Because what follows is, to a certain extent, the kind of argument criticized by nishi (though in a way that I believe caricatures the actual argument as it is presented in its totality), I think it might prove interesting to use this passage from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism as the jumping off point for a discussion of modern conservatism as it stands against modern liberalism (which, I’ve argued, has been co-opted by progressives and, in many ways, no longer resembles liberalism as it was understood in relation to the country’s founding).
Note: this particular passage is taken from a larger discussion on eugenics:
There’s a general consensus among liberal historians that Progressivism defies easy definition. Perhaps that’s because to identify Progressivism properly would be too inconvenient to liberalism, for doing so would expose the eugenic project at its core. The most obvious reply — that progressives were merely representing the age they lived in — fails on several levels. For one thing, the progressive eugenicists had non-progressive, anti-eugenic adversaries — premature conservatives, radical libertarians, and orthodox Catholics — whom the progressives considered to be backward and reactionary. For another, arguing that progressives were a product of their time simply reinforces my larger argument: Progressivism was born of the fascist movement and has never faced up to its inheritance. Today’s liberals have inherited progressive prejudice wholesale, believing that traditionalists and religious conservatives are dangerous threats to progress. But this assumption means that liberals are blind to fascistic threats from their own ranks.
Meanwhile, conservative religious and political dogma — under relentless attack from the left — may be the single greatest bulwark against eugenic schemes. Who rejects cloning most forcefully? Who is most troubled by euthanasia, abortion, and playing God in the laboratory? Good dogma is the most powerful inhibiting influence against bad ideas and the only guarantor that men will act on good ones. A conservative nation that seriously wondered if destroying a blastocyst is murder would not wonder at all whether it is murder to kill an eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus, let alone a “defective” infant.
Mainstream liberalism is joined at the hip with racial and sexual-identity groups of one kind or another. A basic premise shared by all these groups is that their members should be rewarded simpy by virtue of their racial, gender, or sexual status. In short, the state should pick winners and losers based upon the accidents of birth. Liberals champion this perspective in the name of antiracism. Unlike conservatives who advocate a color-blind state, liberals still believe that the state should organize society on racial lines. We are accustomed to talking about this sort of social engineering as a product of the post-civil-rights era. But the color-blind doctrine championed by progressives in the 1960s was a very brief parenthesis in a very long progressive tradition. In short, there is more continuity between early Progressivism and today’s multiculturalism than we think.
Discuss.
I had a long conversation about these issues with Nishi (over the course of several days or a week) in the comments to one of my posts in the pub. I found her to be civil and reasonable. I can see where her style might be offputting to some, but I would not include her among the trolls.
I had a long conversation about these issues with Nishi (over the course of several days or a week) in the comments to one of my posts in the pub. I found her to be civil and reasonable. I can see where her style might be offputting to some, but I would not include her among the trolls.
I do not consider her a troll, Aldo. I do bristle at the people who have not been purposefully misrepresented by her, defending her as civil and reasonable.
Just because she hasn’t called you a babyrape apologist or a xianist theocon or a twodigit or whatever just means she has been civil *to you*.
Actually, Jeff, this isn’t the passage nishi cites in her attacks on Goldberg. What she cites is a comment he posted on the Corner.
The funny/sad thing is, I think the biggest motivation for conservatives to take a hard line on bio-ethics issues is the sense that if they didn’t, their concerns would get no attention. There are certainly extremists who want NO progress in the biological sciences, and they’re certainly used by the mainstream as provocateurs, but I believe the average Joe is more concerned with preventing the abuses.
While Kass(?) would object to any use of cloning, most people wouldn’t have an issue with cloning individual organs. They object, however, to the idea of cloning entire people for the purpose of parting them out.
Rob —
I know this isn’t the exact passage; rather, it was a passage that I happened to be reading while on the john this morning.
But it touches on the same issues, particularly this bit:
I included the bit about identity politics and multiculturalism because it tied into yesterday’s post.
I’ll bold the passage in the original to help the discussion along. If, that is, people are interested in discussing this at all.
Aldo —
I haven’t called nishi a troll. I’ve simply noted that she caricatures (in my opinion) Goldberg’s argument. But I’m willing to listen to opposing views.
Some of what Goldberg writes here is tendentious. But it could still be correct — and so is worthy of consideration.
Laws are for fakemarriage babyrape xtian fundies, Rob, not for scientists.
Point taken Maybee. I was just relaying my personal experience in the hopes that, if she shows up to take Jeff’s challenge, people give her a chance to make a good debate like the one I had with her.
Of course it wrong to misrepresent someone else’s opinion in order to more easily attack it as a strawman, but I think some flaming is within the bounds of internet etiquette.
She’s had that chance, aldo. People engage her more than almost anyone else here. Congratulations that she took advantage of the chance with you.
Fair enough.
Aldo — the problem is that just about the only arguments nishi makes are either ad hom, strawmen, or from (false) authority. I’d welcome an honest debate from her, but she doesn’t seem to comprehend that disagreeing with her doesn’t mean you’re ignorant.
It would also help if she acknowledged the implications of her positions from time to time.
While Kass(?) would object to any use of cloning, most people wouldn’t have an issue with cloning individual organs. They object, however, to the idea of cloning entire people for the purpose of parting them out.
Or, cloning to simply create a new person. Just because it’s icky. I wish I could say why I thought so, but alas I cannot.
It’s like art, right. I know it when I see it.
I suppose this is really the problem with these debates. When it gets down to it it just doesn’t seem morally right (to clone) and people like nishi want to do away with “moral” judgments.
I am disappointed that you would even defend that idiotic book, Jeff.
This is a gem: There’s a general consensus among liberal historians that Progressivism defies easy definition. Perhaps that’s because to identify Progressivism properly would be too inconvenient to liberalism
How about attempting “easily define it” is an exercise in willfully stupid reductionism. It is convenient for me to define all English people as chinless wankers, but is it accurate? That’s what I thought.
I have never seen anyone cling so insistently to the idea that stereotypes and simpleminded memes are somehow virtuous.
When it gets down to it it just doesn’t seem morally right (to clone) and people like nishi want to do away with “moral†judgments.
The problem they don’t see is that almost all judgements are some form of moral judgment. Society has to decide at some point what is “good” and what is “bad” and act accordingly. Otherwise, why have criminal laws at all?
Someone might argue that criminal laws are only needed insofar as punishing one person for harming another – i.e., murder, which doesn’t necessarily mean its a “moral” judgment. But, what about laws against, for instance, drunk driving? Why should it be illegal for me to drive drunk if I don’t get in an accident and hurt someone? You could make harming someone through drunk driving a crime, but not driving drunk itself a crime. Making the drunk driving itself a crime, under the theory that I might harm someone else, is a morale judgment.
Or, fighting poverty. Why does a leftist believe we should redistribute wealth? How is the idea that we have to take care of those poorer than ourselves anything but a moral judgment?
Thus, leftists lie when they say they want to get rid of moral judgments. They just want to get rid of the traditional moral vaules that they don’t like and replace them with new values that they do like.
Just because it’s icky.
Icky isn’t really a good argument, but it might be a good starting point. Aside from the dystopian prospect of cloning humans to harvest their organs (see MST3K episode 811- “PARTS”: THE CLONUS HORROR), there is also the question of WHY you would clone someone.
Technically, all you’ve done is create your own identical twin, just younger, but there are all kinds of nasty implications:
The clone would have only one parent. Lovely legal tangles that would set up.
People might try to clone dead family members from cells harvested from their corpses. Would you want to be that replacement person, who would be like and yet unlike your “parent”?
Cloning would likely be done of the “fittest” among us, but the criteria for “fit” would include beauty, physical strength, IQ, and talent — not morality or goodness. We’re already too messed up in our priorities; we don’t need more eugenics to fortify our shallow values.
Cloning leads to sterility, duh. See ST:TNG “Up the Long Ladder”
I’m disappointed that you’d call it “idiotic”. Have you read it?
For one, “troll” is a hypothetical construct, effectively just a poo-poo fling actually. Power in the poo slider comes from first cocking then timing your wrist action at poo release.
The belief that we can assign value judgments to liberalism and progressivism or conservatism with pedagogic declarations as to “this is” and “you are” ignores the fundamental paradoxical truth that many people stand in agreement with a mixture of both sides of polar political philosophies. I-myself cross the visible/invisible lines in Goldberg’s debate so I see no necessity to assign his framings as contemporary vade mecum.
Meanwhile, conservative religious and political dogma  under relentless attack from the left  may be the single greatest bulwark against eugenic schemes. Who rejects cloning most forcefully? Who is most troubled by euthanasia, abortion, and playing God in the laboratory? Good dogma is the most powerful inhibiting influence against bad ideas and the only guarantor that men will act on good ones.
I am a libertarian who is not dogmatically religious, though I place myself on the right side of the political continuum. Goldberg may be correct that this dogmatism has formed a bulwark against the abuse of science, but I would prefer that we on the right construct an intellectual bulwak that is not based on religious or traditional dogmatism. It should not be too hard to make an argument against Nazi-type eugenics based on Kant’s Categorical Imperative or Robert Nozick’s philosophical work.
She’s a self described griefer. Griefing is a form of trolling. QED.
She can be civil and reasonable and I have known her to be so in the past. But usually, she is not. Usually, she’s trolling.
To get back to the topic, it is well worth re-reading Oliver Kamm’s essay from 2004 on the links between the left and fascism
http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2004/08/fascism_and_the.html
Kamm’s point, though, is diametrically opposed to the one you raise, Jeff – he would have “the decent” left as the bulwark.
Lisa,
As to the history of american progressivism/liberalsim and its development out of the same basic ideas as German and Italian fascism, please point out where Liberal Fascism is incorrect.
I find it interesting that those on the left constantly spew venom at this book but are never able to actually refute the very well research historical analysis contained therein. Calling names is not refutation.
Obviously, some of his conclusions stemming from the history he provides can be argued, but his overall claim (and purpose of the book) that fascism was a creature of the left, not the right as leftists have claimed for years, has not been refuted by anyone, anywhere.
Or, like most liberal reviewers have done are you going to argue that liberals have never claimed that fascism was a creature of the right? That seems to be the new left meme in an attempt to get around the main point of the book.
In that vein, how does a leftist come to grips with the fact that the left is responsible for almost all atrocities committed in the last 100 years (fascism, stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.)? Instead of coming to grips with the fact that leftist ideology seems inexoribly to lead to tyranny and human rights abuses, the left claims any conservative policy or election win is the new coming of the third reich.
Which, I believe, is why Goldberg wrote the book, to help put backward and hypocritical nonesense to bed.
The truth is that there is almost no historical precedent of a conservative movement gaining power and turning into a tyranny with mass murder of its own people. Whereas on the left, such is commonplace (again, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.).
Which again leads to the question, what is it about leftist thinking that seems to lead so easily down that path?
Lisa:
I take it you have not read “that idiotic book.” I have. It’s not idiotic. And it’s definitely not one long, hysterical screed about how evil liberals are. And yeah, I went into it with skepticism, because there is no way I will accept an argument that makes me look good unless it’s pretty solid. (I would rather hear 100 true things that dismantle my beliefs than one lie to support them.)
Goldberg bends over backwards to emphasize that he’s not saying that everyone who self-identifies as a liberal (such as yourself, Lisa) is a quasi-Nazi. He digs into what Fascism was before the Holocaust, when Progressives in the U.S. thought that Mussolini was a great man doing great things, and that Hitler wasn’t far behind.
The eugenics movement in the U.S. gave us Planned Parenthood (prevent those inferior races, especially dark ones, from reproducing) and the minimum wage (to price blacks out of the work force). It also inspired Hitler to take eugenics to its most nasty conclusion: if “survival of the fittest” is Nature’s law, then by all the Teutonic gods, we’re going to be the fittest.
I don’t smear all self-identifying liberals or democrats with the term “fascist.” That wasn’t the thesis of the book. It wasn’t a neener neener, either. It was a scrubbing off of the whitewashing that the educational establishment has done to early 20th-century history. After the death camps were discovered, Fascism was discredited (as it should be), and the Communists took the opportunity to declare that they were “right-wing” (which was Stalin’s thing: he called all of his totalitarian opponents “right-wing”).
But today, if you’re on the right, you’re for smaller government and more individuality, whereas if you’re on the left, you’re for the perfection of society through government micro-management. For our own good, you see. That’s why the cover has the smiley-face with the Hitler ‘stache.
But today, if you’re on the right, you’re for smaller government and more individuality, whereas if you’re on the left, you’re for the perfection of society through government micro-management. For our own good, you see.
That’s a keeper, dicentra. Now, certainly the Republicans elected haven’t fulfilled the hopes of the right, but that is what we’re aiming for. And, simply because they’ve let us down doesn’t mean I’m gonna start batting for the other team.
…but I would prefer that we on the right construct an intellectual bulwark that is not based on religious or traditional dogmatism. It should not be too hard to make an argument against Nazi-type eugenics based on Kant’s Categorical Imperative or Robert Nozick’s philosophical work.
But Kant and Nozick were just people who were good at constructing arguments. So was Marx. Why should we privilege one human thinker above another? Every philosophical system is premised on unprovable assumptions, such as the worth of human life or even the necessity of ethics.
We in the modern West aren’t too fond of murder, but many human societies have no problem with it: if someone disses you or does you harm, why not kill the bastard? Who’s to say he didn’t need killing? Who’s to say it’s wrong? Just because you don’t like it…
It comes down to this: without God, all is permitted. Any good argument that you can make for a particular ethic can be shot down by another good argument. Or a bad one that people will go ahead and follow nonetheless, because it’s easier.
Yeah, I know: who knows what God wants? All kinds of people claim to know, but they don’t agree at all. I guess we’ll all just have to ask The Man ourselves and see if we get a good answer.
People stand in agreement with a lot of things that, when put under analysis, come up wanting under certain conditions, and in certain specific contexts. My thing happens to be “meaning” and how we establish it — and so it is under those conditions and in that context that I assign value judgments to various philosophies, based specifically on how they function.
So there is nothing at all paradoxical about assigning value judgments that are born from perfectly accurate descriptions of a given philosophy. To critique the philosophy is not necessarily to demonize all those who adhere to it. Instead, it is to make the critique available to all those who are willing to examine their own beliefs.
But that’s all so much tortured deconstruction and fancy lingua-whatever excuse making. So forgive me.
#22 Dicentra,
You are correct that any ethical system must be grounded in some absolute, and there will always be some people who disagree with that absolute. The problem is that using God as the absolute is vulnerable to the same problem, since your system will never be accepted by atheists or even people who have a different conception of God than yours.
My argument would be that we should use accept as our absolute the idea that individual humans are ends unto themselves, and not to be used as the means to any other end. This is the central idea of the Lockean political system upon which our Constitution was founded, so a good case can be made that we should all accept it. It is harder to argue that everyone must accept your idea of God’s will.
I thought we already did accept that. Some people may start a bit farther back, basing this principle on their faith, but as far as I’m concerned, this *is* the basic principal of classical liberalism/modern American conservatism.
What would Kant say about my need to go lift weights, then lie out in the sun for a bit?
Yeah. That’s what I thought.
Raise your hand if you think Hugo Chavez is a great leader. Now, those of you with a hand up who are liberals, raise your other hand. Now stay that way for a while, because it’s always a good idea to practice, ya fascists. Fucking progressives.
Your excuse making relates to your/KK’s grand non-stop demonetization and identifying one man as solely emblematic of a certain political philosophy, for which you also assign all a philosophy’s sins upon his head.
He’s not skilled! He’s simply the leftard’s icon! A barking-moon artist con!
I say he can be equally skilled, iconic, and a con of sorts, hell, he’s a politician.
Put another way, saying that fascism stemmed from leftist thought, does not mean that all leftists are nazis or evil.
The point is that it is much more likely for a totalitarian tyranny to evolve from leftist ideology b/c the left believes in a powerful gov’t that controls/regulates pretty much everything in an attempt to create a “perfect society”, the left does not have much use for protecting property rights, and the left has no problem throwing away religious moral dogma about respect for sanctity of life etc., in search of a “perfect society” through science, such as cloning, etc.
It is not a far step from those beliefs to tyranny and human rights abuses. In contrast, it is a harder step to get there starting from a philosophy that pursues smaller gov’t with less power, strong property rights, and traditional moral values.
