I suppose it's unfair, but this is how I see the Democrats and the Republicans.
Democrats:
True contemporary center of weight, their avatar: Ward Churchill.
Most important recent thinker, who continues to supply them with a plan of action: Lenin
Most powerful overall thinker: Marx
Origins (nothing new under the sun) classical avatar: Pelagius
Republicans:
True contemporary center of weight, their avatar: Glenn Beck
Most important recent thinker, who continues to supply them with a plan of action:
Abraham Lincoln
Most powerful overall thinker: James Madison
Origins (nothing new under the sun, is now and ever shall be figure): Augustine
And you? How do you see it?
Sunday, September 12, 2010
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53 comments:
Kirby,
Unfair? Sure. But really, this assessment says more about you than about either the Democrats or Republicans.
Was Ward Churchill invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention? No. He protested at it, ostensibly in recreation of protests at the '68 convention. That you view him as some sort of exemplar of Democratic values speaks volumes. About you.
Connections between Lenin/Marxism and the Democratic party are equally specious. There is an American Communist Party. Those who wish to follow Lenin and his ilk are welcome there.
And you're seriously off message complaining that Democrats are Pelagian. After all, the Pelagians were Christian, albeit heretical from the orthodox perspective. Are you supposed to be complaining that we're all godless heathens?
Actually, I don't see Democrats as godless. I see them as having gotten indoctrinated by Marxism that got into their platform under the radar via Marxist-feminists, Marxists along the lines of Bill Ayers, and gobbled up second-hand via university radicals.
And I see Marx very much as having a strong notion of the good, as I see in Lenin also.
I don't think there is anything godless about Pelagianism. I think the enthusiasm of the Democrats, such as it is, comes from their notion that they must rewrite the race, class, and gender discrepancies, and create equality by putting formerly subjected peoples into position of leadership, so that they own the means of production.
This is what I see Obama doing & being: he's from a subjected class (supposedly he's black, but if you look at his class, he's actually half-white and from a fairly privileged family, and the black part is also from a country -- Kenya -- from which America never owned slaves).
But the narrative goes like this: Obama is an oppressed man (look at his skin, look at his hair -- although his lips and nose and his accent are not typical -- which meant, according to Reid, that he could skate freely across the line).
Then, he wants to get the government to own the means of production. So, he gobbles up banks, the insurance industry, and the automobile industry, and puts new pressures on it to conform to his agency.
The criticisms of Ward Churchill are somewhat outre, and rather grotesque. But in slightly politer forms, they are the same criticisms that someone like Howard Zinn has made (more cagily) of American history.
Lenin is the muscle (not Stalin, as again, he's the truth of Lenin, as Churchill is the truth of Zinn).
The overarching ideals go back to Marx, and before Marx, to Pelagius.
I'm not kidding!
On the other side, I grant that Glenn Beck is the somewhat goofy inheritor of a once-great tradition, but Beck embodies the current strength and weaknesses of those traditions insofar as they are embodied in the actual Republican party.
That is to say, everything the Democrats say sounds to me like Ward Churchill.
Everything the Republicans say sounds to me like Glenn Beck.
There are outliers, and people of principle, who might occasionally say something that doesn't sound like either one of those two, but they are not near the center of power, or what I perceive as the secret core, of either party.
At any rate, that's the choice today, as I see it:
Do you vote for Ward Churchill, or do you vote for Glenn Beck?
For my money, it's Beck, in a landslide, and I think for America, on November 3rd, it will be, too.
"true contemporary center of weight" is a strange term - the difference between Ward and Glenn is that most people don't know who Ward is, and I haven't seen any rallies of tens of thousands + who support Ward.
Rush is a more powerful, though less 'visible,' leader, but I'd still give him the nod over Glenn...he has a lot more listeners...
The Democrats don't have many very-powerful/popular opinionheads...
Our less abrasive, more pluralistic, less binary approach to life makes most of us think those guys are kinda dipshits, our 'side' or no.
Lots more on the right are attracted to the specious logic and bluster of the hannitys et al.
Our figurehead at the moment is probably Obama...
If you're looking for something in the media, maybe just 'NPR,' but still...
If Michael Moore got a radio show, maybe he could move back into the public eye - he does have the same sort of appeal that a Glenn or Rush does, and at this point I actually think the Democrats need people like him to go up against the Becklimbaughhannityoreillyfactor.
Case in point from moore:
If the 'Mosque' Isn't Built, This Is No Longer America -
I am opposed to the building of the "mosque" two blocks from Ground Zero.
I want it built on Ground Zero.
Why? Because I believe in an America that protects those who are the victims of hate and prejudice. I believe in an America that says you have the right to worship whatever God you have, wherever you want to worship. And I believe in an America that says to the world that we are a loving and generous people and if a bunch of murderers steal your religion from you and use it as their excuse to kill 3,000 souls, then I want to help you get your religion back. And I want to put it at the spot where it was stolen from you.
The equivalence, Brett, isn't quite right, as you're correct to note that Glenn Beck draws huge crowds. I feel nervous about Beck and those crowds. I don't quite back them, but against Ward Churchill it's a no-brainer: I choose Beck.
