Leftist quandary: Hong Kong protestors wave American flag, sing our national anthem

Discussion in 'Political Opinions & Beliefs' started by Medieval Man, Aug 13, 2019.

  1. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    What does this mean? Reagan funded the contras to overthrow the Sandinistas ... I don't think there is a Chinese version of the contras -- but if there were, should we support them? Parachute in some C4, some guns?

    Talking of Republican Presidents ... when the Hungarian people rose up in 1956 to throw out the Russians, what did Eisenhower do?
    When the Czech people were faced with a Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, what did we do?
    When the Polish workers formed Solidarnosc, what did we do, in practice?
     
  2. Golem

    Golem Well-Known Member Donor

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    He supported the contras which he considered supported Democracy, and wanted to overthrow Sandinistas whom he considered communists.

    I don't know if he was right or not. But in the case of China/Hong Kong, there is no doubt.

    I already said what I believe Trump should have done. But I do not advocate doing anything illegal.
     
    Last edited: Aug 16, 2019
  3. xwsmithx

    xwsmithx Well-Known Member

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    Seen at B&Q:

    [​IMG]

    I think we're thinking of the same time period, and you gave several examples of my point, that the old Democrats weren't all that chummy with the communists. And while you are correct, the "conservative" movement didn't really get a foothold until the 1950s, I'm reading a book right now that traces conservative thought all the way back to Edmund Burke in the 1700s. Personally, I find that definition of conservatism lacking in that anyone can be a conservative, from a communist in the Soviet Union in 1990 to a monarchist in 1788 France to a Tory in the American colonies in 1774 to a cannibal in Papua New Guinea in the recent past. I would trace American conservative thought back to John Locke, Adam Smith, and the founding documents of American history. Some specific threads of American conservative thought trace their way back to the Bible, Aristotle, and Plato. These entailing very specific policies rather than a rear-guard action against change, an American style conservative is a conservative in the Burke-ian sense in the US today but would have been a radical in the Soviet Union, a partial supporter of the French Revolution (as Thomas Paine was), a supporter of the American Revolution, and something completely alien in Papua New Guinea. So the two definitions don't overlap by a whole lot.

    Burke had some good ideas, though, like the necessity of balancing freedom and law to achieve the perfect liberty. That's essentially where I am... too much freedom leads to chaos, too much law leads to the nanny state or the oppressive authoritarian state.
     
  4. Moonglow

    Moonglow Well-Known Member

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    Man what a thesis with revisionist history thrown in.
     
  5. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I cannot tell you .... it us such a pleasure sir ... after stepping over and around the San-Francisco-sidewalk-thought of some, not all, of the adolescent Leftists on this board [however will they cope when Mr Trump has retired?], to encoutenter someone who knows who John Locke and Edmund Burke are ... I cannot tell you...

    Yes, the word 'conservative' is even worse than the word 'socialism' for being used in multiple ways, often diametrically opposed.

    A 'conservative' in the collapsing Soviet Union could have been what the Russians call 'a man of the old formation', yearning to Make the Soviet Union Great Again by returning to the days when that amiable son Georgia made the world tremble. Or he could have been one of those Russians who circlulated the clandestine writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as a friend of mine did and thereby hangs a tale for another time. Or he could even have been -- I met some -- an excited young man who had just read some of the works of an 'Austrian' economist in Russian translation and was looking forward to seeing them implemented in his newly democratic native land. (I lived there for a few months in the mid-80s, accompanying my then wife who was a Fulbright Exchange Scholar , gave a (short) lecture tour there on computational linguistics at the end of the 80s, was back again several times in the 90s -- my then wife, a Russian-speaker, edited a newsletter on economics in Moscow for a year ... dizzying times, when bliss it was to be alive but to be young was very heaven... eagerly anticipating the establishment of a liberal democracy all the way out to Vladivostok .... and then ....)

    Under the right circumstances all three of these kind of 'conservative' could have been shooting at each other.

