Nov 8, 2016 - The lesser of two evils?
- Thread starter TX Redman
- Start date
- Status
No offense taken. You have, several times, declared your miserable outlook and complete distrust for roughly all breathing organisms. Why would I be different?
Regarding the Bill of Rights, you are correct. I find your interpretations/wishes quite extreme. For most of it, I say......good for you, I disagree. Essentially that proves that I am not conservative.....not ground breaking. .
Your other news flash was that I had not posted anything pro-conservative on the thread which apparently proves I am a "libtard" in disguise. Aside from being flattered that you returned to read all my posts, I am not especially compelled to "prove" my political bent. If you don't accept it.....that's fine.
ErickTheRed
Member
This thread has officially jumped the shark
On the issue of deflection, an always enlightening debate last night that for no reason went way over its emotional merits. The discussion started with a post about the "scandal-free" Presidency of Mr. Obama, and linked that point to how atrocious of a charge it is to accuse Mr. Obama of wiretapping, and then the usual calls about Mr. Trumps sanity. Anyhow my response began with a list of scandals including the Solyndra scandal to suggest that the basis first of the argument is wrong so whatever follows either is wrong or hopeless. A norwegian liberal responded to say oh i should educate myself about Solyndra because government investment to manage investment risks is important in emerging areas like renewable energies and actually Solyndra under Tesla is now paying back 2 billion is returns ... WTF ...so obviously my head spun ... and said please explain how misappropriation of funds, a crime, links to an eventual sale of Solyndra, which bankrupted, brought by Tesla's owner and renamed SolarCity, which is still reeling, is considered a return on public investment to the tax payer?
Anyhow this is where the deflect came ... climate change denier I was ... and guess what i was told, if you want to talk about corruption, let me tell you about oil subsidies ...
... so I left my ideals of devolved governance and why it is important not only for efficient government working, minimizing corruption but also allowing individual liberties to co-exist."If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence & yet who employs these faculties & that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape."
Anyhow this is where the deflect came ... climate change denier I was ... and guess what i was told, if you want to talk about corruption, let me tell you about oil subsidies ...
In The Once and Future King Arthur goes to live with the ants, whose credo is "Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory." This to ants comprises freedom, because they don't have to make decisions: a thing is either done or not done. That's essentially the same argument the left makes: that individual liberty is only achievable through government coercion. The leviathan used to be satisfied with economic coercion intended to create quality of opportunity - or more precisely equality of sustenance. That is, they couldn't make every man a king but they could make every man a relatively well to do peasant. But more and more this coercion inhabits the life of the mind. Untoward thoughts - no matter how germinal or well-intentioned - are heretical as transgressions against the public good. If you wonder whether a man who chops his member off in the belief that nature put it there by mistake is mentally ill - a reasonable question you'd ask someone who cut of his nose for the same reason - you become subject to public flagellation. If you wonder whether two men marrying transgresses the laws of God or nature you are pilloried. Unless you belong to a favored group obviously, in which case questioning your bigotry comprises a hate crime.
Which to come full circle is why all this talk of reasonableness is pointless. If you (royal) think what I believe is immoral, why would you want to work with me toward achieving a common good - you believe that I don't even know what good means. To the contrary, you think what I think is good is evil. What you (royal) want to do is (re) educate me as to what is moral and to force me to behave the way you believe is right through coercion - there are sitting US senators who think what are referred to pejoratively as global warming deniers like you and I should be jailed - for a belief in an ancient earth subject to immutable forces of physics. It stands the world on its head: 100 years ago championing the belief that evolution was real was the stuff of monkey trial legends, now it's a thought crime. In TOAFK Merlyn laments that "the business of the philosopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people." That is what freedom is: the choice between alternative realities. Today the left wants it both ways: they want people to be free to choose among the alternatives that they believe are good and to impose their ideas on those people who think their ideas are bad. Non serviam Lucifer said. As usual I agree with Satan.
Anyhow this is where the deflect came ... climate change denier I was ... and guess what i was told, if you want to talk about corruption, let me tell you about oil subsidies ...
In The Once and Future King Arthur goes to live with the ants, whose credo is "Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory." This to ants comprises freedom, because they don't have to make decisions: a thing is either done or not done. That's essentially the same argument the left makes: that individual liberty is only achievable through government coercion. The leviathan used to be satisfied with economic coercion intended to create quality of opportunity - or more precisely equality of sustenance. That is, they couldn't make every man a king but they could make every man a relatively well to do peasant. But more and more this coercion inhabits the life of the mind. Untoward thoughts - no matter how germinal or well-intentioned - are heretical as transgressions against the public good. If you wonder whether a man who chops his member off in the belief that nature put it there by mistake is mentally ill - a reasonable question you'd ask someone who cut of his nose for the same reason - you become subject to public flagellation. If you wonder whether two men marrying transgresses the laws of God or nature you are pilloried. Unless you belong to a favored group obviously, in which case questioning your bigotry comprises a hate crime.
Which to come full circle is why all this talk of reasonableness is pointless. If you (royal) think what I believe is immoral, why would you want to work with me toward achieving a common good - you believe that I don't even know what good means. To the contrary, you think what I think is good is evil. What you (royal) want to do is (re) educate me as to what is moral and to force me to behave the way you believe is right through coercion - there are sitting US senators who think what are referred to pejoratively as global warming deniers like you and I should be jailed - for a belief in an ancient earth subject to immutable forces of physics. It stands the world on its head: 100 years ago championing the belief that evolution was real was the stuff of monkey trial legends, now it's a thought crime. In TOAFK Merlyn laments that "the business of the philosopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people." That is what freedom is: the choice between alternative realities. Today the left wants it both ways: they want people to be free to choose among the alternatives that they believe are good and to impose their ideas on those people who think their ideas are bad. Non serviam Lucifer said. As usual I agree with Satan.
