“Is this really what liberalism has come to in 2011?”
To which I respond, “that’s a rhetorical question, right?”
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Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
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- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
I would be heartened if I thought the Lees of the world were waking up, but I know they’ll go back to their slumber soon enough.
One voice crying in the wilderness is a start. He’ll be swallowed up and/or excommunicated by the “community,” but at least he made the effort.
Real progress will be when enough Stranahans stand together that they can resist the crushing force of the true believers (the ones who are always calling us ‘sheeple’).
Sounds like somebody hasn’t been paying attention…
Full credit to the man for wanting to hold both sides of the aisle to the same standards.
Someone should tell Lee, that that is not “liberalism”. I mean good on him for saying something, but I learned that words mean things by the vile and dangerous proprietor of this here blog. Lee’s fellow democrats aren’t liberal in the least, well maybe socially, but that’s it.
Since it has been this way for over 50 years, his revelation has been a long time coming and my hope is that that thing he calls “liberalism” will be a long time gone very soon.
No, I think Lee is having an awakening. He’s done excellent work on the Pigford case. I suspect he’s going to find himself being voted off the island.
Yeah, I’ve seen Stranahan’s stuff at HuffPo, and he was as deep a kool-aid drinker as any during the last election. Still, one has to give him credit for cooperating with Breitbart on the ersatz reparations “Pigsford farms” orgy at the public trough that Dan has done a lot of posting about.
It’s always fascinating to watch these public “road to Damascus” moments for left leaners. I haven’t bothered to look at the HuffPo comments, but the hive must be buzzing quite a bit.
How long do you figure before he’s banned from there? Like I was, banned as a commenter that is. Because, you know, my commentary is always filled with such racist, hate-mongering, violence inciting rhetoric…
How many C&D’s you got in your collection, Bob?
No, it’s what liberalism came to 30 years ago.
None that I know of Squid, but, well, you know…
Even then, he didn’t have a problem with asking “What the fuck is wrong with you people?”
I don’t know how I’ve managed to avoid that fate, as you’re usually a tad more polite than I am. I usually just get deleted, but never banned.
About 80 years further back I think, McGehee.
You just wait Pablo. Once your deletion percentage heads north of 75%, you’ll get a warning quickly followed by the ax. But of course we’re the ones that suffer from epistemic closure.
And you’re right, I was always polite, but stuck to facts, principle, and reason; stuff, I guess, that they didn’t want to hear.
Maybe it has something to do with comments being flagged by the commentariat?
Wow, this is fascinating, seeing a progg gain self-awareness.
It’s probably like if a guy was working on a computer program, and it showed a flash of self-awareness. Is it going to keep growing in awareness, or was it just a glitch? He’s hopeful, a little apprehensive, exited.
It’s all sorta weird…
I think it’s pretty well established that facts have a conservative bias, Bob. If you’d concentrated on feelings and desired outcomes, you’d be on much more solid ground over there.
So THAT’S what I’ve been doing wrong!
Wow, this is fascinating, seeing a progg gain self-awareness.
You might find this interesting:
http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/22/people-who-live-in-the-shade
It’s an interview with a “left-leaning libertarian” historian who started off as straight moonbat lefty and has been migrating toward libertarian.
Particularly if you take it with an open mind, whatever your position may end up being, he does raise extremely unconventional questions.
I think it’s pretty well established that facts have a conservative bias
LOFL.
That’s really two or theee big strikes against Stranahan, don’t you think? The invitations slow, those leads and contacts start to dry up, and the next thing you know, it’s down the memory hole. Only when you come out the other side will you see the world’s been turned inside out, and those you thought were liberals are nanny-fascists, and some of those you thought heartless are actually the embodiment of classical liberalism.
(Stranahan also did good work on John Edwards, who you may recall started cheating on his wife (who was dying and has since died of cancer) and fathered a child with a fruit-loop slut while running for President. Potentially kind of a big story, completely buried by the Left / MFM until after the election, but covered by Stranahan).
I read that interview with Russell. The only thing I took from it is what a long, wierd path a handful of very bad assumptions can take you.
charlesaustin, I only got through the first two pages, so I only found it weird. I’m guessing Russell doesn’t have children.
The only thing I took from it is what a long, wierd path a handful of very bad assumptions can take you.
What were those?
I think the guy has a lot of very keen, if not entirely comforting, insights.
“What were those?”
I’m thinking of the main assumption, that only in anarchy there is liberty.
