I would like to offer up a Christmas prayer to our friends Hankkk, LoneRange, Pedro, Spit and our other conservative posters on this NG.
Author: NuGrassDate: Dec 24, 2006 09:09
Please forgive me for being a Left wing, Socialist Liberal. I will do my best to support our President Bush from now on as he sends our troops into battle to get killed in a war for profit. After all, only profit really matters and only a few elite diserve to be rich and live comfortable lives. Everyone else is just lazy and doesn't deserve a livable wage so when Bush tries to reverse the minimum wage increase, I will try to support him. Please forgive me of all my sins and transgressions! I promise to be more pessimistic and I will start by hating all blacks, asians, jews, arabs, hispanics and any other group of people who are not white and Christian.I also promise to support the military actions ordered by anyRepuiblican President and call anyone who disaproves of those actions an unamerican and also to oppose the same by any Democratic Presidentand call those actions "wag the dog". I promise not to bitch about the Half Trillion Dollar national debt our President Bush has created and also not to worry about the collapse ofthe Dollar. I will not complain when we have to take wheel barrows full of Dollars to buy a gallon of gas or loaf of bread. I will also support our Republican leaders when the want to appoint the likes of a Pedophile to Child Protective Services, a Neocon (who never served) as head of the Pentagon, an Industrialist to head of the Dept of Interrior, and generally support any Homosexual Republican as long as they cheat on their wives with other men and are against Same Sex Marriage. So good night and good luck and a merry, merry Chirstmas to all our Right Wing Friends.
Amen
I don't believe I could add to this!
Dec 24, 2006
I would like to offer up a Christmas prayer
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2 comments:
I’ve been reading your entries and I know you can do better than this.
Liberal means you are a partisan of liberty in it’s social, political and economic forms. If that is a disease let it spread!
Our founding fathers were liberals in the John Locke vein, who prized liberty over tradition, opposed concentrated power, and thought we should fear our government more than revere it. Adam Smith was a liberal, who understood that free trade and freedom were intertwined, and that while supporting steel tariffs might help you win votes in Pennsylvania, it distorts prices and ultimately steals from consumers to “pick winners” rather than letting markets decide. John Stuart Mill was a good liberal, describing the threat of popular opinion as being as much a tyranny as any King on a throne and arguing that people should be free to engage in whatever behavior they wish as long as it does not harm others.
Now I get it that you are out to bash folks who’ve taken the liberal tradition and remixed it in ways you don’t approve, but that is no reason to take down a perfectly good word and misuse it.
get you aim, but I hate to see you lined up with abusing language. Orwell wrote about how language would be manipulated to reduce the ability to ever speak the truth. That is what is happening to that word.
People misuse liberalism as a slander to attack what they actually practice (that’s what you are doing) and others misuse it as a cover for statism or other types of collectivism (I think that is the disease you are after) but that doesn’t change the meaning of liberalism or the tradition it represents. Saying Americans “masses” don’t understand this usage is insulting. First their are no “masses”: just individuals who all have the means to learn what the word means and the tradition values. To give up on the proud tradition of liberalism and start using it as a slander is a mistake. You cut yourself off form the liberal tradition and make it that much harder to describe its values accurately to others. Don’t help build an Orwellian lexicon where “liberal” means something bad instead of something good. This is updownism. It’s a misuse of language that is beneath intelligent discourse.
Liberalism is not ancient rhetoric – the issues liberals support are as pressing today in the fight for liberty around the world as it was when liberalism came ashore on the New World. There is certainly nothing conservative about fighting wars to protect human rights and institute democracy. It’s classic liberal radicalism of the Tom Paine variety that believes humans weren’t born with saddles on their backs to be ridden by others (apologies for mixing a paine reference and a jeffersonian image, but it helps the larger point).
From what I’ve read, you are a classical liberal. It’s not semantics that is the issue – it’s philosophy, history, and ideas I care about.
Physician, heal thyself.
don’t like seeing people mangle a political tradition – be it a socialist who believes in “social liberties” but not economic ones, or a modern day “conservative” who too often doesn’t recognize the source of their own liberal beliefs, and too often sleepwalks into mixing social conservatism (morality politics) with a lazy attitude toward protecting individual liberties (like the truly Orwellian named “patriot” act).
Milton Friedman makes clear what is wrong with your use of the term “liberal” in the first chapter of Capitalism and Freedom. And Friedman may be ancient himself, but his explanation of classical liberalism is eminently relevant today. This idea that the term is archaic is asinine. It may not work on talk radio, but any educated person ought to know what liberalism actual refers to (though few actually do). As I tried to point out, it is eminently relevant in an age of liberal military adventurism where we are actively pushing back conservative regimes abroad to try and advance liberal values like free markets, free elections, and human rights.
I’m with you on what is terrible about the Orwellian use of language, but you are doing it yourself by framing liberalism as a boogie man. You are trying to make white mean black and trying to blame it on the “masses” or mainstream usage is such a cop out. Step out of the matrix. Sure, you and George Will may want to conserve the nation’s liberal tradition, but you are no conservative in the traditional sense of the word. I know of a caliph or two who has a rather conservative outlook on the world, and it is pretty obvious you aren’t supporting his side in this global battle.
It is too bad that people talk about politics at a Rush Limbaugh level and abuse language by turning liberal into a bad word. I don’t think it takes us very far toward understanding the world around us. John Kerry and George Bush agree on far more issues than they disagree on – they represent the left and right wing of “American liberalism” – and to my mind, represent a sad chapter in the rather exhausted story of “American liberalism”, where neither is above supporting tariffs or takings when expedient or curbing liberty when political popular.
But if you aspire to keep company with folks who read Friedman and understand what he is talking about, you need to come to terms with the fact that liberalism isn’t the sickness you are claiming it is. It’s more like the cure.
I would like to move Liberals to a more classical and orthodox Liberal philosophy, something within the spirit of those early Republicans who strove for the abolition of slavery.
Do you think we can find some common ground?
Dude:
First and foremost: Thank-you for reading my entries! Seoondly: Flattery will get you everywhere! "I know you can do better than this." Thirdly: As much as I would love to take credit.. I did not Author this Post.
I agree with your well thought out and inntelligent resonse however, and certainly we are more alike than different in our views!
Classical liberalism (also known as traditional liberalism[1] and sometimes erroneously referred to as laissez-faire liberalism[2]), is a doctrine stressing the importance of human rationality, individual property rights, natural rights, constitutional limitations of government, the protection of civil liberties, an economic policy with heavy emphasis on free markets, and individual freedom from restraint as exemplified in the writings of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill.[3] The qualification classical was applied in retrospect to distinguish early nineteenth-century liberalism from the "new liberalism" associated with Thomas Hill Green, Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse,[4] and Franklin D. Roosevelt.[5] The "normative core" of classical liberalism is the idea is that in an environment of laissez-faire, a spontaneous order or invisible hand market emerges that benefits the society.[6]
Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman are credited with a revival of classical liberalism in the 20th century after it fell out of favor beginning in the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century.[7]
Libertarians of a minarchist persuasion use the term "classical liberalism" almost interchangeably with the term "libertarianism",[8] while the correctness of this usage is disputed (see "Classical liberalism" and libertarianism, below). Nevertheless, if both philosophies are not the same, classical liberalism does resemble modern libertarianism in many ways.[9]
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