This is the first in a planned series of posts about the Constitution and political ideology.
Aside from the belief of the Founding Fathers for the need of an “enlightened electorate” which are both educated on the issues and of high moral standing—the misguided effort of the Progressives to march out the quite often disproven yardstick of “Communism on the Left” and “Fascism on the Right” is one of many of my pet peeves commonly employed by this very same group of uneducated potential voters.
The Communism = Left, Fascism = Right misnomer has more to do with the seating arrangement of the parliaments of Europe than it does with where the political system actually falls on the left-right spectrum. Plain and simple–government is power by rule or control. Political systems (not parties) can be measured by how much coercive power or systematic control the system employs over its people. Remove the monikers from the parties because this argument has nothing to do with parties but rather power and control. Nothing to do with Republicans, Libertarians, Democrats, Progressives, or even the Green party–the measurement is not one of political parties, but rather political power.
The founders considered the two extremes to be anarchy (no government, no law) on one hand and tyranny (absolute control) on the other. On one side, the left, of the scale was tyranny or complete domination which they called “Ruler’s Law” and at the other extreme of their scale (on the right) was “No Law” or total anarchy. What the founders designed was a system shy of total anarchy but based on as much freedom as possible which they called the “People’s Law.” Try to remember this has nothing to do with political parties but rather the amount of systematic control the “ruling class” exerted over the ruled.
Ruler’s Law
Some of the characteristics of Ruler’s Law (which was often described as a tyrannical monarchy) echo the thinking of Progressives; People are not equal, but are divided into classes, all are looked upon as subjects of the King. The entire country is considered to be the property of the ruler(s) who speaks of it as his/her realm. Thrust of Government is from the top down, and not from the people up. “Subjects” have no unalienable rights; rights are issued and rescinded by government hence government is by the whims of men and not fixed by the rule of law. As Jonah Goldberg explains (in Liberal Fascism) “They have a desire to form a powerful state which coordinates a society where everybody belongs and everyone is taken care of; where there is faith in the perfectibility of people and the authority of experts; and where everything is political, including health and well-being.”
People’s Law
This country was therefore founded under Anglo-Saxon Common Law, Natural Law, or what was called the People’s Law, where the people were considered a commonwealth of freemen and the decision and selection of its leaders had to be with the consent of the people. Laws were considered natural law given by divine dispensation, power was delegated among the people, and the rights of the individual were considered unalienable. The primary responsibility for resolving problems was first with the individual, then the family, then the community, then the religion, and finally the government or nation.
Conclusions
With anarchy marking the right boundary of the scale while tyrannical monarchy marks the left side of the scale it becomes easy to mark where on this scale differing political systems, not parties, fall. As we traverse this scale from left to right, political systems like Communism and Fascism are placed at the far left, if not totally on the left side of the scale because of the oppressive nature of the rulers, state ownership, or state control over, of all industry and farms, and the lack of individual rights. Progressive-based systems are next, as is Liberalism (a “child” of Progressive think), but definitely left of center on the scale no matter the form. As Goldberg points out, an effort of Liberal Fascism is “to create an “all-caring, all-powerful, all-encompassing” state” but concludes with “Simply because the nanny state wants to hug you doesn’t mean it’s not tyrannical when you don’t want to be hugged”. No matter how benevolent they attempt to appear–political systems are based on control and power. Finally on the right side of the scale stands our Representative Republic as far to the right without falling into total anarchy allowing its people as much freedom as possible while living under a rule of law. The question of how far to the left on the scale they fall is answered by how much power and control they exert over the individual.
Make no mistake, since the foundation, this country has been shifting left by hook and crook through the likes of Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt, and Johnson, among others but that is neither the original framers’ intention nor those of us who uphold the Constitution today as an outline for the best means of governing the country. We hope this post, as well as subsequent related posts, leads to meaningful, civil discussions about exactly what kind of country and what level of government we want for future generations of Americans. As a final note: A great deal of this posting goes to many people but not least folks like W. Cleon Skousen, Cicero, J. Goldberg, and some residents of this blog.
Blogs For Victory 
Anything that you could possibly draw that is a single line spectrum is just plain stupid.
Also, my favorite President that moved things way to the left was Lincoln. Why did you leave him out?
Yeah, here comes Jonny, trotting in to tell us once again that gee, there are just soooooooo many variations of political systems, you just gotta examine ALL of them, blah blah blah.
He is too dense to grasp the fact that once they are reduced to their bare bones, to their essential philosophy, they are represented by one of the two pyramids.
Yes, there are gradations within each system. This is probably what has swifty so bumfuddled. But to understand political theory, you have to start with the basics, which are laid out here. The thing is, swifty and his ilk have no interest in political theory. They just want to pick a team, cheer for it no matter what, and slime the other time at every opportunity.
Fortunately, while they are playing their games, more and more people are grasping the fact that they do not just vote for a person, they vote for a system, and they had better start to understand both systems and make choices based on which system they want to govern the nation, not on who is clean and articulate and has the best reverb set up in his speaker system.
“He is too dense to grasp the fact that once they are reduced to their bare bones, to their essential philosophy, they are represented by one of the two pyramids.”
Amazona is too dense to grasp that saying it over and over will never make it true. You still haven’t managed to explain to me how Rick Santorum and Ron Paul are acting anywhere near on the same set of principles.
“Yes, there are gradations within each system. This is probably what has swifty so bumfuddled. But to understand political theory, you have to start with the basics, which are laid out here. The thing is, swifty and his ilk have no interest in political theory. They just want to pick a team, cheer for it no matter what, and slime the other time at every opportunity.”
Yes, to understand political theory, you have to take away all the inherent complexity and put it in terms a retarded 8 year old could swallow. That way, Amazona can talk to every single liberal the same way and not have to come up with new material when they don’t all believe the exact same thing. She can just argue against a straw man 100% of the time and think she making some sort of valid point.
“Fortunately, while they are playing their games, more and more people are grasping the fact that they do not just vote for a person, they vote for a system, and they had better start to understand both systems and make choices based on which system they want to govern the nation, not on who is clean and articulate and has the best reverb set up in his speaker system.”
Fortunately, Amazona can just make things up and pretend, just like every useless politician ever, that she speaks for the will of the people, without anything at all to back it up.
You still haven’t managed to explain to me how Rick Santorum and Ron Paul are acting anywhere near on the same set of principles.
I don’t have to. Rick Santorum and Ron Paul have told you.
Poor sad silly swifty, so locked into this odd little bubble where everyone has to see everything exactly the same way, every minute of every day, to share the same core political values. Funny world he lives in, eh?
Of course, if he had a clue, if he had been able to overcome his laziness and his arrogance and his passion for game theory and actually read a little about the founding of the nation, he would see that even the Founders disagreed on some of the details.
Rick Santorum and Ron Paul have exactly the same core belief that the Constitution of the United States of America is the best blueprint for governing the nation. What are the big differences between them? Well, Paul is an isolationist—nothing there that violates the Constitution—-and Santorum is a social conservative who still believes that his personal religious beliefs should not be imposed on the nation. So far, same page.
They both believe in power concentrated at the personal and local level. They both believe that the scope and power of the federal government must be severely restricted, as stated in the 10th Amendment. They both believe the Constitution is a vibrant, relevant and powerful document which must continue to be the law of the land if the nation is going to continue to exist as the United States of America and not as a European-style socialist mess.
You do persist in illustrating the lack of comprehension you bring to this blog, don’t you? You get so caught up in the superficial details, in the Identity Politics, you don’t even recognize the core values of conservatism no matter how often they are pointed out to you.
“But….but…but…Ron Paul is a crochety old guy who wants us to pull out of foreign nations, and Rick Santorum is a Catholic whose personal religious beliefs include not using contraception. How can they POSSIBLY share the same political philosophy?”
You are so silly.
“Santorum is a social conservative who still believes that his personal religious beliefs should not be imposed on the nation. So far, same page.”
That’s a load of crap. The easy example of moral statism on the right is always gay marriage, and Santorum is no exception. The concept of the governmental institution of marriage is direct interference by the government in our social affairs. This goes for any number of other social issues, such as the legal status of drugs, where people like Santorum are perfectly happy to allow interference from the federal government. Paul, by contrast, has less interest in governmental interference in social issues. This of course is the biggest divide within the Republican party that I keep mentioning: social and economic conservatism are not anywhere close to the same thing, they just happen to be two groups that have largely allied together and taken up each others’ causes. They are really on direct opposite ends of the little graph at the top of the page, which again makes the graph completely stupid.
You know what I think is silly, though? The fact that you manage to sound condescending when speaking directly out of the Playskool Guide to Politics.
And, once again (anyone keeping track? The number has to be in three digits by now..) swifty is wrong. In this case, wrong about Santorum.
swifty, you were just bleating about how Lincoln supposedly violated states’ rights, stating that this was a move to the Left by Lincoln. If it gives you a chance to get all pissy about a Republican (Lincoln) you’re all about states’ rights.
So what is wrong about Rick Santorum advocating states’ rights? All he has said about any social issue is that any state has the right to vote on it. No, I correct myself. He has also said that he, personally, would not vote to outlaw contraception.
I don’t know what he has said about gay “marriage” but I’m betting it is in the area of a state decision and/or a Constitutional amendment—-both totally consistent with the Conservative model that has been explained to you so often. (And BTW, the issue is not about what gay couples can or can not do, regarding formalization of their relationships. It has nothing to do with what rights or privileges any formalized gay relationship might have. It is, solely, about a WORD. )
Why don’t you quote Santorum on federal vs state laws on drugs? I don’t remember hearing him talk about that.
You keep blathering on about “the Republican Party”, but you seem absolutely incapable of grasping the fact that ideology is not the same as party identity. I wonder why this is so hard for you. I have said it dozens of times, and it’s even mentioned in the thread post.
If you had the slightest understanding of the Constitution, you would know that governing according to it has nothing to do with either social or economic issues, other than allowing people to make up their own minds about how to deal with either one, without a massive and powerful central authority telling them what they must do.
For some reason you are compelled to focus exclusively on the superficial, and to not only ignore but deny the basic—while sniping, with infantile insults, at those who see the difference.
swifty, you are so deeply invested in the idea of an infinite number of infinitely variable political systems here on Earth in the 21st Century (I felt the need to rein you in a little here and impose at least a moderate limitation on possible systems) why don’t you tell us of some that would not fit into the Left/Right political spectrum discussed in the threat post?
Since you can’t handle theory and have to stick to personality and events, why don’t you tell us how far to the Left Lincoln moved the nation. What did he do, and how did it move the nation to the left?
Feel up to that?
Sure. Let’s see, let’s start with a giant civil war he won that was about state rights versus power invested in he federal government. Just as a reminder, he wasn’t on the state rights side.
If you buy into that super-simplistic distillation of the complexity of the legality of secession by the Confederate States, you are probably not smart enough to understand an explanation.
It is too much to go into now, as I have plans for the evening. But I promise to return to this with some facts.
And in the meantime, we can ponder the ongoing effect of Lincoln’s alleged lurch to the Left—seems like once the Union was saved, the nation was still governed according to the Constitution, without welfare, without confiscation of private property for redistribution by the State, without any of the trappings of Leftist models.
But Amazona! The little graph at the top shows that Lincoln doesn’t have to go all the way to the left side to move the bar in the direction. Remember, you love to complain about how it has been pushed that way over the decades.
The best part is why you feel the desperate need for Lincoln to not be liberal: he was a Republican and you, like other Republicans, feel the desperate need to lay claim to a popular president. For all your incessant whining about Identity Politics, you play the game better than anybody.
The Civil War was not simply a matter of overriding states rights. This is a very simplistic view. It was not a case of the federal government riding roughshod over slave-holding states. There had been ongoing debate, escalating into acrimony and then violence, regarding the introduction of slavery into new states and territories. The South demanded parity between slave and non-slave states, so opposed the admission of Missouri as a free state because this would give the free states a numerical advantage. The Missouri Compromise dealt with this by admitting Maine as a free state and Missouri as a state where slavery was permitted, thereby balancing the numbers of free and slave states.