Churchill is an oddball who got tossed from academia. And yet, I think his type is quite common. But academics are cowards. They wouldn't stand up for Churchill, not because they don't believe in his ideas, but because they see he's a lost cause, and are willing to throw him to the dogs.
I think there are probably 300,000 academics who think like Ward Churchill and whose scholarship is similar. It cost a few million to get Churchill out of UC Boulder (even now I believe he still has an appeal or two left).
Beck is enormously charismatic. He's like those 300,000 academics rolled into one, and his audience is probably just about as big. Moreover, he's right about many things. Churchill was wrong about everything, and even when he had a hint of truth in what he was writing, it was grotesquely exaggerated.
I reject Michael Moore instead of Churchill, but mostly because he's so fat. I can't stand Rush either because he's so fat.
I don't see fat people as having charisma, so I don't believe that Rush is really Glenn Beck. Beck still has hair, and has a cherubic face, and his books are hitting #1 on the NYT. Plus, he's having real intellectual impact. He's pulling up Madison, and he's selling millions of copies of Friedrich Hayek. Rush is more of a mad gnat, with no real substance. He's funny as heck, but he doesn't draw intellectual lines in the sand.
Moore is also an entertainer. His mind is useless to the extent that one can say he has a mind.
Churchill and his ilk are much more likely to show their readers HOW to think like them. How to build a hermeneutics of suspicion into an argument.
No one can copy Rush. No one can copy Moore.
But there are hundreds of thousands of Ward Churchills.
And I think Beck's Tea Party is him in replica a million times over.
It's somehow different, but I can't put my finger on it.
I rather like Beck, but am nervous about him as well. I think he gets out of control, and has this huge felling component which isn't logical. I find myself crying at his lines.
I think the left's Churchills also get very very bitter responses among their listeners. They can create extreme anger, which is what really motivates people.
Personally, I don't like this aspect of either party.
It's something to do with a mobilization of resentment, and bitterness. This is very dangerous.
These guys awaken demons in their respective groups, as they demonize their opposition. Feminists do this, too.
I hate it.
It's wrong.
We have to always think of clear universal principles and stick with them, trying always to clarify the principles as we go.
The equivalence, Brett, isn't quite right, as you're correct to note that Glenn Beck draws huge crowds. I feel nervous about Beck and those crowds. I don't quite back them, but against Ward Churchill it's a no-brainer: I choose Beck.
Churchill is an oddball who got tossed from academia. And yet, I think his type is quite common. But academics are cowards. They wouldn't stand up for Churchill, not because they don't believe in his ideas, but because they see he's a lost cause, and are willing to throw him to the dogs.
I think there are probably 300,000 academics who think like Ward Churchill and whose scholarship is similar. It cost a few million to get Churchill out of UC Boulder (even now I believe he still has an appeal or two left).
Beck is enormously charismatic. He's like those 300,000 academics rolled into one, and his audience is probably just about as big. Moreover, he's right about many things. Churchill was wrong about everything, and even when he had a hint of truth in what he was writing, it was grotesquely exaggerated.
I reject Michael Moore instead of Churchill, but mostly because he's so fat. I can't stand Rush either because he's so fat.
I don't see fat people as having charisma, so I don't believe that Rush is really Glenn Beck. Beck still has hair, and has a cherubic face, and his books are hitting #1 on the NYT. Plus, he's having real intellectual impact. He's pulling up Madison, and he's selling millions of copies of Friedrich Hayek. Rush is more of a mad gnat, with no real substance. He's funny as heck, but he doesn't draw intellectual lines in the sand.
Moore is also an entertainer. His mind is useless to the extent that one can say he has a mind.
Churchill and his ilk are much more likely to show their readers HOW to think like them. How to build a hermeneutics of suspicion into an argument.
No one can copy Rush. No one can copy Moore.
But there are hundreds of thousands of Ward Churchills.
And I think Beck's Tea Party is him in replica a million times over.
It's somehow different, but I can't put my finger on it.
I rather like Beck, but am nervous about him as well. I think he gets out of control, and has this huge felling component which isn't logical. I find myself crying at his lines.
I think the left's Churchills also get very very bitter responses among their listeners. They can create extreme anger, which is what really motivates people.
Personally, I don't like this aspect of either party.
It's something to do with a mobilization of resentment, and bitterness. This is very dangerous.
These guys awaken demons in their respective groups, as they demonize their opposition. Feminists do this, too.
I hate it.
It's wrong.
We have to always think of clear universal principles and stick with them, trying always to clarify the principles as we go.
The equivalence, Brett, isn't quite right, as you're correct to note that Glenn Beck draws huge crowds. I feel nervous about Beck and those crowds. I don't quite back them, but against Ward Churchill it's a no-brainer: I choose Beck.
Churchill is an oddball who got tossed from academia. And yet, I think his type is quite common. But academics are cowards. They wouldn't stand up for Churchill, not because they don't believe in his ideas, but because they see he's a lost cause, and are willing to throw him to the dogs.
I think there are probably 300,000 academics who think like Ward Churchill and whose scholarship is similar. It cost a few million to get Churchill out of UC Boulder (even now I believe he still has an appeal or two left).
Beck is enormously charismatic. He's like those 300,000 academics rolled into one, and his audience is probably just about as big. Moreover, he's right about many things. Churchill was wrong about everything, and even when he had a hint of truth in what he was writing, it was grotesquely exaggerated.
