| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| TRANSMARINE |
Posted - 05/20/2005 : 10:34:36
G.W. on cloning:
“I made very clear to Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayer’s money, to promote science which destroys life in order to save life — I’m against that,” Bush said.
Hahahahahahahahaha! What a dolt!
Catchin' blue in his eyes that were brown
-bRIAN |
| 23 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| VoVat |
Posted - 05/25/2005 : 17:59:21
Touché.
I was all out of luck, like a duck that died. I was all out of juice, like a moose denied. |
| TRANSMARINE |
Posted - 05/24/2005 : 08:19:50
quote:
Originally posted by VoVat
quote:
The first thing I thought was "then what the hell are you doing in the Middle East?!"
Well, there's no science in that. I think it's the "science" part he objects to the most.
I was all out of luck, like a duck that died. I was all out of juice, like a moose denied.
Isn't war a science? And aren't there scientific components galore in war?
Catchin' blue in his eyes that were brown
-bRIAN |
| Erebus |
Posted - 05/24/2005 : 06:23:22
quote:
Originally posted by Newo
quote:
Erebus Posted - 05/23/2005 : 18:41:39
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, the left-right dichotomy can be overly simplistic, but it does capture certain valid political polarities.
Would you elaborate please.
All I meant, especially in regard to the essay by the disenchanted leftie, is that there are general positions that can be mapped by a crude, black-white model. While it is true that some on the left do support the Iraq war, most who absolutely abhor war, most who argue for a greater UN role, most who decrie Bush's "unilateralism", .... are on the left. I am suggesting that this left-right polarity is at least useful enough that simply dismissing any argument employing such a model with "skip to the next post" is hardly fair.
Unfortunately, at least in regard to this discussion, within the hour I am hitting the road for a week, across Oregon at a leisurely pace, toward four Pixies shows in Portland. I would like to reply to the Chomsky above, and to your Hunter Thompson post elsewhere, but that will have to wait. Thanks for the invitation to elaborate. |
| Newo |
Posted - 05/24/2005 : 05:32:17
quote:
Erebus Posted - 05/23/2005 : 18:41:39
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, the left-right dichotomy can be overly simplistic, but it does capture certain valid political polarities.
Would you elaborate please.
--
"Here love," brakes on a high squeak, "it´s not backstage at the old Windmill or something, you know." |
| Scarla O |
Posted - 05/24/2005 : 04:01:17
Chomsky:
"Actually I agree that the elections were a success … of opposition to the United States. What is being suppressed - except for Middle East specialists, who know about it perfectly well and are writing about it, or people who in fact have read the newspapers in the last couple of years - what's being suppressed is the fact that the United States had to be brought kicking and screaming into accepting elections. The U.S. was strongly opposed to them.
I wrote about the early stages of this in a book that came out a year ago, which only discussed the early stages of U.S. opposition. But it increased. The U.S. wanted to write a constitution, it wanted to impose some kind of caucus system that the U.S. could control, and it tried to impose extremely harsh neo-liberal rules, like you mentioned, which even Iraqi businessmen were strongly opposed to. But there has been a very powerful nonviolent resistance in Iraq - far more significant than suicide bombers and so on. And it simply compelled the United States step by step to back down. That's the popular movement of nonviolent resistance that was symbolized by Ayatollah Sistani, but it's far broader than that. The population simply would not accept the rules that the occupation authorities were imposing, and finally Washington was compelled, very reluctantly, to accept elections. It tried in every way to undermine them. […]
Then right now there's a struggle going on, as to whether the United States will be able to subvert the elections that it reluctantly accepted. I think you'll have a hard time finding a serious Middle Eastern scholar or anyone who pays attention who won't agree with this. In fact it's quite obvious just from reading the serious press reports on this. Of course once the United States was forced into accepting elections, the government and the media immediately pronounced that it was a great achievement of the United States. But it was quite the opposite. But it's a good thing that it happened, in opposition to the U.S. In fact it's a major triumph of nonviolent resistance, and it should be understood as such. And maybe it's a basis - now comes the question of whether Iraqis can succeed, in reaching, moving towards a stage where they will actually be able to run their own country, which the U.S. is certainly going to oppose. There is no doubt of this. The last thing the United States wants is a democratic, sovereign Iraq. To see why, it's enough to think for five minutes about what its policies are likely to be. Let's suppose there were a democratic Iraq with some degree of sovereignty. The first thing it'll do is try to improve relations with Iran. It's not that they love Iran particularly, but they'd rather have friendly relations with the neighboring Shiite state than hostile relations. So, they'll move towards improving relations with Iran, especially because it has a Shiite majority. If they're democratic enough, so the Shiite majority has a significant part." |
| Cheeseman1000 |
Posted - 05/24/2005 : 02:13:34
Isn't that Ron Vivventrop?