Then came the Kansas-Nebraska Act, in 1854, which created new territories of Nebraska and Kansas. Because this Act allowed each territory to decide through the vote of the people whether or not it would allow slavery, it had the effect of canceling out the Missouri Compromise, as it introduced two new territories and future states where slavery was not made legal by federal mandate. The South fought vehemently to prevent this from happening, and the Act was the event that seemed to propel the nation toward a civil war. Note that the problem was that of the South wanting to nullify popular sovereignty by demanding that the federal government impose laws allowing slavery, no matter what the people might vote on.
In January of 1861, Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state, with an anti-slavery constitution.
Because my books on Lincoln and the Civil War are still packed, I had to do research online to refresh my memory, and in the interest of fairness and balance I went to a website called Daylight Atheist, a stridently Left-oriented site, where I not only found the text of the Secession declaration, I found commentary.
We hold that the Government thus established is subject to the two great principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence; and we hold further, that the mode of its formation subjects it to a third fundamental principle, namely: the law of compact. We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.
In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”
This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made….
But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.
…We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
Okay, this is the wording of the declaration. Now let’s see what a raging anti-conservative has to say about it:
As you can see, there’s nothing in this document about “states’ rights” or any such modern right-wing fiction. Or rather, there’s only one right at issue: the right to own slaves. South Carolina asserted that the northern states had an obligation under the Constitution to return fugitive slaves to their masters, and that they weren’t doing this. They further asserted that the northern states were infringing their “rights of property” by seeking to free human beings from bondage. Because of this, South Carolina claimed that the Constitution was null and void and it had the right to strike out on its own. (And, yes, they did believe that God was on their side: “We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions…”)
There is some background for you. You can claim all you want that Lincoln started the Civil War (by having the South fire on a Union fort, no less) to violate states’ rights, but the FACTS prove you wrong.
When the South tried to break up the Union, shatter the United States of America, by pulling out of the Union, and then declared war on the United States of America by firing upon a military installation of the United States of America, the United States of America, under its new President, Abraham Lincoln, took steps to preserve the Union and defend it.
Ouch. That’s gotta hurt.
Please explain to us of not privy to be a member of the “enlightened” why Anything that you could possibly draw that is a single line spectrum is just plain stupid. when the scale is only depicting the amount of power and control a government exerts over the general population?
One side is total control and the other is no control. I must be missing something only the “enlightened” see.
Because there is no way to draw such a graph such that you can guarantee two people on the same point in the line have anywhere near identical beliefs on individual issues. If being at a specific spot on a graph is not descriptive of anything, then the graph is useless.
I believe that is where you are going wrong because this is not about a belief on a single issue–it is about power and control whether it was gained by force or through consent. Personally, I believe Dr. Ron Paul is the closest candidate to the meaning of the Constitution but then again that has nothing more than how much power and control over the people he would try to employ. Also, I am not sure if I could bring myself to vote for Dr. Paul in this current environment.
All this post appears to be pointing out is that with the evaluation of political systems–it is the amount of control the government has over the people whether the government is elected or not. My understanding of the founding documents for this Republic was based on little Federal government and was mostly State and Municipal which the people of each locality elected. If one felt there was too much oppression in their State, they could move.
That has changed with our Federal government now being the largest oppressor with the States adding in their, quite often ridiculous, rules and regulations. Nevertheless, it makes it impossible to “vote with your feet” when the control freaks are at the Federal level.
This is a great post, though I am sure it will be scorned by the trolls, who hate true political theory.
i have often used the pyramid to describe the two different models of political theory, and am happy to see it so well illustrated here.
As Goldberg points out, an effort of Liberal Fascism is “to create an “all-caring, all-powerful, all-encompassing” state” and this DOES place it firmly on the left end of the spectrum. The Left, when it needed to turn its back on fascism after Hitler betrayed Stalin, simply invented a whole new concept, which was that Right = industry, fascism under Hitler controlled industry, therefore fascism = the Right.. When in fact the only real difference between communist OWNERSHIP of industry and fascist CONTROL of industry is that fascists left the managers in place as puppets of the regime, to create the illusion that the industries were still privately controlled.
This is “true political theory” as taught in a third grade social studies class.
Well, it’s way over YOUR head.
Yeah, trying to understand the complexities of political science without a stupid little one dimensional graph to guide me sure makes me an idiot.
You call it stupid but you still don’t get it. Guess we know what that makes you.
“This is a great post, though I am sure it will be scorned by the trolls, who hate true political theory.”
You pegged Nottooswift…. and he predictable responds with the same nattering crap as always. He will claim that he has invalidated every point with absolutely no corroborating evidence.
Nottooswift: “Yeah, trying to understand the complexities of political science without a stupid little one dimensional graph to guide me sure makes me an idiot.”
Actually, it is a two dimensional graph. I won’t bother explaining it too you, your head might explode.
At least, your conclusion was correct but we will chalk that up as pure dumb luck. A blind squirrel occasionally get’s a nut.
tiredoflibbs,
You should maybe spend some time in a remedial geometry class. That graph is one dimensional.
Nottooswift, the only thing that is one dimensional is your thinking process.
There are two axis on the graph – two dimensions. As I said, your head would explode with any further explanation.
You are wrong again, thanks for playing.
@tired
If someone prefers all power to be in the hands of the people, what other degree of freedom is there in the chart for said person?
Plural of axis is axes.
Wow, I never looked at it this way, my college education was that the political spectrum was a circle with marxism and facism meeting at one point on the circle (say 6 o’clock) and democrats nowadays were at about 9 o’clock with conservative republicans at about 1 o’clock and moderates at about 11 o’clock.
Doug,
If that’s what you were taught, you were taught closer to the truth than most graduates of public schools over the last 70 or 80 years. The history that separated Communism and Facism into Left and Right actually started back in the 20’s or 30’s. I ran across a great explanation of their similarities a while back. I saved the salient part, but lost the link:
Jonathan’s problem is that he’s been taught something that’s not true, and his ego is getting in the way of realizing it.
The problem you guys have is that your whole definition of The Left is “I don’t like it”. You don’t like Fascist Italy, so of course it falls under the broad magic umbrella of The Left. Nazi Germany? Don’t like them, either, so to The Left they go. Nevermind that the defining feature that linked those governments (and Stalin’s Russia, and Mao’s China and Castro) is that they were despotic dictatorships, which is the degenerate state of every governmental/economic system, and has occurred more frequently historically under anarchistic free markets than it has under failed systems of any other variety.
So there are Two Systems, one of which is what you believe, and the other is Everybody Who Disagrees With You. You can even see it in Amazona’s definition of The Left: she summarized them as “the opposite”. It’s one big exercise in avoiding any critical thinking about what you are saying, though, because of course we should all agree with you if the other option is that we’re Ukrainians starving in the street or Jews getting rounded up in concentration camps.
The problem, of course, is that the world is actually nothing like that. Implementing universal health care doesn’t make anybody into Karl Marx, and there are plenty of real world examples of countries that have universal health care and are doing just fine. It may be a lot easier to pretend that implementing any social program amounts to flipping a switch and turning us all into Communists, but it just makes you sound like an idiot.
“Communism is also a totalitarian system, where all property belongs to the state. Government and business are the same thing – as the state owns the means of production. Under a communist system of government, the individual’s interest is likewise subservient to the national interest.”
I meant to point out that that has absolutely no relation to anything written in the Communist Manifesto, if you want to call people Marxists. Marx and Stalin were nothing like each other. Stalin came to power by abusing a communist system that was doomed to be usurped by somebody because of its structure. Hitler was given power from a democratic government; blaming Stalin on Communism is akin to blaming Hitler on Democracy.
But again, these are people you guys love to mix into a big melting pot of “the bad guys” along with every modern political actor that disagrees with you, so you are incapable of admitting these not-so-insignificant details and instead badger people on this blog for being either evil or tools of evil because it is so much easier than having actual discourse.
Jonathan, I don’t think you are thinking about what you are writing. Universal Healthcare system can be, in our case, a completely govt. controlled system, either by them controlling the product and users, or by the producers being in league with the government, or by government being the suppliers.
Ergo, Universal Healthcare is a socialist/marxist (depending on who is running the show) or a fascist system. It is obvious that big pharma has been trying to make it fascist, but their brethren in the insurance business didn’t agree with them and those dang doctors aren’t collaborating. Obama and Sebelius would prefer it being Marxist, based on their actions and edicts. And Romney seems to not be able to make up his mind between socialist and facsist in his version, but truthfully wants to give up the power associated with marxism.
I agree that universal health care, as a social program, can generally be regarded in loose terms as a more leftist philosophy, but calling it Marxist is just another way of pretending that there isn’t anything in between universal healthcare and Soviet Russia. Marx didn’t particularly go on at length about government run healthcare because his writings, overly optimistic as they were, had very little interest in a centralized government running anything, despite what everybody around here likes to think.
Again, this goes back to lumping a bunch of political actors and policies together such that it becomes impossible for you guys to discuss or even understand the incredibly huge distinctions between the people and policies you are generalizing. These aren’t even particularly nuanced subjects, but you’ve been the same line of crap so many times that your paintbrush is just too broad to admit finer strokes.
Mr. Swift,
Once again you are the one trying to marginalize this post with statements like “So there are Two Systems, one of which is what you believe, and the other is Everybody Who Disagrees With You. “ No where is, or has anyone stated, their are only two political systems–there have to be as many as their are countries in this world. It is about power and control and these systems span the entire graph from anarchy (Somalia) to total repression (N. Korea) with many countries finding it is more productive or a necessity to be moving right on the scale (China & most of Europe) because free markets work or they can no longer afford to have everyone on the public dole.
It is here in America that I am concerned with and we are failing to see the failure worldwide and moving more and more left when it has been proven time and again we can not afford it. This really “took off” under Roosevelt and hasn’t been curtailed no matter who was in the oval office or holding the purse strings. This is just another form of coercion but I will leave that for another day.
“No where is, or has anyone stated, their are only two political systems–there have to be as many as their are countries in this world”
Well, except for Amazona, every single time she posts.
“No where is, or has anyone stated, their are only two political systems–there have to be as many as their are countries in this world”
Well, except for Amazona, every single time she posts.
I think we’re talking semantics here. Every political system variation belongs to one of two families: either more control by the government or less control and can be fairly easily placed on the chart in the main post.
What I say, and stick to, is that in the United States of America in the 21st Century, there are only two BASIC political systems from which to choose.
One is of a large, powerful, central government and the other is one in which the scope and power of the central (federal) government is severely restricted and power and authority rest primarily at state and local levels.
Once again, I challenge anyone to show me a political system which does not fall within the range of these two BASIC political systems.
from swifty: Marx ……………had very little interest in a centralized government running anything…..
Really? Interesting perspective. Marx, the father of Communism, who co-authored the Communist Manifest, had little interest in a centralized government?
Well, let’s just take us a look-see at the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto, shall we?
1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communications and transportation in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
Hmmm.
Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, centralization of the means of communications and transportation in the hands of the State, establishment of industrial armies, extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state, and of course abolition of private property. Sounds like a pretty powerful state to me.
Or are you now going to quibble that when you said “centralized government” that is not the same as “the State”. Or that the Manifesto never says anything about RUNNING anything?
I have never seen the diagram you are describing; however, this post is about political systems and not parties because in my short (hopefully, to be much longer) life so far I have been witness to many a so-called Republicans act more like a Progressive or at least a Progressive-lite like G.W.Bush.
This is the first generation, more or less, that has awoken late to understand that burdening future generations with debt will be the downfall of this once, and still possible, great nation.
It started with the Fabians under President Wilson and has progressed to tear apart this once great nation by undermining the educational system, changing the view of the general population, and destroying what made this country leap-frog all other nations in the world–Freedom.
There is so much to discuss but at this point I am starting to wonder if that is even possible any longer.
A little help (like Mr. Swift & somewhat Doug) that have yet to understand that this is all about power and control and not the standard political parties (ie,. Dems & Repubs), those that are not inquisitive enough to actually read history like The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek who argued “that fascism and socialism had common roots in central economic planning and the power of the state over the individual”, nor would believe any poster on this site with a differing opinion that has actually met and lived with friends that lived under Communist rule in Russia and Cuba–I will post a couple of sites that may shed some light–but somehow I doubt it.
(In an effort to get these posts up and for comments including snarky remarks–I am going to split them up).
First is one to show you how far left we have become in recent history courtesy of a KGB agent that fled the system near the end of the Cold war.