    If you are not familar with him, you would probably enjoy reading some of the ideas of the 'General Semanticist' Alfred Korzybski -- the Wiki entry is adequare -- who blames it all on an inappropriate use of the verb 'to be'. His followers take things too far, as did he -- sort of like the Randians -- by trying to write speak and think without the use of this verb altogether, but his essential idea is sound. Nothing more, really, than what every bright 12 year old does for a while after he discovers the delights, which will later become the consolations, of philosophy -- and runs around annoying the adults by demanding that they define their terms.

    And American 'conservatism', yes -- ranging from Reason Magazine -- well, an ally anyway on many issues -- through National Review -- over to First Things ... neo-cons, Buchananites, Darwinian Conservatives, religious conservatives, Harry Jaffa and Thomas Woods .... a cacaphony of voices ... not that most people on the Left read us, or much of anything actually, but if they did .... it makes the differences between The Nation and The New Republic look like an argument between people who want their steak medium-rare on the one hand and rare on the other. (Nothing new here I guess, since both of these flagship liberal publications endorsed the truth of the Moscow Trials.)

    Liberals and Communists is an interesting bit of history. ('Liberals' rather than 'Democrats', is more to the point, although it was not for nothing that John Nance Garner, at a national meeting of that Party, I think it was, raised a toast to the "47 States and the Soviet of Washington".) I want to write something someday to explain to conservatives how it was that a sensitive young man -- like Whittaker Chambers -- could, without becoming a moral monster, transition into an agent of the NKVD, and then out again, and how pas d'enemie à gauche made such sense in those days -- the conservatives and neo-Nazis are not an adequate analogy -- how you could be a decent human being and a supporter of Joseph Stalin, and how a good liberal could think it necessary to co operate with people who were so dedicated in the struggle for Negro rights and industrial unionism, even though they found it logically necessary and logical to exclude them from the governing board of the American Civil Liberties Union. (Alger Hiss lived in the same building as another wife's parents and I once shared an elevator with him... he looked like a nice old man and probably was.)

    I am so looking forward to agreeing and disputing with you. We should probably exchange reading lists, as well as life histories. (I was a very serious Marxist for two decades so can be a sort of reference book if needed. I've been chased down a dark road in Tennesse by angry conservatives , although at the time they were probably conservative Democrats, who didn't want their Blacks to vote, so I'm up for anything modern-day conservatives want to throw at me in the way of less physical arguments. But we'll probably agree on more than we disagree on. )

    Love that Home Depot sign by the way. Don't let BLM know where it is!
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2019
  6. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I don't think you are using the term 'revisionist history' in the accepted sense, at least as applied to American history -- I learned some of the latter from a leading revisionist, by the way, a disciple of William Appleman Williams, although I don't suppose that would mean anything to you.

    However, here is an opportunity to draw a sword for Truth and defeat Error. A bit more difficult than saying 'Donald Trump white supremacy' but perhaps more valuable.

    So, go ahead ... point out where I'm wrong. I shall listen in this spirit, with the appropriate change in the object of the plea:

    “O Lord, I am a fool, and not able to know the truth from error. Lord, leave me not to my own blindness, either to approve of or condemn this doctrine; if it be of God, let me not despise it; if it be of the devil, let me not embrace it. Lord, I lay my soul in this matter only at Thy foot, let me not be deceived, I humbly beseech Thee.”
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2019
  7. xwsmithx

    xwsmithx Well-Known Member

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    Thanks. Among American conservatives, I think there are two types, best exemplified by Rush Limbaugh and William F. Buckley... One is the knee-jerk conservative, the right-wing equivalent of the knee-jerk liberal, who spouts opinions but doesn't really have any intellectual depth, and the other is the thinking conservative, who reads books, thinks philosophically, and tries to find a consistent and logical basis for his views, even if they sprang fully-grown from childhood. I try to be the latter.

    Exactly.

    Another word that gets abused a lot is "equality". Both the left and the right champion equality, but they mean very different things to each side. To the right, equality means equality of opportunity, equality under the law, an equal chance to make something of one's life. To the left, equality means equality of outcome, whether that be in numbers of each race getting to be doctors, number of men and women in STEM fields, wages, wealth, or percentages in prison. And any variation from equal outcomes must necessarily be a result of racism and bigotry, or greed, or theft, or colonialism, or a dozen other explanations rather than individual talent, effort, and personal choices.

