which side are these protestors on?

[elder999]

Which side are these protesters on?





or these:

or this one:

or this one:

or this one:

or this one:

or this one:

or this one:

or all these lovely people?

 

[Empty Hands]

Which side are these protesters on?

They are expressing racist or bigoted statements, so of course they are leftists. Haven't you learned this yet?

This is why I never want to get into the tit-for-tat back and forth of these arguments, everyone just starts arguing the particulars and dredging up isolated examples and the entire scope of the argument is lost. It's a specific distraction technique that some people use, and when we get into this cycle, they win.

No one could be so monumentally blinkered as to believe that everyone on their side is literally pro-freedom, and that anyone who does anything authoritarian or violent must be on the "other" side. We are being played here my friends.

Not that it keeps me from descending into the muck, even when I try to stay away. Hard to resist correcting such obvious and foolish arguments. What I've come to realize though is that the mountains of evidence and arguments that contradict the "my side" narrative won't even be acknowledged. We see this again and again, from the conservative cheerleading to evolution to global warming to whatever. Truth will not penetrate. At best, this is a performance for the onlookers who might respond to actual evidence.

 

[Makalakumu]

Makalakumu, I think I just did. It is the left that seeks to control the individual, not conservative, or the "right" in this country. From what toilets and lightbulbs you can use to what food is served in schools, to wether your home can be confiscated and given to someone else because they will generate more tax revenue, those are not conservative actions, but they are from the left.

What's the difference between a conservative and a libertarian in your world?

 

[Empty Hands]

What's the difference between a conservative and a libertarian in your world?

Libertarians are Republicans who like to smoke pot.

 

[Empty Hands]

What kills me the most about this mindset is that if the likes of Bachmann and Perry and their Dominionist allies received their fondest wish, and we became a repressive theocracy, the Cheerleaders would still be insisting that the theocrats stand for freedom and liberty, and that our lives under the theocracy would be more free then they ever were before.

"Freedom" is just another branded catchphrase, a tribal marker instead of a real concept. If "freedom" had any real meaning to these people, then their actions would be very, very different.

 

[billc]

Looking up charlie chaplan helped me find this article, I'll cover libertarians later.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/the_nazis_were_maxists.html

Goebbels, who was the only major Nazi leader who stayed with Hitler to the very end, wrote in Der Angriff in 1928:

"The worker in a capitalist state - that is his greatest misfortune - no longer a human being, no longer a creator, no longer a shaper of things. He has become a machine."

​

That image sounds almost identical to what Charlie Chaplin, a Marxist, was portraying in his caricature of industrial society, Modern Times. In 1930, Hitler tasked Hans Buchner to clarify what Nazi economic policies were. What did Buchner elect to call the economic policies of the Nazis? "State socialism."

The Nazis were Marxists, no matter what our tainted academia and corrupt media wishes us to believe. Nazis, Bolsheviks, the Ku Klux Klan, Maoists, radical Islam and Facists -- all are on the Left, something that should be increasingly apparent to decent, honorable people in our times. The Big Lie which places Nazis on some mythical Far Right was created specifically so that there would be a bogeyman manacled on the wrists of those who wish us to move "too far" in the direction of Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater.

Vera Micheles Dean in her 1939 book, Europe in Retreat, written before the Second World War began, said that the Nazis had introduced into Germany a form of graduated Bolshevism, focusing first upon Jewish bankers, industrialists and businessmen, but then upon other businesses, noting that the Nazi goal, from which it had not deviated, was to establish an egalitarian society in which everyone is equal and subordinate to the state. The same year Time Magazine wrote that the "most cruel joke of all" has been how Hitler treated those capitalists and small businessmen who thought National Socialism would save them from radicalism. Some businesses had been expropriated; some were subjected to a capital tax; all had profits strictly controlled; and all were subjected to intense government regulation.

YOu inspired me to post this article empty hand. Otherwise I would have talked about libertarians and their isolationist foreign policy and their decriminalizing victimless crimes and wanting even less federal government involvement in the lives of people than conservatives do.

 

[billc]

And this one is for you elder:

http://www.heritage.org/Multimedia/Audio/Liberal-Fascism--The-Secret-History-of-the-American-Left--From-Mussolini-to-the-Politics-of-Meaning

"Fascists," "Brownshirts," "jackbooted stormtroopers"… conservatives are all too frequently tarred with such insulting labels.  It's a way to cast conservative views as being somehow "beyond the political pale." Not only are the slurs unfair, they are historically misplaced as well.

In Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists hailed from the left. An international movement, fascism took on different forms in different countries, reflecting the vagaries of national culture and temperament.  Hitler's Nazis were ardent socialists. They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, supported abortion and gun control, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life.
While fascism in Germany found its ultimate expression as genocidal, racist nationalism, in America, it assumed a "friendlier" form. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated many of the movement's policies in the New Deal.  If this observation sounds strange to modern ears, Goldberg argues, it's only because most Americans have forgotten the policies and principles that truly define fascism.
Jonah Goldberg is a nationally syndicated columnist and an editor-at-large for theNational Review and the National Review Online.

 

[Makalakumu]

Otherwise I would have talked about libertarians and their isolationist foreign policy and their decriminalizing victimless crimes and wanting even less federal government involvement in the lives of people than conservatives do.

Well, if this is your view of conservatives, they don't believe in liberty. It sounds like you don't even know what it means.

Bill, you don't get to define conservatism. Politicians who call themselves conservatives define conservatism. That's what it means to be "personally responsible", one would think a "conservative" would understand this. Lets make this real. In the field of conservatives, who do you support?

Here's a clue to what my response will be. None of those conservatives actually support a philosophy of liberty. Ron Paul comes the closest...and he isn't a conservative.

Bill, in the end, I don't give a damn what you want to call tyranny. It's tyranny. And if you can't see that "conservatives" have supported tyranny and will support it in the future, you won't even notice that the whole house of cards of your political philosophy has fallen around your ears.

Talk to the brown people and tell me if they can tell the difference between "conservative" and "liberal" tyranny?

 

[Tez3]

If Billcihak is defining conservatism by American conservatism why then is he also applying that criteria to UK and European politics? Is this why he thinks Maggie Thatcher was a socialist? Is this why he doesn't understand what a British Liberal is? And more importantly why he doesn't understand what the Nazis, Fascists and their ilk are?

 

[elder999]

If Billcihak is defining conservatism by American conservatism why then is he also applying that criteria to UK and European politics? Is this why he thinks Maggie Thatcher was a socialist? Is this why he doesn't understand what a British Liberal is? And more importantly why he doesn't understand what the Nazis, Fascists and their ilk are?

Oh, never mind. It's just meanly overstating the obvious.

 

[Tez3]

Oh, never mind. It's just meanly overstating the obvious.

I know but he still keeps clinging to his little raft of beliefs floating in the ocean of world knowledge.

 

[Makalakumu]

Conservatives believe in an extremely limited amount of liberty for a narrowly defined subset of humanity.