The left always believes that “this time” it will be better. This time the command-economy will work b/c they are smarter than the leftists who tried it before. This time gov’t won’t become tyranical b/c they are better than the leftists who preceded them. This time abuses won’t occur b/c we won’t let them. And thus, history repeats itself as power corrupts as it always does.
The point of conservatism is to keep gov’t power smaller so that such corruption is not ultimately as costly. Conservatives know that power corrupts all, even other conservatives, so we don’t want to create a gov’t that can easily turn into a dictatorial-tyranny. (Not to mention that we don’t believe heavily gov’t regulations and control over the economy ever works).
I think what Goldberg is getting at in the above-cited passage is that Progressives tend to be mindless iconoclasts: if it’s old, traditional, long-held, or just inconvenient, it’s got to go.
It’s as if those sledgehammer-wielding folks at the Berlin wall, flush with the excitement of tearing down that hated wall, began to tear into all of the walls they could find–on the hospitals, schools, homes, etc.
The early 20th-century progressives believed that democracy and the free market had passed their expiration date. I mean, look! The world was not perfect. The transition from monarchy to representative government was certainly progress, so let’s keep going, folks!
Sounds good, but the proggs were The Educated and Culturally Elite, who were (and are, and always have been) the most arrogant people on the planet. Coupled with the intense desire for their tribe to be in control of the ignorant masses, you get horrors like Nazism, Fascism, Marxism, Communism, Maoism, etc.
They promise a better society, but they can only get rid of life’s natural chaos and messiness by imposing draconian controls on the populace. No dissent! You’re ruining things! Furthermore, the people who tend to take the helm of these movements are malignant narcissists (witness the obsession with putting their enormous visages on every public surface) whose only goal is to Have Their Way, not to actually benefit people.
What bothers me about Barack and Michelle and Hillary is that their words so closely echo the rhetoric of the early 20th-century Progressives. (Hillary flat-out said she was one.) They sell themselves as nice, maternal caregivers who will stop all the bad things from happening to us. But they’re really after our souls.
One really should note that the Woodrow Wilson/Margaret Sanger progressive attempt to eradicate blacks continues to be the most effective killer of blacks ever devised.
“• Black women are 4.8 times as likely as non-Hispanic white women to have an abortion, and Hispanic women are 2.7 times as likely”
The epitome of pregressivism in action and a repudiation of assertions regarding progressive’s inability to achieve their desired ends.
#20: Dicentra you are always very thoughtful and a pleasure to read. I have to admit that I didn’t read the book. I watched Goldberg make the book promo circuit watched him do a bunch of readings and interviews. He also had a Liberal Fascism Blog where he discussed the premise of his book. It appeared to be a bunch of bullshit to me. And since he is so regularly specious on “The Corner” I figured this was more of the same. But I will retract my wholsale dismissal of “Liberal Fascism” and stick with arguing with your arguments.
But today, if you’re on the right, you’re for smaller government and more individuality, whereas if you’re on the left, you’re for the perfection of society through government micro-management. For our own good, you see. That’s why the cover has the smiley-face with the Hitler ’stache.
So you are telling me that Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, all this crazy “we are a Christian nation and should rule biblically” shit, and a Constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage is NOT meddlesome, interventionalist, and “four the good of the nation” fuckery? Really?
I say that both sides of the political spectrum love to use the government to meddle in people’s lives as long as it is someone else’s lives and not their own.
Dicentra, you wrote;
“…We in the modern West aren’t too fond of murder, but many human societies have no problem with it: if someone disses you or does you harm, why not kill the bastard? Who’s to say he didn’t need killing? Who’s to say it’s wrong?…”
I object to the assertion ‘…many human societies have no problem with it…” I don’t believe this to be true now. I don’t believe it to be true of any human society I have ever heard of. At any time. And that may be why I’m disinclined to believe that, to quote you again, “without God, all is permitted”. Human beings everywhere and always have systems of morality, with gods/G-d and without.
She’s a self described griefer. Griefing is a form of trolling. QED.
And with her latest tirade about wanting to punish rather than persuade, the parallels between nishi and she who shall not be named are making me a bit uncomfortable. I think she may ought to think about getting some help.
The book I’m reading:
Christ the Eternal Tao. (Amazon is down.)
It is, in fact, the first principles revealed through religious revelation that are the first, last and best line of defense against fascism.
But you didn’t hear that from me.
#33: Excellent, excellent comment.
Sdferr: No, there has always been a divide between the ‘people of the name’ and the ‘people of the world’, the latter of which found murder permissible under the right conditions, almost unanimously. The only kind of ‘murder’ that was not permissible was that of their loved ones, close friends and comrades, or self. But then again, maybe it was, depending.
Not to say killing human beings isn’t wrong. It always is. But I’m not silly enough to think I’m incapable of wrong, if you know what I mean. I might do very wrong things in defense of my loved ones or nation. I know I won’t be justified before God, but that will have to wait until the enemy is subdued…
that Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, all this crazy “we are a Christian nation and should rule biblically†shit, and a Constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage is NOT meddlesome
All government laws are meddlesome to some extent. What specifically do you dislike about the “Patriot Act”? Homeland Security?
What specifically do you claim for ““we are a Christian nation and should rule biblically†shit”? I hear that a lot but never see any actual arguments that such is happening.
You may disagree with a constitutional amendement re: marriage, but it would not be necessary if the left did not believe in a “living constitution” that they can change at the drop of a hat through activist judges. Most conservatives would accept same-sex marriage if enacted through democractic means and the state legislatures, rather than tyrant judges. Moreover, unlike the left, the right is actually proposing using the constitutions actual amendment procedure, again, rather than self appointed god-king judges who change the constitution pursuant to their own whims.
Sdferr,
I refer you to widely held and practiced concept of “honor killings” in the middle east, for instance.
RiverC
Please tell me the ‘C’ in RiverC doesn’t stand for Cocytus.
Philosopher Kings, I think they fancy themselves, Mr. Banana Omega. Nevermind that highly educated and experienced third parties only possess at maximum half of the knowledge needed to make these kind of decisions, anyway.
Not to say killing human beings isn’t wrong. It always is.
Always? War? Capital punishment? Assisted suicide? Self defense?
Sdferr: Then I won’t. Ever your humble servant.
MayBee: Morally speaking, yes. If humans have in them the image of God, you are marring and defacing it by killing them.
I’m not against capital punishment, self-defense, and necessary warfare, I just like to keep the facts straight.
I don’t believe it to be true of any human society I have ever heard of
I don’t know if it’s true, but an acquaintance in Bali told me that crime is so low there because the police don’t care if family members of a victim of a crime kill the perpetrator. If someone robs from you, he said, it is ok to kill them.
I refer you to widely held and practiced concept of “honor killings†in the middle east, for instance.
Or rap music awards dinners.
I’m open to the arugment that laws such as the Patriot Act give to much power to the Gov’t and should be repealed.
However, to simply throw it out as a boogyman, while supporting giving the gov’t even greater power over our everyday lives through socializing health care and enacting economy killing “global warming” regulations, etc., seems a bit Schizophrenic.
Those kinds of liberal policy dreams would give the gov’t much more power over a far greater number of people than the Patriot Act or Homeland Security could ever contemplate. And that doesn’t even get to the merits of such idiotic ideas.
Man, I can’t believe I’ve been entering my site url wrong for the past… ever. Oh well.
Great Banana
I look upon honor killings as an evil thing. They may not be murder, however, in the sense that we here in the US, do not look upon the killing of Ted Bundy by the state of Florida, as a murder. Those same countries in which honor killings take place (and in which no punishment is exacted on the killers for the killing) yet recognize murder as crime and punish it accordingly.
Yikes RiverC, I had not been to your blog. Pardon, please.
MayBee: Morally speaking, yes. If humans have in them the image of God, you are marring and defacing it by killing them.
God has wisdom and the ability to judge, some small amount of which he also gave us. I don’t believe He is a zero tolerance moralizer.
Thing is, Lisa, lots of us on this side of the aisle are against the extremists on that line, too. I don’t have much truck with the far Christian right, and will work against their political aims when I can. But the reality is, they’re much less likely to get their ends achieved than the left is.
You’re more likely to see hate-crimes laws than blasphemy laws, for example.
Sdferr,
So your position is that every society condemns murder, but they all have different definitions of what murder is?
I think that position kind of makes Dicentra’s point that you were contesting:
We in the modern West aren’t too fond of murder, but many human societies have no problem with it: if someone disses you or does you harm, why not kill the bastard? Who’s to say he didn’t need killing? Who’s to say it’s wrong? Just because you don’t like it…
Doesn’t it?
I look upon honor killings as an evil thing.
But this is not about how you see them. It is about how some societies don’t see them as immoral or evil.
Maybee
That’s right, it is not about how I see them. Those societies see them as punishment and I can see that, just as I can see that we see right in killing Bundy. Far from immoral, they see the honor killing as a moral thing. Far from immoral, we see putting Bundy to death as a moral thing.
I say that both sides of the political spectrum love to use the government to meddle in people’s lives as long as it is someone else’s lives and not their own.
Goldberg devotes a whole chapter to “compassionate conservatism,” which he decries as coming from the same fascistic impulse to use the levers of government to “improve” society, just in a different direction.
we are a Christian nation and should rule biblically
We are a nation of [mostly] Christians, actually. A description rather than a prescription. But ruling biblically? Unless we want to use the tight prescriptions of the Law of Moses as a guide, I don’t think the Bible is a suitable replacement for the Constitution.
I object to the assertion ‘…many human societies have no problem with it…’ I don’t believe this to be true now. I don’t believe it to be true of any human society I have ever heard of.
Let’s see… our inner cities are rife with the gangsta code, which is highly homicidal; the Aztecs hunted other tribes to make thousands of bloody sacrifices to their gods; the Wahhabis believe that it’s OK to kill infidels, especially Jews, etc.
The truth is that during most of human civilization, human life has been cheap and easily disposed of. Might Makes Right is the default setting for human societies. We are extremely lucky to live in an era and in a nation and culture that values the individual. We’re the aberration, not the warrior, bloodthirsty, conquerer cultures that have dominated history for millennia.
o/t. I am on my way out the door. I am going to take my fat lazy dog (the product of a fat lazy owner) with me on my run tonight for the first time. I hope he can make it.
Wish him luck.
That ain’t no moralizin’, Ma’am. It’s complete righteousness. God has this thing called ‘mercy’ for a reason.
I don’t see the need to claim to be righteous or to demand other be righteous. So I can hold that killing is wrong even though I know it is necessary as a society for us to have capital punishment, engage in war, and allow our citizens to defend themselves with deadly force.
This may seem contradictory, but I find attainment of the ideal either in just warfare or utopian peaceful righteousness impossible in this life.
It’s an extraordinarily hard truth, but important: I know that I am not justified by my works.
And in the end, we’re all built to die.
Great Banana
Point to the society without murder. If there are none, point to the society that recognizing murder has no punishment, revenge, or compensation for the murder, but just lets it go. I don’t think any such thing exists or has existed. Maybe they have, but I haven’t heard of them.
For me, Progressivism simply involves control, as the means, for the sake of control as also the ends, as self. The various guises groupist Progressivism states as goals turn out to be either very destructive as pursued by [an obsessive] Progressivism, or fleeting and malleable due to their essentially prop-like/bait-and-switch purposes to begin with.
Iow, for me, the whole point and motive force of Progressivism is nothing but a regressive controllism involving anything and everything.
So, basically, I don’t exactly care yet where Progressivism came from as some kind of political or philosophical movement. Instead, I look at Progressivism/Progressives as I would an animal, and then wonder more about what it is and how it got here from an ecological or evolutionary standpoint.
Ethically, I just say and know that if thought, words, and acts are used – now by a kind of hominid we know as “The Progressives” – only for the purposes of control instead of for understanding and a genuine, Classical Liberal way of solving problems, I’m going to suspect and probably oppose everything they do, at least until I’m actually convinced to go along with them. I’ve learned.
Here’s a wry take on Life With Obama.
And now, to work.
Sdferr,
I am not disputing that. My point is that your observation actually seems to strengthen Dicentra’s point, which was:
But Kant and Nozick were just people who were good at constructing arguments. So was Marx. Why should we privilege one human thinker above another? Every philosophical system is premised on unprovable assumptions, such as the worth of human life or even the necessity of ethics.
We in the modern West aren’t too fond of murder, but many human societies have no problem with it: if someone disses you or does you harm, why not kill the bastard? Who’s to say he didn’t need killing? Who’s to say it’s wrong? Just because you don’t like it…
It comes down to this: without God, all is permitted. Any good argument that you can make for a particular ethic can be shot down by another good argument. Or a bad one that people will go ahead and follow nonetheless, because it’s easier.
In other words, if we are not going to use traditional moral values that come from religion in this country, what are we going to use?
A philosophical argument could be made to support honor killlings or other things that we in the west don’t believe to be moral.
Which is why conservatives don’t want to rush willy-nilly changing traditional moral values for no good reason. In contrast the left wants to disgard all older traditional religious based morals with the soup-de-jour, without any idea where such changes may lead or the harm such changes may cause society.
Dicentra
@56 I think I entirely agree with you as regards the history of humans killing humans. I think I read somewhere that some hunter-gatherer tribes had male death rates from homicide at near 50%. However, these same people recognized the difference between murder and an accidental killing, for instance, and treated the two events differently in dispensing whatever justice they saw fit.
It’s pretty easy to argue that based on the traditions of common law handed down from the English honor killings would be a kind of murder. The state itself has monopoly on the ‘sword’, the ability to take life, but offers exemptions to people protecting their property or family from physical attack. We also limit, as with Hammurabi’s code, our punishment to ‘an eye for an eye’. The only possible excuse for killing a daughter would be if your own daughter were physically killed. Otherwise it can not be established to be fair in terms of earthly justice. Thus honor killing fails two important tests, the first of precedence in our tradition, and the second of the general reasoning on which civil society rests.
God can be a violent prick too, according to most of the revered tomes on god. So it is illogical to say that somehow we are less violent and reasonable if we believe in god. We are pretty much dicks whether we are athiests or believers.
Lawrence Keeley’s “War Before Civilization” compares death-by-violence rates from various times in history to those of primitive cultures. Even during periods we think of as blood baths (WWII, American Civil War), the primitive cultures are much, much more violent. We tend to think otherwise because the numbers are lower; the rates are much higher, though.
I am going to lower the tone of the discourse around here. Fair warning. Both sides of the aisle have incredible amounts of fuck-headed stooopidity when it comes to their desires to lord and rule over us peons. Both sides. To my naive and innocent ;-) way of looking at these issues, Republicans are better only in manners of degree, but more importantly, they are not trying to get into my wallet as much. I am a greedy bastard.
God is a consuming fire, Lisa. It would be like calling the sun violent. The sun is, by nature, an immense ball of energetic plasma. You can call it a prick for vaporizing and burning all you want, but it’s still the sun.
JD: among humans, there is only goodness in matter of degrees.
Great B
On 63.
I guess my object was less about changing the moral principles of the west and the USA in particular, as trying to get to where moral principles come from in the first place. Our principles, it seems to me, have two feeding streams, on the one hand, as you say, Judeo-Christianity (for short hand, Jerusalem), and on the other, the decidedly non-religious western Philosophical tradition (for short hand, Athens). Which is preeminent? Hows ’bout neither?
Athens urges me to look to human nature for answers. So it is to human nature I go.
Athens attests, like all forms of truth, to Jerusalem. Justin Martyr and Clement lauded many of the philosophers of old such as Ovid, Virgil, Socrates, and so on, for their understanding of the Logos (though they corrected them in their errors.)
There really isn’t an ‘either/or’ here, it’s a ‘both/and’.
So it is illogical to say that somehow we are less violent and reasonable if we believe in god.
Some of which has to be attributable to the degree in which we get the message wrong. Simple belief is not the same as trying to follow the ideas laid out.
For example, during the Inquisition the powers that be took the metaphor of dead plant life being cleansed with fire to mean that people needed to be cleansed with fire. If they could understand that the plant was a metaphor for people, why did they insist that the fire was literal?
Once again, the progg’s notion of “moral relativity” rears it’s head.
From “moral relativity” to fascism is but a small stumbling step. Just ask Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, etc. Utopian societies, you see? And if it cost thirty or forty million lives to bring it about? So what? It’s all for a good cause, right?
