to your sources?
CyberRepublican this is interesting and amusing [much more the latter than the former] but it's not a new idea. It's kicked around for quite awhile and I've read variations on this idea for close to 30 years [and i'm no kid - I turn 50 in 04/06]. This idea shows up in, among other places, the works of Frederick Hayek [spelling] and Joseph Schumpeter [spelling]. I'm pretty sure comtemporary esayist like George Gilder and Charles Murray have also worked this theme. What's the thing from Lord Keynes that we're all the unwitting copiers of some long-dead and long-forgotten academic scribblers?
And i'm not putiing this on you, but on the author Wheeler, but it's ausing as heck that he should include Hatvard Presidenct Lawrence Summers among his line-up of guilty-conscience white liberals. President Summers has, for the last 3 years or so, stumped the land delivering a set speech to anyone dumb enough to listen [and even dumber and unfortunate enough to believe],which essentially equates ALL criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. An odd position to propound for someone lumped in, perhaps carelessly, with guilt-ridden holywood types and their like.
CyberRepublican, you are a person of great passion as your various postings reveal, but perhaps something quite less than great in terms of judgement. But no sin in that; I've got my political bugaboos which i expound with equal levels of passion and lack of judgement.
I'm totalty NOT with you but please keep posting.
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Wait a minute!
Doesn't the concept of a "Conservative Mindset" presuppose the existence of a Conservative Mind?
Puting the cart before the horse perhaps?
are just like Hitler and want to burn millions of liberals in gas chambers.
You should run for office, seriously! The Dems could more people like you!
Get it?
I'm know you see the correlation, right???
And you wonder why we all can;t just get along.....
Yeah, Bill, I see what you mean.
I must say I find it an offensive comparison.
There is no question I disagree strongly with most conservative positions. But to compare true conservativism to Nazism is off the hook.
I do not wonder why we can't all just get along Bill. I'm trying to stir up a little grass roots effort at crossing the barriers to real constructive dialog. I think its important to find a way past our differences, and find a way to begin cooperating, at least about the really important things. At this point in time, i'm not sure even a world-threatening potential extinction event would be enough to bring this world, or even this country together as one cohesive unit. And thats the real catastrophe.
Cyber has been running around accusing unnamed "liberals" of being "traitors". And that's pretty much what Hitler did, eh?
Different people require different means of communication. Some people can reason, others need a brick upside the head.
Cyber is getting a dose of his own medicine, and I see no sign that he'd respond to anything subtler. Not so much poetic justice, as just plain justice.
On a larger scale, Republicans generally have no room to feel like victims in the name-calling contest. Limbaugh alone has probably heaved more labels and inflammatory rhetoric than anybody since the Black Panthers.
a cold war between two irreconcilable world views.Fortunately it's a cold contest that's settled at the ballot box once in 4 yrs!
The divide is absolutely a difference in world views (and truly fundamental differences based on core assumptions about, well, everything), but what really gets it going are the demagogues at both ends with enormous media power (driven by marketers who love to get emotions all stirred up because it sells product). I can't even listen to Air America any more because it's just the same old crap as Rush and the boys. Every breath shrub takes is not the end of the world, every judgment the administration makes will not lead to goose-stepping brown shirts.
Say... that sounds like a song lyric. Let's all just sing, all together now....
one day i alternated between AA and "shawn" and by the end of the day i was thru with em both!!
it is more overarching view that the world, in order to function correctly needs balances and "both sides" supply that balance. it is when one side seeks to overpower the other we have conflict.
most world views see only one side as illustrated in this thread......so much for the "free thinking" liberal mind....
of course the "liberals" brought civil disobedience to a science in the 60s; and then you get the "conservatives" taking up the cause of the Branch Davidians, McVeigh, etc, and every so often Southern Poverty Law Center has to sue some idiot for shooting some minority, and many people who style themselves as "conservatives" take up at least parts of these guys causes.
I don't recall ever hearing any liberal calling any conservative a traitor for suggesting that Waco or the McVeigh issues were mishandled, or even that the FBI was the real offender (for following Reno's orders, I guess).
The risk is that some idiot like McVeigh will really do as they threaten, and of course that's where free speech becomes a criminal attempt - it's the classic problem of civil assault, when does a person reasonably consider themselves threatened?
There has been a lot of violence eg directed at abortion clinics; and I - as well as the Federal judge involved - was appalled to hear Bush 1 administration announce they would not enforce an injunction against certain types of abortion clinic protest (distance, what could be thrown, etc) so the "conservatives" have pretty much taken it beyond hollering and waving signs into throwing bombs. Yes, the SDS threw bombs, too, but they were never supported by a government agency.
Then you get Limbaugh on the radio, and all his little wannabees (in my town, the Limbaugh wannabee is a convicted perjurer) hollering about how we gotta get our pitchforks and chase (fill in the Democratic name) out of town for, oh, BJs or asking questions, while of course the prosecutors are immunized from question because of their political connection with Jesus Christ.