G. Edward Griffin Interview Of Yuri Bezmenov
This is an interview done by G. Edward Griffin in the early 1980’s with Soviet Defector Yuri Bezmenov on what the one worlders and the Soviet Union were doing inside the United States political structure.
How about meeting Elke.
Meet Elke. This inspiring woman was born in Hitler’s Germany and lived under communist rule for years before becoming an American citizen.
Her video explanation of what happened in Germany under communism and the parallels to our current administration and the path we are on will give you a chill.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/communism-doesnt-work-chilling-video-warning-to-america-from-east-german-survivor/
See, this is what I mean:
“Meet Elke. This inspiring woman was born in Hitler’s Germany and lived under communist rule for years before becoming an American citizen.”
You do know that the Nazis largely got their start fighting communists in Germany, right? Marxists got trips to the Concentration camps. Trying to conflate the two is historical illiteracy.
The Nazis fighting the communists was very interesting, much like the liberal dems shutting out moderate dems when they get the opportunity, or conservative GOP loathing the liberal GOP. The Nazis and the Communists were natural allies in the long run, and at first they tried to be, but both countries had figureheads that clashed in that they were dictatorial, so the communists weren’t strictly communist and the nazis weren’t strictly fascist. As such the dictatorial aspects of their leaders REQUIRED them to become enemies.
However, each country was so similar to begin with as far as being on the political spectrum (right next to each other) that except for the individual leaders hunger for power, they would have been allies throughout.
No, we’re not talking about Communists in Russia. We’re talking about Nazis, who were largely irrelevant to any discussion of left versus right, slaughtering Marxists right next to Jews. They were not “natural allies” because the only thing the Nazis had to do with leftist policies is occasional bits of rhetoric against large businesses and capitalism which largely went away by the time Hitler was in power. They were for a stratified system of economic classes based on merit, individual property rights, and nationalism. This was all really subservient to rhetoric about racial superiority, but they spent more time courting right-leaning policies than they ever did the left.
But again, this all goes back to the desperate need to paint anybody you don’t like as The Left, regardless of whether there is any truth to it or not.
Communists and Nazis. Neither one could stand for any competition because they stood for the same thing. Almost.
The communists are intent on bringing thier system to the whole world. The nazis just wanted to start with Germany, then conquer the world.
Not much difference in the systems at all.
Hitlers own words.
Hitler noted that Communists made excellent converts to Nazism, because the same personality type was attracted to both. “[T]here is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communists always will.” (quoted in Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks) Stalin also recognized that ex-Nazis and ex- fascists were natural recruits for post-war Communist regimes. As Stanley Payne notes in his A History of Fascism: 1914-1945, “All over Soviet- occupied eastern Europe, most rank-and-file former fascist party members, together with many lower-level leaders, were welcomed to fill the ranks of the initially exiguous local Communist parties. The psychological transition seems to have been an easy one, for obvious reasons.”
Replace “Communists” with “Stalin’s Regime” and you have it pretty close, only the thing that they both stood for had nothing to do with the political systems they allegedly represented, which were markedly different from each other.
Like what?
The one party state?
Power concetrated in the hands of one individual?
The top down centrally planned economy?
Please give your examples.
“The one party state?
Power concetrated in the hands of one individual?”
Those would be two of the primary things they stood for. Are you going to now explain to me now how Obama really wants to be a dictator or something? Or how they are planning on outlawing all parties other than the DNC?
Some acronyms for you.
NKVD. GeStaPo. Six of one and a half dozen of the other. Different names same mission. Eliminating all opposition to the state.
Soviet 5 years plans. Nazi 4 year plans. Big difference huh?
Nazi wanted racial undesireables gone. Communists wanted cultural undesirables gone. Gulags and concentration camps. Whats the difference between them? Any?
Mass deportations. You got em from both sides. Both systems used massive propaganda and terrorism to keep thier people in line. If that didn’t work, a bullet to base of the skull usually did.
No Jonathon, not at all. That is your goal. By all accounts your sympathies lie with leftists of the world. The system you want has never worked. Ever. Fairness. Equality. Social Justice. These are nothing but buzz words meant to fire up those who think there “ought to be a law”.
Leftwing ideology has brought nothing other than uncurdled misery to this world. There are probably about 400 million graves dug in the 20th century alone courtesy of the left.
How many more do you want to add in the 21st century?
Jonathon. Have you already forgotten barkys word during the chicoms president’s state visit in 2009? Maybe you should look them up.
I wonder how many german citizens laughed at that same kind of question. Never happen here right?
“NKVD. GeStaPo. Six of one and a half dozen of the other. Different names same mission. Eliminating all opposition to the state.
Soviet 5 years plans. Nazi 4 year plans. Big difference huh?
Nazi wanted racial undesireables gone. Communists wanted cultural undesirables gone. Gulags and concentration camps. Whats the difference between them? Any?
Mass deportations. You got em from both sides. Both systems used massive propaganda and terrorism to keep thier people in line. If that didn’t work, a bullet to base of the skull usually did.”
Again, you are conflating the things Stalin’s regime did with communism. There is very little about Soviet Russia that Marx would have approved of.
“The system you want has never worked. Ever. Fairness. Equality. Social Justice. These are nothing but buzz words meant to fire up those who think there “ought to be a law”.”
Except of course all those pesky European mixed economies that seem to work just fine, of course. But hey, why let that get in the way of claiming that every system to the left of where you are is Soviet Russia?
“Have you already forgotten barkys word during the chicoms president’s state visit in 2009?”
Ah, good to know that you get your commentary from Rush Limbaugh.
Which economies are you talking about? Norway and Denmark? It can’t be Sweeden because of the recent reductions in Income taxes there.
Norway is paying for thier goodies with good old north sea crude oil. It will run out right? Is that not one of your lefty memes? Denmark might get away with it becuase of being so small. Might until muslims start taking over thier streets.
Can’t be the piigs, they are suffering from record deficits, record unemployment, and record debt.
Germany, Britain, and France are all running budget deficits. They are in the red for the forseeable future. No end is in sight. What is so admirable about that?
II get my knowledge from Rush Limbaugh? I do not listen to Rush. I do not need to.
Your lack of any response to what leftism leads to tells me all I need to know about where you stand.
Can you pull the trigger there comrade? Or will you stand in your office and direct the executions from afar?
OPM?
I will have to admit a booboo here. It looks like the Danish are not immune anymore to OPM drug. Denmark now has a national debt equal to 2.6 of it’s gdp. And it is set to rise even higher next year.
But please Jonathon please keep telling why the system you prefer is better.
Again, you are conflating the things Stalin’s regime did with communism. There is very little about Soviet Russia that Marx would have approved of.
OK, Jonathan, then tell us where a purely Marxist form of government has worked.
“OK, Jonathan, then tell us where a purely Marxist form of government has worked.”
Nowhere! Good thing nobody here is advocating for Marxism!
“Which economies are you talking about? Norway and Denmark? It can’t be Sweeden because of the recent reductions in Income taxes there.”
Most European countries are have substantially broader social programs and worker protections than we do. For some of them it works great, and some of them it hasn’t. Which really goes to show that the specifics of the system in question matter more than any broad categorization ever could when determining the success of a system.
Ah, good to know that you get your commentary from Rush Limbaugh.
Jonathan — seriously? If that’s your fall-back line, you’ve lost, dude.
Nowhere! Good thing nobody here is advocating for Marxism!
So what was your point that Maxism didn’t work in Soviet Russia because Stalin subverted it. And what about after Stalin’s death — it still didn’t work.
There goes swifty again, basing everything on events and identities. Gee, if Hitler killed people from the Left AND the Right, he had to be in the middle, right?
Don’t look at the structure of German politics under Hitler—no, that is irrelevant, and it will evidently only confuse you, as it has swifty.
And gee, here comes a stunner—–Hitler and Stalin were best buds, comrades in arms so to speak, till Hitler betrayed Stalin in his mad grab for world domination.
Look it up, swifty.
Oh, that’s right—you don’t DO research.
nottooswift: “Nowhere! Good thing nobody here is advocating for Marxism!”
You obviously have not read Marx nor have you paid much attention to obAMATEUR’s speeches on “fairness”, “spreading the wealth”, banking, education and micromanagement of the economy from the government level.
But what do you expect from someone who maintains that the above graph is one dimensional.
Pathetic.
“…Nazis, who were largely irrelevant to any discussion of left versus right, ..
Except for that niggling little fact that the word “NAZI” is an acronym for National Socialist Party, which puts the Nazis very strongly and firmly on the left end of the spectrum, and makes discussion of their place on this spectrum extremely relevant.
And, of course, they moved farther and farther to the Left as they became more and more tyrannical.
“Historical illiteracy” is ignorance of the origins of the Nazis, and of fascism, and of the progression of both under Hitler, as well as of the original relationship between Hitler and Stalin, between the Leftism of Russia and that of Germany.
Will somebody please tell swifty that someone born in Hitler’s Germany—that is, in the decade between the mid 1930’s and the mid 1940’s, and who continued to live in Germany after that, WOULD HAVE been living UNDER COMMUNIST RULE if she had the misfortune to be living in East Germany?
It is a hoot to see someone call anyone else “historically illiterate” when he doesn’t even know that East Germany was under communist rule after the war.
Duh.
Again, swifty of the plagiarized name tries to make a point by inventing a ridiculous scenario and then pointing out that it is ridiculous, but pretending that it is a belief of someone else.
Are you going to now explain to me now how Obama really wants to be a dictator or something? Or how they are planning on outlawing all parties other than the DNC?
Aside from the obvious fact that the DNC is not a political party—-score another ten points on swifty’s Political Ignorance Scale—this is just silly.
swifty appears to be trying to claim that a gradual usurpation of Constitutional rights and laws, over time, would not constitute a shift far to the Left in the United States, and a major restructuring of our very form of government. Or something. When he gets all silly like this it’s hard to tell what the hell he is nattering on about.
But no, Obama does not have to want to be a “dictator or something” to have a deep and firmly held belief in Marxism and to do whatever he can to move the United States away from its Constitutional, free market, capitalistic structure to one in which confiscation of private property for redistribution by the state is just the way things are done, which is centered on “collective prosperity” and “economic justice” rather than being a meritocracy.
No one knows if he personally wants to be a dictator. Certainly he has taken on some of the characteristics of a dictator, in doing things like handing unlimited power to a single government agency without the participation, much less approval, of Congress. He has publicly stated how much easier his life would be, as president, if he WERE a dictator.
But he clearly wants the United States to be humbled before the world, to be reduced in power and stature, to be less prosperous, to have more dependence on the federal government, to have a reduced standard of living (at least for those who are not in the political elite) to have the government decide how much money an industry (or a company or an executive and who knows, eventually any citizen) can make, and many other goals that are completely incompatible with the Constitution but quite compatible with early stages of Marxism, before ownership of all private property is eliminated.
Is this process underway as we speak?
From the CPUSA website:
This is an exciting time! Thousands of mainly young people have been occupying Wall Street for three weeks already, and the “Occupy Movement” has spread to more than 200 other cities. On Oct. 6 the actions spread to our nation’s capital.
The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) will hold a national teleconference to discuss it:
Arturo Cambron
The Communist Party and the Occupy L.A. Movement
Tuesday, October 11, 8 pm Eastern
Teleconference number: 605-475-4850 (please note this is the corrected number. ignore previous.)
Access code: 1053538#
Southern California Party leader Arturo Cambron will share how the CPUSA and Young Communist League (YCL) are working in “Occupy Los Angeles.”
This movement, also known as the “99% movement,” is being hailed across the country. Movements and organizations are reaching out in solidarity. The AFL-CIO is opening union halls and offering other material assistance. Ordinary people are donating food, money and materials.
In many areas, the “Occupy Movement” is linking up with the National American Wants to Work Week of Actions, Oct. 10-16.
No doubt the “Arab Spring” demonstrations and those that exploded in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere have inspired it. But underlying it all is the economic crisis, the massive unemployment and growing realization that nothing is getting better, and in fact we may be slipping into a “double dip” crisis. The crushing student debt and the feeling of being locked out of society with no future compound this.
The movement is the newest wrinkle in the all-people’s upsurge against the banks and corporations and reflects a new level of class-consciousness.