I remember whenb I could rationalize ANYTHING I did. And when I do remember, I shudder at my self serving creativity. The left’s problem with “God”, is that they see a sort of super Santa, making a list and hurling thunderbolts. It is beyond their comprehension that knowing God is actually a liberating experience, and that “rebirth” has nothing to do with surviving an abortion, or even a church, necessarally.
They think that having faith in your life is like being a yoked oxen. I know, because I lived there for over forty years. The liberation of faith is like a two-by-four across the face of a liberal. I still shudder when I think of some of the things I’ve done as a “lefty”. It is a painful and humiliating experience when you give in and accept the truth, and so most proggs would rather demand that whatever they do is OK, because they stand at the top of the heap of universal evolution. How could anyone be more moral than they are?
I have always wondered how Hitler managed to take power in Germany, but the mystery is being solved for me, right in front of my eyes. The far left is but a few steps from grabbing the sword and the gun – regardless of the fact that they are but a small minority in this country.
Yoked oxen? More like joked oxen.
That’s one of the fundamental concepts of classical liberalism and the American founders — people are assholes, so what you have to do is get them to be assholes in a constructive way. Thus, economic liberty and competition actually produce cooperation, an outcome that’s damned difficult to legislate. Thus, three branches of government, each with powers to reign in the others. Thus, the federalist system, in which competition between the states — in matters like legislation, services, taxation — drives improvements.
The idea that humanity is perfectible comes largely from the tradition of the French Revolution; it informed the communists, the anarchists, and the fascists. That those movements have all tended to result in bloodshed on epic scales is no coincidence.
Of course, there’s immense tension between a school of thought that accepts the flaws of humanity and one that believes perfection is possible. That classical liberals accept unequal outcomes is viewed by the left/progressives/whatever as cruel, callous, retrograde, etc. That the left/progressives/whatever accept the violation of individual’s rights in pursuit of a greater good is viewed by classical liberals as oppressive.
Damn you, Karl, for the demonetization. I’m not sure what that means, but I expect that means depriving people of the convenience of the construct that is money. How Karl is accomplishing that, though, is something only thor understands.
Yeah. I mean, it’s not like I ever called anyone progressive other than Obama — nor have I ever delved into what it is about progressivism that I find dangerous so that, when those things are evident in the beliefs of a given politician, I can identify that politician as “emblematic of a certain political philosophy.”
Before Obama, in fact, the whole site was dedicated to nothing but movie lists and bunnies!
The fact is, I haven’t followed Obama’s politicking all that closely. And it seems to me that Karl has oftentimes noted Obama’s political skills, particularly in terms of his campaigns organization and strategy.
Me, I can’t say how skilled he is — though winning the nomination would suggest that he has a certain skillset. Unfortunately, that skill set is not something I find at all useful for anything other than winning a nomination. At least, insofar as I’ve analyzed it at all.
Again, my problem with Obama is his politics. Which can be gleaned from a number of factors, not just his more recent speeches, in which he’s forced by necessity to sound more centrist than he is.
Which reminds me: haven’t I also noted that McCain is “emblematic” in many ways of “progressivism”? So it seems my “excuse making” tree has many branches after all.
Funny, that.
RiverC
Athens, as I understand it, does nothing of the sort. For Athens, I think, reason, human reason, to put it rather coarsely, trumps divine or revealed truth. If that is not the meaning of the philosophic tradition of the west as pursued from then down to this day, I don’t know what to think.
Hitler and Mussolini proclaimed theirs the “Third Way” — neither communism nor capitalism, neither totalitarian nor libertarian. That they were lying should have been obvious, but as we’ve been seeing, people can ignore a lot if they just try.
Not to mention that, once a large portion of your society begins basing its beliefs on bald-faced lies, it’s easy to get them to delude themselves even further.
“…God can be a violent prick too, according to most of the revered tomes on god.”
– That idea is not at all to be understood as cogent ( as it is presented to man). First of all, right up front man is stamped as being unable “to know the mind of God, and the mysteries of his works”, which is to say, assigning any sort of intent, judgment, or purpose to his actions is summarily reduced to the same level as accusing a hurricane of murder, when nature decides to dance across the earth.
– Now you can decide that stipulation is just self-enforcing and too convenient for your tastes, but never the less that is the way it is presented.
– Secondly, even had we the ability to divine intent, God as the creator would have the right to do as he pleases, with or without our aprobation.
– Whether you believe this or not, it is the dogma.
– This requirement would be inescapably at the heart of the Progressives natural distaste for ontological thinking, since the corner stone of their mantra rests on the usual “I know better” Theistic tenets, as found in all Fascist movements.
#69: The sun is not a supposedly salient being. And supposedly, god gives two flying fucks about all of us and sent his son to die for us and all that shit. Or he commanded some arab guy to do a bunch of shit and marry a 9 year old or something.
If god is like the sun, why bother worshipping?
Your excuse making relates to your/KK’s grand non-stop demonetization
I don’t think the US has ever demonetized its currency, unlike almost all other nations. I may be wrong. Certainly, you can’t waltz into the treasury with a gold certificate or silver certificate and demand gold or silver; those days are past (which makes Ron Paul an unhappy man). But they’re still money; if you’re dumb enough to try to spend them (since they’re worth more than face value), it’s legal to do so.
What was the subject of this post again?
Hardly. At its best, Athens reaches to the expanses of the heavens and not beyond. Heraclitus, Socrates, Zeno- attest to the inability to attain ultimate knowledge through mere human reason. Human reason is a marvelous tool and no less in the hands of these great men, but it ultimately bows its neck in submission to the uncreated and infathomable God.
Interesting, here is Heraclitus:
“Of the Logos, which is as I describe it, people always prove to be uncomprehending, both before and after they have heard of it. For although all things happen according to this Logos, people behave as if they have no experience, even when they experience such words and deeds as I explain, when I distinguish each thing according to its constitution and declare how it is. The rest of humanity fails to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do when asleep.”
Indeed, Socrates himself said:
“It is neither easy to find the Father and Maker of all, nor, having found Him, is it possible to declare Him to all.”
One of the better threads at pw, if I may so opine. Love to see the interconnectedness of the various political and philosophical fields, especially as we encounter the next Great Society. The contradiction inherent in leftism is by now quite mind-boggling.
Of course, and no matter the magnitude: The overhead recording on the Chicago “L” city train I rode the other day sez that soliciting and gambling are prohibited on that particular piece of inconsequential State property.
You know, because of the vast, natural chasm between collective churchiness and State. Good thing something that minor will always be limited to two dollar rides…
Bambi /mini satin
Night of the Lepus/Flemish Giant
That Michael Moore one with the rabbit murder scene/German Grey
Harvey / American Sable
Donnie Darko/ Dutch
Oh, and #83 is especially fulfilling…
Lisa: God is beyond description. You said that God is a violent prick, I merely pointed to the biggest material source of power, which is deadly without being actively violent. God’s deadliness need not be active and intentional, but may indeed be simply a result of his nature. Obviously whether or not God is like the Sun (he is like all things, but also unlike them) is not the hold-out for your decision not to pay deference to Him.
“In the Beginning, God created Man. And Lisa, being the gentleman she is, promptly created God.”
Can’t recall who that paraphrases, but s/he was spot-on.
RiverC
Natch.
Would you be so kind as to source that Socratic quote so I can place it?
In the meantime, I fully agree with you that philosophy is not transcendent nor should it be. That can be seen immediately in the furious arguments over Darwin and Behe.
Jeff, I too hardly dare glance in O!’s general direction for all the shining light. O! is — it seems even this early on, and consistent with that other branch of leftism, which is willful blindness — merely gunning for the JFK profile; the man is wrong on so many things one literally loses count. Or, rather, He has profile and myth projected upon Himself, which serves the quest just as well, thank you very much.
Appearances-centrism is a fundamental subset of dishonesty, and the Democrat Prez campaign is naturally all about dishonesty — legalizing theft and bigotry tends that way.
As Ric suggested, it’s all about the winning (which cultivates overt pandering, as if the better panderer naturally qualifies.)
Plato, Timeaus. As quoted by St. Justin Martyr in his “Second Apology”, p. 191.
And, of course, it’s not necessary to believe in God to be humbled by the immensity of the universe, and to acknowledge your own imperfections and imperfectibility.
Whether you see imperfectibility as coming from original sin, or from the basic rules of nature (perfection violates causality), once you accept that humanity cannot be perfected, you start to focus on how you can make the best of the hand we’ve been dealt.
Rob: In its deepest form, contemplation of the universe is contemplation of God. This is the implicit meaning of John, Chapter 1. His word is ‘Logos’, which was the Greek philosophers’ term for the underlying order or sustaining pattern of all things in the cosmos.
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and RiverC, have you read Timaeus? As I remember it, it is by far the least understood dialog Plato wrote. Much of it appears to us moderns as pure nonsense. What it may have meant to Plato’s contemporaries is beyond us, transcendently so.
I have often wondered whether Jesus read Plato. Any guesses out there?
My dear, I quote Justin Martyr, for he was a greater mind than I will ever be. He appeared to comprehend Plato’s Timaeus. Then again, with the Christian revelation it may be fully comprehensible. It should be on my reading list somewhere.
#84: Damn JHoward. You make us sound like creepy motherfuckers from “1984” working at the Ministry of Love.
Sdferr: He was the Logos. I have doubts as to if he ever picked up a book except to bless it. More important things to do, like, chill out in the cool of the day.
Man, what a life.
Which us would that be, Lisa?
Regardless, the creepy motherfuckers from “1984″ working at the Ministry of Love is how it, um, progresses, not how it starts, Lisa. I’m seeing more of a Jonathan Price navigating Brazil right now.
I, for one, am kinda glad I can never know God, or the Universe, even though I seem to want to: otherwise, what would trhere be left to wonder about?
Sdferr,
Are you making the epistemological assumptions that ‘revelation’ has something to do with ‘sudden’? My assumption regarding it is that ‘revelation’ was a process of some 1,000 – 2,000 years or so that involved discernment and the incorporation of ‘the good’ (or Tao) into what we consider to be dogma today. I’ve never understood the benefit of assigning a higer ‘truth’ value to a value set derived through reason (Kant) rather than one derived from observation and practice. Besides, Kant wrote as if he were paid a penny a letter – a bit like Hegel and more than a few others who worshipped the bitch goddess Reason. A shame that they weren’t within reach of the Jacobins at the proper moment. Those fellows knew the value of sacrifice in Reason’s bloody eyes and would have given us the shortened version in the flash of a blade.
RiverC
I must admit I never thought of JC that way before, like, he IS the LOGOS, so what the heck would he be doing caught reading a book? So what’s up with the carpentry thing?
“If god is like the sun, why bother worshipping?”
Lisa,
It gets a little deeper here than you are probably willing to
go. And If I had three days, I might be able to scratch the
surface.
But I doubt it. Real faith comes as a lightning bolt in your life,
and beyond that, can’t really be explained in words.
Just being aware that there is something in your life that can’t be
explained is a good first step, though.
And “worshipping” is a word that is just as loaded as the word
“God”.
There is a reason that the ancient Jews were not allowed to utter God’s name aloud, and the current meaning of “worship” is a construct of religions, nothing else.
Ah! Who knows? Faith is faith, and you either have it or you don’t.
Unfortunately for too many people, it can’t be reduced to a text book.
“Damn JHoward. You make us sound like creepy motherfuckers from “1984″ working at the Ministry of Love.”
– Yes, and some of us actually enjoy it.
#104: God Works with his Hands?
Cosmic puns are the best.
What is this quintessance of dust-bunnies. Man delights not me.
Nor this crap scandi vaccuum cleaner.
#105: our word for the Nameless One (since we’re so hung up on names) is literally ‘The invoked’ (I think…)
Also, we should remember that David said that the creation itself glorifies God, that is, worships him. It does so by doing what it is created to do. There is a teaching that church services are ‘rational worship’, that is, a requirement in some degree for mankind being that he is sapient. This does not mean that man does not do general worship in the way that creation does – quite on the contrary. If symphonies, jazz and great art are not a kind of worship, then I am dumbfounded.
“It is neither easy to find the Father and Maker of all, nor, having found Him, is it possible to declare Him to all.â€Â
RiverC,
Thanks. All of those words of mine, and Socrates blows me away in one sentence!
Rick
What’s sudden about rolling back the stone and finding the chamber empty? What’s sudden about Paul’s trip on the Road?
What about Lost Dog’s ‘lightening bolt in your life’?
On the other hand there isn’t anything particularly sudden about the early church fathers whittling away at the faith for a couple of centuries or so.
I don’t think I require revelation to be anything other than what its attestants tell me it is.
God can be a violent prick too, according to most of the revered tomes on god.
Violent? Yes, but not all violence is wrong. When God wields the destroy-stick on a society, it’s not arbitrary nor is it cruel. He takes out societies when they degenerate into such depravity that it would be a sin to allow them to bring any more children into the world. I personally believe that Sodom and Gomorrah had devolved to the point where everyone did everyone else, including diddling the children. IOW, way beyond mere homosexuality. Kids born into that society didn’t have a chance.
Besides, we humans look at death as the Worst Thing In The World (as is natural), but from God’s point of view, death just moves you from one playing field into another. We see absolute loss, He sees cutting losses.
From God’s point of view, it’s worse to lose your soul than your life. For example, the Jews et al. lost their lives in the death camps, but the Nazis lost their souls. Whose loss does God mourn the most?
Also, in my religion, God is not incomprehensible. That’s a neo-Platonic concept not found in the Bible. God is just smarter, has a better perspective, and has an agenda that may or may not coincide with our own.
Toddlers can’t understand why their parents haul them into the strange room where needles get poked into them, but the parents endure the toddler’s protests because they know it’s for the best in the end.
Damn JHoward. You make us sound like creepy motherfuckers from “1984″ working at the Ministry of Love.
If by “us” you mean “everybody left of center” or “everyone who votes Democrat,” then that’s not the target of our scorn. Orwell was describing a particular tendency among some people to micromanage society for whatever reason — our own good or their own satisfaction, it doesn’t matter.
Anyone in government (or the university or the office or the church or wherever) who thinks that coercion is a good means to an end, or a nifty end in itself, is Evil, in our books.
You really ought to be careful, Lisa. You might end up over on the dark side after all. We’ve got cookies!
My problem is that calling it “mainstream liberalism” is that it is a misnomer and concedes the semantic high ground to people who are in reality reactionary leftists of the worst stripe.
WE are the liberals, classical liberals, the heirs of the American tradition.
Which is one of the reasons I like Jeff G. so much.
Well, God’s purposefully mysterious about all of this stuff. Some people get lightning bolts, other people get ‘paths without tracks’. It’s so arbitrary, but the Man does what he’s gotta.
There is a reason that the ancient Jews were not allowed to utter God’s name aloud
? ~”Of the Creator, those that speak don’t know, and those that know don’t speak” – attributed to Chief Joseph, Nez Perce, in response to the question of whether he would want schools on the Reservation. He thought they would bring with them the arguing Protestants and Catholics.
Lost Dog
Don’t trust that Socrates character. He’s a liar. Sometimes. And besides, he’s just made up, kinda like Scooby-Doo.
#63 In other words, if we are not going to use traditional moral values that come from religion in this country, what are we going to use?
See comments #16 and 24, where I posed that question and attempted an answer.
“I don’t think I require revelation to be anything other than what its attestants tell me it is.
– Actually, according to most who find it, religious “knowing” in your soul, so they say, id one of the few things in life that requires no one elses agreement, like a baby’s smile.
I am going to lower the tone of the discourse around here. Fair warning. Both sides of the aisle have incredible amounts of fuck-headed stooopidity when it comes to their desires to lord and rule over us peons. Both sides. To my naive and innocent ;-) way of looking at these issues, Republicans are better only in manners of degree, but more importantly, they are not trying to get into my wallet as much. I am a greedy bastard.
You are my white knight, charging in on your steed of lowered discourse.
I agree with you, btw.
Aldo
You’re on to something, though from 16, if it were easy it would have been re-done already, don’t you think? To the extent that it has been done in the Constitution, yippee and we keep on going. Modify, argue, co-operate, modify, repeat.
Uttering God’s name does not disclose his Name, but gives on hand a false sense of knowledge, but also since names are associated with essences (being symbols of people) it was also a way of saying, “I will not speak of thy mysteries with thine enemies.” It was an act of tremendous respect.
I am a greedy bastard.
I would say the ones trying to plunder your earnings and piggyback on your achievements are the greedy ones. Otherwise, spot on.