No, I don't think Limbaugh and Swaggert and their ilk are civilized, because they're making money off cons. If they were dealing with a single person, instead of an entire community, they'd be committing actionable fraud.
Screw one person, you get impeached or bankrupted. Screw an entire group, and shrug your shoulders, it's politics.
needless to say I fully agree with your analysis.While the bulk on both sides of the divide are civilized, imho the conservative dogma enables more violent behavior by disturbed individuals than the liberal dogma,although both sides harbor them.Luckily,their effect on national elections is still negligible....
Jeremy, don't EVEN go there bro... thats crossing an ugly line. wish i'd seen this before my auto-response to billkile further down this thread.
if you actually read the article he linked to then you would see that my response was appropriate. I notice that Bill never comments on the bomb throwing from his side. He only gets offended when the other side responds in kind.
i'm used to it. that's why i've pretty much written off the notion of coming here with anything other than fastballs.
You're not Cyber, and you don't have to be. When somebody (here Cyber) proclaims that unnamed liberals are traitors, then it's perfectly in tune to respond to him, that conservatives are Nazis.
Nobody pinged on you, but you still took offense. If you want to identify with Cyber, suit yourself. I'd pick almost anybody else. But if you're gonna hyperventilate because some jackass calls himself a conservative, and others point out that he's a jackass, well, that's like getting pissed because you like Fords and some cop gave a Ford driver a ticket, ie., not real swift.
If you take this smear propaganda as something pertinent, then you really have no understanding of liberalism.
Liberalism is a rebellion against the Darwinistic influence on human psychology and society. It's an attempt to continue to civilize oneself and one's peers and one's society. To take it all up a notch.
This article is contemptible in its intent and irresponsible in both its information and its reasoning. Except for very short, out-of-context phrases, Jack Wheeler doesn't even try to analyze what liberals have really said or written, or argue against it. For anything approaching a debate or an argument, this article is all but worthless. Is this what you take as an expert?
The whole basis of it has several glaring mistakes in fact and logic. So, tribal people live in hysterical fear of the envy of their peers and form superstitions about it; liberals acknowledge envy as a social problem, therefore liberals are just as irrational. So, is the argument then that envy should be disregarded in human relations like the superstitions should be? Or is the argument more like "liberals think too much like *those people.*" I know you're offended if I say the latter, but writer doesn't bother to analyze the actual differences in liberal and tribal thought. So while he is carelessly, or perhaps deliberately making the first error, he is making an emotional appeal to the second one. It really does look like he's saying: "'those people' believe that there's envy, they also believe in the evil eye, now liberals believe there's envy, they know there isn't an evil eye, but don't they still think too much like 'those people?'" (wink)
The worst: just because the evil eye, and other such attacks, do not exist doesn't mean that envy itself doesn't exist or that it should be blythely disregarded by all superior-minded people. This is at least as irrational as a belief in death by voodoo curses, the reference to which were off topic except as a focus of contempt.
Do you really like being manipulated like this? Do you like having your buttons pushed like this article does? I mean I can't understand buying a political philosophy like a pack of cigarettes when the marketing pitch is so blatently deceitful and sleazy.
I haven't forgotten I owe you a post, but no one but us seems all that interested in it. Maybe we should do this via email. [email protected].
in front of others, even if you're not talking to them.
Shoot - we promise not to laugh too loud [GG]
We have this ongoing conversation re spiritual stuff - so far, only the two of us have contributed, so I assumed there was no real interest in this board. I welcome controversy, and even laughter, but I don't want to bore people over something I am really passionate about.
actually, i enjoy your discourse on that subject.
you and Zin discuss it at an intellectual level that exceeds where I'm at with it but at a gut level, it's very important to me and i like to read zin's perspectives.
BK
Then I will post a next installment soon. Thanks for the input.
I think Zin's subject title captures it well.
In case this is a dialogue, the essence of my so-called liberalism is the scope of who I see as part of "us." "We" are not just those who are American citizens, but are bound by something deeper, our interconnection, our interdependence. My compassion for those who suffer great poverty and deprevation is not because I hate being a wealthy white male, but because I can feel. And while I also believe the most fundamental response is to encourage self-reliance, I do not hate them or myself for their ignorance and poverty or my priviledge.
The point is my rights exist within the context of their rights and I am accountable to more than my own self-centered needs.
So the very conjecture that liberalism is a form of self-loathing is the projection of a certain state of mind, one that cannot challenge its core assumptions of who "we" are ("we" are the dominant ones - and this "we" is so part-and-parcel of our basic assumptions that someone who challenges it must be victim of self-hatred. How else could they take the position they do?) and why "we" is so limited.
It is the changing of an Age, taking place within one generation. An inescapable by-product of the Information Age is greater identity across cultures and geographies.
Now, if you want to think it's self-hatred, be my guest.
-- Modified on 10/17/2005 2:40:14 PM