted reasoning at best. But let us set that aside. You never actually do that. This is what you write:
“Justice and equality are by no means the same thing”
“Equality is related to fairness which is a mixture of justice and mercy”
“Equality can not come from justice”
That is the sum total of your argument about the relationship between justice and equality. Everything else is about mercy and justice. You indicate that there is some relationship between equality and justice by way of fairness which is just unambiguous code for equality, but are perversely very set that they are “completely different concepts” though you believe that fairness (I am supposed to read equality — or maybe I’m not?) is partially comprised of justice.
John Hutchins writes, “This whole argument comes from your claim that socialism is more just”.
I assume you mean more just than conservatism, but since you are now saying socialism rather than liberalism you may mean capitalism. I never indicated that. I am serious when I ask you to reread what I write. I would really like for you to provide the quote where I indicate that — to be unambiguous, where I claim liberalism is more just than conservatism.
I wrote, “I submit that liberalism gives much greater emphasis to justice than conservatism does, which is primariliy concerned with liberty.” That does not mean that liberals are more just. That means that they are more concerned about whether or not something is just…whether justice is maximized.
I believe that liberals (on the whole) would abridge individual liberty if it would create a more just society. I believe that conservatives (on the whole) would accept a less just society if it maximizes individual liberty. Neither is interested in reducing liberty or justice. In my opinion, liberals believe that real liberty will be found in a society that maximizes justice — by maximizing justice you maximize real liberty. In my opinion, conservatives believe that real justice will be found in a society that maximizes liberty — by maximizing liberty you maximize real justice.
If the law were to have been determined to be a just law then this was indeed justice. More information would be needed on why that law was determined to be just in those circumstances, perhaps it was but there is not enough information to determine absolutely if the law was just. Under the assumption of the story that the law was just then it was justice, in an real context it may indeed be harsh but again there is not enough information about the subject. We would need to determine if the law were indeed just before saying it was not justice, which we haven’t done.
ok:
Here is how I understand this arguement:
1. Em(Jl) > Em(Jc) (empasis justice (J) in libralism (l) greater than in conservatism (c)
2. Em(Lc)>Em(Ll). (empasis liberty (l) in conservatism (c) …)
3 L~F ^ J~E (~ I must assume is some equivalence relation with the standard rules of an equivalence relation. ) (Liberty similar to Freedom (F), Justice similar to Equality(E))
4. F>E xor E>F
5. Es > Ec -> Jl > Jc
Which to me is pretty unambigous that you were argueing that justice in liberalism/socialism (which you yourself have related to each other) is greater then in conservatism/capitalism (again which in your arguement you yourself have related).
John Hutchins wrote:
“Here is how I understand this arguement:
1. Em(Jl) > Em(Jc) (empasis justice (J) in libralism (l) greater than in conservatism (c)
2. Em(Lc)>Em(Ll). (empasis liberty (l) in conservatism (c) …)
3 L~F ^ J~E (~ I must assume is some equivalence relation with the standard rules of an equivalence relation. ) (Liberty similar to Freedom (F), Justice similar to Equality(E))
4. F>E xor E>F
5. Es > Ec -> Jl > Jc”
So since you were unable to provide a quote, rather than admitting that you have fundamentally misunderstood my argument you have opted to tell me that UPON READING MY COMMENT you used a logical formula to arrive at a conlusion that I did not present based off of not taking the entirety of my post into account. This is the sort of response that leads me to believe that you are arguing in bad faith.
However, assuming this is really what you do when you read a paragraph let me try to explain a final time.
There are a few concepts that you must understand.
(1) A TERMINAL VALUE is a value describing what you want to get out of life. Examples might be freedom, pleasure, or salvation.
(2) An INSTURMENTAL VALUE is a way you you go about achieving your terminal values. Examples might be loyalty, forgiveness, or self-discipline.
(3) People may hold more than one TERMINAL VALUE at a time.
(4) People may use multiple INSTURMENTAL VALUES to work towards a TERMINAL VALUE.
(5) TERMINAL VALUES and INSTURMENTAL VALUES may be placed in a hierarchy. This means that a person might believe that freedom, pleasure, and salvation are all important goals but will rank one over the other if two were to conflict.
Not only does Dr. Rokeach’s not use my terminology of LIBERTY and JUSTICE, but his theory is much more complex and subtle than mine. I have only been aware of his value system for a little over two-weeks and have read nothing that he published.
When I asm using the term justice, I am using it in the normal sense of it meaning the quality of being just; righteous, equitable, or morally right. You could probably us the term fairness in its normative defintion of being free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice and mean the same thing.
The political theory that I am advancing is that the significant difference between a liberal philosophy and a conservative philosophy is the emphasis placed on the TERMINAL VALUES of justice and liberty. Please note that I say TERMINAL and not INSTURMENTAL. That means I am not advancing that conservatives are less just or that they place no premium on the TERMINAL VALUE of justice. Indeed it might be that justice is a conservative’s second TERMINAL VALUE if we were to look at his hierarchy of TERMINAL VALUES.
What I am advancing is that liberals are more concerned with justice than they are liberty.
This means a liberal would curtail liberty to advance justice. As an example, a liberal might support a law that requires businesses to be handicap accessible to promote justice for the disabled even if this curtails the freedom of the business owner. A liberal might advance the belief that without government involvment, the creation of handicap accessible businesses will be haphazard and unfairly distributed.