    I'll check it out.

    I have to agree with you here. The gulf between the old right and the new right was enormous, and Trump seems to be taking us back to the old right with his trade wars. The only thing he hasn't stumped for that characterized the old right is the gold standard. I half expected him to endorse isolationism, which characterized the right before WWII. For myself, I'm very much a neo-con, I believe in free trade and strong borders, an active American diplomacy and a strong military, and engagement with the enemy where he lives, not where we live.

    Interesting views. I would probably quibble a bit about being a decent human being and supporting Stalin; I think we made a drastic mistake in WWII providing the Soviets with any support, and that's how a third of Europe ended up under the yoke of communism for 45 years. But we can argue history another time.

    Thanks. I'm interested in your change-over story. There are far more from the left who have moved to the right than vice-versa, but as someone who started over on this side, I find their stories fascinating. There's a whole series of videos on YouTube called #WalkAway made by Democrats who have switched to the Republican party. Some of the most interesting and occasionally moving stories are from those you don't expect, like blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and homosexuals. Brandon Straka, the founder of the movement, is himself homosexual. But what's your story? How did you go from Marxist to conservative?

    Actually it's from over your way, at B&Q, or whatever it's called. I would imagine it was next to the off-white power accessories and the black power accessories, but you can't see those in the pic.
     
  8. struth

    struth Well-Known Member

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    Well nobody can name the protestors; and because China is a left wing dictatorship, they have all the guns and power
     
  9. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Hear, hear. My wife and I used to holiday (as the Brits say) in the US every year for six weeks or so, in a little VW camper van a friend of mine kept for us out in the country near Austin. Driving those long American distances, I would listen to Limbaugh for a whlle, and he did make me laugh, although my very English wife didn't find him funny at all. But as a deep thinker, or even an adjective-free one ... no way. Lenin made the distinction between 'agitation' and 'propaganda', defining 'agitation' as presenting one simple idea to many people, and 'propaganda' as presenting many complex ideas to a few people. And I think if you're doing agitation, you're almost forced to over-simplify. And there are worse than Limbaugh ... you probably know/knew about Michael Savage? Just the laws of the market as each newly-entered competitor tries to capture market share further and further out, or lower and lower down the IQ distribution.


    Yep. Someday we'll be choosing our descendants' genomes, everyone will have an IQ in the sixth Standard Deviation at least, plus all the other desirable cognitive and emotional features which are the product of our biology, like empathy and impulse-control. Then we'll have eliminated the real source of extreme inequality, and, as the robots do all the no-mind-needed work, we can begin to make the leap from the Kingdom of Necessity to the Kingdom of Freedom. How I would love to spend just a week in that world!


    I must say we could probably argue about how the social environment actually impacts our ability to make good personal choices, and the varied opportunities it gives us to express our talents. Do you recall the drug dealer in The Wire who is attending evening classes in Business Studies? But another time or place.

    As I said, we need to swap reading lists.



    A neo-con, eh? Well, I was one as well, and still am, except not in foreign policy. "A liberal who has been mugged by reality" as the saying has it. When Bush first mooted invading Iraq, I remember quoting Robespierre, of all people, to the effect that "People do not love missionaries with bayonets". And then ... one day after finishing a lecture on Boyce-Codd Normal Form or something to my university class, which had many Muslims in attendance, I made a disparaging remark about the upcoming invasion, perhaps catering to my Muslim students a bit ... and then afterwards a young woman from the class came up to me ... and she tore a strip off me! She was an Iraqi .... "You don't know what it's like living under that monster!!! You are our only hope!!!" ... it didn't help that she was beautiful. I felt terrible. And began to hope ... well... maybe it will work out. (I read somewhere that some academic Arabists had similar experiences -- they didn't realize that their nice civilized graduate students might not represent the 'Arab Street'.) I also had two Iranian girls, one whose parents were Tudeh Party supporters (the Iranian Communists), the other whose parents were Monarchists ... best of friends and they looked hopefully, I think, at maybe getting the assistance of the 82nd Airborne at some point so they didn't have to wear chadors back home when they went outside. Oh well. Waiting is.