“Good dogma is the most powerful inhibiting influence against bad ideas and the only guarantor that men will act on good ones.”
That’s part of what Jeff has in bold and my point is that “good dogma” was not “revealed” with the suddenness of scales falling from Paul’s eyes. The discernment process involved took a bit longer than Kant did in thinking up and writing his cookbook of reason.
if we are not going to use traditional moral values that come from religion in this country, what are we going to use?
I would be happy if we said that the Enlightenment Values and English Common Law and Federalism and anything else that birthed the Constitution’s core values is our basis and then stick with it.
We don’t really have to “prove” that we’re right: we just have to say “this is how we want to live because we like the results it produces.”
That’s as good as it gets in this life, yo. The trouble we’re having now is that not everyone wants to stick to the Classical Liberal principles. It’s going to lead either to a type of secession or a civil war if we’re not careful.
There’s more than one kind of not-reading-the-book going on here.
The early Progressive movement didn’t grow out of “leftism,,” but out of a strain of Christianity that what we call “liberalism” has since socially, but not ideologically, displaced; it’s the same, with a few words changed.
Goldberg underemphasizes this, because talking about war and eagles and shit is more entertaining, but he doesn’t pretend it’s not so. Especially today, that pretense is impossible to keep up.
Look around. Huckabee may be out, for now, but Obama speaks the language of the same heresy, as plainly as anyone since the Women’s Christian Anti-Saloon League — as does McCain, with his inveighing against (anyone else’s) profit, demagoguery about “service,” etc.
It’s the American ideology, and it has been since…always. The Locke/Jefferson stuff got some lip service for a couple years, but it never got tried, because it’s as foreign to the American soul as Islam is.
And given the lack of Old Testament smiting that’s come down — that Boston and D.C. haven’t been Sodom-and-Gomorrahed, even this late in the game — God may well be on that side, not Jefferson’s.
So don’t invoke His endorsement in vain.
“all this crazy “we are a Christian nation and should rule biblically†shit”
I call bullshit on this one, plus the rest of Lisa’s screed. For all the mewling I’ve heard over the past 8 years about how the e-vil BushCo was going to impose some kind of xtian theocracy on this country….it hasn’t happened. Furthermore, neither Bush nor anyone in his administration has EVER said anything remotely resembling this nonsense.
Bush is a Methodist, for chrissakes. They are NOT a denomination known for their in-your-face and down-your-throat proselytizing.
As for Homeland Security or the Patriot Act, I’m still waiting for someone, anyone, to tell me how they have been interfered with in any way by either of these laws (aside from the obvious one of it being a royal pain in the ass to get on an airplane these days).
It’s clear that the real reason the proggies don’t like Goldberg’s book is that he commits the cardinal sin of pointing out that the leftist “emperor has no clothes” when it comes to who the “fascists” really are.
Deal with it.
psycho:
Are you talking about the Social Gospel? The one where you go all totalitarian so as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, etc., except that you fail to transform your own baser instincts through the Redemption, because you don’t think you could possibly have any, given your Good Intentions?
The trouble we’re having now is that not everyone wants to stick to the Classical Liberal principles. It’s going to lead either to a type of secession or a civil war if we’re not careful.
In his crappy novel <em.Spook Country William Gibson introduces the idea that we are already in a “cold” civil war. I believe that classical liberal principles are the best basis for a just society, and I believe that they are based on sound “first principles” that almost everyone can accept, even atheists. We may be entering an era in which the majority of the younger generations do not understand and/or accept this paradigm. If so, some sort of political dissolution is inevitable.
Yes, the revelation is complete, but the container needs some work. See the traditional story about Mary’s life and illumination. Most of the time is the revelation working on us, which might make it more possible for us to communicate it.
– And then we have Luthor who said “{every} act of the common man or woman that produces some good is an act of God through them. Thus the farmer at the plow, tending his field, or the maid at the milk can, are the equal of the most pious church goer, or church elder.”
– Hey. It worked well enough to get generations of immigrents to help build this mess.
psycho: Christianity is the overarching paradigm of the last days. As the world changed from start to present with the fall, so it did with the incarnation. It would be unusual to find any kind of perversion that is not somehow related to Christianity. It is orthodox Christianity (or correct dogma, as Goldberg notes) that protects and builds. It is this leftist notion of remaking reality in your own image that takes parts of Christianity and affixes them like sequins to their technicolor dream coat of utopian progressive totalitarianism.
Would we assume a porn star wearing a cross and saying ‘Oh God’ was somehow inspired by Christianity to make videos?
Why then do we assume that the Social Gospel is anything Christian at all?
I would be happy if we said that the Enlightenment Values and English Common Law and Federalism and anything else that birthed the Constitution’s core values is our basis and then stick with it.
Bah, false consciousness strikes again! Much better to go with things that have never worked, or can’t possibly work, or…hey, with O!Hope, I say. What, have all your thrill receptors died, or were you just born that way?
“because you don’t think you could possibly have any, given your Good Intentions?”
Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson’s theology didn’t use the “Good Intentions” argument because they were absolutely secure in their faith that SCIENCE & REASON had already revealed the true path – ‘cept for the part on which those brown and black and yellow folks were standing. Thus the need for a nice scientific Eugenic Broom to sweep off the litter.
“Some people get lightning bolts, other people get ‘paths without tracks’.”
RiverC,
As far as I can tell, they go hand in hand. “Paths withou tracks”
are the reward of faith. And lightning bolts are just about the only way a cynic will be shaken enough to understand.
Giving God human traits is an impossible way to approach faith, and seems to be one of the main reasons so many people have trouble with the concept of “God”.
So I recommend lightning. Most painful (psychically), for sure, but it’s the only thing that could have possibly worked for me. The words “hand your life over to God” are quite frightening and misleading for people who are determined that they are the top of the evolutionary heap – you know – God as oppressor. The truth turns out to be just the opposite.
And the “trackless path” is the best thing I have in my life.
Thanks for two great quotes today.
I never had a ‘lightning bolt’, full faith and credit. But I did catch glimpses of distant light along the winding road.
Well..
Good thing I said “have”. Because I think the best thing I ever “had” was the 2002tii my parents gave me in 1972.
Am I confusing anybody?
Rick
As to Kant and Hegel, why stop there? The enterprise among scientists and philosophers is ongoing. Learning continues. Is it revelation, as understood by a religious, or reason, operating under, as you put it, observation and practice that informs E. Rutherford’s scattering experiments? Is revelation driving the Large Hadron Collider? Kant isn’t the end all be all of rationality. As you yourself pointed out, why should he be?
Where’s the nish when you need it?
I want to hear more about quantum ‘ghosts’ (say it with a Christopher Walken impression.)
Sdferr,
There is no reason not to watch the evolutionary process continue within science and philosophy with hope – as long as the work isn’t used to encourage sudden change or to declare “Finally, we’re there.” Hegel through Nietzsche and Heidegger to Hitler really wasn’t all that fun a trip.
– With the shining promise of Science and Reason as the backdrop, think of Oppenheimer’s feelings leading up to that instant in time when he flipped that small chrome switch. Then imagine what you would say to Gabriel if things had gone awry.
– Science is not very comforting in certain settings.
I’m a Steven Wright guy, myself.
And I’m pretty sure Mitch Hedberg died for my sins.
Aldo
I linked “E Pluribus Unum: the Bradley Project on America’s National Identity” yesterday in Jeff’s Tale of Two Multicult Cities. Check it out and pass it on.
“I never had a ‘lightning bolt’, full faith and credit. But I did catch glimpses of distant light along the winding road.”
RC,
“Lightning bolt” is obviously an analogy.
I don’t live within a lightning bolt, but that’s what it took to shake me out of my comfy little bed of disbelief.
I guess I am lucky, but my active alcoholism (and I was months from death) also disappeared with that bolt. Overnight.
I see pretty much what you do now, but I can’t even see THAT when I try to manipulate outcomes.
Anyway. Enough. I really don’t usually talk about this stuff, because it’s a waste of time and energy. It’s just that once in a while, I get the crooked notion that SOMEONE might be “seeded” with the truth.
I am now going back to being The Lost Dog.
Thanks. This is a great thread.
I’ll go check it out right now Sdferr. Thanks.
Rick
You have right, at least as much as you mention. However, there were during those perilous times many other thinkers and actors at work in the world, E. Hayek, L. Szilard, W. Churchill, W. Halsey, to pick a few names
What, have all your thrill receptors died, or were you just born that way?
Actually, yes. Asperger’s and depression will do that to you. :D
they were absolutely secure in their faith that SCIENCE & REASON had already revealed the true path
Except that SCIENCE and REASON can’t tell you what is ethical. Science can tell you how to put a dude on the moon or how to build an internal combustion engine or whether there really is a plesiosaur in Loch Ness, and Reason can identify logical fallacies and permit theoretical mathematics, but it cannot tell you whether it’s ethical to clone humans or exterminate the unfit.
I didn’t see Ben Stein’s movie, but much of the criticism seemed to assert that Stein was saying that if you believe that Darwin was right about Natural Selection, then you’re a breath away from building exterminating camps.
I don’t know if that’s the connection Stein made, but there might be a legitimate point somewhere in there: from a purely Darwinistic perspective, can you really say that trying to engineer a master race through selective breeding/execution is wrong?
No, unfortunately, which is the thesis of the above-quoted passage. The Constitution and Classical Liberalism can tell us how to govern (based on certain assumptions about human rights), but it can’t really settle questions of ethics such as embryonic stem-cell research or cloning; it just provides the framework for us to work it out ourselves.
But if the Proggs have their way, what they say goes, and no objections will be heard.
“I’m a Steven Wright guy, myself.”
– Well then. That explains everything. I was wondering why someone had snuk into the site and replaced every pixel with an exact duplicate.
Once I went to the store and bought a blank tape, then I took it home and stuck it in the tape deck and turned up the volume full blast.
Then I got a knock from a neighbor, who asked me to turn it down.
He was a mime.
–Steven Wright
Maybe we should look to Benedict’s Regensburg address as a tool to get a handle on the God/Reason reconciliation? Seems to me he aimed to encourage Islam to do something about that “Whatever Allah says, Goes…whether the interpreted ‘Allah says this’ directly contradicted the ‘Allah says that’ or not.” And Benedict manages to attach reason to God as inseparable: keeping God uppermost while retaining reason which, while gently knuckling under, gets to keep on doing its ‘high energy or evolutionary research’ thing unmolested.
“from a purely Darwinistic perspective, can you really say that trying to engineer a master race through selective breeding/execution is wrong?”
Huh? Where did “Darwinian perspective” come from? I don’t see the relevance to right and wrong. Where did you find that perspective in Darwin? As far as I know, Darwin studied evolution, but didn’t phlosophize about the right and thr wrong of it.
And to answer your question: Yes. I can definitely say it is wrong. Every attempt by man to “engineer” nature has been a disaster.
If we can fuck up Yellowstone with our arrogant “stewardship”, just imagine the possibilities that engineering the human race will provide…
– Once I went to the store and bought a new waste basket. I brought it home, took it out of the bag, and set it next to my desk.
– Then I wrinkled up the bag and threw it in the waste basket.
– Now I’m not sure what to do if I want to return it.
– Steven Wright
– Sdferr – That is not a failing of science, its what science does, and all it does.
– Science is not a craft involved in existential questions. Its a craft solely concerned with mechanics.
– Its purpose is to ask “if” we can do things, not “should” we do them.
– Anyone that seeks salvation through science will be sorely disappointed.
Every particle in the Universe has a state vector, a description of how it is (or is not) moving. In order to describe the Universe fully, you would have to specify each particle and its state vector; but, in order to encode data, what we do is alter the state vector of a particle. It follows that a complete description of the Universe within the Universe is impossible, because the data within that description requires more particles to encode it than there are within the Universe, not counting the fact that the Universe then contains the description of itself, which must then be described…
And it follows from that that if a complete description of the Universe exists, it must exist somehow outside the Universe, which calls the definition of “Universe” into question. At that point belief kicks in, generally in the form “I believe I’ll have another drink”. God must of His nature be ineffable, because anything you can eff isn’t God.
Like Timaeus, I assert that that which exists must have a cause, although unlike Timaeus I accept (in Pratchettian dismissiveness) that that cause may be quantum. Whether the cause comes before, during, or after, and what its nature may be, I regard as unanswerable questions — if we cannot, by rule of logic, fully describe ourselves, what chance have we of capturing any essence of the Creator?
We live within a mechanistic Universe, and cannot go outside it; the very concept contradicts itself. What we can do is discover whatever of the mechanisms may be accessible to us, for our own fun and profit. In the course of doing so, pragmatism raises its head. The word has a negative connotation these days, on account of all the people who asserted that beating the shit out of people always works, but in pure form it simply means accepting the outcome and assuming that the process that achieved it is repeatable. A true scientist is pragmatic. The prayer of the scientist is please, no miracles — what he wants is the least syllable of the Word, something small enough to fit within his limited intellect. I call that a sacrament.
Within that — the question here is how to build a social order. I choose to assume that that social order which results in prosperity and comfort is superior to the one that does not; this is a choice, and one which is at its root arbitrary. Given that choice, we then examine those social orders which have existed, and choose those elements which lead (or appear to lead) to the desired end state. That doesn’t require Divine inspiration, though it may be helpful.
Regards,
Ric
– As Ric has said so eloquently, the principle of non-realization of any constituent of the framework within which it resides, has been proven to an exactitude, if for no other reason than we simply cannot do it, nor can we devise any circumstance where we might be able to do it in the future.
– That means that we are forever bound by certain limits, which is a decidedly unfortunate condition if you are of a mind to eschew any thought of deity along the lines of Progressive eugenicists, because anything that is beyond our knowing is, by its very unknowable nature, a deity in relation to us.
– And a man has got to know his limitations.
Ric, infinite turtles abound: The small end of the Universe peters out in one of two states. Either there are an infinite number of sub-atomic particles perched upon one another, or there are a finite number, with the smallest being motivated — both into motion and into existence — by what is, from our perspectives, faith.
In other words, It is. And so then are we, et al.
And in that context, if you so much as suggest that God cannot be proved — to your point about the mind being bound within the Universe — eyes roll. Meanwhile, the sciencist depends on the faithful pursuit of the unpursuable.
Huh? Where did “Darwinian perspective” come from? … As far as I know, Darwin studied evolution, but didn’t philosophize about the right and the wrong of it.
Exactly. Darwin wasn’t walking around saying that what he observed from the Galápagos finches was a moral imperative. He made observations and hypothesized about the mechanism.
But the Proggs did a few things with Darwin’s observations:
1) They concluded that they could finally get rid of the notion of God, because now the old “proof” of His existence (oh yeah? then how do you explain all THIS?) was finally off their backs.
2) Now that those old stupid ethics were out of the way (and the nonsense about fallen man, and life after death), they could roll up their sleeves and begin to immanentize the eschaton. After their own desires, that is.
3) They figured that Science and Reason was a good replacement for Religion, so they latched onto Darwin’s notion of Survival of the Fittest (though I believe someone else articulated it thus, no?) and converted it from an observation into a moral imperative.
So when I say “Darwinian perspective,” I’m referring to both the Progg’s mutation of Darwin’s ideas and to the fact that Darwin wasn’t attempting to define any kind of ethic.
“Meanwhile, the sciencist depends on the faithful pursuit of the unpursuable.”
– True. But like so many things in life, you don’t have to know if the cheese in your pizza is based on some finitely tiny, or infinitely boundless quanta, in order to enjoy it or experiment with alternate recipes.
– Its equally feckless to deny the Pizza exists, simply because it assualts your faith in a certain dogma.
John in Ann Arbor( North til you smell it, West til you step in it…)
I don’t think the US has ever demonetized its currency
See 1933, when FDR “forced” the sale of all privately held gold at $20.67/oz- then “declared” the new price as $35/oz- but “you” were still not allowed to actually own it for almost 40 years…
Its equally feckless to deny the Pizza exists, simply because it assaults your faith in a certain dogma.
I dunno. At work they brought in three “pizzas,” and I deny and denounce all of them. Two with white sauce, two with chicken, one vegetarian, lots of onions and peppers.
But not a slice of pepperoni or sausage to be seen. That’s worse than an assault on my cherished dogmas: it’s downright obscene.
– I will join you in denouncing such blasphemous meatless trash. Shuuuunnn the vegy heretics – shhhuuuunn them!