This means a conservative would curtail justice to advance liberty. As an example, a conservatice might he in opposition to a law that requires businesses to be handicap accessible to promote freedom for the business owners even if this curtails justice for the business owners. A conservative would advance the belief that THE MARKET will advance the creation of handicap accessible businesses without the need for government intervention.
Once again, this has nothing to do with INSTURMENTAL VALUES. A conservative might have the INSTURMENTAL VALUE of just as their primary INSTURMENTAL VALUE.
“The political theory that I am advancing is that the significant difference between a liberal philosophy and a conservative philosophy is the emphasis placed on the TERMINAL VALUES of justice and liberty.”
I respectively disagree. Conservationism, in America, means conserving the principles of the Constitution intact. Liberal values meant, in the old days, an abolition of class privilege and the spread of the voting franchise, and in the modern day, means socialism or some form of quasi-socialistic intervention in the economy.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, Liberal values have lost any coherent center, and current form a coalition of various special interests, such as racial grievances, advocacy for sexual perversions, environmentalism (particularly of unscientific or hysterical ilk), and a desire to alter the beliefs, attitudes and speech of men to prevent the irritation or exasperation of protected groups. These acts are allegedly to benefit the poor and oppressed, by that pretense is so thin and unbelievable that I do not see how or why any educated man can believe it.
There is also a strong antinominian tendency, which seeks to normalize deviancy, pornography, drug abuse, divorce, and other acts of self-destructive self-indulgence. The one exception to this general pattern is smoking tobacco, which the Liberal world view seeks relentless to stamp out, using junk science and abusive lawsuits as its chosen instruments. I have no explanation, nor even a theory, why this one addiction is singled out for puritanical crusade.
There is also a general tendency to despise the military, and seek to augment the prestige and power of international institutions over and above United States sovereignty.
None of these characteristics, neither economic illiteracy, ignorance of foreign policy, nor counterproductive acts meant to help the poor which actually harm them, display any concern for justice either in what you call TERMINAL VALUES, which ordinary people call ends, or INSTRUMENTAL VALUES, which ordinary people call means.
The idea of curtailing liberty to advance justice is illogical, and my indeed be taken as the central conceit of all modern liberal thinking. Justice here means Caesar distributing alms, bread, honors, jobs, and society’s approval on the various grievance groups who constitution the liberal mass.
Conservative thinking holds that as much liberty as is consonant with an ordered system of justice and the protection of innate, natural rights both from the dangers of anarchy and the dangers of government is a virtue in an of itself, and not as a means to an end.
See that I understood. I thought I was taking the entirety of your post into account and providing a quote. If you find my reasoning hard to follow and I am misinterpreting what you are reasoning then not only are many of our base assumptions very different but our way of thinking is also quite different.
Under your understanding of what is just I think I have to agree with you, but disagree with your understanding of what is just. Which brings back my original post on the subject that clearly your ideas of justice, the law, and the proper role of government are very different from mine.
As you say, public welfare to the poor, social security and other schemes, are not at variance with the teachings of the Catholic Church. The catechism makes clear we all have an obligation to aid the poor and distressed. The means selected are a secular matter, and the conscience of the individual is not bound to a particular economic model under Catholic teaching.
We are in utter agreement. I even agree that Social Security is certainly not the best method.
“We are in utter agreement. I even agree that Social Security is certainly not the best method.”
The problem as I see it is that the idea of having the Church run all the charities, as she did back in the Middle Ages, is that the Church is simply not large and far reaching enough to do so now.
True, but how much of that is because the Church got replaced by the State in these matters? There used to be a practical reason to belong to a church, and having to deal with this voluntary community seemed to create a “virtuous loop”. Look at what happened to the Great American clubs (Lions, Elks, etc). They were not just social clubs that did good works. They were the first “HMO’s”. When the government stopped them from acting in that fashion, they faded deep into the background. Few people today understand how important and useful they were. Sigh.
“True, but how much of that is because the Church got replaced by the State in these matters? ”
Most or all of it. My libertarian friends, if they were truly interested in driving the government back into its proper and natural sphere, would be eager to return the institutional Church and private clubs like Elks and Lions to predominance.
One reason why I am no longer a libertarian is that they talk a good game, but they don’t seem to realize you cannot rely on the culture, the informal non-governmental rules of behavior, to enforce the norms of society unless you first have a culture and have a society. A group of transients in a nation-sized hotel with no love and no loyalty to the nation, her traditions and her spirit, are at best the purchasers of a protective service — as if the military and the police were merely body guards and night watchmen writ large.
With no offense to my libertarian friends, I have never understood, if we allow unhindered movement of people and goods across all borders, what to do if a large body of (presumably armed) emigrants moves into the libertarian commonwealth, and votes to overturn the provisions of the statues and of the Constitution, no matter how strictly worded, meant to prevent government meddling in economic and private affairs.