I reject Michael Moore instead of Churchill, but mostly because he's so fat. I can't stand Rush either because he's so fat.
I don't see fat people as having charisma, so I don't believe that Rush is really Glenn Beck. Beck still has hair, and has a cherubic face, and his books are hitting #1 on the NYT. Plus, he's having real intellectual impact. He's pulling up Madison, and he's selling millions of copies of Friedrich Hayek. Rush is more of a mad gnat, with no real substance. He's funny as heck, but he doesn't draw intellectual lines in the sand.
Moore is also an entertainer. His mind is useless to the extent that one can say he has a mind.
Churchill and his ilk are much more likely to show their readers HOW to think like them. How to build a hermeneutics of suspicion into an argument.
No one can copy Rush. No one can copy Moore.
But there are hundreds of thousands of Ward Churchills.
And I think Beck's Tea Party is him in replica a million times over.
It's somehow different, but I can't put my finger on it.
I rather like Beck, but am nervous about him as well. I think he gets out of control, and has this huge felling component which isn't logical. I find myself crying at his lines.
I think the left's Churchills also get very very bitter responses among their listeners. They can create extreme anger, which is what really motivates people.
Personally, I don't like this aspect of either party.
It's something to do with a mobilization of resentment, and bitterness. This is very dangerous.
These guys awaken demons in their respective groups, as they demonize their opposition. Feminists do this, too.
I hate it.
It's wrong.
We have to always think of clear universal principles and stick with them, trying always to clarify the principles as we go.
Put a mosque in Venice, the one in Florida. It should be in the control tower of the little airport where Mohammed Atta took his flying lessons, right next to the windsock. Look up Mad Cow Morning News.
The Democracts are Puritans and Republicans are Cavaliers, and they always loose the big fights. 361 years ago the Cavaliers could rally behind a true King, now they have Glenn Beck and Sara Palin. The path is a long one, but the cause is quite lost.
Oh, William, I would reverse these identifications. I see the Democrats as the Cavaliers. The Cavaliers believed in reason, and were often Socinians, and Episcopalians, and Universalists. That's much more likely to be Democrats, today.
The other side, the Republicans, are more likely to be Baptists, and fiery believers, like Palin and Beck.
But I don't know how well those identifications hold.
We've never had ANYBODY in America who was remotely like the wonderful Cavalier poet John Suckling. No one in America has ever been like that at all. You simply can't find it in our literature.
EE Cummings I suppose tried to be like that, but was he really like that?
I think we're all Puritans on this side of the Atlantic. Well, that is, if you have European background.
I don't know what you are if you are from somewhere else. They had the victory Mosque imam on Larry King tonight and I simply couldn't follow his logic. Whatever he was thinking, his thinking was so unAmerican, so out of my universe, that I couldn't understand his mentality at all. He just came off as a rude, bigoted prick, almost like royalty. Plus, I think he had on a lot of mascara!
He didn't give an inch, and he quoted Christian thought with the grace and agility of a rhinoscerous. the funny thing is that I think he was trying to be polite.
Muslims should build their mosques next to nuclear power plants, and start munitions factories on adjacent lots so they can manufacture the bazookas and grenades they will need to finish the country off. What's the worry? It's a religion of peace, after all.
The states that elected Barack Obama are roughly the states that elected William McKinly in 1896.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1896_Electoral_Map.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Electoral_College_Map_2008.svg
Over the century (mainly due to FDR and Johnson) the two main American political clusters have switched their party labels. If you are a northern republican today, you are more or less a copperhead, trying to resist the latest wave of progressive reform, which you view as ripping up the old order and pushing us all towards destruction. It was said that the settlers of old Virginia were generally from families that sided with the King, over Parliament and Puritan, and the northern states have obvious links with the Puritans (Massachusets and Connecticut) and other dissenting sects (Quakers in Pennsylvania and Ohio).
Kirby, I am an illiterate, so I can't judge, though I've heard it said that the best American authors are from the South, which is Cavalier territory.
Copperheads were Democrats who resisted fighting against the South.
So I don't think this makes as much sense as you usually make, William.
Just saying.
I suppose taste in literature varies. I don't like Faulkner, or any southern writers, much, with the possible exception of Lafcadio Hearn (I love his Japanese writings).
I'm not really a fan of American literature. I like French literature better, but do like American literature after Americans started going to France, or looking to France.
Poe is good, then in the twenties there is Gertrude Stein, and by the sixties there is Corso, and Codrescu, and Brautigan and a few others. Sadly, I am a Francophile.
I will have to work more on your argument later today. It's an interesting one, but I would have to reverse most of the positions.
Democrats were Copperheads then, and they are Copperheads now.
Still, I think you hit on a key term: Copperheads.
Let's define it further and use it as a metaphor for understanding left and right today.
I say it's about preferring your faction over a universal solution.
William, I think you have reversed some of the truths inherent in the political maps. But the similarity in the mapping hides a deeper problem.
The northerners are now communists, having been educated to think like communists. They believe that if you change the race, gender, and class makeup of the powers that be you will have progress. Instead we have BO, a man without military experience, and without any larger understanding of global history than what he gleaned from his Pastor, who damned America.