Shunning is not enough. The fate of the Anti-Pepperonist must be but one – the steak and a fire so hot that it both sears and charbroils.
And dicentra knocks it out of the park @ #157. Were Darwin here today, I suspect he’d be nodding in assent.
People a lot should do what they think is right. I don’t know that we need to get all rulesy about it.
dicentra-
I would surely be forced to denounce any pizza with a “white” sauce… my “spiritual advisors” (Jerry & Ken) say that it seems “assimilationist”.
I can’t ‘throw it under the bus’ until I’ve had a couple slices.
They can take our lives, but they’ll never take our MEEEEEEEEAT!!!
– Can we humble servants of the great Pepperoni be so bold as to expect a quaff or two of the ice cold brew?
– Hark….comes a fevored knock at yonder chamber door… ‘Tis the deliverist, come with multitudenus hot sausage burnt offerings for the wicked and the quick….
Cave Bear I agree that fascism is thrown around rather stupidly way too much. I parted ways with a couple of friends over the misuse of it. But calling liberals fascists is the answer? My question to my now ex-friends was: Okay so we know fascism is really really bad – it is antithetical to all that is good and reasonable. So if you say that Republicans are fascists, what do you propose to do with them? You can’t live in a country that is run by fascists. You have to have do something to get rid of them. You can’t vote people who don’t recognize democracy out of office. Because they are FASCISTS right? So how do you purge this country of the fascists?
Now this pissed my buddies off and we parted ways that night. However, I always pose the question to anyone who sits around casually accusing their fellow Americans of being fascists. But I ask you who think that liberals are fascists – what do you propose to do with these people who are fascists – fascist being creatures who are utterly and completely dangerous and antithetical to democracy and freedom?
My point is that calling anyone or their beliefs fascist – unless they really are a fucking fascist – is dumber than a picnic basket full of dirt sandwiches. I don’t want to hear anyone’s bullshit reason why they think American conservatives or liberals are fascists. We live in a democracy or a democratic republic…whatever…it sure ain’t a country run by fascists. If the president or the speaker of the house were fascists, as each side likes to casually toss around, we would not be sitting around drinking beer and typing on our MacBooks about how fucking fascist anyone is. We would be more or less fucked.
There is a mango mojito waiting for me next door. Gotta go, homeskillets. I will be back later, drunker and surlier.
Well Lisa do they want to take my monies? Fascist is as good a word as any.
Really, Lisa? Surly on mango mojitos? A boilermaker should make you surly. A mango mojito should make you all sunny and slobbery with drunken love.
I’d say the problem Lisa’s having is that people can’t divorce the emotional Really Bad Shit aspects of WW2 from the dry fact of fascism as yet another failed ideology that leads to repression and mass murder (see also: Marxism). Many people throw the word around in the former sense, while Goldberg’s book deals primarily in the latter.
hmmm…has everyone had their say?
kk, ill have mine.
This thread makes about as much sense to me as a transmission from the snail people in Alpha Centari.
thing 1–morals and ethics and social mores and taboos don’t come from “god”– they come from consaguinous
pre-religious tribal kinship relationships in the EEA, and later became codified as religion and government.
We know this for two reasons–cultural anthropoloy has tagged consistant universal themes and markers in widely geographically separated primitive tribes, and the atheists and agnostics that you personally know, are not rapists, theives, murderers, etc.
Well…to me this isn’t conservatism, but neoluddism. Perhaps the two are isomorphic anymore. The problem with Goldberg’s little rant here, is that Free Market Eugenics are already in operation. Eggs from Ivy-league co-eds are going for $5,000.00. And Un-freemarket eugenics are also in operation. Other nations are not so scrupulous about cloning and genetic engineering. I think it is well nigh impossible to develop a countermeasure without first having the measure.
I agree that people’s children are the greatest good. But like my friend Godless Capitalist once said, opposition to genetic engineering will melt once the soft-left latte soccer moms realize they can have designer babies. When people can buy the best genetic advantage for their offspring, they will.
Transhumanists are the ultimate libertarians.
We plan to end the tyranny of genetic determinism, the totalitarianism of the bell curve.
How can the right call itself libertarian when it supports the presidents council on bioethics?
Thing 2–conservatives may advocate a color-blind state, but they do not advocate a religion-blind one. The rightside coverage of the YFZ ranch illuminates this nicely. The right rationalizes practices in fellow xians that are universally despised and condemned in muslims.
Goldbergs genealogy of progressivism is interesting and historical.
But I object to his triumphalist rants on xianity and “god” being the universal antidote to tyranny and genocide.
If our great Republic is “free”, it not because of judeo-xianity, but in spite of it.
Religions are anti-freedom in general.
And finally, why do i come here?
Great intellects are rare anywhere, and it seems most especially in the blogverse, where any tard can put up a weblog and build a tard echochamber.
Jeff is simply, a great intellectual.
Now that word, intellectual, has become a dirty word to conservatives.
Consider why.
I go to both sides.
Darksyde at dKos is a great intellectual too.
But i can’t eat their food either.
When i told the Derb i was gonna jump ship from the republican party, he asked me where i was going to jump to.
He’s right–both sides of the looking glass are the same–its a mirrorworld on either side.
In the end im just a hungry kid with her nose pressed to the plateglass window of both restaurants, the rightside and the leftside. Im not welcome to go in, and most of the food just makes me sick anyways.
Lisa, you really, really need to read the book. Goldberg goes out of his way to state that modern liberals are NOT fascists. What he is arguing is that “progressivism” has its roots in the statist mind set of the early 20th century, that many of the intellectual forebears of the “progressive” movement openly admired fascism (and vice-versa), and that some of the impulses behind modern liberalism are shared with the “progressives”.
Fer crissake, the last chapter is titled “We’re All Fascists Now” and excoriates “compassionate conservatism” for falling into some of the same patterns of thought.
(NB: He also says one of the problems is the one you’re falling into — that “fascist” is not synonymous with “evil”, yet many insist on using it so. Fascism can lead to evil, sure, but so can many, many other things.)
What the progressives did with Darwin’s observation that in nature the organism best fitted to survive and prosper does was to apply it to humans. On one level it was correct, humans are remarkable because they can adapt to different environments, from the Amazonian rainforest to the Arctic Circle. On a second level they misapplied it to describe the differences between different human societies, and that mistake is still being made.
They explained that the difference between the level of technological development between late-nineteenth century Europe and the rest of the world – such as Africa and Asia was based on the unique characteristics of race rather than the differences between different cultures and societies. For example, sub-Saharan Africa was technologically backward because of the inherent nature of its people rather than the difference of culture.
This is still used, though as a club in a different direction. The guide is not how technologically advanced a nation or race is, it is how ‘spiritual’ they are. American Indians are superior to the European Americans because they are more spiritual and their culture revered the earth and lived in harmony with the fluffy bunnies on Gaia’s bounty. It still exists, you see, it has just been grafted onto the opressor-oppressed narrative to show why the ‘oppressed’ are superior.
Much fun, eh? And very useful, if you get to pick what marks superiority and what marks inferiority. You can see it in the statement that a lawyer who is a community organizer is superior to a lawyer who works for a large firm or corporation.
Lisa,
Many posting here can do a schematic showing a path with just a few forks which leads from Hegel to Hitler or Stalin. Draw us a schematic of a path which includes Montesquieu, Burke and Smith and then leads within 10,000 miles of Hitler or Stalin.
We realize that progs don’t like their crazy ugly cousins but those suckers never, ever grew from conservative roots. Goldberg did a decent job of tracing lineage back to the early 1900’s and there is a slightly separate path that runs from there back through Mill, Bentham and Locke but that group isn’t precisely conservative or classical liberal.
MayBee – you are showing classism as you must know! A boilermaker is the drink of the bitterly clingy, a mango mjito is the drink of the enlightened.
CLASSIST!!111!!!!!
Darksyde at dKos is a great intellectual too.
rofl.
In the end im just a hungry kid with her nose pressed to the plateglass window of both restaurants
I went and found a restaurant that serves breakfast any time. I ordered waffles in the Renaissance.
– You cab pick and choose all you like, but at the end of the day what you can’t do is deny what history has taught us, so many times its an embarrassment to the intelligence of mankind that its even discussed any longer. Taken as a group you can toss each and every totalitarian ideology in the same stew pot, because oppression and mass killing is exactly what has resulted.
– It really doesn’t matter what the customs are like, or the musical score, or the stage settings, if at the end of every performance, the actors all commit genocide, and the roof tiles cave in on the audience, while the theater burns down.
– When you see someone who fancies themselves as in some way “elite”, backing and advocating for anything that even mimics a Theistic Totalitarian social construct, you have to know its from a deep desire to simple raw power.
– The kiss of death for extremists is stability, and so they are forced to attack any sort of stable social atmosphere, most notable Democracies, or Republics. Its what they do.
But calling liberals fascists is the answer?
Actually, the term “Liberal Fascists” is not Goldberg’s. It came from H.G. Wells, who looked at Mussolini and Hitler and thought they were the cat’s pajamas. He called for England and the U.S. to adopt a “liberal fascism,” which is fascism with a “liberal” face. Because fascism tended to change “flavors” depending on the country where it arose, the kind of fascism that Wells envisioned for the Anglosphere would be “liberal,” which means “not monarchical.”
The term “liberal” originally meant something other than what it does now. It might help to read this essay, which defines the various continuums and how terms like Left and Right and Liberal and Conservative get misused.
They took my monies.
Fascists! Tommorrow I’m having some space-age spam.
My chief gripe with Goldberg, is that it is never religion vs. anti-religion, but always tribe vs. tribe.
matoko
Your evidence about markers found amongst disparate groups doesn’t actually answer the question where the markers came from. You assert that they sprang from those people in parallel development, but the presence of the markers does not actually provide evidence of the source. That it is there is not an iron-clad argument either way for how it got there.
I would think that the lessons of human history would be enough to show the inherent problems of breeding superior people, the problem that it has lead to some very bad results where innocents have been murdered because they were of the wrong (fill in the blank). Scientists won’t control the determinations, matoko, politicians and demagogues will, and they will manipulate scientists in the quest for power.
You should be careful – there have been many smart people before you, and some much smarter. Read some history, the history of the last century before you tie yourself to that project and learn their fate. And keep in mind – what if the trait the eugenicist, the genetic engineer is looking for is not yours? Where do you land then?
It isn’t neo-luddite, this has nothing to do with factories and changing jobs – this has to do with the very nature, the very definition of being human.
– Sure Mikey, but with all the millions of bodies littering the planet, the product of all the wonderful promise of the past Utopian super race dreams, history for the Progressives starts TODAY!
tribe vs tribe?
Read history – it is the history of clans, tribes, and nations; it is human history. Your projct will fail if you do not acknowledge the ground you are starting from, and understand not only what it is, but why it is, and why it is so resistant to change. And why encouraging tribalism (i.e., identity groups and identity politics) is so easy.
opposition to genetic engineering will melt once the soft-left latte soccer moms realize they can have designer babies.
Children As Fashion Accessories is already happening, with that Free-Market Eugenics you were talking about. And women have always been naturally drawn to Alpha Males (just as men are naturally drawn to Beautiful [healthy] women).
But you probably missed my #13, wherein I said: “Cloning would likely be done of the ‘fittest’ among us, but the criteria for ‘fit’ would include beauty, physical strength, IQ, and talent  not morality or goodness. We’re already too messed up in our priorities; we don’t need more eugenics to fortify our shallow values.”
Genetic engineering to select for desirable traits will not get us a better or more moral society. Too many people forget that the weak and undesirable among us can force us to stop being so vain and selfish. Their neediness can bring out the best in us as we learn to accept, serve, and care for them. Many a parent of a Down Syndrome child will tell you how loving and accepting their kids are, and how much they’ve matured as people because of the struggles they had in raising them.
See, the “better” society that these Utopians strive for looks like Hell On Earth to me. It’s a matter of taste.
But I ask you who think that liberals are fascists – what do you propose to do with these people who are fascists – fascist being creatures who are utterly and completely dangerous and antithetical to democracy and freedom?
Duh. Round them up in camps and gas them to death. <<== Leftie Straw Man
What do we propose to do with them? Not vote for them. Argue with them. Try to stop them from getting too much power. Call them out on their bad actions. Try to persuade the rest of society to abandon the Progressive agenda and return to Classical Liberalism. Fight them with the tools that our democratic republic provides.
If that fails, we might have to secede or something. But if they think that it’s a good idea to let it come to blows, they should remember who is armed with guns and who wields paper-mache puppet heads.
Lisa, we don’t think you’re a fascist. We don’t think that democrats are all fascists. We think that the biggest threats are in the political system, which is the same as it ever was. We’re frustrated as hell that we couldn’t nominate someone whose primary goal is to scale back government and not do stupid things like seize the profits of oil companies in order to lower the price of gas or use the phantom of Global Warming to execute an obscene power grab.
BBH – I agree. You can make people believe that 2+2=5, (for example) and totalitarian states have defied physical realities before, relying on an act of will. The fate of the late USSR should be an example, but no. Someone wants to start the project all over, no matter how many times it has crashed and burned.
Swamp Castle comes to mind.
If one believes in human individuals as ends not means as was stated earlier this thread, then charges of “neoludditism” at those questioning the commodification of humans are revealing as amoral a-thiesm.
My chief gripe with Goldberg, is that it is never religion vs. anti-religion, but always tribe vs. tribe.
Wrong again. It’s liberty vs. tyranny, freedom vs. coercion, self-rule vs. autocracy. Which side are you on?
Human beings have ben treated as commodities before. It is called ‘slavery’. As I recall history it isn’t a very good thing for either the commodity or the owner of the commodity. The Roman Empire suffered because of this, I think.
And I think this Republic has something against that.
It’s quite easy to determine whether or not someone is a liberal fascist: would they disagree with you but defend to the death your right to express yourself?
Case closed.
No shit?
And you will fail utterly. Recall what I said above — perfection violates causality. History is filled to the brim with movements that thought they had the solution to every problem, but none of those solutions have ever been better than sad wastes of time, and most often have been tragedies. You may attempt to “end the tyranny of genetic determinism”, but you will simply substitute one tyrant for another.
And given your avowed disdain for the rights (and opinions, and worth) of your fellow citizens, I have no doubt it would end badly.
The “right” doesn’t call itself libertarian. And many of us don’t agree with everyone or every conclusion of the council, but that’s a different thing than your position that the very existence of bio-ethics is oppressive.
Would you mind linking to one of those rants, ‘coz I’ve never read any such thing from him. I’m almost tempted to say you’re making shit up again.
Because self-declared “intellectuals” have spent much of the last two centuries crafting tyrannies and justifying horrendous crimes? Because self-declared “intellectuals” have apparently made it their project to destroy the systems that have given more people freedom and comfort than ever enjoyed in history?
Conservatives actually express admiration of many intellectuals; Hayek, Friedman, Sowell, Lewis, Sharansky — off the top of my head. Speaking for myself, what I dislike is intellectualism — “excessive emphasis on abstract or intellectual matters, esp. with a lack of proper consideration for emotions” or “the belief that reason is the final principle of reality” — especially as it expresses itself in the belief that the supposedly educated are somehow better able to make choices for the rest of us.
That also dicentra. But tribalism is a very potent force in history, and one that cannot be ignored today. Liberty tends to weaken tribalism, so it is a good thing; as does ‘equal justice under law’.
Now that word, intellectual, has become a dirty word to conservatives.
Consider why.
Because you just used it to describe a pinhead like Darkcyde?
Amusing little tidbit from The Corner, which is a propos of this thread:
Response from Andrew Stuttaford:
We humans really are stupid, arrogant fools. The trouble with the intelligentsia is that they utterly lack humility and common sense, and they’re totally oblivious to their own excesses. That’s what makes them dangerous.
“…no matter how many times it has crashed and burned.
– The argument I’ve heard most often is; “Well yes….but thats because it wasn’t applied properly. The people did not follow Marx’s plan religiously”…
– Those were the exact words of one of my progressive friends. The true believers are simply not to be tutored or disabused. They have the fervor of the worst evangelistic adept I’ve met. Which of course, tells you they are not to be offput by history or critical thinking. They seem to run on the belief that this old idea, dressed up in the clothing of post modernism, is their best bet to shake up the stability, break the stranglehold of the established norms, and achieve a second chance at enfranchisement. Totally self-absorbed, “Me-ism”.