    And so I hoped and hoped .. that purple finger ... Christopher Hitchens, whom I admired tremendously, played a role ... I had read Kieran Malik, The Republic of Fear. I was always more a National Review guy than an American Conservative guy anyway ... I recall an email exchange with a social-democrat peacenikky ex-wife, saying to her, "Well, maybe they won't appreciate missionaries with bayonets, but what about missionaries with shopping malls?" I descovered a group of Maoists -- no kidding -- or sort-of-ex-Maoists in Australia who were pretty smart and who provided a Marxist rationale for the invasion --- American imperialism, the last super-power, carrying through the bourgeois democratic revolution, opening the way to socialist revolution (isn't the world complicated?).

    Anyway, I think I was wrong wrong wrong. I had a last fling with democracy-exportation with Libya and the 'Arab Spring', but it was just an illustration of Dr Johnson's observation that a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

    However, of course we have a huge interest in seeing 'the end of history' (heard him speak in London soon after that book came out), I just think this needs to be done, can only be done, in a different way. I have heard that "If we don't stop them over there we'll be fighting them over here" before but that was in 1967 at Tigerland before the Drill Sergeant took us out to the firing range to learn how to use these new M16s. Wrong then and wrong now I believe. Of course at the end of the day, as old Bismarck said, all the great questions of mankind are settled not by parliamentary debates (or UN resolutions), but by blood and iron, and we've got to willing to do the necessary, when it's necessary, and stay tooled up, although today it's not iron forges but silicon ones we have to stay ahead in.

    Incidentally, how do you figure a Senior Editor editor of the late Weekly Standard, coming out with this? An editor of American Conservative, sure. But the Weekly Standard ????

    Okay. Before absolutely condemning Communists who looked the other way when stories of the holodomar filtered out, etc ... check out how the average American reacted to My Lai. People just hate cognitive dissonance.


    Of course! "White Goods", just like "White Coffee"! I should have twigged it instantly from the form factor of the telephone jacks ... of course you could never have a 'White Power' sign in the US.

    They say "When America sneezes, Britain catches a cold," but there is usually a delay of several years. I don't think we have males entering into female athletics events yet, but it will no doubt come. We absolutely have the same grim, humorless ultra-feminist Cotton Mather types in the academy here, although the 'transgender' thing has got them fighting among themselves, which is a real pleasure to see.

    Certainly the PC purge in academia is well under way. Google 'Noel Field'.

    Over here, local County Councils have some of the same powers states do -- it's very different of course -- and the PC disease is very strong in some of them. There was one county -- Rotherford I think --where for years, local Muslim men would go down to the homes for vulnerable young girls who had been 'taken into care' by the Council -- there is a white underclass here which is very much a parallel to the American Black underclass, all the same social pathologies -- and they would invite them out, groom them, and then these young girls would be rented out, passed around, subjected to the usual male perversions.

    Everyone among the police and social workers knew about it, but because the perpetrators were Muslims -- and over here, "Islamophobe" has the same black-magic effect that "white supremacist" has on your liberal boobies over there -- no one did anything about it. Finally it got too bad to cover up, and now some of the perps are doing prison time. But no one really questioned why this had happened, except the usual suspects on the Right.

    On the other hand, there is a certain kind of deep British common sense which, I am sorry to say, Americans don't seem to have much of -- our gifts are otherwise -- also a kind of special sense of humor, no doubt allied to the same psychological source. I think the fellow who wrote Notes from a Small Island spotted this. This deep appreciation of irony, of the inability to remain solemn in the face of gross affronts to common sense, plus a deeply ingrained sense of fair play, will protect them for a while, I hope forever. You've probably read about what happened to Roger Scruton. I think I posted something about this affair a few days ago.