BO is a nitwit, but voters went for him solely on the basis of the color of his skin, and didn't reflect on the content of his character (he has none).
He got the black vote out of black solidarity with him on a racial basis. But BO has destroyed the economy, and blacks have now reached record highs in unemployment (under 25s have hit 50% unemployment).
Obama is a nitwit socialist. Many people think this is the way forward, and that redistribution is going to create equality. It never has, and it never will. The government control of the economy leads to a planned economy, and we see how that is working out in N. Korea. Obama's hubris, combined with his lack of business or military experience, is killing our economy, and also suggests that he has lost his way with regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He sees us as an occupying power in those countries. He would see the Civil War in the same way, and like the Copperhead that he is, pull out, in the name of peace.
He's such a dope it's amazing.
"During the American Civil War (1861-1865), the Copperheads nominally favored the Union and strongly opposed the war, for which they blamed abolitionists, and they demanded immediate peace and resisted draft laws. They wanted President Lincoln and the Republicans ousted from power, seeing the president as a tyrant who was destroying American republican values with his despotic and arbitrary actions.
Some Copperheads tried to persuade Union soldiers to desert. They talked of helping Confederate prisoners of war seize their camps and escape. They sometimes met with Confederate agents and took money. The Confederacy encouraged their activities whenever possible.[2]"
The Copperheads are more like the Ward Churchill of "a thousand Mogadishus" and where the CEOs in the Twin Towers were "little Eichmanns," a sentiment that is widely shared in BO's administration in which "fatcat bankers" are to be destroyed, and where anyone making a profit should be destroyed. This is a very unfortunate way of looking at things, as it tends to discourage CEOs and others from making a profit, or from even working.
Good CEOs are the geese laying the golden eggs of prosperity. Killing them in the name of redistribution just creates a collapse of the economy. Idiots like BO can never get anything going because they can't understand the basis of business, or even the basis of universal human rights.
They see everything incorrectly, and so all their solutions just make everything so much worse.
The Democratic lineage: Saul Alinsky, Lenin, Marx, Pelagius -- just creates devastation and ruin.
the Republicans have the right ideas. They can't always articulate them very clearly (W. wasn't terribly articulate). McKinley also was not terribly articulate. I don't know why this is the case. Palin is articulate, but not quite good enough, either.
I guess it's up to me.
Bush's 'right' ideas crashed the economy and got us into a war - Iraq - that you agree was unnecessary.
Obama inherited a sinking ship...Perhaps there are ways he could fix it faster.
But shooting holes in the floor by following his predecessor's failed approach don't seem like the right answer.
And you need to stop judging Obama wrt war on the basis of 'feeling' - In Iraq, he followed the timeline Bush set up with the Iraqis...
In Afghanistan, he increased our forces greater than two-fold within a year.
Obama's race - much like Palin's gender - did have an impact on the elections, but merely replacing white men with non-whitemen is not the Democratic platform...
The Democratic platform is the communist and anti-colonialist platform. Dinesh D'Souza does a very good job explaining this in a new article in Forbes.com:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/politics-socialism-capitalism-private-enterprises-obama-business-problem_print.html
I think if James and Em had time to read it, they could chime in. D'souza is remarkable in that he brings out some of the worst aspects of Obama (his father was a raging lunatic along the lines of Patrick Mugabe, but Obama continues to cherish the lunatic's memory).
Obama is an amazingly messed-up fellow.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/politics-socialism-capitalism-private-enterprises-obama-business-problem_print.html
He needs to work in-depth with a psychiatrist.
W. at least came from a strong lineage.
I can't believe this lunatic is in the White House.
D'Souza has the best read on him that I have yet to see:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/politics-socialism-capitalism-private-enterprises-obama-business-problem_print.html
Maybe an exorcist.
I still pop in from time to time. I love your exorcist comment--pray it isn't so, but understand why you put it there.
I don't understand those who still cling to this guy. I understand those who say Bill Clinton wasn't as bad as many opponents said at the time, but I do not understand any who are not ideological socialists as still supporting him. He's definitely not for personal liberty and he definitely is for the state controlling everyone's life (as his wife is demonstrating by telling restaurants what to cook).
I understand the hoopla and the "hope" back in 2008, but today, after almost 2 years...not at all.
Randy
Randy
"The northerners are now communists, having been educated to think like communists."
Communism is equality reductio ad absurdum. The northerners have been on a mission to bring equality to the world for some time now.
Equality of opportunity is a decent enough idea. I think the Republicans in the civil War understood that, and fought for it. I think it's fine.
Early feminists wanted equality of opportunity. I think that was fine.
But now the Democrats want to engineer an equality of outcome, so that you get money and a house whether you work or not. This is what caused the economic collapse (Fannie and Freddie were in such Democrat-commanded debt that they took huge chunks of the economy down with them).
Obama is so dumb he mandated something similar for insurance right on top of Fannie and Freddie.
Now we have yet another giant bear on our backs.
Income isn't what we need. We need jobs. Obama doesn't know what a job is.
He doesn't understand work, or employment. He doesn't get it.
He just thinks if you can get a big credit card, your wife can take 60 pals on a lunch date at the fanciest hotel in Spain where they all eat the most expensive stuff on the menu while telling their hosts that they are racists.
It's the weirdest mind set I've ever seen.