Maybe I was reading too much into it…
He also mentions this:
Russell: Charles Paul Freund’s article for reason, “In Defense of Vulgarity,” was one of the first things by a libertarian I read. It was stunning. And it helped me see how the free market can produce genuine liberation for ordinary, working-class people and subvert repressive traditions more quickly and thoroughly than any formal social movement.
Which I did also find to be a great read.
http://reason.com/archives/2002/03/01/in-praise-of-vulgarity
“In Praise of Vulgarity: How commercial culture liberates Islam — and the West”
Men were now measuring their freedom by the smoothness of their chins. “I hated this beard,” one happy Afghan told an A.P. reporter. Being shaved was “like being free.”
Although it’s omitted from the monuments and the rhetoric of liberation, brutal tyrannies have ended on exactly this note before. When Paris was liberated from the Nazis, for example, one Parisian cadged a Lucky Strike from an American reporter, the first cigarette he’d had in a long, long time. As he gratefully exhaled, the Frenchman smiled and told the reporter, “It’s the taste of freedom.”
…
“How depressing was it,” asked Anna Quindlen in a December Newsweek column, “to see Afghan citizens celebrating the end of tyranny by buying consumer electronics?” Apparently, if you’re somebody like Quindlen — who confessed in the same column that “I have everything I could want, and then some” — the spectacle was pretty dispiriting. Liberty itself descends on the land, and the best thing its people can do is go shopping? It was just too vulgar.
Pulitzer Prize winner Quindlen had given voice to the Cultural Sputter of the bien-pensant, a well-known reaction afflicting people of taste forced to live in a world of vulgarities. It’s an act with a very long pedigree. Eighteenth-century aristocrats by the palaceful were appalled when professional writers first appeared. Writing in exchange for money, they thought, would be the ruin of letters. John Ruskin, King of Victorian Sputterers, couldn’t stand Rembrandt because the Dutch master’s paintings lacked “dignity”: All those paintings of self-satisfied, bulbous-nosed burghers made Ruskin gag.
The sputter is endlessly adaptable. A notorious space-age version choked Norman Mailer half to death. He was watching astronaut Alan B. Shepard walking on the moon in 1971, when Shepard suddenly took out a secretly stowed golf club and launched a drive at the lunar horizon. Mailer was spiritually mortified. Humankind should have been humbled, literally on its knees, as it entered the cathedral of the universe; instead it drove golf balls through its windows. What’s the matter with people? Give them infinity, and they make it a fairway. Give them liberty, and they reach for a Lucky. Or they go shopping.
I’m thinking of the main assumption, that only in anarchy there is liberty.
Well… um, the stuff makes you think. Something like that… but opposite. It does dwell on those types of questions, and not all his opinions are very comforting at all.
But no – he actually takes the exact opposite line.
His own position – probably most controversial, and from which they titled the article – is more like only under tyranny there is liberty.
Russell: Foucault contrasts what he calls “the regime of blood,” which is monarchy, slavery, external control, and what he calls “the regime of sex,” which is modern republican democracy in which everyone is brought together and power flows through them and everyone participates willingly. There’s a great moment where he suggests that those people who live in “the shade”—meaning in the shade from power—have more freedom. And he very strongly suggests that those who live in a regime of blood, like peasants and slaves, live almost entirely in the shade, because they’re not participating.
Russell: But since Eugene Genovese, dozens of scholars of slavery have shown that the slaves, in general, were far more liberated culturally than whites were. The Protestant work ethic is the idea that work is godly regardless of what you gain from it—not that you should work to gain money in order to spend it, but that one should work no matter what one gains from it, that it is virtuous in itself. That’s a European invention. It was not invented in West Africa. There’s no evidence it was a prominent part of any culture in West Africa. No one disputes that. And when West Africans were brought here and put into slave quarters, they had absolutely no incentive to adopt it. On top of that, no one tried to proselytize among them in terms of the work ethic, because they were considered to be a waste of time. They were considered incapable of adopting the work ethic, because they were considered to be savages.
Well, that has a very positive unintended consequence of allowing a particular class of people to live without believing that working from dawn to dusk every single day is the way to live.
and..
Russell: There’s a constant tension. That’s how I view history, by looking at that tension between virtue and nonvirtue in a democracy. Those who spend their time fornicating and doing drugs and drinking and slacking off are not being democratic citizens. That’s where we are less democratic, but that’s a good thing.
The socialists have always said that socialism is the purest expression of democracy, and I think they’re correct. But that also is totalitarian, in my view.