    More follows.
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2019
  10. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yes, switchers are interesting. One would think that they are either people of some intellectual seriousness, obedient to Popper's injunction to always seek disconfirming information for their beliefs and always following the guideline of asking, for each belief they hold, "What evidence would make you change your mind?" ... or, they are weak, impressionable people, swaying with the popular breeze ... Vicars of Bray. But who knows why we change? There is probably a sub-branch of that sub-branch of psychology called psychology of religion which studies conversion-psychology. I think both Left and Right can agree that when someone leaves the other side and comes over to ours, it was due to some great strength of character which allowed them finally to leave the Dark Side and embrace the Truth, but when someone from our side leaves for theirs, it was clearly due to some terrible flaw in their character to which they finally yielded.

    Actually, I haven't changed as much as it might look. I think it's @Mac7 who taunts me from time to time by congratulating me for being a principled liberal, and as I thought about it, well ... yeah, I'm more of a FDR/JFK guy than a Reagan/Bush (jr) guy in terms of my optimism about the amelioration possible through a wise government program. And I've been an atheist since 14 and have never seen the least reason to have doubts ... or rather, not to doubt. Although I do take to heart what's-his-name's view that a true conservative believes in a 'transcendental order' -- which in my case is the vague belief that our explanation of the universe has to someday go way beyond seeing it as little partcles bouncing off each other, even if they're doing it according to Schroedinger's Wave Function -- I mean, how do we explain consciousness? And I'm still some sort of historical materialist. (Marx and Engels were great believers in the progressive role of the bourgeoisie, especially its globalizing attack on backward cultures. Just read the Communist Manifesto.)

    If I could make up labels rather than having to choose one from the shelf, I think I might call myself a 'Civilizationist/Common-senseist-/Civil-conversationalist. CCC for short, but I don't mind adding a fourth C for 'conservative.', of the Burkean sort.

    I think National Review's founding editorial board, in its majority or nearly so, had been Marxists of one sort or another ... Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Frank Meyer ... of course they 'came over' when the wind in America was blowing very strongly to the Right ... but then it was doing so, in part, when Communism seemed to be in invincible advance ... the neo-cons were responding more to the manifest failure of liberalism to solve America's social problems, plus what also looked like Communism's advance in the Third World, but not in an atmosphere of semi-hysterical domestic anti-Communism....

    Some of the best liberals used to be conservatives, and are the better for it. Michael Lind and Gary Wills come to mind.

    I haven't changed the deep reflex-emotional values I had in 1960: sympathy for the underdog, a strong belief in human progress, and an absolute loathing for liars.
    I just got mugged by reality. Well, it took twenty years of mugging to raise deep doubts and another ten or fifteen before I reassembled some more-or-less coherent worldview. (Do remember, for me, in my youth, conservatives were people who wanted me dead. Or they were like the lady on our school board who opposed teaching Russian in the high schools. I can tell you stories ...)

    You've probably read Neo-Conservatism, Autobiography of an Idea . Irwin Kristol says in there that he never regretted for a moment his youthful experience in the Trotskyist movement, and I feel the same way. And I learned a lot there, how to recognize social systems in the process of disintegration and, hopefully, how to carpe diem when the time comes. The hours we spent studying successful and unsuccessful revolutions .... you want to know what the Bolsheviks did wrong in seizing the Winter Palace, I can tell you. How the KPD screwed up in Germany, three times? What went wrong in 1927 in Shanghai? What should have been done in Spain in 1936? The United Front tactic? It was like working on a ******ned Master's Thesis .. while selling the paper down at the docks at the same time ... today you're a 'Marxist' if you can manage to set an American flag alight and some of them can't even do that it seems ... kids nowadays ....

    My last lingering nostalgia for full real socialism was finished off when I engaged with the Socialist Calculation Question, believe it or not. If you haven't read it, get Francis Spufford's Red Plenty. Brilliant.

    It's not an intellectual justification, but another thing that attracted me to the conservative movement was it took ideas so much more seriously than the liberal side did. (Marxism is like conservatism that way, actually.) Both liberalism and conservatism are at root dispositions, not ideologies. And there is no doubt that the Left have the better set of middle-level thinkers -- we have no equivalent of The New York Review of Books, despite the Claremont namesake. But you search in vain for high-level thinkers on the Left (genuine Marxists of the Old School excepted.) Or at least so it appears to me.