We need to go back to the Protestant Work Ethic. All dignity and knowledge comes from work, not from goofing around in a fancy foreign restaurant drinking alcohol.
The whole problem with the communist Democrats is that they are lacking a work ethic.
It's like they have doughnuts for heads. Lots of sticky unctuous thinking with zero inside.
The Big O is their perfect leader because he resembles a doughnut.
Marxism has always been this way. It's a zero that attracts people because it seems so sweet.
But it kills everybody.
Why doesn't the stupid president ever talk about real jobs again? All he can do is give away more money. He has to be the biggest zero that ever lived. Or maybe he's just a huge trail of zeros.
Work ethic, Mr. President. Bring jobs back to America. Kick out the foreigners. Make people work for their houses and educations.
He can't think like that. He always had everything handed to him.
"All dignity and knowledge comes from work"
This is Thomas Carlyle, no?
I think Obama has been working quite hard to create more jobs for government workers. Note the Democrats are the party of the civil service. The Republicans are the party of outsiders.
Kirby, on your recommendation I just finished the D'Souza article, in which he ties President Obama's ways of thinking on domestic and foreign issues to the dreams, phantasies, and frustrations of his fiercely (and rascally) anti-colonialist father. This simmering anti-colonialist ressentiment in Obama D'Souza also sees as reinforced by thinkers such as the pathological Marxist revolutionary Franz Fanon as well as one of Obama's teachers at Columbia, the bitterly pro-Palestinian Edward Said (both Western-educated anti-colonialists). Though Said's work "Orientalism" has been thoroughly demolished by real historians and Orientalists (from Bernard Lewis and Robert Irwin to Keith Windschuttle and Ibn Warraq, to name a few, just as his personal history as a supposed Palestinian refugee has been exposed as a deliberately-fabricated fraud by the scholar and writer Justus Reid Weiner), the influence of Said's work (especially among the lit-crit set) remains influential, and, according to D'Souza, has made an indelible mark on Obama's ways of thinking.
Because of Obama's anti-colonialist idee fixe apparently inherited from his father and his radical teachers, D'Souza contends that Obama sees himself as a redresser of the world's imbalance of resources and power, as in the US, the presumed neo-colonial member among the group of older European colonial powers. And just as the wealthy and middling classes in the US must pay their "fair share" for the advantages they've gained (or "stolen") from the disadvantaged, so the US must make good to the developing and under-developed worlds for our exploitative greed. European-style socialism led by "enlightened" bureaucratic and statist elites seems also to accord with Obama's governing approach.
This domestic governing approach may account for the presumption of his and his party's Congress's summoning of corporate heads to Washington DC to account for their actions, pay, projections about the cost of his health care bill, even their mode of conveyance to their own auto-da-fe. It may account in part for his dabbling in racial and class war demagoguery as well as his singling out individuals for blame (whether former president Bush, the House minority leader, Representative Boehner or select talk-radio hosts) for their supposedly retrograde and reprehensible views.
In foreign affairs, Obama's cool indifference to allies like the UK and Israel as well as his apologies for America's "sins" in his Cairo speech (in a pathetic attempt to pacify Middle Eastern dictators and the like) and his UN General Assembly address are emblematic of his whole defeatist approach to standing against the forces of repression in the world.
The much-older countryman of D'Souza, the Bengali writer and historian Nirad C Chaudhuri (1897-1999) endured a long life of penury and disapprobation for a view counter to that of what D'Souza sees in Obama, when he dedicated his "Autobiography of an Unknown Indian"
"To the memory of the British Empire in India [. . .] Because all that was good and living within us Was made, shaped and quickened By the same British rule."
"Equality of opportunity is a decent enough idea. I think the Republicans in the civil War understood that, and fought for it. I think it's fine."
The problem with a crusade for equality, is what is there for the crusaders to do once Jerusalem in conquered, go home, or sack Constantinople? (I know I have the facts askew here).
The progressive movement needs to find things to demands change about, the costs always be damned.
James, your post was ten times what I had hoped for, esp. the ending, which was a dazzling bit of provocation: we thank the British for teaching us how to be human, is virtually what it says! Thank goodness some people get it.
I am also happy to read the names of those who have hammered Said and his pet project Orientalism.
William, it may be Thomas Carlyle originally (all dignity comes from work) but I was more or less summarizing a current Harvard economic theorist by the name of David Landes who makes this case more or less throughout his volume The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, but never in the exact words I used (I don't have the volume handy).
"Progressive," and "radical," sound better than "conservative," on the face of things, but by nature progressives and radicals are experimenters, and experimentation, generally speaking, fails. The tried and true functions, and so I think the conservatives, by trying to maintain what has worked in the past, make more sense.
To change for instance the whole nature of marriage so that all kinds of freaks can get married, is a radical idea and perhaps it's even progressive (depends if we're moving toward a society of freaks or toward a society of biological norms, or toward a society that is that is based on what is biologically viable in terms of children, and what is best for them, or towards a society of freaks, and what is best for them), at the same time as we are allowing freaks (biological freaks) into the military, without taking on board the experience of the Catholic church, which allowed in the freaks, and got a freak show in which children were hounded and exploited for sex (often the articles about the Catholic church allegations are right next to the articles about gays in the military, and no one blinks), but of course if gay men with their long history of rampant promiscuity and lack of personal relationships based on anything other than a flippant attraction to a rear end are admitted to the higher ranks, then the only way privates will become corporals is when they bare their corporal privates to the majors and generals in a totally submissive fashion.