UPDATE: Thousands of Occupy Chicago protesters cheered the communist leaders last night in Chicago.
“So what was your point that Maxism didn’t work in Soviet Russia because Stalin subverted it. And what about after Stalin’s death — it still didn’t work.”
What on earth makes you think that the Soviet Union became Marxist just because Stalin died? As I said before, a despotic government is the failed state for every broken governmental system. A dictatorship is as far away from a Communist system as you can possibly be, except that something as far out there as to be Communist tends to fail fairly quickly and end up like every other failed system. Meanwhile, anything anything that moves far enough out into the direction of having a free market manage everything has the same problem. This doesn’t cause intelligent people to sit around claiming that a market is not a useful solution for anything, so why should they do the same for any sort of collectivist action?
“Jonathan — seriously? If that’s your fall-back line, you’ve lost, dude.”
No, actually, I just recognized terminology that comes directly from Conservative talk radio. I wouldn’t say anything at all, except one of the common memes here seems to be that anybody who disagrees with you is a useful idiot that just parrots the party line. It amuses me to occasionally cite the source of your words, because I doubt you’ll ever be able to do the same to me.
“There goes swifty again, basing everything on events and identities. Gee, if Hitler killed people from the Left AND the Right, he had to be in the middle, right?”
Or he was neither left or right because he was a genocidal monster with no particular interest in any of the politics we are talking about in any meaningful sense.
“Don’t look at the structure of German politics under Hitler—no, that is irrelevant, and it will evidently only confuse you, as it has swifty.”
Okay, since you are convinced they are the same thing, I’ll let you explain to me which which part of the Communist Manifesto calls for democratically electing a dictator.
“And gee, here comes a stunner—–Hitler and Stalin were best buds, comrades in arms so to speak, till Hitler betrayed Stalin in his mad grab for world domination.
Look it up, swifty.
Oh, that’s right—you don’t DO research.”
Just so you don’t forget, immediately after that the United States was an ally with Stalin. Oh, and we’re currently pretty close with Saudi Arabia, and have been pals with any number of other despots over the years when it has suited us. Doesn’t that make us look worse? I mean, Hitler even, in your own words, betrayed Stalin. Sounds like he was really into that whole Soviet thing.
Ama, that is what nottooswift does, he makes baseless accusations and conclusions while not providing any corroborating evidence what-so-ever.
All the while, once proven wrong he runs from the discussion. You’ll notice that he claims that his “proof” has been deleted… and no matter how many times he is proven wrong he continues with his baseless accusations and outright lies.
What on earth makes you think that the Soviet Union became Marxist just because Stalin died?
I didn’t say that, Jonathan. You said it was not recognizable as a Marxist government while Stalin was alive. If I made a faulty assumption that the USSR reverted back to Marxism after Stalin’s death, then it was only because of the way you worded your comment. Personally, I can’t remember a time that the USSR WASN’T referred to as a Marxist government.
In response to this:
You said this:
It sure sounds to me like you’re saying Marxism works just fine as long as reeeeeealy bad actors like Stalin don’t get in charge. If that’s not what you meant, then I don’t see the point of your comment. And the part where you say, “that that has absolutely no relation to anything written in the Communist Manifesto”, well, as Amazona shows — that’s just goofy.
And then you compound your goofiness by saying this:
If you’re really trying to argue that the USSR was not a despotic/dictatorship prior to Stalin, then you are even more misinformed than I thought. Can you name one instance of a Marxist government that was/is not a dictatorship?
Or meeting the only man known to have escaped that worker’s paradise of N. Korea after he turned in his own Mother and Brother (penalty execution)
How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp
There was torture, starvation, betrayals and executions, but to Shin In Geun, Camp 14 – a prison for the political enemies of North Korea – was home. Then one day came the chance to flee…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/escape-north-korea-prison-camp
You all do realize that Socialism is only a stepping stone and if you actually pay attention to the news–we are well on our way towards either Communism (Piven’s favorite) or Marxism (Obama’s choice)
Yeah, any day now the more socialist Western European and Scandinavian countries are going to start opening up prison camps.
Yeah, any day now the more socialist Western European and Scandinavian countries are going to start opening up prison camps.
Why should they? In these countries you have absolutely no right to defend yourself or your property, They are prison camps already.
Yes, I’m sure living in countries with some of the highest HDIs in the world is equivalent to prison camps because they have gun control. Or is it because there’s no way to possibly be free with high taxes? I don’t know, it’s hard to follow an analogy that ridiculous.
Yeah, any day now the more socialist Western European and Scandinavian countries are going to start opening up prison camps.
Another snappy comeback, Jonathan. You’re just a fount of wisdom today, You’ve got the “if-you-can’t-dazzle-them-with-your-brilliance, baffle-them-with-your-bullsh*t” meme down to an art form.
Whenever anyone brings up just how great life is in Western Europe, it reminds me of the segment done by “60 Minutes” or 20/20 10 or 15 years ago about European social democracies. An interview with a group of young Belgians was the part that really stuck in my mind. One particular young man was asked if he minded giving up over half his income in the form of taxes. His answer was that he didn’t mind at all because everyone made a comfortable living, everything was provided for them, lots of vacation and paid leave whenever they wanted it, and no one had to work very hard. What could possibly go wrong with that dynamic?
Yeah, any day now the more socialist Western European and Scandinavian countries are going to start opening up prison camps.
This kind of smirky nonsense is a fallback for Lefties when they are proved to be wrong. They invent some silly lie, and then make fun of it, as if anyone else had ever even thought of such a thing.
It’s a way of waving the white flag while posturing as having made a valid point.
Guys, I don’t know if you noticed this, but dbschmidt was the one that brought up prison camps, not I. What was the point if it wasn’t to imply that other lefties also were going to open up prison camps? Seriously, I was just supposed to let that stand, or did I need some more thorough explanations as to why I didn’t think social welfare programs were in any way related to “torture, starvation, betrayals and executions”?
It’s like you guys can’t even be bothered to actually read the post to which I am replying.
Swift,
I brought up three examples of what communism is and does to differing people. Not that you spent any time examining any of them.
–Yuri Bezmenov showing how the Communist (KGB) of USSR/Russia have spent generations helping US idiots become ‘useful idiots’ (the agent’s term),
–Elke, born under Hitler but lived under communism following the war. If you watched and understood–her and her mother were in E. Germany and her father was in W. Germany. Her “indoctrination” as a child is similar to what is happening in the US now as she noted.
–Shin In Geun born into a N.Korean prison camp because of the sins of his parents. So brainwashed he later turned them in for planning an escape. The penalty for even planning an escape was execution. However, I guess that is okay if you have no problem shooting your mother just don’t forget to stuff her mouth full of pebbles first.
As I have pointed out time and time again–Socialism is only a stepping stone to either Marxism or Communism. The US is heading that way while the large part of the world is heading towards a system based on free market capitalism (like our Constitutional government).
I believe the Constitutional (not Republican, Libertarian, or Democratic) method is the best model for governing this country and we need to turn this nation around before we are one of the statist nations let alone one of the PIGGS.
Swift,
Just as a BTW, The US does have a history of “internment camps” under President Wilson and again under President Franklin D. Roosevelt–both Democrats but more important than their party affiliation–both tried to overturn the U.S. Constitution.
Not saying it will happen again under this administration; however, with this administration’s motto being “Never let a good crisis go to waste” and associates of this current administration also being recorded (video and audio by an undercover FBI agent) stating that (paraphrasing here) “that a great many Americans will need to be sent to reeducation camps” and later noting “that those that can not be reeducated will necessarily have to be killed.”
Put it this way–I seriously doubt it will or could happen here in this day and age but I am just pointing out there are plenty of folks here who a dreaming about it.
Welcome to the new worker’s paradise, Comrade.
Oops, my bad–it was Theodore Roosevelt not Franklin D. Roosevelt that wanted to overturn the Constitution. CRS moment.
Told it was a CRS moment–it was FDR and not Teddy. Once again, my bad.
And to the crux of the matter, Marxism is only a stepping stone away from fascism. The difference is just on how you define the dictators of the proletariat. In Marxism, the proletariat becomes the dictators over the means of production, with the final outcome naturally (but not stated) being the representatives of the proletariat running the production.
That is a stone’s throw away from fascism which uses the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to completely control the production for the benefit of the proletariat. The stone’s throw is just that in fascism the dictator and his party is recognized and in Marxism it is just an obvious necessity to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat.
NATURAL ALLIES, right next to each other on the political spectrum.
Why did Antonio Gramsci die in a fascist concentration camp?
Nottooswift…. why are you responding to anyone here. It is obvious that they did not write the thread.
At least that is the pathetic excuse you used to dodge away from obAMATEUR’s lies about his drilling record.
Anyone would think that you would want to remain consistent?
tiredoflibbs,
I can’t copy/paste text from this post and find any sources it was directly plagiarized from, so if it was copied, they were at least smart enough to do a better job of it than you did. Either way, other people’s transgressions will never make yours okay, so I’m not sure what your point is. I’m sorry you aren’t smart enough to come up with your own material?
Still sticking with that lie I see.
You are in direct conflict with the reasons you gave earlier. You chose to dodge and think of pathetic excuses so as to not defend obAMATEUR’s lies – the facts in the thread.
Proper credit was given. I corrected the simple oversight. You just needed an excuse to avoid comment.
Yeah, which is why you continue to delete my posts every time I present the full sequence of events. You certainly have nothing to hide.
swifty can waste time trying to pin a plagiarism charge on the author (or authors) of the thread post, but can’t be bothered to study the history and ideology of the Left, or of the Conservative Movement, or of post-war Germany, or—-well, anything relevant.
Shows you what his priorities are, doesn’t it? Not political discourse, which he avoids at all costs, usually by flooding posts with irrelevant verbiage, but trying to find ‘gotchas’.
And, at the risk of pushing him over the edge into another one of his hissy fits, another aspect of his dependence on Identity Politics.
BTW, swifty, I did credit Marx, though maybe not Engels, for the Communist Manifesto excerpts—-you don’t need to scurry around comparing the words to see if you can play gotcha with that.
Though it is more up your alley than actually discussing politics.
I think what’s more interesting is everyone here’s apparent lack of interest in the plagiarism and subsequent dishonesty. It’s fun to watch people who love to claim the moral high ground sit by silently when one of their own tries to lie, cheat, and steal his way to… whatever tiredoflibbs thinks he is accomplishing.
nottooswift, no what is HYSTERICAL to watch is you flapping in the breeze as you use every pathetic excuse to avoid commenting on the FACTUAL reports in the thread.
Again, when a source is cited it is not plagiarism. The sources are the FACTUAL reports in the thread. You just can’t refute the FACTS and are afraid to admit it and making yourself look like a fool.
Jay Carney is made the fool since he has to LIE in order to back up the pResident’s LIES.
You should just swallow your pride and admit obAMATEUR is a liar when it comes to drilling as the FACTUAL reports confirm.
Keep flapping in the wind, there nottooswift. Sooner or later, you will have to again change your name so no one will remember your incompetence and cowardliness when they see “jonathan swift”.
Again Nottooswift, duplicate posts and obvious lies were deleted. There s no reason to post duplicate sequences of events. Once is enough. But you had to defend yourself in you dodging.
“yeah”
At least you acknowledge you needed an excuse for dodging the topic of the thread by looking for any excuse not to comment.
They aren’t duplicates if you’ve deleted all of the other instances, too. I keep wondering how long this blog is going to allow your rampant abuse of your moderation powers.
Nottooswift, again it boils down to the fact that you stated you could not respond to the thread because I “did not write the thread”. Facts are facts no metter how they are presented. Proper citation eas given.
But now you seem to have no problem in doing so with your one dimensional thinking. If you are going to lie at least be consistent. This was too easy to call out your pathetic dodging tactic.
For some reason you have a problem with basic reading comprehension, as you demonstrate in ALL responses.
“Nottooswift, again it boils down to the fact that you stated you could not respond to the thread because I “did not write the thread”. ”
No, I stated that responding to the thread would be pointless because you weren’t capable of synthesizing a coherent response on the subject as evidence by the fact that you didn’t. Not only that, but you know that you can’t, as evidenced by the fact that you tried to pass of somebody else’s work as your own.