Try to stop them from getting too much power.
well, dicentra, you have utterly failed then.
the arts, media, academe, science&technology, and both houses of congress are left now.
soon the executive as well.
all you have left is talkradio and half the blogverse.
i don’t how this could possibly a power grab.
It looks more like a comprehensive rejection of conservative culture.
To remove the tyranny of the bell curve you would have to make each person exactly the same. And that is a good idea why? Talk about an echo-chamber!
Seriously, when you consider the range of human accomplishment in so many different fields from music to science to literature to athletics to plumbing, it would be impossible to produce the perfect human for all. The very statement you made, matoko, is absurd.
tribalism is a very potent force in history, and one that cannot be ignored today
Then let’s do these tribes and let the pink tribe live in Russia. It’s certainly big enough, and Global Warming will make Siberia actually useful.
I heard/read an interesting argument — that the massive influx of slaves into Rome led to the degeneration and failure of the Republic. Basically, the wealthy discovered they could buy all the labor they ever needed, and would be spared dealing with Roman citizens and all the rights and benefits they required. So the Roman people were displaced from hard work, disconnected from the actual process of creating wealth.
It struck me as rather similar to the illegal alien situation here in the US. “Jobs Americans won’t do” — spit!
It looks more like a comprehensive rejection of conservative culture.
By the Elites, which is no different from the rest of history. If the ship goes down, I guess we’ll go down with it, but if there’s a heaven we’ll be happy there, and if there’s nothing but sweet oblivion after death, then that’s OK too.
While certainly funny as a reality show (The Weather Underground – The Yurt Years ; or Code Pink – Reindeer Herding), I’m afraid we’re stuck with the material we have, dicentra. :)
robcrawford i had this argument with manzi already.
is gene expression chaotic? is quantum entanglement chaotic?
i think not.
if it is not chaotic, eventually we well be able to model it.
even if we have to use quantum mathematics and quantum computers.
;)
English much?
Or ever, for that matter?
Mikey NTH
Liberty only weakens tribalism if something is offered in tribalism’s place – E Pluribus Unum. Backed up with “in God we Trust”. It’s the three-legged stool that supports America’s survival
It also hurt, Rob, because the backbone of the Legion was the Roman peasant. Making that tough-minded, stoic, disciplined SOB a recipiant of the dole got Romans out of the army, forcing the Empire to hire foreigners, especially Germanic tribesmen, to fill the ranks.
What do you do when you can’t find a Roman who is willing to serve the Empire as either a Legionaire or a civil servant? What do you do when the patricians won’t do anything because they don’t have to?
Fortunately, this Republic still has enough volunteers willing to serve her. How long that could last? I am no prophet, but I like to be an optimist – I’ll say many, many years. Maybe a century.
All I know is I won’t see.
“if it is not chaotic, eventually we well be able to model it.
– You do realize what that means don’t you. Maybe not, or it would be most unsettling to you. If we can divine the very framework of our existant, then it is deterministic, which demands a design, and that design had to come from “something” that approximates in some sense, satient thought.
– Just great nishi. You just invented a deity. Congratulations. You have truly shot yourself in the ideological foot.
your position that the very existence of bio-ethics is oppressive.
no.
it is my position, as well as that of dr reynolds and dr pinker among others, that the make-up of the bioethics council renders it useless.
it is stacked with bioluddites.
BBH, i am a believer.
202 Rob
That late influx of slaves also (as I have read) failed to buy into the idea of seeking Roman citizenship. They had no desire to assimilate or think of the acquisition of the priviledges of being a citizen of Rome as a worthy goal. That was a path that many earlier slaves took (being a slave in Rome was not the same as a chattel or bond slave in the 18th century).
So yes, the parallel to illegal aliens is strengthened. We now have large communities of illegals who have no interest in American citizenship … their relationship with the US is purely parasitical.
Don’t forget ‘equal justice under law’, Darleen. When the guarantee that you will be treated equally is gone, then the reason to make an Unum out of the Pluribus goes too. Then it becomes time to get the best deal for your ‘tribe’ (and thus yourself) that you can. Identity politics is antithetical to this Republic – it is unAmerican.
A “model” is not the real thing. Models invariably leave out details, and models are never complete. You’re as hubristic as the Marxists who believed a five-year plan could manage a national economy; somehow they never managed to pull it off.
Again, perfection violates causality. There will always be the unexpected, there will always be random chance, there will always be free will. There’s a massive “IF” in the statement “if it’s not chaotic” — and you’d be betting your models against a system that has been driven by chaos since the day the first chemicals replicated themselves.
The thing is, nishi, people are chaotic. That’s one reason the various theories of societal perfection have failed — you can no more get everyone marching in lock-step than you can get all the molecules of gas in a room to cluster into the same corner.
Which is to say “even if we have to use magic”. Trying to order civilization based on a fantasy is stupid, nishi.
BBH, i am a True Believer.
FTFY
“BBH, i am a believer.
– That is good. Now if you can just discover what you believe in.
– BTW. Don’t feel bad. Materialists always fall in the “deity” paradox. Everyone who argues for the ascension of human thought to include the details of its own existance does. Its a classic puzzle.
*shrug*
I don’t really care. Because the council has done absolutely nothing to limit research. Hell, the Bush administration was the first to fund any stem cell research.
Of course, Darleen, the position of a slave in Imperial Rome isn’t quite the same as an illegal alien here. The slave was owned, and the owner had an interest in that slave not going anywhere. An illegal alien, not so much for the employer. They are interchangable.
i dont SEE how this could possibly BE a power grab.
happy now?
Oh, and nishi, you still haven’t provided any links to Goldberg’s “triumphalist rants on xianity and “god†being the universal antidote to tyranny and genocide”.
And naturally matoko has not answered my first observation, that observing similar phenonema amongst different groups of humans does not imply the source of the phenomena.
On such rocks her ship founders.
If you treated your audience with enough respect to write clearly, I’d be happy. Dashing off semi-literate screeds and expecting others to make sense of the gibberish is not the route to convincing anyone; if anything, the contempt you show for the people you’re ostensibly trying to persuade drives your audience away from your position.
/shrug
my point is, the paragraph Jeff highlighted from Liberal Fascism proves to me that Goldberg’s brand of conservatism has straong elements of neoluddism and reactionarism.
Unlike Lisa, i have read the book, and i have no beef with Goldbergs political genealogies.
I object to the theme of religion as remedy.
mikey, only intransigent moronic illits deny between-group variation anymore.
go back to the stone age.
I object to the theme of religion as remedy.
Then propose a better one and give real-world examples of that remedy actually working.
Gene Roddenberry fantasies don’t count.
The only answer, as I see it, against tyranny is keeping as much power in a society split to different groups. Keeping governmental power split between different bodies, keeping spiritual authority seperate, econmic authority, social organizations, etc. seperate helps prevent tyranny.
Jealous groups squabbling about their ‘turf’ keeps power from being pooled, which protects all from the ‘ants’ Ric Locke has commented about. Just add liberty and E Pluribus Unum and equal justice under law and you have something very special.
why is teh council consuming taxpayer fundage if not to “advise” bush?
it just issued a 550 page report on “dignity”.
i gots ur smaller government right here.
/obscene gesture
why even exist if it is a blinkered bioluddite echochamber?
I’m sorry, matoko. Correlation does not imply causation. Nor does existence imply how it got there. Go back to logic school.
dicentra, the remedy is the Republic, sans religion.
Where is that in the book?
Rob – the teeny-bopper text-message form she writes in is indicative of her contempt for everyone here, from Jeff on down. It is a superior sneer that no one here is worthy of being treated seriously.
the remedy is the Republic, sans religion.
I asked for examples, please.
And what do you mean by “sans religion”? That religion be outlawed? That people stop being religious by themselves? That all references to religion be expunged from public discourse (as the ACLU does)?
Nice try, but when you get rid of traditional religion, something else will rush in to fill the void. Like Environmentalism. Or Fascism. Or Communism. Or a Cult of Personality.
Would that be the American Republic, the one of the Founders, or Plato’s Republic?
You’re assuming that the President would accept and implement their advice without any other input.
Which, clearly, he has not.
Funny, innit? Almost as if he were seeking input from many sources. Almost as if the strawman you’re arguing against doesn’t exist.
I stand by comment 34, both spam-troll sites under different names hoping to get banned, then crowing about it as a badge of honor. Both use butchered grammar/slang of their own invention. Both have a completely irrational hatred of anything Christian. Both repeatedly post the same jingoistic slogans in lieu of actually argument. Both are highly educated numbers geeks with poor to nonexistent social skills. Both are unwilling to recognize that people aren’t fucking numbers and don’t act in predictable ways. The only question is when nishfong is going to pop.
– The real shame is that in some distant time geneticists will know enough to understand fully all the dangers and pitfalls of human engineering.
– People like nishi always suffer from a lack of temporal understanding. Theres a good reason why, in this day and age, we no longer “bleed” people to effect cures for physical ailments. Just as I would not, as a physicist, attempt to build an atom bomb in my living room. I know enough to understand why such a hobby would be dangerous. 100 years ago, it would have been tried without hesitation, if they had the rudimentary knowledge.
– All she sees is that shining promise on the hill, but lacks the knowledge to understand all the rattlesnakes hiding along the path up that hill. A common ailment of the “elite”. Just enough jargon and reading to be truly dangerous.
And, nishi, before you simply gesture to the bit Jeff quoted as “proof” that Goldberg sees religion as the answer, note the “religious and political dogma” bit. He’s stated that writing the book made him a more libertarian thinker, and I suspect he’d be the first to agree that the bulwark against tyranny isn’t solely from religion.
It is amusing that you state that I am the illiterate here, matoko. Perhaps you should skip logic school and just go back to kindergarten.
For the record, Magna Cum Laude from law school is the opposite of moronic. And your rant tells me that you are in the ‘pound the fist on the table’ stage of oral arguments. You really have nothing more than speculation and your druthers, do you? I and others have cited the cold record of history and your cites are what? Another persons’ speculations and druthers and an appeal to authority without any explanation why that authority should be respected on the subject at hand?
Very poor for a self-proclaimed scientist, matoko.
“looks more like a comprehensive rejection of conservative culture.”
Which? The election of Jim Webb, Bob Casey, Jr., or John Tester? Looks to me like the Democrats aped “conservative culture” to win an election.
Nishi, don’t let the actual facts get in the way of the Narrative. I’m soaking it up everytime you assholes spike the ball on the 5 yard line.
P.S. Have you decided on the thing/person/vegetable to blame when O’Bama loses the whole Upper Midwest and Pennsylvania yet?
“Almost as if he were seeking input from many sources”
As if.
do you remember Bill Frist gettin tarred and feathered when he changed his position to support of ESCR?
where is he now?
maybe he will come back someday, when the bioluddite council is gone.
im goin to get something to eat.
that i can eat.
This is a gem: There’s a general consensus among liberal historians that Progressivism defies easy definition. Perhaps that’s because to identify Progressivism properly would be too inconvenient to liberalism
How about attempting “easily define it†is an exercise in willfully stupid reductionism.
Lisa @ 11 – How silly of everyone. Of course the wonder and slpendor of progressivism would take a set of volumes the size of the Oxford English Dictionary to describe, while other political philosophies can be summarized for discussion purposes in the space of a few paragraphs or pages. Damn convenient that.
“For the record, Magna Cum Laude from law school is the opposite of moronic.”
Or, you are a teetotaler and a prodigious note taker.
No, the real shame is that someone so apparently immersed in the worlds of SF has failed to see the warning signs so many authors have posted.
There’s a reason Thomas More chose the title “Utopia”.
No. In fact, that has bugger-all to do with what we were discussing, and I suspect you’re attempting to change the subject.
And have you found those rants of Goldberg’s yet?
– Ok. At this point its becoming obvious that the nishi is involved in some sort of personal axe grinding here. Her pronouncements are sinking down to the level of “Who moved my cheese”.
– She says shes a believer, but apparently would have no problem playing God between dinner out and a movie. A rather confused individual it seems.
I agree with Nishi at # 229. I made the same argument early in the thread.
One tyranny of many, sadly. Note how oppression crops up in this person’s lingo later. It all follows.
She cannot so much as define a reasonable life’s purpose, Rob. The principle at work there is a variant of racing goalposts, which grossly evidenced themselves in her miserable failure on the FLDS debacle. But it’s worse than that. Not identifying goals is akin to not having them, except perhaps to make them exclusive pets. Same old, same old.
There is much evidence of that pathology, yes. Proofs of concept by simple might eventually prevail in her otherwise sterile vernacular — see #199. The POV is lifeless, robotic, worse.
But the point should be that that same POV has come to infest pop-secular intellectualism.
matoko’s contempt is also (obviously) shown by her dismissal of any questions about the ‘should it be done’. The ‘can it be done’ of her project is a question of engineering – although the hurdle of removing the bell curve is a tall one, and the requirement of everyone being exactly the same still remains – how much the same: physically, intellectually, possessions, etc.?
She can’t actually answer the ‘should it be done’ question with a reasoned argument that could persuade a doubter. For that she pulls out the club, the old ‘because I say so’ argument. Which, IIRC. is what a parent says to a child.
Contempt, you see. Just not said in the manner of steve or thor, but still contempt. And I really do not cotton to contempt as an argument.
Prodigious note taker – yes. And a library rat.
But teetotaler only during finals. After finals we, as a class, had a habit of descending on the Old Shillelagh in Greek Town to do some serious unwinding, and I unwound with the best of them.
After all, I had worked at Camp Dearborn and went to Michigan State – I know what a beer-glass is for (and make that two, miss).
I agree with Nishi at # 229. I made the same argument early in the thread.
You are opposed to the freedom of religion clause?
Or reverts to the you-guys-already-lost canard. The defeat there is palpable, almost as much as that spectacular ego is.
Neoluddities and blah, blah, blah, but I’ll win eventually. Sounds like the theory of ascribing cockroaches the win because eventually they’re the only thing left standing. And Johann Sebastian was, you know, some cockroach.
“But the point should be that that same POV has come to infest pop-secular intellectualism.”
– Well having to make judgments is sooooo “for old people”. Moral responsibility is such the “SuXoR!
Yeah. But the good thing is, BBH, winning is everything. By what means is irrelevant and to what aim never even comes up.
Alas, but I was beholden to the Demon Whiskey, and preferred to read John LeCarre in class. I had enough of an ear for the law to understand the important things without all of that pesky reading and outlining and ass kissing. And now I drive a better car etc. than those Law Review types. Apparently, it is the space between the law book and the client that they find so damned unbridgeable.
– I don’t know. To me the whole idea seems ludicrous. I picture a colony of like individuals patterned after Kahn from Star Trek. Such a group would all be dead at the end of a week.
– People like nishi should be compelled to live within such a compound for as long as they could stand it before they actually threatened to committed suicide, and after some period of rehabilitation, they would be cured and able to function in polite society.
– The classic case of be careful what you wish for.
decentra
Gene Roddenberry fantasies don’t count.
I happened to catch STTNG movie “First Contact” on scifi the other night and stayed up to watch. There came a point when Picard is explaining the 24th Century and says “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force; we work to better humanity.”
I almost snorted my glass of wine up my nose and
I remembered why I never found TNG as fun as the original.
oops, sorry dicentra
– Wait a sec. I thought the whole idea behind the acquisition of wealth was so we wouldn’t have to work so hard. Which millennia do they fuck up that dream in?
I was never law review, Alec. In the summer when I could have applied I had made commitments out at Camp Dearborn that I would be there until a certain date. For some odd reason they liked me as a Night Supervisor. And I was working as a law clerk at a firm the same summer so I did not have the time. I suppose I could have screwed each place over for that, but I don’t go back on my word unless there is good reason – law review wasn’t a good enough reason for me.
But everything has worked out in the end – I have a job I like, and work with people I like, in a field I like (utility regulation is not exciting, but there is a lot going on, and representing the state means I don’t have to hate my clients) and I am not rich but I am comfortable, and I have free time.
What could be a better life?
Aldo
what B Moe said
(btw, nishi is disengenous … she wants a Caliphate run by scientist imams.)
No.
Back home after having fulfilled his promise to only serve two terms.
Outside of class, Alec, I preferred Dorothy Sayers and John Dickson Carr (Carter Dickson) for relaxation reads. But that’s just me. And one year my little brother was living with me – he got out of the regular army (was reserve) and was doing tests and community college prior to going ROTC (he’s a major now) so there was plenty of entertainment on tap for the weekends. And ‘on tap’ did describe most of my weekends. Did I say I worked at Camp Dearborn and went to Michigan State? Yes, I did.