If the small but Libertarian town of Galtsville, Oregon, pop 500 has no restrictions or regulations on emigration or voting, and if 501 members of the Muslim Brotherhood of La Raza, wearing Muslim headscarves and Mexican ponchos buy property or come as lawful guests into town on election day, and one and all pulls the balloting lever for Che Mohamed the Twelfth Imam, who immediately declares himself Glorious Leader, and outlaws all borrowing and lending practiced not in conformity with Sharia law, outlaws the best-loved industries of libertarianism, pornography and harlotry, and imposes draconian measures to stamp out unveiled women and homosexual men, and changes and overturns the libertarian laws and constitution and private yet binding arbitration agreements all by means of lawful libertarian due process, what recourse do the honest libertarians of Galtsville have save to fly to arms? And if a lose collection of semi-anarchists battles a tightly disciplined body of trained revolutionaries, who is likely to win?
You cannot win the Culture War without a culture. And you do not have a culture unless you have a cult, a set of supernatural beliefs the common people are willing to die for. That is the nature of the human beast: whether you blame blind Darwinian selection or credit the Hand of the Creator, that is the way we are made.
Libertarianism has to be a majority view, or a universal view, adopted by the culture and enforced by the informal mechanisms of society before its provisions can be adopted into law, and the government actually and really restricted to its lawful sphere: and for reasons of self-preservation, if nothing else, the libertarian commonwealth must exclude those who are not loyal to libertarian principles from the (thankfully small and weak) levers of power that obtain.
And such informal mechanisms have little or no force unless backed by a supernatural sanction. In other words, Christians akin to early Puritans could live in Galt’s Gulch, and abide without laws or the need for laws, but atheist Ayn Rand and those like her could not.
History has pretty solidly shown that Constitutional democracies flourish in Christian nations, but in non-Christian and post-Christian, they erode into ever-expanding swamps of Socialism. Why this should be, or whether it is causal or coincidental, I know not.
If I may be cynical, the main point of a Christian nation, of course, is to give the Jews a place to stay. If the idiot Christians can put aside their endemic anti-Antisemitism, this allows the Jews to use their genius and diligence to produce wealth that benefits the whole economy. Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, Taoist, and Confucian emigrants have a similar record of mutually beneficial success.
I think you are a little hard of the Libertarians here (No big surprise, they seem to go to of their way to be targets). The Churches and Clubs were Libertarian, Free Market solutions which got “killed” by the government either co-oping or banning the practical stuff they did, the stuff which brought in the new blood, which then learned the culture and passed it on. It’s one of the good examples I hear from the gentlemen trying to sell me on Libertarianism. Right up there with Underwriter’s Laboratory. For all that they are blued skinned weirdos who want to legalize drugs, they know this one….
My argument is not in favor of Caesar running welfare, nor in favor of inmates running the asylum, nor of foxes guarding the henhouse. My argument is that laws (enforced by police i.e. coercion ) can be replaced by mores an social conventions (enforced by Mrs Grundy i.e. peer pressure and conscience) if and only if the informal and unwritten rules have a strong control over the minds and hearts of the people — only men of honor desire, or tolerate, liberty. Only the sanction of religion can enforce an informal honor code. Each individual need not be, but the general consensus must be, either by strength of numbers, or by the commanding high ground of controlling the education, the entertainment, and education of the people. The only institution to do this is the church
Right. I think we all got that. But you seem to miss my point, which is the Church, and the Great Clubs of America, were attacked by the Socialists on the “Get them into the seats” side. The clubs had a moral code, and did good works, but the reason most people joined them was for the health insurance they provided. Stripped of that function by the State, the Clubs have withered. We have seen the same with the mainstream Protestant churches, when they were stripped of their charitable duties, sometimes by force of law (I believe we saw that just recently in California?). You are focused on the “medicine” the Church provides, which it certainly does. But a “spoonful of sugar” helps the medicine go down, and they aren’t allowed to provide “sugar” anymore….
Oddly enough, S.J.Gould once described Dawkins as a fascist, and Harris has been characterized in somewhat the same way. Some ideas, he wrote, are so dangerous that people could be killed for holding them. That a certain body of thought holds the traditional bourgeois West in contempt does not preclude various factions from drawing knives on one another. Hitchens and Harris and some others weigh the anti-Western stance of Islam against its religious nature and find their hatred of religion outweighs their contempt for the bourgeois West.
Hitchens once openly advocated Muslim genocide to the point that even PZ Myers was appalled:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/10/ffrf_recap.php
He also voiced his support for Giuliani over Obama and Clinton.
I find him hard to categorize, other than as “Trotskyite” and “evil.”
To be fair, PZ Meyers CHARACTERIZED Hitchens comments/speech as being tantamount to calling for genocide or, at least, wholesale slaughter.
Fair enough. I haven’t seen anyone disagree with Myers, though – the comments are full of people who were there and agree. Still, I don’t have any respect for Myers’ honesty or non-scientific intellect, so he might have been wrong.
“And you seem to have missed the fact that my comment does not so much as mention the Democratic party.”
I didn’t miss anything. My point was that what you view as liberals and what Wright calls the Left are clearly not the same thing. You need to be able to read between the lines a bit, dude.
“What I quoted and responded to from Wright’s essay were not arguments. They were merely assertions. Are you familiar with the difference?”