I think in many ways it's better to stick with what's tried and true and remain as conservative as possible. Conservatism is based on what works. The radicals and experimenters generally create a stinking mess.
Nice to hear from Randy again.
Hrmm...pretty sure Obama IS for personal liberty, and is center-left, a far cry from the kinda-socialism found in, say, Northern Europe, or Canada.
Citations for policies that indicate otherwise? He's already given us more freedom when it comes to guns...
Blah.
How about Monarchists?
True contemporary center of weight: Prince Hans-Adam II
Most important recent thinker, who continues to supply them with a plan of action: Thomas Carlyle
Most powerful overall thinker: King James
Origins (nothing new under the sun) classical avatar: God.
"Obama IS for personal liberty"
Obama is decidedly not for letting me buy whatever type of health insurance I want, or letting me freely negotiate my wage.
Freedom of speech has been an enormous issue on campuses. It strikes me that "politically correct" speech is almost mandated at this juncture, and I see Obama as very much aligned with that perspective. He wants to shun anyone, any news station, any individual, who does not see things his way. He pretends to dialogue, he claims to dialogue, but he gets things done in the middle of the night. We still don't really know what's either in the Stimulus Bill (2000 pages) or in the Obamacare Bill (2000 pages). His idea was to buffalo and bamboozle, and at this point, the lack of transparency has created enormous suspicions throughout the electorate w.r.t. the Democrats.
He's also been getting in justices who are way out of the mainstream, and is not in favor of doing anything about the broken border with Mexico.
The only clear statement he's made thus far was that he thought Officer Crowley was stupid.
Other than that, I think he speaks in euphemisms, and slippery double-speak, while secretly whittling away at the Commerce Clause, for instance. He's a menace, and a very sneaky one.
William,
Point taken on health care, although yours is a rather one-sided and shallow summary of a complex and deep issue. But what's your gripe on wages? I've not heard any proposals for revitalizing the Nixon-era wage-price review board, or anything like it.
Stu,
I would guess WB is referencing Obama's support of unions, which are squarely against letting folks set their own prices for labor.
In a perfectly Christian, un-fallen world, everybody would share and share alike.
As it is, in a fallen world, will to power is everything, or is such a strong influence, that nobody can escape it. Therefore, we will always try to work whether individually or in groups to amass as much power as possible.
It's the way of the world.
Republicans vs. Democrats is will to power. Both groups seek to legitimate their will to power by re-representing it as a "share and share alike" mentality, or at least as the notion that they are following some sound doctrine, when of course it's just will to power.
I think this is the basic hypocrisy that Stu points out when he discerns that Republicans throw out love for the unborn, but really want to keep their wealth.
I think this is the basic hypocrisy that I would like to point out with people like Jesse Jackson, who claim to be for black victims, but in fact are just in on the take, and trying to rally public support.
Obama may care more that his wife gets to go to Spain to party with her friends than that something sane is done with healthcare.
It's very hard to know what is what. Will to power is a huge part of everybody, and we can't escape it.
The sneakiest conspiracy afoot in the country is the Episcopalian psychological war machine. They claim to care about gay ordination, when what they really want is to be seen as decent, so that they can continue their hegemony. Wanting to be seen as holier than thou or anti-racist, is actually a form of will to power.
It's amazing how this always circles around. Christ tried to point it out, but he ended up pinned to a cross.
And yet, saints too when they carry their crosses are actually having a will to power, and the cross is like a giant crossbow from which they can knock whole civilizations down. Jesus used the cross as a kind of battering ram that destroyed Roman society.
Love can do that!
It's a tremendous weapon!
But in the wrong hands, it can knock down all the wrong people.
I love it!
The Democratic and Republican parties are in fact siege engines, and the armies in their train who push them have all kinds of mysterious agendas, the most important of which is will to power!
GM,
I would guess WB is referencing Obama's support of unions, which are squarely against letting folks set their own prices for labor
Perhaps, but again, this seems like a peculiar way to characterize unions. After all, unions are a negotiating strategy, and generally speaking, people in unions are better compensated and have more regular employment.
The thing is, unions (being basically an aggregating strategy) are most effective when you can treat laborers as more-or-less interchangeable parts. This is true by design in assembly-line situations, but that's not a common employment context these days.
Anyway, Obama's been a lawyer and an academic in turn, and these are careers in which compensation is more tightly bound to individual merit. There's no faculty union at UC -- it would really go against institutional culture. I really don't see Obama as someone who is deeply committed to unions. To collective community action more generally, sure. But unions specifically? I don't see it.
Kirby, you may be interested in this fellow's take on progressivism,
http://covertrationingblog.com/general-rationing-issues/drrichs-theory-of-progressive-thought
Stu, I was thinking of CEO's and Lilly Ledbetter. If wage agreements are the government's business, then they aren't yours. I know I am being simplistic. Why is it that conservatives tend to prefer oversimplifications, while the left invokes "nuance"? Is it because conservatives are simpleton's, or because lefties are liars or an explanation more nuanced?