Still sticking with the lies and as usual reading comprehension fails you.
More invalid ASSumptions on your part. I see you need to protect your dainty ego.
Pathetic.
I see we are resorting to outright lying, there notsoswift….
Your exact words.
Nottooswift: “It’s not like you even understand the subject. If you did, you’d have written your own material on it. So then why would I even bother responding to you? It’d be like telling a parrot that the phrases it is repeating aren’t logically sound.”
Hmmmm… You won’t respond because as you claim I did not write it. Yes, let’s just forget about the fact that material here is not original and is referenced as source material. Again, you have draw baseless conclusions from your faulty opinions.
Now that I have exposed you again for the liar you are. What other dodges do you have for us?
Again, I can’t find anyplace that this is a direct text match from. I also assumed, by the strange author name, that this was a guest column of some sort possibly. Either way, it isn’t immediately obviously the sort of foul play you engaged in, so it isn’t a fight I can reasonably pick. It does seem to be yet another way for you to try to conveniently change the subject from your plagiarism and moderator abuse, though.
definitelynottooswif: “Either way, it isn’t immediately obviously the sort of foul play you engaged in, so it isn’t a fight I can reasonably pick.”
I engaged in no foul play. Why do you maintain the lie? For someone who, always argues in shades of gray, you sure have drawn the line between black and white.
Just like the typical mindless liberal….
Who, exactly, is squealing about alleged “moderator abuse”? The same person trying to shift attention away from his pathetic inability to respond coherently to a single post, that’s who. The one who plagiarized a name to use on the blog.
One thing about having a post deleted—-once it is gone, you can pretend it actually said something that made sense. Hard to carry off, given the body of evidence supplied by the posts that remain, but hey, when a guy is desperate……..
It’s especially easy to pretend that there is no evidence of foul play when you delete it every time somebody posts it.
I don’t know what you are whining about because I have not seen the posts you claim have been deleted. But the term “moderator abuse” had such a melodramatic tone to it, it is kind of funny.
Very interesting thread and some great comments thus far. I see Jonathan is the only liberal who has had the guts to comment, and I really don’t expect to see any other liberal chime in as this level of discussion is way beyond their TMZ understanding of politics.
My two cents is this – it’s all about the balance. First of all, there should be little argument that government is most effective when administered from a local level as spelled out in the constitution, which restricted the authority of the federal government in favor of the states, and of which something that our country has veered too far away from. 50 laboratories of democracy would create a much stronger union than one massive centralized bureaucracy ever could, and if liberals really wanted fairness and equality, they would be insisting that more power be handed down to the local levels. Secondly, we do have a responsibility to take care of those who are incapable of taking care of themselves, hence – some level of socialism, which can be much more effective when controlled and administered at a state, or even a county level. All states already have programs in place and those programs are twice as effective as those administered at the federal level, leaving aside the waste of duplication of which the federal government is famous for. Anyone that advocates for a large centralized bureaucratic federal government is simply advocating for waste, fraud and incompetence as those are inherent too a centralized bureaucracy.
So the key is managing the balance. The balance between the federal and state authority, and the balance at the state level between public assistance and private markets.
and if liberals really wanted fairness and equality, they would be insisting that more power be handed down to the local levels.
Cluster, you’ve nailed one of the central tenets of Progressivism. How do you get a majority of people to follow you into serfdom? You promise fairness and equality; and not just fairness of treatment and equality of opportunity, because that won’t get you the allegiance of those who are too lazy to provide for themselves. You dress it up in pretty sounding words like “social and economic justice” and fund it with OPM. Look how it’s worked with blacks in this country. Liberal Democrats have been promising blacks fairness and equality for nearly half a century in exchange for their near-lockstep vote. And yet a high percentage of blacks in this country aren’t any better off than they were in 1965. Many, in fact, are worse off, as they’re simply back on the plantation that their ancestors escaped from 150 years ago.
And to Jonathan: you’re not doing any better job of winning people over to your POV than you did posting last fall as Corey. You left then, saying you were NEVER coming back, but you are back, and it appears you haven’t learned anything in the interim. If what you profess to know about government and politics was learned at a college level, I’d seriously consider demanding a refund of your tuition if I were you.
This is a great thread, and a long time coming. Looking forward to more in the series
“Cluster, you’ve nailed one of the central tenets of Progressivism. How do you get a majority of people to follow you into serfdom?”
By assuming the controversial predicate as an axiom. Oh, did you not mean to be begging the question?
“And to Jonathan: you’re not doing any better job of winning people over to your POV than you did posting last fall as Corey. You left then, saying you were NEVER coming back, but you are back, and it appears you haven’t learned anything in the interim. ”
I saw you claim this before, but I don’t know who “Corey” is, so I just ignored it. Who is he and why would you think I am he?
“If what you profess to know about government and politics was learned at a college level, I’d seriously consider demanding a refund of your tuition if I were you.”
Interestingly, they didn’t teach me a lot about politics during the course of my stay in the Natural Sciences department. I took one Government class that, if it had any subjective spin at all, tried to teach us that the two party system as it stands is okay. I certainly didn’t get a lecture on social equality in my Algorithms and Data Structures class, or instruction on analyzing governmental entities using Game Theory in my Digital Logic class. I know you guys love to think that Universities are big evil bodies brainwashing everybody into liberals, but professors actually still spend most of their time teaching or researching in their specialty, not trying to convince students to be Communists.
Oooooh, nice collection of irrelevant straw men, Jonny.
I saw you claim this before, but I don’t know who “Corey” is, so I just ignored it. Who is he and why would you think I am he?
Because a number of your arguments are almost word for word the same as those used by Corey in similar discussions. Maybe you just inadvertently “plagiarized” his work, heh.
You know, Spook, you’re right. I have had nearly identical discussions with Corey, who then disappeared, about the kinds of political choices available to us, and his arguments were the same as swifty’s.
And you know what? You never hear swifty talking when Corey is taking a drink of water!
Something to think about……..
Cluster,
This is actually one of the more sane posts I’ve read here in a while. There are legitimate discussions to be had about the role of government at various levels of government and the balance between the free market and government interference. The problem I’m having is convincing people here that there are even discussions that fine grained to be had. Not that what you are discussing in this post is actually that incredibly nuanced, but it is a lot more specific than “You’re either with me or you are a Communist”, which is mostly what I’ve been running into here.
The one thing I would like to note on the whole local versus federal government is that there are inherent inefficiencies to doing things on the local level, too. First, there are economies to scale to consider. Administering the same program in thousands of locations can sometimes cost a lot more than doing it from one, even if that one is somewhat inefficient. That is more frequently an argument for moving from the local to state level, but the incentive for conglomeration is there.
The other often overlooked effect is that it puts municipalities and states more in competition with each other. We like to think that free market competition always encourages efficiency, but that doesn’t always turn out to be the case when you are talking about entities whose income comes from taxation. You can already see this effect if you pay attention. Has your city or a city near you given monetary incentives to try to get businesses to come into town? What about when cities offer incentives to get professional sports programs to locate nearby? You end up in a competition to see who can give the most taxpayer money away. The more systems we move to work on the local level, the more this effect broadens, and cities are forces to walk the razor’s edge on their budget to keep people and businesses from moving away. But walking on the razor’s edge is what gets them into the huge budget trouble we keep seeing in cities across the country when we go into a recession.
It’s worth noticing that many of the effects I just described couldn’t have been an issue when the Constitution was written. There are other influences that made local governance more important to them, as well. A far away ruler would be completely unable to directly see to their wellbeing or happiness, which is the problem they faced with rule from England. Now, if the President wants to learn about the state of affairs in Los Angeles, he can read their local newspapers, call up the Mayor, or get on a plane and fly there.
This is why arguing that our government should be differently structured today than it was in the 18th Century does not mean that I believe that the things I believe should be changed were mistakes when they are written. They were an incredible set of premises and compromises that got this country off to a great start, but as I’ve said before, the wisest piece of the Constitution, and the part that has allowed it to survive to this day, is the Amendment process. The Framers recognized that they could not write a document that would be applicable, without change, hundreds of years later. We have to constantly re-assess all policy options, currently Constitutional or not, when formulating government; doing otherwise is a massive disservice to our Founding Fathers’ greatest achievement.
The other often overlooked effect is that it puts municipalities and states more in competition with each other. – Jonathan
But that’s the beauty of having 50 laboratories of democracy. Competition brings out the best in everything from people, to product to service. And more importantly, consumers, or citizens can vote with their feet and move to the state they like best.
Re: your cost to the states and economies of scale – if we were to have a more constitutional government, the states would be receiving the bulk of tax revenues to account, and pay for the added responsibilities, so it would be a wash. However, because local governments are more efficient, a lot of waste and fraud would be trimmed out, which should leave states with plenty of money to run the government and administer their programs.
I have to concur with Cluster that free enterprise (with limited regulations) in 50 laboratories (the States) could quickly find solutions and allow those less effective results benefit and adapt winning strategies quicker.
Jonathan actually has a solid post but I would beg to differ on the final paragraph in that if we did not move so far to the left (the reversal of Federal and State as far as power), adapted (through coercion when required) socialist spending boondoggles and lived (as a country) within our means–the Constitutional model with the Amendment process would still be our best method for ruling our people today.
It’s worth noticing that many of the effects I just described couldn’t have been an issue when the Constitution was written.
What is worth noting is that many of the things described either WERE issues when the Constitution was written, or could have been and probably were foreseen—if not in absolute detail, at least in the abstract.
Which is precisely why the Constitution was written the way it was. Which is precisely why the 10th Amendment said that if something was not specifically delegated to the federal government, or prohibited to the States, it was up to the States to do it if they wanted to.
I suggest that “economy of scale” is a minor consideration when compared to the cost of money lost while filtering through federal agencies, each of which takes its cut, and then falling into black holes of unsupervised distribution. A local entity, whether county or state, can keep a much closer eye on expenditures than can the maze of federal bureaucracy.
the wisest piece of the Constitution, and the part that has allowed it to survive to this day, is the Amendment process.
I think the wisest is the 10th Amendment, but as that is dependent on the process being in place in the first place, it looks like I agree. But we need to look at what policies and programs are now in place that do not fall within the boundaries of Constitutional acceptance, and which were put into place without going through the process of amendment.
I don’t agree with all the amendments, but I accept them because they are part of the Constitution and therefore the law of the land. What I do not accept is legislation, programs, policies that simply ignore the Constitution.
“But that’s the beauty of having 50 laboratories of democracy. Competition brings out the best in everything from people, to product to service. And more importantly, consumers, or citizens can vote with their feet and move to the state they like best.
Re: your cost to the states and economies of scale – if we were to have a more constitutional government, the states would be receiving the bulk of tax revenues to account, and pay for the added responsibilities, so it would be a wash. However, because local governments are more efficient, a lot of waste and fraud would be trimmed out, which should leave states with plenty of money to run the government and administer their programs.”
The economies of scale are probably less of a concern than the second issue I brought up. Governmental entities are not Corporations and free market competition doesn’t work with them the same way. A company’s margin is income from selling a product or service minus costs of providing that service. A governmental entity’s income, on the other hand, comes directly out of taxpayer pockets, and the concept of “demand” kind of goes out the window. Like I said, there are already places where this sort of behavior happens, and you already see cities sometimes dumping huge amounts of money into building stadiums for professional sports teams to get them to relocate. Adding other responsibilities to the local government and state government adds more venues for this sort of competition, and despite the age of this country, that’s largely unknown territory for us. People in 1700s and 1800s couldn’t get information on conditions in other locations in the country or move there nearly as easily as we can, so what was right for them isn’t necessarily right for us.
“What is worth noting is that many of the things described either WERE issues when the Constitution was written, or could have been and probably were foreseen—if not in absolute detail, at least in the abstract.”
Such as…? I respect the men who founded our country a great deal, but I find it highly doubtful that they anticipated something like instant information available in the format that we have it. I think a lot of people stray into the area of psuedo-religious reverence when it comes to the Founding Fathers and their predictive powers, but I’m not even sure most of them foresaw women and minorities being considered legal equals to white men.
“I suggest that “economy of scale” is a minor consideration when compared to the cost of money lost while filtering through federal agencies, each of which takes its cut, and then falling into black holes of unsupervised distribution. A local entity, whether county or state, can keep a much closer eye on expenditures than can the maze of federal bureaucracy.”