Blah, blah. Fine, argument was not the most appropriate word choice (I wasn’t using it rigorously), but neither is assertion. Really what they are are part of a definition – he was asked to define the Left as he use the term, which he did. I use definition here in the specific sense having to do with debate and logical argumentation. I think you misunderstood the point of the piece above, which was to do definition (which is part of argumentation in the sense that it provides part of the basis for arguments). You are confusing assertion with definition.
“And I suspect Wright would not hesitate to describe the four individuals, if he’s familiar with them (or reads them supposing he’s not), as leftists in the sense he’s using the term. Are you saying they aren’t?”
You can ask him if you like. My point there had nothing to do with saying they aren’t, but rather that they themselves seem to agree with Wright’s definition of the Left, at least in a general sense.
“I didn’t miss anything. My point was that what you view as liberals and what Wright calls the Left are clearly not the same thing.”
People who self-identify as liberals are part of what Wright calls the Left. I don’t think Wright would disagree with that. If so, he’s invited to correct me if I’m wrong. And I also strongly doubt he would disagree that the 4 people I quoted as being on the Left are, in fact, Leftists as he was using the word (again, he’s welcome to correct me on this if I misunderstand him).
“Really what they are are part of a definition – he was asked to define the Left as he use the term, which he did.”
Really? Here is what he said:
“Alas, I am not defining the word Leftist. I cannot…..I do not think the movement, for which I have no satisfactory name, can be defined.”
What he did do, in an indirect way, was to identify what he’s calling leftists primarily with people who self-identify as liberals, progressives, socialists, and secular humanists (in the process of sniping that they don’t deserve these labels). As I pointed out previously this seems workable as, if not an explicit definition, at least sufficient to give us a good idea of who he’s talking about.
“My point there had nothing to do with saying they aren’t, but rather that they themselves seem to agree with Wright’s definition of the Left, at least in a general sense.”
As am I in the sense mentioned above—which is as close to a definition as Wright ever comes in the essay.
“Alas, I am not defining the word Leftist. I cannot…..I do not think the movement, for which I have no satisfactory name, can be defined.”
You have, again, to read between the lines. The piece is called “Defining the Indefinable,” after all.
I must say that the Gettysburg Address, when judged by the standards of a Shakespearean sonnet, is the worst Shakespearean sonnet ever. It does not even conform to the standard rhyme scheme.
You say: “As with so many of your essays, I find little to criticize in your arguments…..for the simple reason that you have presented no arguments. Merely a long stream of unsupported assertions.”
To which, if I may quote from your own words, “You say: “As with so many of your essays, I find little to criticize in your arguments…..for the simple reason that you have presented no arguments. Merely a long stream of unsupported assertions.”
To which, if I may quote an authority you trust, “What I quoted and responded to from Wright’s essay were not arguments. They were merely assertions. Are you familiar with the difference?”
What I admire is that you can both blatantly contradict yourself, and maintain a condescending tone.
And where exactly did I contradict myself in the two quoted statements?
Sorry about the error in placing the quotes. Wish we had an “edit comments” option here.
And that should have been “criticize islam” rather than “criticize the Left”
Just got off the phone with a guy, I have not seen or heard for 20 years. He wanted to let me know, he just retired with 80% of his pay, from a job working for the State of Illinois.
I guess he doesn’t realize the state giveth with one hand and taketh with the other hand.
He’s a proud Democrat, until the state decides that pension plan has bankrupted the state in 3…2…1…!
On a less contentious note, I’d be interested in hearing more about this:
“For example, a group of concerned but economically-illiterate citizens who want to see the poor workingman receive a decent living wage will support a minimum wage law, unaware that this increases unemployment, and unconcerned that it intrudes a Federal power into local or individual affairs.”
A discussion on a concrete and specific issue like the minimum wage might be useful.
Here is my contribution to such a discussion:
What sets the height of wages?
If it is the whim of the employer, then wages can be set at any level whatsoever. By this logic, if a seven-cents an hour minimum wage is good, a seven dollar an hour wage is better, and a seventy dollar an hour wage even better. Indeed, by this logic, Congress could make us all millionaires tomorrow by passing a law ordering each of our employers to pay us a million dollars.
However, we recoil from this absurdity. We realize that employers do not have infinite money to spend on wages. There is something that forms a limit. What is that something?
That something is the law of supply and demand. A job which many men are able and willing to do, since workers bid against each other in the auction for jobs, the hotter the competition for the job, the lower the price tends to drop; and, likewise, a job seeking to attract men from among many jobs, since jobs also bid against each other in the auction for workers, the hotter the competition for workers, the higher the price tends to rise. Ultimately the customers and consumers of the good or service to which that worker contributes work set the price for his labor.
Since the wage is set by the law of supply and demand, then the employer’s only role is to pay as closely to the market rate that wage for that work, because if he guesses low, other jobs paying more will tempt the worker away; and if he guesses high, and passes the higher cost to the customer, other manufacturers charging lower prices will tempt customer away.
In such a case, suppose a man is only worth two dollars an hour: a shop owner wants to higher him to push a broom and clean away dust and litter from the stairs in front of the shop. The dust and litter drives away some small number of customers, and the work is something any able bodied youth can perform, so there is a benefit to the shop provided the wage is low.
The benefit to the shop is minimal compared to the availability of labor: two dollars an hour. The police arrive, and demand the shopowner pay the sweeper three dollars an hour.