William,
Stu, I was thinking of CEO's and Lilly Ledbetter.
Two very different issues. I have no idea how you shoehorn Ledbetter into the category of "not freely negotiating my wage." It's a mystery.
As for CEO pay, this was around the issue of loans to financial institutions. The deal was that if you took the loan, you had to abide by CEO pay restrictions until the loan was repaid. This has proven in the end to have been a fairly effective mechanism for obtaining repayment.
I'm all in favor of good simplifications, where by this I mean a simplification that strips away obscuring complexity and leaves you with a clearer understanding of the essentials of problem at hand. But your simplifications seem like bad simplifications to me. What is being thrown out is essential to understanding, and what is preserved serves only to advance an a priori agenda. If this is all you've got, then you've got nothing.
Kirby, if you get a chance to read the classicist Victor Davis Hanson's latest political commentary in National Review Online, "Obama's DC Animal Farm," you might find it both instructive and amusing in reference to the topics discussed in this thread. His engaging and humorous writing style reminds me of yours on LS.
Kirby, I might have added that when Hanson says that with Obama we now have
"the return of the old peasant mentality of a limited good. With a finite pie, one slice to someone must mean one less to someone else. The relative wealth of a few, not absolute wealth for all, is what matters,"
he speaks from the standpoint not of the academic, but from that of his years of experience as farmer and orchard-grower in California.
By the way, how did your cucumbers grow this year?
James, my cucumbers grew very well this year. I put in Spacemaster Cucumbers and they managed to remain inside the garden bed, which was hilarious to me, since generally they sprawl. These cucumbers are somehow trained to remain in a smaller space. I got about thirty five cucumbers out of one packet of seeds. I still have about fifteen that I can harvest.
I also grew a beautiful pumpkin, and about ten mini-watermelons.
Victor Davis Hanson is always a hoot, and a charming read. Has he written anything about gays in the military? I would like to read his take. The local paper, The Oneonta Star, opined this morning that we should allow gays in the military, because "Having a boyfriend didn't keep Alexander the Great from conquering the known world."
This was on the editorial page. I laughed when I read it, because that was their trump card.
Davis ballyhoos the hoplite soldiers. But the Greeks did practice some forms of homosexuality in the ranks. And yet Davis is conservative, so it would be fun to see what he makes of this particular kerfuffle.
"Before Alexander's time, The Sacred Band of Thebes was an all-gay outfit and renowned as the finest soldiers of their era," the editorial continues.
Would Davis qualify Socrates as gay?
Here's the syllogism:
Socrates was gay.
Socrates was a good soldier.
Good soldiers can be gay.
At any rate, it would be fun to hear your take, and Hanson's take.
James, I read Hanson's neat article, and it seemed to expand my consciousness appropriately. I loved it! Sometimes I feel nuts for thinking as I do, since I am surrounded by a sea of liberals, and Stu and Brett.
But Hanson thinks quite along my lines, though he does so in a much more convincing fashion.
His understanding of the "liberal" mind is right on point.
Kirby, glad to hear of your success this year in breeding and herding your cukes. Take care that some zealot just awakened from an existential trance and who's mulled deeply on the question,
"What possible right do we have to eat a plant?" might attempt to "rescue" your remaining fifteen cukes.
I'm not sure what Hanson thinks on the current issue of open gays in the military. But he does use his classical learning to correct misuse of the classical record to justify current debate on the issue, for example:
"Presidential aspirant Mike Gravel recently opined on the advantages of having gays in the military:
'…the Spartans trained their people to be homosexuals because they were better fighters.'
Not quite.
I think the popular myth that has fooled Gravel has arisen lately because of the movie '300' — and the natural confusion between the Spartan 300 who died holding the pass at Thermopylai (480 BC) and the 300 of the Theban Sacred Band (378-338 BC). [Kirby, I assume here his reference is to the "Sacred Band" of Epominandas and Pelopidas, who defeated the previously invincible hoplites of Sparta at Leuctra in 371 BC]
The Spartans did not instruct their youth to be homosexuals (no word really exists in the Greek vocabulary for our notion of homosexual). Xenophon (Lac. Pol. 2.13), for example, insisted that the older males in the army were specifically not to engage in physical relations with their younger warrior-pages (paidika).
And if in reality some hoplite soldiers occasionally did engage in what we would call gay sex, in Sparta or elsewhere, the practice was analogous to the protocols of the modern prison in the absence of women: physical relationships were loosely defined among those interested as an active older male and a younger male that served as a surrogate female.
In general, most Greeks thought that male sexual passivity was shameful, as was exclusively male sex, as were those who appeared outwardly feminine.
The closest the classical Greek world of the polis came to Gravel’s notion of an idealized gay warrior cult was in Thebes, where the 300 aristocrats (150 pairs of “lovers”) of the Sacred Band fought often at the acme of the phalanx-a very small cadre (perhaps less than 2-3% of the Boiotian army) that was predicated on class and philosophically idealized.
But even here we are not quite sure what actually was the relationship between eromenoi ('beloved') and erastai ('lovers') in this tiny clique; it might not necessarily have even been physical.
So in general, the Spartans most certainly did not train their soldiers to be homosexuals."
So much for the claims you read in the local paper, it seems.
What about Alexander the Great, James? Did he have a boyfriend?