I’d argue that it depends on the program. States are big enough to have the sorts of inefficiencies you’re talking about anyway, and if it is a program that has a high startup and low marginal cost for servicing people, you’re not going to see gains by farming it down to lower levels government. I’m not saying it won’t happen anyplace, but even in the best cases, there is likely to be some amount of offset on any efficiency gained. I’m not saying it would bring the system crashing to its knees or anything, but I don’t think there is as much of a cost savings to be gained as many people think.
“I don’t agree with all the amendments, but I accept them because they are part of the Constitution and therefore the law of the land. What I do not accept is legislation, programs, policies that simply ignore the Constitution.”
Then how about you just go ahead and assume that any time I suggest something that you believe is Unconstitutional that what I am actually suggesting is that we amend the Constitution? That way, we can short circuit the whole Constitutionality debate and move right on into the merits of the suggestion itself.
“Now it is easy to scam the system, get a credit card so even the people at the store don’t know it is government charity. It is impersonal, at a great distance, and therefore devoid of the societal controls that local and personal charity has always had.”
The idea that programs run at the state level are anything but impersonal is pretty dubious. Even at the local level it gets pretty hard to believe once you move out of rural areas. What, then, are you advocating for? That we go back in time to when this was possible? That we get rid of all these hundreds of millions of people so we can go back to all knowing each other?
“What is worth noting is that many of the things described either WERE issues when the Constitution was written, or could have been and probably were foreseen—if not in absolute detail, at least in the abstract.”
Such as…?
Well, such as the propensity of people to become corrupted by power, and the necessity of limiting the opportunities to gain power by keeping it local and by dividing power at the federal level, as well as by denying additional powers to that level.
If you don’t like what the government is doing, really the only thing you can do about it is elect someone else. That is, fire the people you think are doing a bad job.
It is easier to fire a governor than a president. It is easier to fire a state Senator than a national Senator. It is easier to fire a mayor or a county commissioner than any national officer.
It works from the top down, too. You say a president can call people in another state to find out what is going on, even fly there to see for himself. But one man trying to keep up with 50 states is not reasonable. And according to the foresight of the Founders, he isn’t even supposed to.
According to them, he is supposed to stick to federal issues. They wrote this into the Constitution when they laid out specific duties, and they reinforced it quite forcefully when they added the 10th Amendment. (You know, of course, that the Constitution would not have been ratified if the Founders had not promised to add in the Bill of Rights, because citizens of the new country felt that the Constitution gave too much leeway to future power grabs. Of course you know that.)
Did the Founders know in detail what would happen in 50, 100, 200, 200+ years? Of course not. But they saw a lot of what lay ahead for future Congresses and Presidents early in the new nation’s history, when people started claiming that the federal government should do all sorts of things for all sorts of people. Their responses have been reprinted here, many times. I’ll reprint some of them for you again.
This is the genius of the Constitution. It gives a framework for governance at the federal level, and then it lets people make their own rules at state and local levels. It is designed to allow for all sorts of changes and accommodations at state and local levels, but to maintain a status quo at the federal level of severely restricted power and authority and specific duties assigned to each branch of federal government.
Your post actually sounded pretty reasonable, till you got to getting “…rid of all these hundreds of millions of people so we can go back to all knowing each other…” when you went off the rails again.
I don’t think issues in question deal with equality of women or minorities—these issues have been dealt with through amendments.
The Constitutional issues that concern Americans today turn, for the most part, on the federal government assuming larger and larger roles in the everyday lives of people. And this is done without going through the process of amendment.
We are giving vast amounts of money to people to provide sustenance, housing, and medical care—things not delegated to the federal government and therefore not allowed to it, as so clearly stated in the 10th amendment, and things once described as “charity”.
Efforts began soon after the Constitution was ratified, and the very men who wrote the Constitution, who argued over every word in it, who devoted their lives for months on end to create the document they thought would provide the best blueprint for governing the nation, immediately responded to these efforts.
“A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labour the bread which it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”–Thomas Jefferson
*****************************
“With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers (enumerated in the Constitution) connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.” –James Madison
******************************
In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees who fled from insurrection in San Domingo to Baltimore and Philadelphia, James Madison stood on the floor of the House to object saying:
“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” — James Madison, 4 Annals of Congress 179, 1794
*********************************
“[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” James Madison
And there are more quotes, more instances when the men who wrote the Constitution took pains to clarify the intent therein.
As for excesses like the EPA and interfering in private industry as shown in the GM takeover and the halting of drilling in the Gulf, these were well dealt with in the 10th Amendment.
And yes, I know that Jefferson was in France while the Constitution was being written, but he remained in constant contact with the authors in America and made his own contributions.
Jonathan,
“I think a lot of people stray into the area of psuedo-religious reverence when it comes to the Founding Fathers and their predictive powers, but I’m not even sure most of them foresaw women and minorities being considered legal equals to white men.”
is an incorrect statement if you look at the surrounding documents and the beliefs of the founders at the time. Women were considered equal and had the same inalienable rights as men, and they already realized there was something wrong with slavery.
I have often stated, and then repeated, that I have no problem at all with some degree of government intervention and even charity—but at the state and local level.
Our Constitution recognizes this need, and acknowledges it, in the 10th Amendment, when it states that local entities can do all sorts of things, including charity, as long as what they do is not otherwise prohibited by the Constitution. That freedom is built in, and placed where it belongs.
There was a time when charity was administered at a local level, by people who knew the people involved. They knew who had genuine need and who was just lazy, who had just lost a husband and breadwinner and who had gambled his money away. And those receiving aid knew who gave it. There was a humanity there, a connection, a sense of community.
Now it is easy to scam the system, get a credit card so even the people at the store don’t know it is government charity. It is impersonal, at a great distance, and therefore devoid of the societal controls that local and personal charity has always had.
Keeping the racism alive:
He (Jesse Jackson) added: “Blacks are under attack.” African American families are facing record home foreclosures and unemployment. Their children are burdened with student loan debt. States, particularly conservative ones, are passing voter laws that leaders know will disenfranchise blacks and other minorities. Meanwhile, the nation’s prisons are brimming with black faces, he said, and their numbers that suggest that the legal system is quicker to send blacks to prison than whites.
This is a very effective tool of the left. Divide people, blame one segment for the problems of the other, and promise to have the solution.
Ah, good to know that you get your commentary from Rush Limbaugh.
Jonathan — seriously? If that’s your fall-back line, you’ve lost, dude.
YUP, the LOSER LOST!!
This is a very effective tool of the left. Divide people, blame one segment for the problems of the other, and promise to have the solution.
a Loooong hot summer is coming….they are telling us what they are going to do…..
And the army of useful idiots has no freakin’ clue what they’re in for.
I would have to agree with Jonathon on one thing. There are many variations of the political systems. After all, why are chicoms so concerned that they will be flooded with refugees from noko?
No workers of the world unite there anymore? No international brotherhood of the proletariat? No classless paradise?
Nope, they just quietly send along anyone lucky enough to get out of noko to South Korea.
Lucky them.
GMB, just a little quibble here: I suggest that your comment There are many variations of the political systems would be more accurate if it said There are many variations WITHIN political systems
maybe we could send them a few……
Completely irrelevant comment deleted//Moderator
.giving you two of the angriest, loneliest humans on the planet
barry and the mooch?
or
al and je$$ah?
Yet I do not live in a fantasy world where I pretend to come from another planet, I do understand political theory, and I do know how to find the Shift key on my keyboard.
Oh, I also don’t need to play amateur shrink to try to find something to say—-I have actual ideas instead of inane kinda-insults.
Ama
tell the boys if they cant take the heat get out of the kitchen…they dont like you because you give them reasoned well written rebuttals for which they have no answer for and expose their stupidity for all to see.
keep up the good work
-I have actual ideas instead of inane kinda-insults…Amazona.
Hahaha, you crack me up, Ama.
In this thread alone:-
“He is too dense to grasp”
“Poor silly swifty”
“If he had a clue”
“If he had been able to overcome his laziness and his arrogance”
“You are so silly”
What part of your political philosophy would those words of wisdom fall into?
You are quick to criticise others who use insults to discourage debate but, for some strange reason, you do not have the ability to recognize when you commit the same offense. Why is that? Your posts are rife with snark and sarcasm. You may sneak in some ‘actual ideas’ from time to time, unfortunately, they are lost when you resort to personal insults hurled at whomever you are ‘debating’.
Because you hold yourself in such high esteem and think you are more knowledgeable in the realm of political theory than most others, excusing this behavior as being ok because someone else is doing it just won’t cut it. You are better than that, right?
It would be very refreshing, Amazona, if we could see more ‘actual ideas’ and less ‘inane kinda-insults’ in your posts.
cO
go back and re read arguing with idiots.then you may understand some of the verbiage here.
I see CO as usual you ignore the insults from anyone on the left.
Go away you bore us.
CO, obviously you observe very little, or you would have been able to observe that each of the comments that so deeply offended you, which are apparently seared—-SEARED, I tell you!—-into your brain are in the context of a statement which I then address.
As opposed to your fellow travelers, whose entire post efforts are nothing BUT insults.
And another point you miss is that I do not make these comments to discourage debate, I make them in response to the refusal of you guys to engage in debate.
As for me putting “more ideas” in my posts, why should I? You guys can’t keep up with the ones I do.
OT, but one of the best articles I’ve ever read at MarketWatch.
Try to remember this has nothing to do with political parties but rather the amount of systematic control the “ruling class” exerted over the ruled.
Not when communism is involved, the party and the government are one and the same.
“the party and the government are one and the same.”
Micro-managing the economy, as the Democrats try to do over and over (and failing each time), is effectively close to the same thing.
tired
you bet it is……..and who is the present day donks?
CPUSA
OOH BOY…..in rides ole je$$ah
Zimmerman can only be arrested if he broke the law, not because Jesse Jackson and protestors believe he should be. A grand jury is looking into whether the law was broken. So is the Justice Department. The idea that protestors should be able to pressure a grand jury in to doing what it wants is so out of whack with the very concept of justice, that Jackson makes a mockery himself of the justice system.
Never mind about guilt or innocence in the eyes of the law. Jackson wants to bring a rope and carry out a lynching. He wants an arrest even if one isn’t warranted.
When the two sides have such radically different concepts of “justice,” dialogue is impossible.
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Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/03/jesse_jackson_bringing_the_hate.html#ixzz1q3bI0zOO
spook
what happened to your outstanding avatar?
He’s off on a covert mission. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you, heh.
LOL
out with seal team 6?
UP DATE………to a political witch hunt and a public lynching.
Click to access Zimmerman_Martin_shooting.pdf
Think it’ll play to the mobs?
I doubt it, not with old race-baiting Al up there with his microphone, and the lynch mob mentality at work.
sure looks different from his “dad”
http://peopleagainstshittycop.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/pasc-tr1yv4n.jpg?w=630&h=231
My concept of political discussion:
1. Establish definitions
2. Establish foundational information—such as that set forth in the thread post
3. Declare which side of center on that political spectrum you find the best way to govern the United States AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL (Some here seem to have gotten the federal and state things all muddled up together.)
4. Defend the chosen model
5. Set out goals and agendas and then discuss whether or not they can be achieved at the federal level in either of the two basic political systems available to us now, or at the state and local levels
1 and 2 might be the same. The thing is, in no conversation with anyone whose general statements appear to place him on the Left have I ever been able to get 1 or 2 checked off, to be able to move on to the more detailed issues. Not in a face to face conversation, not in a blog exchange. Never.
There is such a skittishness on the Left about admitting to preferring a powerful central government with extensive control and authority, they simply duck and dodge, change the subject, attack the questioner, and in general do anything they can to avoid answering those questions.
This leaves me with two questions about their antics: Do they do this because they simply don’t know a thing about the two basic systems and are too lazy to find out, or do they really know but also know that an admission of such will inevitably lead to the next level of discourse, which is about the Constitution. So many on the Left profess to love and respect the Constitution, but they seem to know that if they get pinned down to a discussion based on their admission to preferring a large and powerful central government they will, if honest, have to admit that they do NOT respect the Constitution and do not feel it is the best blueprint for governing the United States. Because the two positions are mutually exclusive.