This means that every hour the shop stays open, the shopowner suffers a net loss of a dollar an hour. He can either can raise his prices to the customers to cover the loss, or fire the sweeper.
Since the prices in his shop are also controlled by the law of supply and demand, increasing costs to his customers will drive customers to his competition, which again involves loss to him (and presumably to his customers, who prefer lower prices to higher for the same goods). If the business lost through higher prices is more than the business lost through having dirty stairs, he is wiser to fire the sweeper.
In general, if a government command sets the wage above the height dictated by the law of supply and demand, the worker is a net drain rather than a net asset, and either is discharged, or the employer changes the conditions of work to economize, or passes the losses on to the customer, or incurs losses and inches toward bankruptcy. The first and final options are self defeating, the second is tantamount to firing the worker and rehiring him at a higher salary to perform a more productive job (an unlikely circumstance), and the third harms the employer in relation to any manufacturers not bound by the wage-control order, and if all manufacturers are bound, drives away the marginal customers to their mutual detriment, which again inches the company toward bankruptcy.
If effect, minimum wage laws only make sense in the context of the Marxist assumption that (1) the worker and the employer exist in a relationship of exploiter-and-exploited, a zero-sum-game where the loss to the employer is desirable for the sake of the gain to the employee, and that (2) the height of wages is arbitrarily set by the whim and avarice of the employer.
Allow me to quote from Ludwig von Misses:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/HmA/msHmA21.html
This is all true.
The main argument I’ve heard, though, is that many poor workers aren’t capable of moving easily, so there really isn’t that many places they could work — that from the worker’s perspective it doesn’t really operate like a theoretical free market. I don’t know if this is true in practice or not — it may well not be.
Ultimately, though, if we’re going to *have* a welfare system in the first place, we’d be better off to jettison the minimum wage laws and use the welfare system to make up the slack for those people who can’t survive on what they’re making — this would lead to fewer unemployed people.
(Actually, I think a Civilian Conservation Corps style program where the government educated in employable skills, and supplied the necessities, for people in return for work would be the best solution — it prevents people from starving while not having the risk welfare does of producing long-term, even multi-generational, dependence; and it would reduce the drain on the total economy [people being paid for not producing anything]. Of course this would only apply to those capable of work — the disabled and such would need a program perhaps more reminiscent of our welfare.)
From an economic point of view, the cost of moving the worker to the work is the same as any other factor affecting supply and demand, i.e. it is a transaction cost. In the example above, if the sweeper was too far away from the shop to pay for his commute out of the two dollars per hour his labor was worth to the shopowner, the job is out of reach.
I’m not an economist but from what I’ve read the evidence doesn’t strongly support the claims of substantial negative impacts on the economy as a result of the minimum wage.
The increased income, for example, it’s argued by many economists, offsets the negatives. Yes, the restaurant owner has to pay more in wages to his staff but makes more income because low wage people in his community have more to spend at his restaurant.
Since you’re against the minimum wage what do you see as the best approach to reducing poverty? Or is that even a goal for you (as it might not be if you’re libertarian)?
Ok the poverty reduction is to someone else so I will let them answer it unless you would like me to.
The reason that minimum wage doesn’t normally change the economic activity is that what is usually happening is just updating the wage to meet inflation. The minimum wage doesn’t automatically update with inflation so politicians are able to make it a big issue that they are helping the poor when the reality is they are simply maintaining the minimum wage in real value terms. There is a natural minimum wage rate for most employees in most jobs and the federal minimum wage has usually been decently close to that rate so for most areas the negative effect is minimal (or if the employees had not been receiving increases to match inflation they are beneficial).
Inflation, in turn, acts a a transfer payment away from creditors, investors, and people who save their money, and toward debtors, spendthrifts, and people who consume rather than save. The overall effect is to raise interest rates, making it harder to borrow money, lower the capital available for loans, and decumulate the capital. This effects the whole economy, rich and poor alike: a falling tide lowers all boats. Naturally, the poor are the hardest hit.
“I’m not an economist but from what I’ve read the evidence doesn’t strongly support the claims of substantial negative impacts on the economy as a result of the minimum wage.”
I have studied economics, and from what I’ve read, the weasel word in that sentence is the word “substantial.” Mass unemployment was unheard of before the modern government interventions in the market. We now regard a five to ten percent unemployment rate as normal. If the wage rate were allowed to drop, it would drop to a level that would clear the labor market of all available labor.
“The increased income, for example, it’s argued by many economists, offsets the negatives.”
Whether true or not, logically the offset would be all the greater if there were fewer negatives. It would be more persuasive if you argued there were some other non-economic benefit to the artificially created unemployment. The standard argument used by unions is that keeping non-union members out of work, the skill of the craftsmen is increased. You are in a weak position if you argue that the inefficiency of keeping the shopkeepers from employing the sweepers who want jobs, and keeping the sweeper from working at jobs they want, somehow produces more rather than less efficiency.
And, by the bye, such arguments are not true, since they depend on money coming from nothing for no reason.
Economics is a science, like geometry, a set of deductions from axiomatic basics. It is not guesswork, it is not sociology, it is not mass psychology. The empirical evidence shows only the resulting sum of all vectors of price changes in the market, and cannot analyze those vectors in their components, since such situations (where only one factors is working on changing the supply versus demand and all other factors of production stay the save) is unheard of and impossible to create.