    You'll note in 'debates' here .. while there are some civil and reasonable people on the Left (really, they're in the Center, most of them), and some of them can make very cogent criticisms of some of the ills of capitalism -- especially the main one, growing inequality -- there are so many -- probably just kids -- who know nothing, and, far worse, lack personal honesty in debate. I sometimes read the comments on all those wonderful YouTube videos exposing Leftist idiocy, and there you maninly get young Rightists making snappy one-liners ... but I suppose the YouTube comments section encourages that. But in debate forums, you would expect something more. Sometimes I watch those videos where Jay Leno goes around American campuses and asks questions like "What country is the Panama Canal in?" ... and I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Such nice kids, such empty heads. But it's probably not a representative sample.

    Back to work.
     
  11. Golem

    Golem Well-Known Member Donor

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    Exactly! So, from Trump's point of view, his family business can make a bigger profit from communist China than they can make from a Democracy.. And, for that reason, he's the first President that, when faced with a movement for democracy that opposes a communist regime, refuses to support, even verbally, the democratic movement.

    You got my point!
     
  12. xwsmithx

    xwsmithx Well-Known Member

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    Yeah, good point. And then there's Alex Jones below Michael Savage. Who are the intellectual leaders on the right now? Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro?

    You're much more optimistic than I am. The lower classes are outbreeding the upper classes by more than 2 to 1 and the lowest classes by 4-1. They aren't going to wait around while you play with your genetic selection games. Even in low IQ India, the Muslims have a lower IQ than the Hindus and will soon overtake the Hindus in number of population.


    I often wonder how much influence parents and/or genes have on our political views. We know from the 50's and 60's that having conservative parents doesn't prevent the kids from turning out uber-liberal. I heard one author point out that good economic times breeds liberals and bad economic times breeds conservatives, and Republicans presiding over good economic times and vice versa essentially accounts for the swinging pendulum that is politics. But how does that affect the individual? Anecdotally, it seems that the more conservative minorities have at least some Anglo-Saxon genes running through them... think Lauren Chen, for example.


    I get the impression that your reading list is WAY longer than mine. Of course, I have divided my time among many topics rather than just politics.


    I opposed the Iraq war as well. We had Saddam contained and were already engaged in a war, with Islamic extremism. Iraq only diverted us from our purpose and made us seem like the bad guys. Best I can tell, the only reason we invaded Iraq a second time was because Saddam had put a hit out on Bush's father.

    There's an example of rationalization run amok.

    Yep, both of those only created more problems than they solved. I think the same thing is true with Hong Kong. We can sympathize with the protestors and put pressure on the Chinese not to crack down, but in the end, we must stay out of it.

    Yeah, I still believe that. Same with China. We have to keep the 7th Fleet on their doorstep because they already are trying to put ships on ours. China bought the biggest port in Panama, essentially giving them control of the canal. Macchiavelli said you delay war at your own expense and to the advantage of your enemy.

    You never know how restrained someone is being in his/her writing. I restrain myself a lot on this forum. Sometimes I slip and express how I really feel and usually end up having my post deleted and being warned by an editor. I haven't finished that article, but I would add that a lot of Russians were frightened by what was going on in Chechnya and Putin put a stop to that, too.


    That may be so, but they had plenty of advance warning. The reports of the Holocaust started trickling in months before the first camp was liberated. The My Lai massacre had no such warning. As an aside, I was surprised/not surprised that the girl in that iconic photo running naked down the road burning from defoliant is alive and well and living in Canada. I think what My Lai and Abu Ghraib teach us is that there are always going to be some bad apples in the bunch, even among such a good people as Americans.


    That's one of those innocent things that can be taken the wrong way, of course. I remember the uproar a few years ago because someone used the word "n!ggardly" in a sentence. The etymology of the word has nothing to do with race, but of course people heard it the way they wanted to hear it. Edit: Oh Jesus H. Christ, even this thing's censor-bot blocked it!