Implicitly what you are suggesting to me (and at times it is quite explicit) is that the concoction that is the "left" as a group and as an individual is interested ultimately in pure power (this is the end, not a means, whereas wealth is a means to pure power for example) in the guise of social justice - the power to then decimate others by sheer will to starve, terrorize, indoctrinate, pauperize ... and if the ultimate will is pure power then anything democratic such as the vote becomes paramount to deliver some brakes to the overall project of pure power.
For me freedom - a Yang worship word - consists of (1) liberty in all its manifestations and also equality in the means of basic subsistence, education, health and opportunity for every child, boy or girl, and equality in opportunity to adults to create ones own well-being by their own labor (2) extreme devolution in goverance (so the centre is accountable to the local and in cases vice versa) and markets (the very opposite of global markets very devolved, localized); (3) and conservatism whether it is some aspect of tradition, practice and identity with religious morality, material well being based on tradition, practice and identity and the non-material factors such as human relationships, ideas and cultures.
I disagree with number one but then I'm not very charitable (understatement of the year). Because individual liberty has nothing to do with equality. And in fact the more inequality that exists the more liberated are those who are in a position to capitalize on inequality. That is, the pharaohs were more liberated than you and I will ever be and they owned slaves. I understand your perspective and sometimes when I'm in my cups wish I weren't so jaded that I believed in it - or for that matter anything - but I don't. But I think that you are searching for a unified theory of governance, whereas I'm searching for a bong with a vagina. Because on an individual level there's no salvation, only comfort.
Wait are you telling me that a unified theory of governance is not the proverbial "entry point" into more bong hits and vagina?
Perhaps it may have been better stated in terms of a level playing field that accentuates or expands liberty. But the freedom to do and be whatever one wants especially a vagina chaser. What I see with more and more rules and regulations is the Brave New World hierarchy and a proliferation of the Epsilons and Deltas and Beta minuses.
But perhaps beyond just debating left vs right or liberal vs conservative world views, the discussion needs to be couched in the realization and the reality that progress towards our specie and world betterment is a fraud. Reliance on one discipline or one institution or one silo-ed concept or one reality often leads us down a familiar cul de sac. Now while what I am about to say perhaps seems controversial, depending on your opinion about the subject, it needs to be said. For the longest time, I viewed the world through a "leftist" lens: the belief in progress towards an ideal, perfection, based on scientific logic and rationality over traditional customs and rules, and linearly towards a more perfect, well-managed globe and society ... is all a myth. So not to romanticize the past in any way, the question(s) that arose were was it imminently possible that some or all of our forefathers were more advanced, more adept, more in-tune with multiple realities and knowledge systems, disciplines, institutions and concepts. Meaning they saw the whole better than we see the minute sum of its parts. My learning, my experience and my gut tell me that the more and more we specialize, rationalize, narrow our views, the more and more backwards we become. This is why just over the last year of the 50 years of my life, conservatism (the act of conserving our cultural, natural, social and political heritage) has become increasingly important including that change should be organic (rather than revolutionary and violent) has greatly shaped my recent views. (Note to be a conservative in our common vernacular is akin to a curse word).
Anyhow my main point is simple: societies in the past relied on what I call criss-cross institutions (market, state, communitarian) because they knew a number of failures are attributable to each of the institutions, and this knowledge emerged not only from scientifically deriving conclusions but also something called traditional or sometimes referred to as indigenous knowledge - a form of knowledge that is being lost and replaced solely by science and multiplicities are becoming singularities.
And so while we denigrate economist, social, natural scientist and individual disciplines, their intentions are not really so much a question to me - meaning they probably meant well, but in the framework of siloed institutions, knowledge systems, the realities and concepts within which they operate, will mean every single time that the answers they provide are mere fragmentation of what is needed in society.
With the above, I complete my unified theory of governance ...
Teilhard's theory of the omega, that man is evolving toward god, is about the silliest thing I can imagine. Leave aside the fact that the theory of evolution is a scientific fraud at worst and a tautology at best. Leave aside the idea of the existence of a supreme being about which men of good conscience can differ. Eschew the theories and look at the evidence: what man has done best over the past 500 years is to perfect technologies that can destroy other men. Two thousand years ago as horrific as was the human imagination it was at least constrained by foot pounds and geography: you could put one guy on the rack, not millions of people in Treblinka. Nowadays one run of the mill religious fanatic can kill millions and the human imagination has expanded to the point where mass murder is preferable to conquest and slavery. The latter is at least understandable as an expression of the id; the former is sociopathy. A lion in the jungle might kill an elephant - because I know you love elephants - but that's a biological instinct borne of a imperative. A man will kill an elephant to because its head looks good on the wall or because its tusks might make his dick hard. If that's progress then a monkey is my uncle.
Well Elephants are a natural heritage among other species and land/seascapes they exist on, and if they are still around in the future, I would want the coming generations to have the opportunity to see. The main question still lingers though why does conservatism as an ideology allows scientific knowledge to often co-exist with non-scientific or "superstitious" knowledge, while the leftist ideology has entrenched this epistemological break to the annihilation of traditional knowledge and superstition, and towards the precipitous slide into mass murder .... ?
I totally get that presidents bring in their own people but I dont like one bit this whole Preet Bharara thing ( I have no problem with replacing the other 45 ). I dont like what Trump and Sessions are doing here. Aside from the fact that Trump met with him months ago and asked him to stay on but Preet was doing a great job and draining the cesspool of NY politics along with many other things. This is the type of guy that Trump should be wanting to surround himself with
Part of me really wonders what this fox news stuff and Hannity had to do with it
Part of me really wonders what this fox news stuff and Hannity had to do with it
- Status