I read the Alexander the G. Wiki page, and he appears to have a close friend since boyhood that many of the queering councils have declared an amatory and gay relationship. It's not clear if it is.
My local paper hates Christianity, and the editor is constantly inveighing against it.
He likes the pagan Greeks and is always waxing on and on about them, and about how the Christian universe, and the Jewish universe, is stupid by comparison.
He wants America to be Greek, and yet, and yet!, he also hates the fraternities who are over present in his hometown of Oneonta because they make so much noise. If only they could be more ... well, Christian, he seems to argue.
You can't have it both ways.
Kirby, I'm glad you don't vote in vowel-ending Florida, for vowel-ending Rubio's the conservatives' candidate there (as opposed to, [shudder] Crist or Meeks). Perhaps you could just call him "Rubicon"? Or even Paladino "Palladium"?
Dr. Jim,
It's fun to vote in Florida--we love crazies.
I'm tempted to vote for Charlene Crist just because she's running as an independent.
I'm just happy to be able to vote against Corrine Brown
AND
know that this is the last election she'll win, since our fair representation amendment is going to pass.
"The deal was that if you took the loan, you had to abide by CEO pay restrictions until the loan was repaid. This has proven in the end to have been a fairly effective mechanism for obtaining repayment."
The major banks were forced to take Tarp money, so it was a real restriction. Obama and the progressives more generally have made many statements indicating that they level of income inequality is a problem, and I see the desire to restrict CEO pay by whatever means available as part of that.
Anti-discrimination laws are a form of wage control, since the employee and employee are no longer legally allowed to negotiate wages outside of a particular range. You can agree or disagree with the justice of this, but it is clearly a restriction of the freedom to negotiate wages.
William,
The major banks were forced to take Tarp money, so it was a real restriction.
I grant some justice to this, but view this within the framework of "taking one for the team." After all, our country has had a military draft for much of its history, and likely will again. We routinely ask our citizens to serve on juries, and don't provide anything that even vaguely resembles freely negotiated compensation in either case. The common theme here is that of overwhelming national interest, vs. a limited time/commitment required from each individual. In the case of TARP, a major issue was stigma avoidance, i.e., the idea that potential customers might choose to avoid institutions that had accepted TARP money, if taking it was voluntary. The "team," in this case, the nation and its economy, required a certain sacrifice, and could not obtain it by purely voluntary means. I'll note here that the "involuntary" part was imposed by the Bush administration under Secretary Paulson, while the association of TARP funds with CEO compensation limits came later under Obama-era TARP committee. But my point here is that this is not an extension of the ordinary powers and prerogatives of government beyond accepted norms. To say that Republicans would have done likewise seems a reasonable defense, and indeed, Republicans have gone far further.
You're too young to remember Nixon's wage-price committee, a mechanism for curbing inflation, but which proved in the event to be soft on white-collar raises, and hard on blue collar raises. I believe you'd have to go back to WWII to find a similar level of intervention in the economy by the government, and for all the noise we hear from Kirby about Obama trying to centralize the economy, nothing even remotely similar to this has been proposed. Yet these more invasive controls were imposed in the face of a national economic emergency that was no where near as large as the nation faced at the end of 2008.
If, in the end, both Nixon's and Obama's interventions carried a bit of a class warfare taint, it seems more justifiable in Obama's case, because the pay restrictions could be removed by paying back the TARP funds, and so were a means rather than an end in themselves. There was no such ameliorating consideration for class warfare as practiced by Nixon's wage-price committee.
Anti-discrimination laws are a form of wage control, since the employee and employee are no longer legally allowed to negotiate wages outside of a particular range.
If negotiations were a game of full information, and if we accepted as a nation the premise that discrimination is private matter, then I'd have to agree. The later is likely a question that we differ on. But the former is most assuredly false. Employees and employers are rarely equal participants in wage negotiations. Almost always, the employer has the benefit of privileged information. The Ledbetter Act itself was directed at abusive uses of this privileged information by the employer, and in particular at a SCOTUS decision which interpreted a technical requirement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in an exceptionally peculiar way, overturning literally decades of precedent on this question.
You can agree or disagree with the justice of this, but it is clearly a restriction of the freedom to negotiate wages.
Only if you are willing to describe negotiations in which one party is permitted to make abusive use of privileged information as "free." I am not.
> After all, our country has had a military draft for much of its history, and likely will again.
God, I hope not. We passed amendments to get rid of slavery, let's not use it for jingoism.
GM,
I wrote:
After all, our country has had a military draft for much of its history, and likely will again.
You replied:
God, I hope not. We passed amendments to get rid of slavery, let's not use it for jingoism.
I concur with the hope. I'm just trying to be realistic. As Mark wrote, “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is not yet.”
Much as we like to believe that we live in an enlightened era in which war is an exception rather than an expectation, we do so in the face of the experience of our own lifetimes. Remember that the Victorians also felt that they lived in an enlightened, post-war era, various little wars notwithstanding. But their world was shattered by a cataclysmic war. We have not built a world any freer of war than their's. We are naive if we don't recognize the all-but inevitability of major war in our nation's future, nor the probable consequences of such a war.
The right stance on all of this comes from Matthew, “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” We are doves in our hope, but must be serpents in our wisdom of human nature.
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