    I usually hear that in relation to Canada, and usually in an economic sense rather than culturally. I think in many ways the Brits are ahead of us on the cultural curve, and that curve is rather pointed downwards. We've got the feminists and the trannies fighting over here, too. There's even a name for them, TERFs, trans-exclusionary radical feminists.

    Two jokes from the culture war: Know what I like best about conservative women? No penis.
    Couple of jokers put a transmission in the women's bathroom in the Florida statehouse. Think about it.


    I don't know how much of that is overt and how much is covert. Like you don't see open firing of conservatives, but anytime a conservative retires, he's replaced by a liberal. It certainly seems to be getting a lot worse. One liberal pointed out that the ratio of liberal professors to conservative ones used to be about 4:1. Now it's 12:1.

    Liberal professors outnumber conservatives nearly 12 to 1, study finds

    https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/6/liberal-professors-outnumber-conservatives-12-1/

    Someone did point out in the article that this study only applied to 40 universities and only five liberal arts subjects. Science, engineering, and business schools aren't nearly as unbalanced. But even in the sciences, the PC brigade is mucking things up.

    Is political correctness damaging science?

    Peer pressure and mainstream thinking may discourage novelty and innovation

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299305/


    Yes, I bring this instance up all the time. Tommy Robinson is in jail over it.

    I don't know about common sense. There's certainly a strain of irony that runs through British humor that doesn't always translate well, and I say that as someone who likes and appreciates British humor. Examples: Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch - hilarious; Monty Python's Fish Slapping Dance - eh, I don't get it.

    Probably the most interesting thing about the Roger Scruton business is that he got his job back. That would never happen over here. Nobel Prize winning scientist James Watson was stripped of his titles after repeating factual statements about race and DNA, and will probably never get them back, not even 25 years from now after he's dead. I made the same statements on this forum and they were dismissed as racist.
     
  13. Distraff

    Distraff Well-Known Member

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    Democrats don't want a Chinese system. They support democracy too.
     
  14. xwsmithx

    xwsmithx Well-Known Member

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    Accurate for most, I suppose. I'll defend myself by saying I don't think the Democrats are evil (okay, not all Democrats are evil), and I'm always on the lookout for ways in which I'm rationalizing rather than seeing objective truth. And I tweak atheists by pointing out that I was a believer for 29 years before I was an atheist, but I didn't get any smarter, any wiser, or any better than believers by doing so, I just changed my mind. The atheists on this forum can't engage my theistic arguments rationally so they accuse me of being a closet theist instead.

    Pass. Having gone from believer to atheist, I still have questions about evolution and/or Darwinism which no one on here has been able to answer to my satisfaction. But I'm not a historical materialist. Humans have fought over many many things throughout history, and material wealth is only one of them. We are ourselves on the verge of an all out war over culture, despite there being only a small difference in wealth between left and right, with the right having the advantage but the right more than likely going to be the side that starts it.

    On a side note, you're thinking of it wrong. You have to start from consciousness. Everything we see is there because we're looking at it. The universe is holographic. You see what you see because you want to see it. Why did Heinrich Schliemann find Troy in Turkey? Was it because it was there all the time? Or was it because he wanted to find it there?

    While I'm a firm believer in Ayn Rand's statement that reality exists whether you believe it or not (examples: men can't be women, you can't levitate no matter how hard you try, and American blacks have an average IQ 15 points below that of whites), much of what we think of as external reality didn't exist until we got around to looking at it. Now that we have looked at it, it exists and won't go away just by looking away, but before we looked at it, it wasn't really there.


    I haven't. I have read The Conscience of a Conservative, several times.

    Interesting. Russell Kirk in the anthology I'm reading said in his introduction that conservative writings have sometimes seemed nonexistent. Not really true, but I suppose if all you ever read was The New York Review of Books, it might seem that way.