As serious as your life |
| hammerhands |
Posted - 05/24/2005 : 02:08:47
Hitler: I am not a racialist, but, und this is a big but, we in the National Bocialist Party believe das Überleben muss gestammen sein mit der schneaky Armstrong-Jones. Historische Taunton ist Volkermeinig von Meinhead.
Himmler (stepping forward): Mr Hitler, Hilter, he says that historically Taunton is a part of Minehead already.
Shot of a yokel looking disbelievingly at balcony. Von Ribbentrop appears behind.
Von Ribbentrop: He's right, do you know that?
Meanwhile back on the balcony.
Hitler (very exited): Und Bridgwater ist die letzte Fühlung das wir haben in Somerset!
Over this we hear loud applause and 'Sieg Heils'. The yokel, who is not applauding, turns round rather surprised to see whence cometh the applause. He sees Von Ribbentrop operating a grammophone.
quote:
The essay Dallas posted includes a lot ot grey area, and amply spells out characteristics which members of the "left" can accept as accurate observations.
"But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King's call for equal of opportunity."
"Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill."
"the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces"
"Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?" |
| Erebus |
Posted - 05/23/2005 : 18:41:39
quote:
Originally posted by Newo
Left-right is a phoney argument designed to conceal the fact there are more than two sides to a debate. George Orwell called it 'black-white'. If you see someone declare themselves or someone else to be one or the other, skip to the next post.
Sorry Owen but I think this is a phoney reply. The essay Dallas posted includes a lot ot grey area, and amply spells out characteristics which members of the "left" can accept as accurate observations. The Left does hold most of those values the author finds he must reject. Yes, the left-right dichotomy can be overly simplistic, but it does capture certain valid political polarities. |
| PixieSteve |
Posted - 05/23/2005 : 17:21:38
yeah there's three. you can be a centrist ;)
 Oh let it linger |
| BLT |
Posted - 05/23/2005 : 16:51:53
quote:
Originally posted by Newo
Left-right is a phoney argument designed to conceal the fact there are more than two sides to a debate. George Orwell called it 'black-white'. If you see someone declare themselves or someone else to be one or the other, skip to the next post.
Right on. |
| Newo |
Posted - 05/23/2005 : 15:50:01
Left-right is a phoney argument designed to conceal the fact there are more than two sides to a debate. George Orwell called it 'black-white'. If you see someone declare themselves or someone else to be one or the other, skip to the next post.
--
"Here love," brakes on a high squeak, "it´s not backstage at the old Windmill or something, you know." |
| VoVat |
Posted - 05/23/2005 : 14:40:08
quote:
Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics.
Weren't they both operating on the basic principle of revenge? It's easy to rationalize violence. What's apparently difficult is trying to come up with a more civilized solution to disagreements. And it seems like most world leaders today, whether they call themselves right-wing, left-wing, Christian, Muslim, or whatever, are totally inept at this. It's all very depressing and scary.
I was all out of luck, like a duck that died. I was all out of juice, like a moose denied. |
| Dallas |
Posted - 05/23/2005 : 11:30:00
Dont worry Erebus, it just takes some people longer than others. This from the SF Chronicle on Sunday. I added some bolding for kicks
Leaving the left
I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarityKeith Thompson
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.
I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.
I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.
My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.
Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.
Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think Kafka, without the bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift, without the buzz. Every anomaly that didn't fit my perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring for so long ignored. The insistent inner voice I learned to suppress now has my rapt attention. "Something strange -- something approaching pathological -- something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," the voice whispers. "How did this happen?" The Iraqi election is my tipping point. The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I did many years before.