If the unemployment rate goes down rather than up after the impact of a minimum wage law is put in place, logic suggest that this means that some other factor, not identified in the study, was driving the employment rate up faster than the wage law was driving it down: we cannot predict what the price will be — economics is not a predictive science but an explanatory one — but we can conclude that if the unemployment rate went down in the face of a law forbidding workers from working, it would go even further down if those workers were legally allowed to work.
This is independent of the moral argument that the state has no right to put private individuals out of work, or to interfere with their contracts and covenants with each other, absent some clear military or peacekeeping purpose.
“Since you’re against the minimum wage what do you see as the best approach to reducing poverty? Or is that even a goal for you (as it might not be if you’re libertarian)?”
Minimum wage laws increase rather than decrease poverty: that can be proved by pellucid logic. Logically, to abolish such well intentioned but ignorant meddling in the operation of the market would be a first step.
Referring again to the economist I quoted, I point out that what raises the height of wages is the increase of the efficiency of each worker, either by better organization of the task or by mechanization or some other means of lowering the cost of each factor of production that goes into the finished good.
The government’s role is to ensure stability so that rational men can make long term plans with a reasonable certainty that their contractual obligations will be carried out, loss to crime and negligence be minimal, their property safe from invasion and insurrection and confiscation, the title to their property clear and clearly transferable.
What the government cannot do is create jobs or lower the interest rate or create money or select winners and losers. These are not things the government can but ought not to do; these are things the government cannot do whether it ought or not, since they are not logically possible. The whole point of economics is to dispel popular and shallow errors involved in an visible benefit with a higher hidden cost. The creation of state-caused permanently unemployed underclass is an example of an invisible cost; the higher wage created is a visible benefit, but what it effectually is, is a transfer payment, robbing the poor and giving to the non-poor.
The end result of all such well intentioned meddling is the decrease of efficiency, inflation, market volatility, and a tendency to capital de-cumulation: investors find it wiser to consume than to invest.
Work reduces poverty. Hard work. Economics is called the dismal science because it exposes the foolishness of all attempts to evade, elude, hide and lie about that one simple truth.
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
There actually would be some unemployment even in market clearing conditions as, because of imperfect information, there is some time between a person being let go of a job and finding a new job. Percentage wise this would give us 2-3% unemployment from what I have read, the exact number is not known. Less unemployment then whatever that number is means that there are jobs being created with no potential workers available to fill the jobs which slows economic growth.
“There actually would be some unemployment even in market clearing conditions as, because of imperfect information”
Certainly, but I was only speaking of modern mass unemployment creating a permanent dependent class, not of the temporary unemployment natural to the estate of man.
FYI
Omitting the spikes of major recessions and the dips of world war full employment, the median unemployment rate since ca. 1870 has been 5%. That is, half the years were higher and half were lower. There was no change to this base-rate before-after the New Deal. (There WAS, however, a huge change in business bankruptcy rates: they dropped dramatically with the New Deal and the volatile cycles were damped out.)
That is interesting data. Would you point me to your source?
The Statistical Abstracts of the United States.
http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/statab.html
The Historical Statistics covers up to 1970, the annuals cover the period after. Be aware that sometimes the figures for a year are updated in light of further data, so that the reported figures for the same year may differ by a decimal or so in different volumes. Also take note of various efforts to game the system. Reagan had enlistment in the military counted as “in the labor force” and “employed.”
In re minimum wage:
This has very little effect on most workers, who usually have skills worth far more than the minimum wage. It has maximum impact on those with few marketable skills: so it is no coincidence that increasing minimum [real] wage rates coincide with systemic unemployment among black urban youth and more broadly among urban youth in general.
Thank you for the link!
On the subject of Islam, I’ve noticed that many on the Left do not defend Jihadism. Their approach is still a stretch, and is no less kind to Christianity, but is at least not outright paradoxical. When a fanatic stones, beheads, or blows up the innocent, their way to attack Christianity is to put it in the same boat as the Jihadist. There, they say, is where the Christians would go if we let them. There, they say, is the fate of all nations that elevate their god in the public life. This, they say, is why we must remind the faithful Christians of their place: they are not welcome to let their beliefs lead their lives.
I am not sure what you mean by “many on the Left do not defend Jihadism.”
I direct your attention to the case of Lars Hedegaard, who was put on trial for racism and hate-speech because he criticized Danish immigration policy toward Muslims; and to a parallel case involving Mark Steyn; and to the human shields who offered to sacrifice their lives to stop the bombing of Saddam Hussein, who paid bounties to the surviving families of suicide bombers in Israel; and to the difference between the new coverage of the riots in Iran and the riots in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is the likely beneficiary of any pro-democracy movement, which would overthrow a weak but still useful American-Israeli ally; whereas the pro-democracy movement in Iran was crushed with nary a peep from the Western press.
No matter what the intent nor the high minded principles of such antics, the effect in the real world is to embolden and enable the Jihad.
Stalin encouraged and funded pacifism and war-protest in America during the Cold War because it benefited him; Hitler was likewise blessed by high-minded anti-war movements among his enemies.
If you mean only that many on the Left do not voice agreement with the tactics used by the Jihad, there I agree.
