Ronald Reagan: The Greatest President Ever

Not completely true. It's just that conservatives only come in two sizes: mind-blowing geniuses like Milton Friedman and thick fratboys. The former category are very, very rare and we don't get to debate with them.

 

Incorrect, I made no attempt to caricature any political persuasion, I mocked the observed behavior of the vacuous(to borrow a word from you) behavior of the right wing posters at this forum!! I no where spoke of right wingers at large, only the ones at this forum. I have observed the majority of that group, and have come away far from impressed. Why don't you try to buck the trend, and join the 3% capable of making serious arguments. Or else you can just post more things like this.

 

I agree. The problem here is that we are losing focus on the subject (in spite of claims made in the post immediately preceeding this one), the fact that Reagan was the greatest president ever. I was mostly concerned with the freedom gained by millions behind the Iron Curtain. But this thread has been wasted on a lot of idle banter unrelated to any meaningful arguments of the Reagan's contribution to this. Now that the thread is quickly closing in on 500 posts, I am looking forward to starting part II. Not sure if I am going stick with the current theme, because it really was lost in this thread, or go with the Reagan economic revolution. I might save the latter for thread #3.

 

I have never been on the Democratic underground in my entire life. My views about the collapse of the Soviet Union are based on academic research into the topic. As you may have noticed my recommended reading in this thread was a book by the head of the Slavic Studies department at Harvard. Not the blathering of some partisan hack. However, if you can't create straw men about what I believe and think, what other argument do you have? This thread has consisted of people on the left making arguments, and people on the right posting straw men, ad-hominem, and linking to absurd partisan sources and attempting to use those sources to appeal to authority. Appealing to authority is always bad form, but in this instance since the supposed authority isn't actually an authority, it is even more absurd!!

 

The bolded is why no one in this thread is taking your posts in this thread seriously!! Greatness is a normative judgment, which cannot be established on a factual level. When such incredibly simple things need to be explained, it becomes difficult to discuss more complex notions.

 

Tell it to the wind frodly. You are right of course. But they are not really interested in history or events. The new Tory backward looking Right in the USA are about building myths upon ignorance. As soon as you start to probe their most superficial ideas, they disintegrate and so they resort to abuse. The reason that they don't answer the points made in detail about Eastern Europe and the collapse of the USSR is because they can't. They don't know enough for a start. What happens is that they hear this simplistic myth - someone tells them that Reagan destroyed the USSR and then it becomes an article of dogma. If you get close to debunking it - which is not hard - the only possible response is for them to indulge in character assassination and personal abuse, and then, as here, taunts and fratboy immaturity. This is how totalitarianism works. It is on the Left too. We saw it debating Marxism with Red - for all his fine sarcasm and wit, he just didn't have the arguments or knowledge when challenged hard on Marxism and resorted to sneering too. Most people don't like debate. They don't want to understand the other point of view. They like certainty and the monologous repetition of stock slogans that sustain their pale monochrome little world and keep it safe.

All of this underlines the ultimate superiority of liberalism, and I mean that defining liberalism in a broad sense, from the writings and views of articulate and erudite conservatives like Friedman and Fergusson, right through Smith, Rousseau and Tom Paine to modern liberals like Popper and Rawls. We are distinguished from the fratboy rabble through our intelligence and our refusal to settle for ignorance and stupidity. We don't need to be bashful about it; our problem is that the others just don't have the capability or passion for ideas. That's what leads them to authoritarianism and abuse. It's because we do have this passion for knowledge and the interpay of arguments that whatever our different journeys are, we end up as liberals.

Liberalism, in the European sense of the word, not the American sense, is the result of self criticism, continuously examing and re-examing your views. It is about dialectic and rigorous pursuit of thesis and antithesis in ideas, the Socratic model of inquiry. It revels in self doubt and uncertainty because to examine these doubts presages discovery and in discovery lies a magic land. It is us that made the modern world, and it is our obligation to keep doing so. We need a certain standard of intellectual rigour. There are conservatives who have it. But they are rare and on close examination are not so far away from us.

The world is split between the stupid who love ignorance, vacuity and shallow certainty, and those who like the shifting sands of pushing the limits, developing knowledge and sharpening reason. Not Right or Left. The stupid are always at the extremes grunting their party lines and their formulaic mantras.

Those Victorians who made the modern world were distinguished not by their sense of certainty, but by their sense of wonder. That is what we must never lose. The modern world was made by the curious, by people who, if they knew only one thing, knew that the received shibboleths of the age were brittle illusions that survived little examination. That is what makes our lives superior, our awareness that the world is complex, nuanced and wondrous. We are priveleged when all is said and done.

 

Based upon member complaints I've reviewed this thread and found extensive "tit for tat" personal attacks and off topic posts by both "sides" of the discussion. Posts addressing other members are always off topic (members are not the subject of any thread) and when derogatory in context they are a personal attack.

Many of the members involved in this conduct are long standing members and know better than to get involved in these types of posts. They know that I could issue formal warnings and infractions for them but, because it is so extensive I am not. I'm closing this thread and warning everyone to knock this type of posting behavior off.

Shiva_TD
Site Moderator