I think this is the heart of the conflict our resident Lefties feel. So they tapdance around questions, they engage in elaborate evasive tactics to avoid the questions, they ridicule the questions as if it would be beneath them to answer them, they flip and flop and squirm and wiggle and lie and attack and insult, but THEY DO NOT ANSWER THE QUESTIONS.
And so, no serious discussion ever takes place, because no definitions have been agreed upon. It’s as if people are arguing about the distance from A to B, but one is using feet, one meters, one yards, and one smoots. If you can’t agree on your form of measurement, you can’t discuss distance. There’s just a lot of yelling about “I say it’s 1, I say it’s 3,” and so on.
Marx said, in the Communist Manifesto, The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. But modern-day Leftists, no matter how near and dear to their hearts they find the planks of this manifesto, DO try to conceal their views and aims.
I find this interesting. And my pointing it out has upset many a blog Lefty.
Is your concept of political discussion applicable to all who comment here, Amazona, or just aimed at so-called leftist posters? If you do intend for it to be applied across the board, you may have to exempt more than a few conservative folks as I doubt that many of them could adhere to the five conditions set out in your lofty goal for this blog.
Once again, you prove that you are a very poor observer. Over the years I have been on this blog, every single conservative poster here has, at one time or other, stated his or her positions on each of the five points I made. A poster might state it in his own words, or he might say he agrees with the words another has posted, but each of these points has been covered, by the conservative posters.
And none of them has been addressed by any of the Leftist posters.
Feel like breaking the record? Stepping up and breaking new ground?
1. Define Left and Right as you see them
2-3. State your place on the political spectrum—large and powerful central government or a central government severely restricted as to its scope and power?
4. Why? (Historical records to support your position are helpful.)
Once these are established, we can move on to details, OK?
Oh, that’s right—you don’t have a say in anything that goes on in this country, you just poke your nose in and make snotty comments. Come back when you have a dog in the hunt.
CO, do you find these criteria of mine unreasonable?
CO, do you find these criteria of mine unreasonable?…Amazona
————————————————————————–
Whether I find the rules you put forth to be reasonable or unreasonable, Amazona, is, I’m sure, of little consequence to you. You certainly don’t need my, or anyone else’s, approval as you are entirely free to dictate any criteria your little heart desires. Knock yourself out.
cO
can you define the TEA party?
Sadly, Neocon, the Tea Party movement seems to have shrivelled up and blown away. Do you, or any of your buddies, still attend any of their protest gatherings?
In other words, the so-called Canadian misnamed Observer cannot address a single real issue, even such a simple one as stating whether or not my personal ideas of what it would take to have a political discussion are reasonable or not.
And he can’t define the TEA Party. He can snipe at it with half-baked Lefty lies, but when it comes to actually knowing anything about it, he’s just bluster without a fact or an idea in his head.
So, to sum it up, he comes to an American political blog not to talk about politics but to hurl snot-nuggets at people who do, evidently because he likes to insult people and obviously because he is totally ignorant of politics beyond the TMZ level of Identity Politics.
This has really been a fun thread. It started off with an insightful and relevant post that should be archived by all conservatives as it does such a good job of laying out the political spectrum and putting to rest some of the silly Lefty lies such as fascism being a right-wing construct.
And it lured empty-headed poseurs into spouting their canned rhetoric and cockamamie ideas, so they could be shown up as ignorant dupes who passionately support a system they don’t understand, and love to attack another system they understand even less.
What makes this special is that in this case the ignorance is determined, purposeful, because to maintain it they have to deny the facts in front of them, make up new histories, and in general work very hard to remain so ignorant.
I have often said that I respect Barack Obama. I think he is profoundly wrong in his political theory and allegiance but at least the man has studied his chosen political system, he understands it, and he is working from a position of knowledge of it to try to promote it and replace the American Constitutional form of government with it.
These silly and often pompous twits who come charging in here full of bombast and poorly understood lies, primed to attack anything they can identify as “conservative” even without having a clue about what “conservative” means do not deserve respect. They are no more than emotional whiz-bangs, wound up by their masters and set off to make a lot of noise. Some, like swifty, think that polysyllabic noise is more convincing, and some, like CO and baggi, don’t even try to pretend to offer ideas and just snipe, but so far not a one of them has approached this blog with a coherent political philosophy he is willing or able to explain and defend.
And that brings me back to the question: Do they really remain ignorant of the foundation, goals and agendas of their chosen political system, or do they understand it and support it because they truly do believe in it but also know that admitting it will expose them to hard questions they can’t answer about subverting the Constitution, the failure of their chosen system every time it has been implemented, and other difficult issues they just prefer to avoid?
Are mandatory, involuntary transvaginal probes a reflection of Ruler’s or People’s law?
Seriously. This is happening right now, and while Demcorats are outraged, the right is pretty much ok with it. In this scenario, who is advocating people’s rights and who is practicing tyranny?
Where does the injection of infinite undisclosed cash into the current political system fit into this chart? On the right I see “All Power In The People”…which people, exactly? All people? The poor? Billionaires? Virtually equally divided power per individual? Wealth doesn’t concentrate power among a few individuals at the expense of all the others?
What is the purpose of this exercise? Is the moral of the story to vote Republican? Somehow Mitt Romney is a representative of “All Power in The People” while the community organizer is a tyrant?
Or are we looking to a distant future where an actual conservative is in the running?
Is murdering an unborn baby Rulers or Peoples law?
http://littlemissattila.com/?p=25383
Point well taken. Tell Laura:
I, and maybe surprisingly most liberals, do not get pregnant in order to have an abortion. We believe it could, and should be extremely rare. The two things that would accomplish this are:
1.Well informed contraception use – currently (and ridiculously) under attack by the right.
2. A nation’s promise to embrace and support the miracle that resides in a mother’s womb for those who choose to have children, insuring that every child born has the chance to learn and the health to grow into an informed, productive, proud American citizen no matter the financial circumstances of it’s parent(s). Republicans seem to believe we should all just choose our parents wisely like Mitt.
1.Well informed contraception use – currently (and ridiculously) under attack by the right.
Clowny,
The way you present this, I’m not sure if this is your statement or out of Laura Bush’s book. Either way, the portion after the dash is a lie. There is nowhere that the USE of contraception is under attack. Nice try, though.
Hey, Laura Bush has the same right to be wrong as anyone else.
If one is determined to ignore the fact that a human life is being taken, and concentrate solely on the convenience of the female gestator, then of course abortion seems like a perfectly reasonable act.
Why drag Laura Bush into this? She is a private citizen expressing the view of a private citizen, as she is allowed to do under the 1st Amendment. Her personal opinion is totally, 100%, irrelevant to the discussion of the Left/Right spectrum of political choices.
Trying to drag her into the discussion does, however, illustrate two things we have been talking about: The ignorance of the Pseudo Left who support Leftist agendas with no knowledge whatsoever of the political system they are promoting, and their dependence on Identity Politics.
Are mandatory, involuntary transvaginal probes a reflection of Ruler’s or People’s law?
Seriously. This is happening right now, and while Demcorats are outraged, the right is pretty much ok with it.
Where besides a couple recent episodes of Doonesbury is it happening?
Creepy assclown, are these the People’s Laws or Ruler’s Laws:
Involuntary mandatory helmet laws
Involuntary mandatory toilet flush capacity laws
Involuntary mandatory shower head capacity laws
Involuntary mandatory handgun purchase background check laws
Involuntary mandatory health insurance purchase laws
Involuntary mandatory light bulb construction laws
Involuntary mandatory speech content laws
The list goes on and on.
What are resonable laws to one group are not so reasonable to another….
I say get rid of all of them…..
….but the liberal looters in Congress will never let them go.
When large numbers of people vote to curb the waste of limited resources for the greater good of the entire nation, aren’t the people exercising Ruler’s law? Isn’t that the whole idea behind “of, for and by the people?”
Maybe an argument could be made for Republican legislated government-mandated transvaginal probing being for the greater good of the entire nation.
Enlighten me.
Bozo,
I must have missed the vote on flourescent light bulbs – when was that?
When large numbers of people vote to curb the waste of limited resources for the greater good of the entire nation, aren’t the people exercising Ruler’s law?
Could you give an example of where a “large number” of people — something even remotely close to a majority, have voted to curb the waste of limited resources?
Well, for one thing, this mandate that has you so obsessed is a STATE law.
If you reject the idea that unborn human beings are not, for some reason, supposed to be granted the same right to life as a human being of a different age, then and only then does abortion move from Constitutional jurisdiction to that of the state.
Take a minute to read the 10th Amendment, for a change, and you will see that if something is not specifically delegated as a federal duty, and if it is not prohibited by the Constitution, then it is up to the state, or the People, to handle as they wish.
We are talking about federal law here, but you and swifty seem quite incapable of keeping federal law and states’ right separate. Or even knowing the difference.
I don’t know if this is cause or effect—you are a Lefty because you can’t tell the difference or you can’t tell the difference because you are a Lefty—but it is a common confusion among the politically illiterate.
freakzo would have to define his terms: “large numbers” and “waste” to start with. “Waste” is one of those subjective terms with a lot of personal judgment attached to it. And of course there should be a definition of “limited resources”—does this refer to oil, water, or OPM, for example.
creepy assclown: “When large numbers of people vote to curb the waste of limited resources for the greater good of the entire nation, aren’t the people exercising Ruler’s law?”
Large numbers? You mean like over 400 and less than 1000? That is how IMPOSED these mandatory laws outside of their authority granted by the Constitution. All those (except those that pertain to the 1st and 2nd amendment) are STATE issues.
Your “probe” obsession is ridiculous. You (and your fellow drones and looters) make it sound like the “probe” is worse than the actual abortion itself! But, of course, you miss the point entirely.
The Supreme Court has struck down waiting periods and extra tests for abortions, stating that it hinders the “right” of a woman to exercise her Constitution right to an abortion. Never mind, that the right is not explicitly stated in the Constitution (never mind that the “right” is a creation of legal mumbo-jumbo). But no one has a problem with curbing or hindering access to ones own 1st and 2nd amendment rights.
The “greater good” can only be applied at the federal level IF AND ONLY IF it is authorized by the Constitution! But we are not seeing that here. We are seeing the federal government MANDATING those examples which I posted earlier.
The “greater good” is more mealy mouthed rhetoric that convinces the ignorant of the perceived validity by those at the federal level to control anything.
As I said, get rid of all unauthorized mandates, follow the Constitution.
freakzo seems quite obsessed with the idea of a transvaginal probe. I doubt that he knows what it is, but being able to repeatedly use the term seems to please him. It’s probably as close as he can get to the anatomical area in question.
First, while it is technically possible to become pregnant without actual penetration, nearly all pregnancies begin with a transvaginal probe.
Second, the only people who have to endure the absolute AGONY and HORROR of having something inserted into their vaginas because of a law are women who have chosen to kill their babies, when the heartbeat of the baby can’t be detected by any other means. (And it almost always can.)
Third, there is a very good chance that the murder of the child will also involve a lot of vaginal probing, examination, etc. What do you think happens in an abortion? Whether something is inserted into the uterus (via the vagina) to kill the baby chemically, or whether it is done mechanically by a D&C or some other ripping apart of the baby, the method involves going in through the vagina and the dead baby coming out the vagina.
Why is it supposed to be such a horror to have an ultrasound probe inserted into the vagina of a female gestator who has decided to kill her baby, when the killing process will involve a lot more probing, inserting, and general activity in and around the same vagina when the lucky gal finally gets to off her child?
freakzo, you have already proved to us that you are totally politically illiterate, so you don’t need to keep adding to that body of knowledge with your silly posts, which do nothing but prove that you are not only ignorant in general of even the most basic of political theories, you can’t even accurately process the written word.
You’re so hung up on events and personalities, you are blind to actual political philosophy, which makes you nothing but a dupe.
I’m actually kinda flattered that you put so much energy into slamming me. Must be striking a nerve.
Bozo,
I am still really curious as to when the use of limited resources was voted on as you claimed. When was that? Please advise.
THIS is what floats your boat? Being so annoying that people notice?
Not that this is a surprise. You certainly don’t try to impress by being, well, impressive.