I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite term for reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community, where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics and Jews was unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and right, wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and "progressive thought").
The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful that way.
I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice, lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate ever to a Democratic convention.
Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble. To my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.
A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word "evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert.
When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'" too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport.
My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like "gulag" to the dinner table.
I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations.
Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics.
Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots. Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on a mediocre day.
All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King's call for equal of opportunity.
These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this: pathetic.
I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.
In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).
Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do that."
When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided."
I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?
He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators. Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan is shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice for "all of God's children."
My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body politic.
In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders' talk -- and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.
America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition.
At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society (whose] capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to "foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give them room to breathe."
One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I became a liberal in the first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my reactionary hometown.
This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.
True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.
Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection, and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self- determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for so many years.
All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name "progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.
|
| VoVat |
Posted - 05/23/2005 : 11:10:09
quote:
The first thing I thought was "then what the hell are you doing in the Middle East?!"
Well, there's no science in that. I think it's the "science" part he objects to the most.
I can't quite understand how cloning is destroying life. Isn't it all about creating NEW life? Or is the quote pertaining to something more specific than cloning in general?
quote:
nuke programs in Korea, Iran, and Libia revealed
I love how people who point this out never seem to care that the United States has had a nuclear weapons program for decades, and that Bush wants to make MORE (apparently because we only have enough to destroy OUR galaxy right now; what about all the others?). But then, a conservative is nothing if not a hypocrite.
quote:
I'd say there's a pretty good chance that history will regard Bush as the greatest leader since Churchill, especially if you ostriches fail to replace him with Clinton-Gore-Kerry clone
That would be a bit of an odd composite clone, considering that Clinton, Gore, and Kerry were all completely different.
quote:
No telling what Bush might have accomplished if all the moral midgets of the left had put their efforts into something other than ankle biting.
Yeah! We could ALL be dead! Wouldn't THAT be cool?
I was all out of luck, like a duck that died. I was all out of juice, like a moose denied. |
| Newo |
Posted - 05/22/2005 : 09:00:34
--
"Here love," brakes on a high squeak, "it´s not backstage at the old Windmill or something, you know." |
| hammerhands |
Posted - 05/21/2005 : 01:34:41
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. |
| Cheeseman1000 |
Posted - 05/20/2005 : 14:01:35
quote:
Originally posted by PsychicTwin
I delightfully noticed graffiti on a STOP sign right by my apartment
As serious as your life |
| Erebus |
Posted - 05/20/2005 : 13:13:50
Struggles toward democracy all over the globe; the UN and our European "allies" exposed for what they are; nuke programs in Korea, Iran, and Libia revealed; Middle Eastern deadlock finally broken; support for regimes in eastern Europe; .... I'd say there's a pretty good chance that history will regard Bush as the greatest leader since Churchill, especially if you ostriches fail to replace him with Clinton-Gore-Kerry clone and its policies of hope, appeasement and reality-denial. No telling what Bush might have accomplished if all the moral midgets of the left had put their efforts into something other than ankle biting. |
| floop |
Posted - 05/20/2005 : 12:29:10
wow.. that's good stuff.
you couldn't write that stuff |
| kathryn |
Posted - 05/20/2005 : 12:08:59
Where to begin? As good a site as any...
http://www.bushisms.com/index1a.html
 I still believe in the excellent joy of the Catholics |
| PsychicTwin |
Posted - 05/20/2005 : 11:50:03
Having moved down to DC last weekend, I delightfully noticed graffiti on a STOP sign right by my apartment -- someone spray-painted BUSH below it
Good to know he's hated even in the very capital he resides in.
{;
Having him be president of the U.S. is not unlike entrusting the keys to a bank vault to a mentally retarded chimp. |
| TRANSMARINE |
Posted - 05/20/2005 : 10:58:27
quote:
Originally posted by BLT
But what if the life it destroys were Arabs? He'd probably go for that.
Exactly. The first thing I thought was "then what the hell are you doing in the Middle East?!"
Catchin' blue in his eyes that were brown
-bRIAN |
| BLT |
Posted - 05/20/2005 : 10:52:52
But what if the life it destroys were Arabs? He'd probably go for that.
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