    I have a very cogent response to the growing inequality claim if you want to read it. Most of the "problems" of capitalism are actually problems of government intervention and not capitalism, but the leftists' solutions are always more government, which of course just makes things worse, not better. Why do we need more government involvement in health care? Because of the last 50 years of government involvement in health care. Why do we need more government involvement in college tuition? Because of the last 75 years of government involvement in college tuition. There were some serious abuses way back when, mainly in terms of illegal agreements on prices and terms. But these days, 99% of capitalism's abuses are caused by government policies. High risk loans to people who couldn't pay causing the bottom to fall out of the housing market? Entirely caused by government policies. And then all those banks that bought derivatives we should have let fail. We could have bailed out the depositors at a fraction of the price and all those bankers would be out on their asses.
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2019
  15. Zorro

    Zorro Well-Known Member

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    Failed to respect your fellow Americans.
    Sat silent while we were slandered as "Deplorable" "Racists" "Bitter Clingers" and "Nazis".

    TRUMP AND TONE: “The situation in China reminds me of one of the political philosopher James Burnham’s famous political laws: Where there is no alternative there is no problem. What’s the alternative to Donald Trump on any of these issues? Joe Biden? Elizabeth Warren? Bernie Sanders? To ask the question is to answer it.”

    What’s funny to me about China is that the same people who were saying that Trump would blunder into a war with some thoughtless angry tweet are now dumping on Trump for not interrupting his delicate negotiations to call the Chinese murderers.
     
  16. CourtJester

    CourtJester Well-Known Member

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    If you define patriotism as blindly supporting whatever your government does as patriotism then you are correct. I can fondly remember the morons who said we weren't patriotic when we opposed the Vietnam war.
     
  17. Medieval Man

    Medieval Man Well-Known Member

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    Using California as my example, they only support democracy when they can be assured of one-party rule. When not in power, they choose to resist by claiming the U.S. has been racist and unjust since it's founding (at least most of the Democratic Party presidential front-runners do).

    When they are in power and increase the power of Fed.com, they believe the U.S. is the greatest country ever, until their political opponents regain power. Then, it's flag burning time once again...
     
  18. Medieval Man

    Medieval Man Well-Known Member

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    I'm all for checking the power of Fed.gov, not using the government to increase their power over those of us who believe in freedom and liberty as statists tend to do. And most statists come in either a religious flavor or they are leftists, wouldn't you agree?
     
  19. Zorro

    Zorro Well-Known Member

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  20. CourtJester

    CourtJester Well-Known Member

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    Of course not since the scope and size of the government has increased significantly when we have had a Republican/ Conservative government.

    And it is clearly the Conservatives/ religious right that continuously tries to increase government controls over individual behavior.
     
    Last edited: Aug 20, 2019
  21. Medieval Man

    Medieval Man Well-Known Member

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    I agree about extremist religious conservatives and their desire to use the power of Fed.gov to impose their beliefs on Americans; heck, they are just as bad as the wacko environmental extremists and most other leftist Democrats who use the government with the same religious fervor to obtain power and regulate the lives of normal Americans.

    Both groups are statists who would crush our Bill of Rights and individual freedom and liberty to impose their religious and political beliefs, which when it comes to such cultists, are quite similar...
     
  22. CourtJester

    CourtJester Well-Known Member

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    Everyone who gets power tries to shape the system to increase their power. Applies to all parties and all religions and all belief systems.
     
  23. Medieval Man

    Medieval Man Well-Known Member

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    Which is why we must strive to return to the concept of limited government as envisioned by the founders, don't you agree? That way even when the power-hungry gain control, they are unable to impose their beliefs on normal Americans.

    Right?
     
  24. CourtJester

    CourtJester Well-Known Member

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    Well as much as I do respect the Constitution and the founding fathers I don't think they could have foreseen the world of 2019. And to me the biggest threat to America is not the government but the power wielded by corporations and the rich. The government only exists in 2019 to do their bidding.
     
  25. Medieval Man

    Medieval Man Well-Known Member

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    I agree; big corporations often use bribes to politicians in the form of campaign contributions to create laws and regulations to stifle competition and the free market, once again showing how big government is a burden for normal Americans.

    Corporations would not be able to amass such power without the help of a large, centralized government...
     

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