But if you think a few seconds of typing about a nonsensical post is proof that I consider you important, think again.
BTW, the closest you got to “striking a nerve” was participating with such success in the parade of political know-nothings, and therefore proving my point, once again, that the PL trolls are clueless about politics but really into Identity Politics, where you can fret about events and focus on personalities.
Soooooo much easier for people like you.
Cluster, you won’t get an answer, just as I never got an answer to my repeated request for the name of one single political system on Planet Earth that does not fit into the L/R continuum explained in the thread post.
GMB, your link is brilliant. I have seldom read anything so well-written, so compelling, and so poignant. I read it after I posted my own comments on the mechanics of abortion, which I had to do from a third-party position as I have never had one.
I strongly encourage everyone to read this. I’m bookmarking the site.
Thank you.
“difficult issues they just prefer to avoid?”
Willful ignorance.
The absolute disbelief, the seperation of the thought from the reality of the misery that leftwing ideologys have brought on this world. We are supposed to make things fair, we are supposed to make everyone equal.
The absolute belief that this time we will get it right. The absolute belief that human beings can be perfected. They have to keep trying no matter how much bigger the bone piles get.
“Power to the people!!? I am the people” Seppe Stalin
This has been fascinating to watch. Aside from the frantic effort of freakzo to divert the discussion away from actual politics to Laura Bush and his obsession with vaginas (and we can only hope the two are completely unrelated, a hope I am sure is devoutly shared by Laura) we have seen some really strange comments made—comments which I think illustrate the extremely limited scope of political knowledge that seems to mark the Pseudo-Liberal.
A lot of it has merely shown the lack of understanding of the difference between state and federal power. Time after time we are presented with an argument that is really about a state decision, from swifty’s opening salvo about government intervention in marriage to freakzo’s blathering about transvaginal probes.
If people don’t even know the difference between a state law and a federal law, how can they possibly make intelligent choices? More to the point, if they don’t even understand what is allowed to the federal government and what HAS to be kept at the state or local level, how can we expect them to make intelligent political choices?
Another thing that has come out is the overwhelming role emotion plays in the “thinking” of the PL. Just look at how often people on the Right are accused of “not liking” or “hating”, of making decisions based on those emotions. This is a natural outcome of seeing EVERYTHING through an emotional prism, and then assuming everyone else does, too. I’m beginning to think that this is a genuine response, based on a personal view that is so entrenched it is second nature and never examined, as much as it is a strategy to try to undermine opposing ideas. But there is clearly not much of a line between thinking and feeling with these people.
A third is the dependence on “information” from biased sources. We’ve all seen the spin put on various events by Leftist demagogues, such as the effort recently to recast Christianity as socialism, and before that the effort to claim the Constitution supported collectivism. Here we have seen such a mishmash of misinformation, we have to assume that while some of it may originate in poor education, at least some of it has to come from lies told by beloved Lefty demagogues such as Ranty Rhodes, Maddow, Schultz, Maher, et al. What strikes me is that this misinformation is never challenged,never exposed to critical thinking, but just regurgitated. Lincoln was a Lefty? Marx had nothing to do with Communism? Communism has nothing to do with dictators? It’s bizarre, but we see it, over and over again.
If you’ve been fed the wrong information, of course you are going to form the wrong conclusions. What baffles me is the determination to stick to the wrong conclusions. When I proved that Lincoln had NOT moved the nation to the Left by being president during the Civil War, that meme was just dropped. When I quoted parts of the Communist Manifesto, co-written by Marx, the claim that Marx was not related to Communism was just dropped. When I challenged swifty or anyone else to name even one single Earth government that did not or does not fit onto the L/R continuum as explained in the thread post, there was no response.
An intellectually honest person would say “Hmmmm—you know, I never actually READ the Communist Manifesto, but when I have heard my chosen political talking heads discuss it they always said Marxism was not the same as Communism. Looks like I’d better start re-evaluating what I have been accepting” and then go on to a serious discussion of the tenets of the C.M. When this does not happen, it does create the strong impression that the person either knew it was wrong when he said it or that he doesn’t care that it is wrong because it supports his emotion-based chosen political team or provides ammunition to use against the other team.
I feel that I have a good insight into all of this, because when I write about these things I am writing about myself, a few years ago. As an ex-hippie Flower Child, who had been in Haight-Ashbury, I was a poster child for the Clueless Left. If there had been blogs like then, I probably would have sounded much like swifty does now. (I NEVER would have sounded like freakzo.)
The reason I am so hard on people who simply reject alterntive points of view and conflicting information is because when I was finally exposed to alternative points of view, and conflicting information, through talk radio, it did challenge me to examine what I had held to be self-evident truths. I know what it is to re-evaluate ideas that had formed my entire political identity. It was not easy, and it was not a quick process.
But what pushed me to it was listening, on the radio, to callers who sounded exactly like swifty, who would make sweeping pronouncements and then refuse, absolutely REFUSE, to explain or defend them, or to answer direct questions. It was terribly frustrating for me, because I would be mentally begging the caller to please PLEASE tell me WHY I believed what I believed. It was the evasiveness, the efforts to change the subject, the answering a question with a question, that started to make me wonder why not one single caller from the Left could defend and explain his position.
But the people on the Right did.
So I started to read, and the more I read the more I realized what a dupe I had been.
I am accused here of being arrogant, but in this area I think I am entitled to be a little proud of the fact that I had the courage to examine my closely-held beliefs and discard those that could not be supported by fact. And this is why I am so pushy toward those who will not.
Ah, yes. Talk radio. The last bastion of intellectual discourse.
You must not be listening to Rush. He doesn’t take left-wing callers. At least not real ones.
Hurts my witto feewings that after I stopped calling you Ammo out of respect for civility here, you still call me freakzo. Oh well. My Marxist Medicaid social worker psychologist will help me get over it.
Actually, I never heard Rush until long after I had realized the error of my ways. Nice straw man effort, though. Don’t address any of the content of my post, just attack someone who is not even part of the post, and act like this is relevant. (And BTW, I seldom listen to Rush now, unless I am in a place with poor radio reception and his is the only show I can get. Funniest thing, he is always on the strongest stations…….)
And, as I so clearly stated, my epiphany was not based on what any talk radio host said, but on the inability/refusal of ANY Liberal caller to explain a position, defend a position, or answer a question about his position.
As I so clearly stated, I was frustrated because I held the same views as the callers but had come to realize I didn’t know WHY I held them, so when a Lefty caller would call in I would be tickled to hear my own position stated so firmly, so clearly, so emphatically. And then I would wait for an explanation of the position. A defense of the position. And I would wait………..and I would wait……….
And there was never an explanation, never a defense. What there WAS was the same kind of evasive crap we get from you—changing the subject, refusing to answer a question that was based on what the caller himself had said, efforts to drag in extraneous and irrelevant stuff and focus on that, and general inability or unwillingness to discuss anything beyond the original assertion.
It was THIS that got me to reading, to studying, and THIS that led to my realization that I had been a dupe.
But thanks for yet another brilliant illustration of what I was talking about.
So if you can’t let us know when the vote on limited resources was held, can you at least admit that you just made that up for effect?
And if you actually listened to Rush, he has a lot of liberal callers, and they often go to the front line. Just FYI. You might want to call in sometime.
And when you self-identify as a freak, as you do with your avatar, it’s silly to whine when your choice is noted and even respected by including it in reference to you.
Oh, and do call me Ammo—–I think it’s cool.
Just remember, in a war of ideas I still have plenty of ammo left, and you and your kind are still firing blanks——but are happy just making noise.
You have definitely landed on a huge obstacle that common sense conservatives and rational Americans currently face, and that is a completely dumbed down, ignorant and indoctrinated liberal base. I was watching a segment of Watter’s World on O’Reilly the other day, and Jesse was asking college students who they would vote for this fall. One girl quickly said Obama, and when asked why, her response was:
“Because democrats are the nice party and republicans are mean”
This statement is from a COLLEGE STUDENT, but unfortunately, I think this is as about as deep politically as most liberals go.
It’s about as deep as nearly all of the PL blog posters are, and they are the ones interested enough in “politics” to go out of their way to find a political blog and post on it.
Of course their politics have nothing to do with real politics, but even so they ought to be at least marginally more informed than this girl on the street, and they are not.
media matters and alinsky….
I came across this and thought of this thread. For those of you who take the time to read it, you might find it interesting. But those of you like Ama, will probably immediately dismiss it out of hand as more liberal poppycock. Without, you know, actually pondering what the author says because it runs against her meme.
Ama, you have no shame and should consult a therapist to address your psychological need to always be right. It might make you a nicer person if you forgo your smugness, your condescendtion and your arrogance. You really are nothing more than an unhappy, miserable witch.
http://www.guernicamag.com/features/3541/robinson_03_01_2012/
At least she makes a pretty good case for why she’s right, something that you Lefties rarely, if ever, do. All you ever seem to be able to do is call her names.
jr
alinsky 101
Bitchiethekid:”Ama, you have no shame and should consult a therapist to address your psychological need to always be right. It might make you a nicer person if you forgo your smugness, your condescendtion and your arrogance.”
I can’t speak for Ama, but am sure you would encourage the pResident and his fellow proggies to do the same.
Come on, obAMATEUR BLAMES EVERYONE ELSE FOR HIS FAILURES SINCE HIS POLICIES ARE ALWAYS THE CORECT ONES.
Come on, grow a spine bitchie.
Maybe you should ask the moderator to ask the “posting gods” or “posting non-entities” to make this a separate thread because it really does not belong on a thread about political systems. Nevertheless, I will answer about what I think for as far as I could take the article.
“The meaning of it is much disputed—does it mean equality of opportunity or equality of outcome?”
No dispute–in the US of A—it is ‘equality of opportunity’ and the outcome cannot be foreseen but is determined by the rugged individualism of each person. Any form of ‘equality of outcome’ prior to birth will only be found in the Communistic systems and for the vast majority it doesn’t turn out well. Ask Shin In Geun.
“…their most common problem is also their deepest problem—a tendency to undervalue their own gifts…”
Jaime Escalante proved that time and time again yet the folks currently running public education insist on dumbing down to the lowest common denominator when they are not indoctrinating the kids with the agenda of the Left.
“On CNN.com I came across an article which affirmed that liberals and atheists have higher IQs than conservatives and the religious.”
CNN. Really? For an instructor or supposed one, s/he used sources that would have gotten me failed out of college.
“Liberal is defined for these purposes ‘in terms of concern for nonrelated people and support for private resources that help those people.’ ”
Liberal in these terms, which is very similar to a ‘liberal arts’ education, has no political party and at that point the author, Robinson, who “…looks to the stars for clues about our nature” conflates political beliefs with bits and pieces from an evolutionary psychologist, Kanazawa, who is doing a study at (for?) London School of Economics using American data on what? “It’s unnatural for humans to be concerned about total strangers.”
Basically, even as the author states, it can easily be disproved and reads like a great deal of pseudo-intellectual drivel which it clearly is but you can always join her looking to the stars for clues about our nature because this is not it. It has been proven (in dollar terms) that Conservatives, and the Religious, donate at rates that should embarrass Liberals; however, that may be different if you are talking about Liberals using OPM because it sure isn’t theirs.
Oh, mitchie, you really do not pay attention, do you. I have said right here on this blog that I am often wrong, can be wrong several times before breakfast, I just wrote a long post about how profoundly wrong I was for years.
If you want to prove me wrong, though, you will have to do it with coherent ideas, expressed coherently, and not just by playing amateur shrink and calling names. (I have seen some of your posts before they were deleted and find it amusing that you, of all people, whose posts are so often proofs of a severely disturbed mind, reeking of vulgar and violent imagery and too often reduced to nothing more than crude name-calling, should declare that I of all people need therapy.). It appears that you are reduced to this impotent state of rage and ad hominem attack merely by being presented with information you cannot refute.
I did read your link, and while I agree with db that it is pseudo-intellectual drivel, I would add ‘pompous’ to the description. There were a couple of decent ideas buried in the mass of polysyllabic blather, but on the whole it seems to be written by a self-defined “intellectual” to try to impress other self-defined “intelllectuals” and gave the impression that the author was paid by the word.
As for “liberal” poppycock, I didn’t see much of anything political in it. Why did you describe it as “liberal” ?