If you mean that many on the Left blame the Jihad for international terrorism and do not blame the West, Israel and the United States of America, especially President Bush, for creating, arming, and training the Jihad, there I disagree.
A very large and vocal segment of the Left — I would say it is the official party line — is that the West created by Jihad because of its evil and over-reaching foreign policy, and the West’s unwise opposition to Russia, not to mention the racism, capitalism, and global warming caused by capitalism causing food riots.
Anyone believing this is obligated to believe the best strategy for handling global Muslim terrorism is pre-emptive surrender to their demands, the abandonment of the state of Israel to holocaust, and an isolationist foreign policy.
Naturally, anyone recommending a policy of giving the Danes the Danegeld, no matter how high minded their intentions, and even if they are not at war with the non-Viking Danes, is still objectively speaking helping and aiding and abetting the Danes.
Likewise, anyone who is more afraid of President Bush than he is of the Jihad, whether he admits it or not, realizes it or not, is a “Useful Idiot” aiding and abetting the Jihad.
WOW….I didn’t read the entire essay, but I read enough to understand that the writer knows how to hit the nail on the head with ease! In my experiences, in which there are many and varied, I have boiled it down to where “Leftist” simply means “Selfist”, and these people are exceedingly selfish. They will agree to allow government hire people, and set up bureaucracies to “help people”, but will not lift a finger on their own for their fellow man. Regarding the assertion that young people don the pose of Leftist elites, and assume intellectual superiority, I have witnessed that many times, and am frightened by it. Thank you for the essay. Unfortunately, the ones who need to read it are too busy being “educated” with trivial Leftist political soundbites.
“In my experiences, in which there are many and varied, I have boiled it down to where “Leftist” simply means “Selfist”, and these people are exceedingly selfish.”
Atheists helping the homeless:
http://www.atheistshelpingthehomeless.org/
Humanist in Haiti:
http://thehumanist.org/humanist/10_mar_apr/Ardiente.html
Atheists serving their country in the military:
http://www.maaf.info/
Yep, a bunch of selfish jerks.
First of all, I should say that I think it’s great when anyone gives to worthy charities. But does no one remember when Dawkins and other prominent atheists constantly made a huge point (mostly in the face of the survey that suggested religious people give much more to charity) of how religious people only give to charity so that they can promote their religions, meaning it’s not really charitable giving at all?
So Dawkins and other atheists are dorks in that regard, also?
Oh, he used to go on and on about how disgusting it is that Christians leap on the backs of every tragedy, and then BAM:
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/4933
Also, let’s not forget that religions are evil for brainwashing kids, and all children should be allowed to choose freely for themselves when they become adults, and then BAM BAM:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/5674934/Richard-Dawkins-launches-childrens-summer-camp-for-atheists.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/arts/31arts-THEGODDELUSI_BRF.html
At issue is the sweeping generalization that Leftists are selfish. Not whether they may be critical of religion. The two, after all, are not mutually exclusive.
Another prominent recent example of unselfish service to others is Pat Tillman (who was an atheist).
Calling those on the Left selfish is nothing more or less than an expression of prejudice. Surely we can have a discussion about political perspectives without descending to that level.
Nietzsche’s complaint was that atheists were not selfish enough, and were still contaminated by a residual Christianity.
Just one example of the many stupid things Nietzsche said.
For what it is worth, I do not think all Leftist are selfish, even by my definition. I know of Left-leaning lawyers who, for example, do pro bono work helping inmates in prison get access to holy books of religions not their own.
My opinion of Leftists is extremely negative, but it is not that negative.
That is what is at issue in your comment, and that is why I started my comment with approbation for atheist givers to worthwhile charities. I don’t myself believe that liberals are selfish – in fact, many of those I’ve known are simply consumed by the need to put time into a cause, while most of those I know on the right are only interested in charity if they are also strongly religious.
But what is at issue in *my* comments is that Dawkins, and those who worship everything he says, are hypocrites. If you thought that my comments had to do with “whether they may be critical of religion,” you severely missed my point. Dawkins believes the end justifies the means, as long as the end is attacking religion. Any port is good in a storm, and any hypocrisy is good so long as it hurts religion. And so long as no one notices it is hypocrisy, of course.
Not everything in a comment need be a strict counterargument to what came before. Sometimes it is merely a thought spun off of the earlier post – that is, a comment.
Could you provide some examples to substantiate your claim of hypocrisy on Dawkin’s part?
I offered three already.
Camp Quest and the children’s book. Both are examples of Dawkins endorsing the idea of teaching children to think critically. Hardly equivalent to indoctrinating them to uncritically believe unsupported claims. If he was endorsing the idea, for example, to indoctrinate children to be atheists, THAT would be hypocritical.
Regarding the donation to Haiti aid, what Dawkins criticized is not that Christians donate to aid for disaster victims (what, after all, is bad about that) but that they use it as an opportunity to proselytize to people in an extremely vulnerable state. The article you linked to only said that Dawkins gave a large donation to aid in Haiti. Not that anyone giving out the aid was proselytizing for religious skepticism.
Again, no hypocrisy.
All right, I guess we’re too deep for me to reply directly to your comment, but you are mischaracterizing Dawkins doubly. I’m not surprised to see either retreat, but this is the common tactic when called out on hypocrisy – oh, we were never saying THAT, we were saying something almost the same which allows an exception for the thing we want to do.