Ahhh, beer.
BBH
Roddenberry was obviously unacquainted with Rand.
In a way, he contradicted himself in the movie. The character of Zefram Cochrane exclaims he didn’t invent warp drive to better humanity, he did it so he could make a pile of money and live quietly on some tropical island…
Cochrane was accumulating wealth to buy himself TIME (not to horde it)..and he figured to get there by following his own drummer
Picard revealed himself more Borg than human in his admission.
Oh – and I was running on student loans (for a lot of living expenses) and an academic scholarship (full ride), so keeping the GPA up was a ‘first premise’. Drill, drill, and more drill. Otherwise I could not have afforded it.
The Star Trek franchise got better after Roddenberry died. Sorry, but that’s just how it is. His juvenile fantasies about The Planet Of Unlimited Sex With Space Babes got really old.
At least in DS9, there was a religion with actual, existing “supernatural” beings. And the idea of society just naturally progressing morally got challenged.
I always found it funny that TNG tried to make the Ferengi into the Ultimate Enemies because they were always going after Profit. They ended up as clowns instead. It wasn’t until they came up with the collective Borg that Evil got plausible.
#172: That is true Maybee. I have never gotten surly on mojitos, cosmopolitans, or even martinis. Boilermakers do indeed do the trick.
You know, my bottom line is that I have ideas about the direction I would like this country to go in. A lot of the time, no most of my lifetime – the people who share my desires do not get elected – not enough of them to actually do the things I would like to see done. It happens to have bbeen the case that more Americans disagree with my preferences and thus, other people than I would like get voted in. Policies get pushed forward and put into being that I disagree with.
That is how it is. What I don’t get – and what irritates me about the motherfuckers in our great nation – is our inability to accept that sometimes our ideas don’t jibe with the majority and thus we can’t fucking get what we want. There is always some conspiracy where the opposition somehow screwed us out of what is rightfully ours – via the evil MSM, the wicked, unfair mechanizations of the lying opposition, various “shills” for whoever it is that happened to kick your favorite politicians sorry ass…etc. etc. We can never just accept that we might just be on the unpopular end of the stick this time around and better fucking luck next time. We have to cry that we were somehow robbed or that the opposition somehow screwed us out of our rightful victory.
And god forbid you actually get what you want, your guys get into office and start implementing the ideas that you hold near and dear….and they FAIL miserably. It is not that your ideas might have just turned out to actually fucking SUCK….it is that someone stabbed you in the back. If it weren’t for the goddamned [insert traitor here] the policy/war/whatever would have gone PERFECTLY.
That is my bitch. I can accept it when people don’t share my goals and values. It is all of our country and if more people think something ELSE is a better idea and vote accordingly, then c’est la vie. But I can’t stomach the incessant whining when we don’t get our way, and the even more irritating shrillness when we get our way and things don’t quite work out as delightfully as we thought they would.
That is really apropos of nothing.
Does anyone watch the new Battlestar Galactica? It is pretty damned good. Since we are on the subject of Sci Fi.
Fair enough, Mikey – but I say, as I did in Lawschool, ‘the law is life, and life is to be lived!’ I don’t think that means anything, but it left my classmates puzzled long enough for me to scuttle them and make my way out of doors right before our classes started.
There is always some conspiracy where the opposition somehow screwed us out of what is rightfully ours – via the evil MSM, the wicked, unfair mechanizations of the lying opposition, various “shills†for whoever it is that happened to kick your favorite politicians sorry ass…
There are certainly too many people who can’t accept the fact that sometimes you lose, and that’s just how it is. Maybe it’s the natural fruit of the Self-Esteem Movement.
Those of us on the starboard side tend to blame the MSM, but we don’t necessarily blame them for everything. We mostly blame them for their own failures. Like failing to notice that the 1972 “typewritten” memos were done on MS Word.
As for BSG, they have discussion threads over at Ace of Spades every Friday, with spoilers aplenty. I don’t have cable, so I don’t watch.
Now that I think about it, I just totally missed the damned show because I was next door drinkin. Shit.
“And god forbid you actually get what you want, your guys get into office and start implementing the ideas that you hold near and dear….and they FAIL miserably. It is not that your ideas might have just turned out to actually fucking SUCK….it is that someone stabbed you in the back. If it weren’t for the goddamned [insert traitor here] the policy/war/whatever would have gone PERFECTLY. ”
Well, you see, when I signed on for the Iraq War, my notion was that we were going to kill the fuck out of everyone that looked at us funny. I didn’t figure that pictures of a tomboy pointing at Arab weiners would be irrefutable evidence of having lost a War.
Now, surprise of surprises, we send in a few thousand soldiers and a few more Marines (a few is ususally all it takes) and they kill some bad guys, and, well, no more pictures of tomboys pointing at Arab weiners and such. Less people looking at us funny too.
– #265 – “It takes a whole revolution to raise a demon”
266 Lisa
I love BSG! New episode tonight.
Thanks Dicentra. I will check out Ace of Spades. I kinda like them anyway. I haven’t checked them out in ages, but I always liked mixing it up with them every once in a while.
You are right that the MSM does fuck up really bad. They actually do suck horribly. They do deserve the scorn heaped upon their heads. But we have definitely got a country full of jokers that can’t face the consequences of their actions, nor can they accept losing (the fact that there are still people burned up about the Civil War – make that the War of Northern Aggression – tells me a lot about our stubbornness and resolute refusal to face reality). I have to count myself among this number even as I bitch. I am still suspicious about Florida recount thing even though everyone except my cat and grandmother has formally investigated and found nothing amiss. I would probably be suspicious of my grandmother if she investigated and found nothing. I would throw her under the back of the bus, to quote JD. I think it is endearing that we as Americans do not meekly lay down when we don’t succeed. We get up, brush ourselves off, and try it again and again until we get what we want. But our drive is accompanied by a terrible predilection for wild delusions.
Fair enough is fair enough, Alec. That is just what I did because of who I am. Surprisingly, I wasn’t tossing judgment at you (although I know no reason why I would want to); I was tweaking matoko, who needs all of the tweaking she can receive. Maybe one day she will develop humility. It is a long shot, but humility helps the researcher better than arrogance, it teaches them to ‘measure twice, cut once’. A good trait to acknowledge what you do not know before you start declaiming.
#272: Darleen it is so outstanding. I am about an episode or two behind. I keep missing it for one reason or the other, so I have been downloading the episodes from zune marketplace onto my zune (I generally watch them on the train).
That show is so badass. Really good writing and top-notch acting. And I am deeply in love with Jamie Bamber.
275 Lisa
yeah, Jamie could have just been eye-candy, but he’s really turned Lee into a very interesting character.
No one can beat Edward James Olmos as Adama. And for the love of god, what great women characters!
I would give anything to sit in on the writers conferences. Sad, this is the last season (keeping fingers crossed they don’t totally blow the ending)
I prefer ‘The War of the Rebellion’, Lisa. But then again I actually have an ancestor who served in the Iowa Volunteer Infantry as a surgeon. And there is no article or clause in the US Constitution that provides the mechanism for a state to leave the union (it does provide for states to join), and on a federal question the US Constitution is the supreme law of the land.
Otherwise, amend or get a new constitutional convention called or once you are in, you are in. And the US Constitution – no matter the treaty or the staute – is the ultimate right bower.
– Lisa, HBO, and the Left leaning believers behind the scenes, are getting a lesson in modern high speed communications, even as they try to hide behind their desks. awash in the wide spread laughter at their offish efforts to revise history one more time, in they’re bumbling rendition of “recount”.
– The remarkable thing is that had they not made the movie most people would still be laboring under total misconceptions fueled by Liberal media propagandizing.
– Within a few says, as a result of appearances by the supposed “bad girl” in front of a national audience, everyone now knows it was in fact the Dems, led by the Gore camp, that intentionally avoided a proper recount, not the Reps.
– As often as its hurt them, almost without exception, I continue to wonder why they keep beating a losing drum. But there you are.
Lisa, are you working in DC?
I agree, Bamber has done a fantastic job making Apollo into way more than just the “hot good guy”. And all of the women are indeed amazing. I can’t think of any character, man or woman who is anything close to simple or formulaic.
Edward James Olmos is a god. He is the greatest motherfucker EVER as Adama. That character could easily have been the cliche “benevolent commander” ordering air strikes and and passing out nuggets of wisdom to the young folk. But he is incredible. Fucking incredible.
Just outside of the District, Pablo.
And via Instapundit, there’s this:
Messiahs make my teeth itch, not to mention my trigger finger. The right thing to do is nail ’em up. The ones that come back are authentic.
Regards,
Ric
Morford receives calls from his own frickin’ network, Ric.
Not to say you aren’t right in pointing him out, but just as a caveat.
Yeah, Ric, the cult of personality surrounding Obama is creepier than anything I’ve seen in a long time. It really makes me nervous: he’s reveling in this worship thing way too much.
I used to watch the old newsreels of Germans wetting themselves over Hitler, and I could never understand how people couldn’t see what an evil man he was. But I guess he didn’t look evil at first.
Not to say that Obama will turn out to be a genocidal monster. He didn’t write Mein Black Kampf or anything. He’s just naive like Carter.
No for real Baracky is pretty copacetic with the genocide.
Ric – he isn’t thinking; he isn’t feeling – he is in a rapture.
How long will that hold on, and how many will join? We’ll see in five months. Of course – Morford is a freak and San Francisco exists on its own navel. So there is that.
I believe him anyway.
Somehow I question the kind of “spiritually advanced” people Morford knows in Frisco.
Betcha crystals, funny mushrooms and attempts at anonymous group sex figure prominently in that Advanced Spirituality(tm) freed of Ugly Religion.
As per Haps – BLT doesn’t give much shrift – short or long – to anyone who isn’t black. And that kind of thought has a pretty clear end-path.
Oh, Jaysus H Keerist…. Lightworker
Wonder how many batteries are used in that vibrational form of expressing love?
Ha!
Lisa, shoot me an email, would you? pablo4200 at hotmail dot com
Oh, I’ve encountered Morford before. I may even have met him, long ago and far away — I was pretty <ahem> spiritual at the time, if I recall.
But between thor and nishi you could pretty well rewrite that paragraph without changing the meaning significantly, no? I repeat: Sanhedrins provide a vital service. If it claims to be a Messiah, nail it up and wait three days. It’s the scientific approach.
nishi, I think, needs to read Lois McMaster Bujold, particularlarly Mirror Dance but all of the Vorkosigan cycle. She’d be valued on Jackson’s Whole, but her personal compensation might not be exactly what she expected.
Regards,
Ric
“We believe that we are evolving, not to ascend off the earth, but to stay on it in a higher vibrational form.
– Powered by the energizer bunny. Your kinda people feets.
Lois McMaster Bujold, particularlarly Mirror Dance but all of the Vorkosigan cycle.
I am unfamiliar with her. Damn! I am going to have to go and buy a bunch of books, now. ;p
Oh, I see. Obama is the Beatles. Except for John Lennon, because that would be racist, what with Mark David Chapman and all.
And Morford is a tool, is now, ever has been and always will be, world without end, amen.
Wait. I just had an epiphany.
I don’t object to Obama because of his beliefs and ideas. It’s because I looked at his skin color, then looked at mine, and noticed that his was darker.
Well, we can’t have THAT.
I just think Obama is more of a poll-driven weathervane than Bill Clinton ever was. Though I could never see the advantage of making the ‘Hokey-Pokey’ the test for the presidency. American Gladiators, yes.
B Moe, you have my permission :-) to skip The Warrior’s Apprentice, Falling Free (save ’til later), and Ethan of Athos. Komarr, A Civil Campaign, and Diplomatic Immunity should not be missed, but aren’t on point for this discussion.
Lighthearted space opera by a person who understands Timaeus at a deep level. Beware of traps.
Regards,
Ric
Come on folks. Only one more post to make it an even 300. Don’t make me double-post.
Am I the only one to get a Nuremberg vibe when seeing an Obama rally?
How was that?
No, Russ – you weren’t. Mass emotion can lead to very bad things. See a European soccer riot for an example – but truthfully, I think the Euros engage in that because they can’t do a real war any longer.
Re: #266 Lisa,
Probably too late but…
I like BSG also. I never got a chance to see it when it came out but this winter Best Buy had the DVDs on sale and I bought them and watched 3 to 4 shows at a time.
Best Sci-Fi show since B-5. I haven’t watched any of this seasons shows as it had already started before I finished off season 3 DVDs. I’ll wait for the DVD set and watch it then.
#262 Darleen: Cochrane’s remarks weren’t Roddenberry contradicting himself. ST:First Contact was co-written by DS9/BSG’s Ron Moore who, while a lefty, isn’t in denial about human nature. (And both DS9 and BSG have treated religion far more fairly than most Hollywood output).
#300 Russ: You’re nowhere near alone on that. I’m not sure if people are having mass hallucinations around him or he’s actually the Antichrist but either way he and his creepy mega-rich-black-guilt wife are McCain’s best attribute.
And I’ve liked Edward James Olmos since Blade Runner and Miami Vice. His role on that show echoes his BSG character.
Lisa-
Does anyone watch the new Battlestar Galactica? It is pretty damned good. Since we are on the subject of Sci Fi.
Sci-Fi on TV is never really “Sci-Fi”! It seems that half of the “Sci-Fi” Network is nothing but Ghosts, Psychics, Werewolfs, and/or Vampires.
IMO, “Science fiction” should contain some actual “science”!
(Which usually doesn’t include sexy cyborgs wearing an “evening dress” during their entire prison sentence.)
I saw the original release of Star Wars IV in August 1977 (I can still remember being a 12yr old in the back seat of a 69 Volvo wagon reading the movie reviews with my best friend and his Moonbat* parents).
After seeing “Star Wars”, I think I read every “Sci-Fi” novel in the Westerville, OH library during the next 9 months- even L. Ron’s “Battlefield: Earth”!
By the time “Return of the Jedi” was released, I had read enough “good” Sci-Fi that I didn’t even bother watching…
*(He was a “white” “Spanish Lit” professor at the local college who was into Chomsky, Nader, and PBS in 1973-(He was also a “Mensan”, A 3rd degree black belt in “Judo”, and he was also just below “grandmaster” rank in Chess.)
She was a “Mexican national” who had her Masters in “Child Psych” and was a “leftist”
apologistworking at TYCO (‘juvenile incarceration’ for the real 12 yr old psychopaths…)Imagine all that occurring directly across the street from you in a “town” with less than 5000 people…
um….
we just watched the first season and it was kinda painful. the last couple episodes made it somewhat acceptable, I’ll probably add season 2 to the queue.
have really liked what I’ve seen of BSG. I’m just not very good at keeping up with things like that. particularly when RTO is deployed because I try to stick to things he’d hate.
…pictures of tomboys pointing at Arab weiners and such.
West Virginia National Guard foreplay — “Get in the truck, bitch.”
Sci-Fi on TV is never really “Sci-Fiâ€Â!
Except for the Holy Firefly.
and no dicentra, it is always tribe vs. tribe.
it is independent of idealogy.
its the red hats vs. the blue hats, the star bellie sneetches against those without stars on thars.
we are hardwired to resist the other because of the way cultures evolved.
the cultures that didnt have the wiring, they are dust in the winds of evolution.
they went extinct.
Many a parent of a Down Syndrome child will tell you how loving and accepting their kids are, and how much they’ve matured as people because of the struggles they had in raising them.
but what about the rights of the indiviual not to have downs?
that is what genetic engineering offers.
a cure for genetic disease.
just excise that trisomy or point mutation.
your argument sounds like we need downs kids to teach us compassion.
sukks for the kids i guess.
I miss Firefly. Communism? Not so much.
BMoe and Dicentra,
Suppose we set out to design a system of ethics that would prevent its adherents from engaging in the types of scientific abuses that occurred in the 20th century. Upon what authority would we ground such a system?
Of course we could base our system on the foundation of Judeo-Christian religion. If we lived in Utah, or our country was still almost entirely Christian and Jewish, this would probably work out, because the Judeo-Christian God’s authority would be almost universally accepted in our society. In the real world of 2008 America there are a lot of people, particularly in the scientific community, who are atheists, or who have different conceptions of God. Is this a problem to you?