As to the camps – if you look at the article, you will see the following sentences: “The retreat is for children aged eight to 17 and will rival traditional faith-based breaks run by the Scouts and church groups. It will teach that religious belief and doctrines can prevent ethical and moral behaviour. The camp is part of a campaign, backed by Dawkins and Professor AC Grayling, the philosopher and writer, designed to challenge Christian societies, collective worship and religious education.” Sure, you can say that it is only there to teach critical thinking, but the activities are clearly designed to produce the exact doubting of religious faith that Dawkins preaches constantly. After all, it’s not as if they’re teaching any old kind of critical thinking, like the types taught in public school classes – it’s exercises designed specifically to eliminate the supernatural, the mythological, etc. In any case, for him, critical thinking is the same as atheism, which may explain why he’s so bad at it when it comes to religious topics.
“Regarding the donation to Haiti aid, what Dawkins criticized is not that Christians donate to aid for disaster victims (what, after all, is bad about that) but that they use it as an opportunity to proselytize to people in an extremely vulnerable state.”
While this is something that Dawkins has certainly said, my post was not about that argument. I might have been unclear, but it was about the other argument he uses – that religious charities are there to advertise for their religions to people in general – that is, they are just part of a PR campaign and thus not praiseworthy. It’s his standard argument when in arguments about whether religion is good for the world, and someone brings up charity work, I believe. Also, most large-scale religious charities – for example, the largest, Catholic Charities – do not proselytize beyond the knowledge of where the aid is coming from (and even that is not always the case) because missionary work is done by other parts of the church. I expect it’s the same for the atheist foundations.
In all cases, what you have is atheism looking for special exceptions to its rules about all ideologies. In some ways, certainly, atheism is not like other ideologies, and is not a religion by dint of not believing in a god or gods. But it constantly considers itself a special case when it comes to all the things it accuses Christians of – indoctrination of children, unsupported metaphysical beliefs, modes of transmission of beliefs, groupthink. It’s just begging the question, because Dawkins has defined his belief system as not being a belief system so it can’t do anything that other belief systems do wrong, wrong. So when they create a summer camp for children which looks exactly like every religious summer camp for children ever, except that it’s atheist, it’s nothing like all those horrible Godbotherers’. Sure.
atheism is not like other
ideologies, and is not a religion by dint of not believing in a god or gods.
OTOH, Dawkins has not let that stop him from calling Communism a “religion.”
Yes, well, see my point about avoiding criticism by begging the question. Also see: No True Scotsman fallacy.
Hitchens says the same thing about Communism, which is deliciously ironic since he was (is?) a Communist.
“In all cases, what you have is atheism looking for special exceptions to its rules about all ideologies.”
Last I checked atheism and Richard Dawkins were not the same thing.
“Defining the Indefinable, Defending the Indefensible”.
Does Atheism have a Pope? A college of Cardinals? Given the lack of an official Orthodoxy and Central authority, we must ask, is there such a social group that advances the ideology, Atheism? I think the answer is clear, yes there is. But how do we know who speaks for “Atheism”, given the lack of same? We must either treat each case in a vacuum, such as we try to do (Officially, at least the governments) with Islam and the sawing off of heads and general murder of Jews, or, if we are sane, we must look to see who is treated like a Heretic by the rank and file, and who is treated like an Elder Statesman. Richard Dawkins, at this point in time, seems to be treated like and Elder Statesman by the rank and file Atheists and so, as much as an undefined, amorphous, headless and uncountable movement can be grouped with something, yes Richard Dawkins and Atheism are the same thing.
Yet another example of avoiding criticism in a logically cowardly manner. I see it all the time. They quote Dawkins endlessly, defend him in any way they can, and when it is finally revealed that he is indefensible – *poof* Dawkins doesn’t represent all atheists! We’re all unique snowflake freethinkers! For proof, see page 52 in The God Delusion.
“Does Atheism have a Pope? A college of Cardinals? Given the lack of an official Orthodoxy and Central authority, we must ask, is there such a social group that advances the ideology, Atheism?”
Wait. So your response to an article whose main point is that the enemies of civilization and Christendom never define themselves, never allow themselves to be named, never admit that what they preach and support is actually their doctrine, is the objection that “atheism” (note scare quotes) cannot be defined nor named, verily, that no doctrine of the movement can be criticized on the ground that atheists have no magisterium?
Friend, I admire your chutzpah, but not your sense of logical consistency.
I offer your own words as Exhibit A to show that my accusation has at least some basis in fact.
I know I will have to wait for Friday, but I’m a little confused. Are you talking to me or Mr. Ellis? We seem to be in perfect agreement, but the words you offer as Exhibit A are mine.
Nope. Its just a mistake on my part. Sorry. I thought you were him, or he was saying what you were, or something. My bad.
Well thank you sir. No harm, no foul.
I like that that’s your single, solitary response. I assume, then, that everything else I said was correct, particularly the main point that Dawkins is a gigantic hypocrite?
I should have been clear that when I said “atheism” there I meant only the paltry, excuse-making, logical-fallacy-using, so-called New Atheists. Richard Rorty, for example, would never mire himself in such silly stuff as they propagate.