At least two people in this thread have asked what could substitute for God as Jonah Goldberg’s bulwark against eugenic schemes. Earlier in the thread I proposed that our system of ethics be based on the humanist proposition that all people are ends unto themselves, and not to be used as means to any other end. It seems to me that a near-universal consensus could be formed by stipulating to such a proposition, and people would accept the enforcement of a system of ethics that derived from it in a way that they could never accept ethical systems which they perceive as “theocons pushing their religion on me.”
Of course I am not proposing that religion be banned. I am simply saying that we could build a consensus around a First Principle and stop short of attributing it to a Judeo_christian God. Let people arrive at it according to their own paths. Our premise is consistent with every religion I can think of, and accepted by atheists as well. It is also consistent with, if not the philosophical basis of, our whole Lockean political philosophy in this country.
Oh goody. A state religion based upon the Lockean empiricism which produced the exceptionalism that is the cornerstone of situational ethics. Would you reccommend a Spartan level of enforcement to insure adherence by the 80% or so of the population which understands exceptionalism to mean that they actually possess the mental faculties to determine the “right” course of action in every circumstance?
nishi is not about persuasion; she’s said that previously. She’s more about teh PUNISHMENT. Don’t you feel punished?
General topical responses: I don’t have any particular disregard for intellectuals. I do have a certain wariness, because I’ve noticed that intellectuals in general are quite a bit better at rationalizing evil. Also rationalizing good, but good enacted doesn’t quite have the same negative impact as evil enacted. Morality can act as a brake against this kind of thing, but there’s no substitute for thinking. Even if you’re not an intellectual: if you’ve given over your right to think to someone else, bad things can happen.
FWIW, anyway.
Not yet, it doesn’t. Some diseases, but not all.
And there’s a difference between diseases that affect development during gestation, and diseases that may enhance odds of cancer in life. One you can treat after birth, the other not.
#314 If anyone in this thread is proposing a state religion it is the people who would like to see certain scientific procedures banned by the government based on Judeo_Christian religious objections. I am not proposing a religion at all. Accepting the premise that certain guidelines need to be established to avoid the recurrence of 20th century scientific abuses, I am simply proposing that these guidelines be founded upon a generally accepted premise or First Principle that is consistent with the teachings of various religions and also the value systems of atheists, secular humanists, etc.
In other words, I do not think that it is necessary to invoke a Judeo-Christian God in order to design a code that prohibits gassing “inferior” people in an attempt to improve the race.
#307,
“we just watched the first season and it was kinda painful. the last couple episodes made it somewhat acceptable, I’ll probably add season 2 to the queue.”
B-5 season one is like a prologue. The series is one where the creator/writer had almost complete control of the story and had conceived the entire 5 season story before the show started. This allowed him to have events which are viewed one way when first aired and which resonate in a different way later.
I had watched and recorded the entire series when it originally aired and had wanted my wife to enjoy it too. In 2003 I was injured at work and laid up for 6 weeks, with my wife being wheelchair bound we were both not going anywhere. I asked her to watch it with me, all 110 episodes, with the request that we watch the first two seasons before she told me whether to continue. We watched it all as each season built on what had gone before. We will have to do it again, maybe this summer.
The B-5 movie “In the Beginning” is also very good but like “Razor” in BSG shouldn’t be watched too soon as it covers events that could be spoilers. After season 2 or 3 for that one.
If “Firefly” had not been canceled so soon it would be a rival to B-5 and BSG. It’s a wonderful show that died before it could grow into it’s promise.
In other words, I do not think that it is necessary to invoke a Judeo-Christian God in order to design a code that prohibits gassing “inferior†people in an attempt to improve the race
That seems to be a semantic argument. Of course you needn’t invoke God, but I don’t know that we can say anyone in the West hasn’t had some Judeo-Christian morality imprinted on him, whether he accepts God or not.
Here is the money quote from the paragraph Jeff quoted in his post:
…conservative religious and political dogma…may be the single greatest bulwark against eugenic schemes.
If our bulwark is based on religious or traditionalist dogma in the 21st century it is going to hold up against pressure from the scientific community about as well the New Orleans levies held up against Katrina.
I get the idea that Nishi does not understand the need for a bulwark at all. This is where I disagree with her. I do. I just think that we need to base it on something more compelling to scientists than dogma.
Put equal emphasis on “conservative” and “political”.
Currently what genetic engineering offers people with Down Syndrome is not to be free of it, but to exist with it or not exist at all.
How long have you lived in the DC metro area? And in which state?
As someone who was raised (and still lives) in the VA suburbs, people who live just outside DC are infuriating to deal with politically. A good chunk are career civil servants or contractors who may as well be civil servants tasked with the never-ending task of making the whole thing work somehow. Contrary to what seems to be the perception of the PW commentariat at large, almost none of us are evil socialists bent on growing the government without end (although we’d all swear that employees of [Insert Rival Agency Here] are all in the pay of the International Communist Conspiracy / Military Industrial Complex / Satan Himself). We also all seem to know someone who is deeply invested in the political machine of the opposite political party, yet still a decent human being, and as such most of us can at least understand the other point of view.
#319 MayBee, Invoking God or not may seem like a trivial difference to you, but any reference to God sends people like Nishi off onto a diatribe about theocons. If people like Nishi are going to be on the cutting edge of science, and we want them to respect certain limits, then we need to frame our argument in terms that they accept. Of course it works the other way around too. Nishi likes to come out with both guns blazing sometimes. That’s ok, but even the cretins at DU can do that. I think she could take her game to the next level if she accepted the intellectual challenge of attempting to be persuasive instead.
It isn’t just a reference to God that sets her off, Aldo. It is anything she deems to have a basis in Judeo-Christian morality. In reality, it’s pretty random as she is fine with things like brother and sisters marrying but calls someone having sex with a16 year old “babyrape”.
I don’t know that Nishi is going to be on the cutting edge of science- if I understand correctly, it is an interest of hers, but not a vocation.
A truly bright person can get past terms they accept and get to the underlying ideas.
You can’t base a political system by separating morality based on the source, because even on a micro level, you can’t separate the source behind an individual moral precept. In other words, you can’t tell if someone holds a particular moral precept because of religion or because of some non-religious morality. Nishi wants to remove religious morality from the state, which in practice must mean that anyone that derives any of their morality from religious sources is barred from having a say in running the state.
Likewise, because at a meta level the value inherent in a moral proposition of morality is necessarily equal because all moral statements are equally true (or equally false) regardless of the source. In other words, “X is good” is on a factual level as true as “X is evil” without alluding to an arbitrary dogmatic source.
Ultimately, then, you’re down to three possible sources for you moral code: an arbitrary dogmatic source such as religion (which you’ve ruled out), the people as a whole expressed through some majority mechanism such as an elected government (which is what we have now, and which leads to the inescapable problem that a good number root their morality in Judeo-Christian-Greek ethics), or some chosen section of the population which is superior enough to have proper ethics (such as Nishi’s non-religious section of the US population).
A related problem is defining what a religion is. If someone claims to have their moral precepts based on the Jedi code, are their beliefs disqualified for being religious? Would a Confucianist be disqualified? How do you define a religion? This ties into our earlier discussion of Intelligent Design from Nishi’s perspective. Religious dogma is banned from public education, but political dogma is permitted (much like saying religious morality is ineligible but non-religious morality is permissible). As such, people that want religious dogma in public schools will redefine it as much as possible so it’s non-religious, and at some point, they will succeed if based on an objective test of religiousness. If the religiousness test is subjective, it’s biased to the party in power and will inevitably lead to corruption, fascism, and nuclear war.
There you go. What civilis said.
Darleen forgot to mention that the music of Yanni is prominently featured in San Francisco spirituality.
If our bulwark is based on religious or traditionalist dogma in the 21st century it is going to hold up against pressure from the scientific community about as well the New Orleans levies held up against Katrina.
and it won’t hold up against the the rest of the world either.
My argument is that is that it is basic ludditry and reactionary behavior to attempt to hold off free market eugenics with 2000 year old mores and taboos, and also to try to tar all eugenics with the holocaust brush.
it isn’t realistic.
the basic problem as i see it is that tribalism demands that the tribe’s belief system is reguarded as superior to all others.
it isn’t that i think we don’t need a bulwark, i just maintain we already have a builtin universal one for homosapiens sapiens, and laws built by government should be built from that.
the problem with the judeoxian moral set is that it seems inflexible and unable to adapt to modern technologies.
it is luddist and reactionary (and unrealistic) to universally reject bioengineering and eugenics.
that is problem…..judeoxian ethics conflict with other ethics systems, like the idea of ensoulment.
how do you resolve that, Aldo?
I do not think that it is necessary to invoke a Judeo-Christian God in order to design a code that prohibits gassing “inferior†people in an attempt to improve the race.
I would agree with that point now. My point, and the point others are making, I think, are that the secular moral codes of today all descended from religious origins. Theoretically a secular code could spontaneously develop, I suppose, but I am unaware of it happening.
I think we should take up a collection and get Lisa a copy of Liberal Fascism, and nishi a copy of Jurassic Park.
Beyond that, let me stop and say here that this thread shows why other bloggers are so envious of the commenters I get on this site, whose thoughtful and erudite contributions to many debates completely enrich the pw “experience.”
Plus, you all make it harder for the leftist blogs to reduce pw to just another “conservative” echochamber. Which, gleefully, drives them apeshit.
And my praise goes out, too, to thor and nishi, who — though they are provocateurs (and often embarrassingly wrong, in my opinion) — are neverthess quite intelligent, and provide a valuable service to the site.
Datadave? Not so much. In fact, were he to find other accomodations, I’m sure I could get higher rent for his room, and that the new occupant would be a step up, intellectually speaking.
Alas, the dude’s a leftist, and so he’s demanding rent control. Just our luck.
the secular moral codes of today all descended from religious origins.
well, that isn’t strictly true.
ALL moral codes have evolved from the base substrate of tribal kinship relationship relationships in the EEA.
religious and secular alike.
Ultimately, however, the issue is not tribal unless the entire American culture is a single tribe. Because American culture derives from so many cultural influences in aggregate, even if the majority are Western (that is, derived from a shared Judeo-Christian-Greek root), not all are, and not all Western cultural influences agree with each other. For our culture, as in any culture without an established “chosen” “superior” political class, all values will eventually be dragged back towards the majorities’ values even if the roots origins for values differ among individuals.
Our system has proven the best so far at deciding which values predominate in the system. The reason for this, I think, is that from the beginning we defined a set of meta-values necessary for running the debate in an organized fashion and set them in stone in the form of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and we respect these values enough that we allow them to trump our other values. The fact that we value the “democratic system” value allows us to not go immediately revolutionary when the system coughs up a value enacted as law that we disagree with.
The democratic system value isn’t infallible. It has produced dictatorships elsewhere. At some theoretical point, every individual has to be able to say that “society (the value system enacted by the majority) is so bad that I must leave” or “society is so bad that I must actively oppose it”, and it worries me that the rhetoric of the far left seems to be approaching this point arbitrarily often.
What is more worrisome is the increasing expansion of rights that are enshrined as necessary and immutable by a chosen few against the wishes of the majority, to the point that these values override the meta-values that make the system function. We value free speech, as it is necessary to a vigorous debate over values. We look at reasonable restrictions on speech (fraud, slander, “shouting fire in a crowded theater”, etc.) as not violating this right. But by running the issue into such things as prohibitions on hate speech, we approach the point where the original value no longer provides the benefit it once did. At some point, the pendulum of society, pushed down by the gravity of majority public opinion, will start swinging the opposite political direction, and this causes the tensions that end up breaking the system.
i meant consanguinous tribal kinship relationships
For our culture, as in any culture without an established “chosen†“superior†political class, all values will eventually be dragged back towards the majorities’ values even if the roots origins for values differ among individuals.
regression to the mean, is what we say in genetics and evo theory of culture.
the problem is that the current system of judeoxian ethics seems innimicable to modern biotech.
How does that get resolved?
and i have a copy of Jurrassic Park, tyvm.
;)
the problem is that the current system of judeoxian ethics seems innimicable to modern biotech.
How does that get resolved?
Probably much the same way things have been resolved for millenia, when the traditional meets the modern. There’s a danger in remaining too rooted in the past, and there’s danger in imagining we live in a time like no other and tradition no longer matters.
the secular moral codes of today all descended from religious origins.
well, that isn’t strictly true.
ALL moral codes have evolved from the base substrate of tribal kinship relationship relationships in the EEA.
religious and secular alike.
Example, please. I am unaware of any tribe evolving from a purely secular environment. And no matter how much you ignore it, religion is one of the biggest definers of tribes historically. Religion, race, and geography.
but what about the rights of the indiviual not to have downs?
that is what genetic engineering offers.
a cure for genetic disease.
But is Downes Syndrome really a disease? You can cure a disease without changing the identity of the afflicted. If you do something as radical as what you are suggesting, you aren’t really curing a disease, you are altering the DNA so as to make a different person. I am not saying it is wrong, I am just saying you should consider the implications, and talk about it terms that are honest.
I would instead say “Current American majority values are opposed to or have ethical concerns over some forms of biological research.”
I strongly suspect that more biological research will get done than you imagine. At the moment, however, there will always be a number of value systems with ethical concerns over research on any biological systems. Some will have traditional conservative religious reasons, some modern trendy progressive reasons, some anti-business reasons, and some environmental reasons. Your task as an advocate of scientific research is to address those reasons. It may mean persuasion using facts, values and emotions, and it may mean adjusting your research to accommodate ethical concerns.
Ultimately, if a majority of the American people are opposed to your research, then they are opposed to your research, and they will use what legal recourses they have to stop you. Your best hope in that case is that they respect the democratic system enough that they stay within the law, but that requires that you respect the democratic system and play by its rules. People respect the democratic system because they believe that ultimately it benefits them. If any group flaunts the system enough that it no longer benefits the majority, no one will respect the democratic system and we can kiss America goodbye.
One rule of thumb: if you are going to genetically engineer a slave race, make them ugly, mute and smelly. If you engineer them to be attractive, easily emotional people will fall for them and will have an easier time swaying public emotion against you.
the problem is that the current system of judeoxian ethics seems innimicable to modern biotech
shorter nishi: Self-identified Scientists need no stinkin’ ethics. We are God, you genuflect.
Aldo
With all due respect, for humans to be considered “ends” means somewhere, somehow, someone has to decide humans are special.
Ayn Rand was a devout athiest, but she still wrote of Man as Special, possible of great morality or immorality. She couldn’t quite escape her Jewish upbringing.
That may beg the question, who doesn’t consider humans “special”; and that would include people who believe humans are plague and should work for human extinction.
Our society swings back and forth between Scientist as Savior and Scientist as Evil. This follows examples from scientists of either great good OR great evil. Science is a tool, like a shovel, axe or a building crane. Scientists are no less liable for their actions and the harm it may cause than New York City crane operators.
B Moe
My interest was piqued by your 338. :
“I am unaware of any tribe evolving from a purely secular environment. And no matter how much you ignore it, religion is one of the biggest definers of tribes historically.”
I had long wondered if there were a people (however you care to define people) who simply had no god. I mean simply, as in no word for god, no deity to worship, sacrifice to, pray to, etc. I wondered, but I did not go out of my way to look for such a thing.
Then I ran into a book, “Rounding the Horn: Being the Story of Williwaws and Windjammers, Drake, Darwin, Murdered Missionaries and Naked Natives-a Decks-eye View of Cape Horn”. The author, Dallas Murphy in telling the story of the now extinct Yaghan (Yamana) people of the Cape, a migratory canoe based people, living nearly naked in the worst weather imaginable for people to live and still survive, on some of the most barren earth (since bad weather) known, mentioned that these people had no god. No word for god. No worship of anything like a god. From Murphy I turned to Darwin “Voyage of the Beagle” and Peter Nichols “Evolution’s Captain” to try to find out somewhat more about them. Then I got a copy of Murphy’s source book, “Uttermost Part of the Earth” by E. Lucas Bridges who was born in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego in 1874, son of English missionaries, grew up speaking yaghan (his father compiled a dictionary of the language) and pretty much lived the rest of his life there. The last full-blooded Yaghan died in 1989 I think.
Anyhow, these are the only such people I’ve heard of. They, along with their lifestyle, are extreme to say the least. They and their forbears were the source of their morality, such as it was. But on reflection, I believe it was a human morality.