Part One of Five
THE ANTI-LIBERAL LIST
Broken Down into Five Parts
Twenty Statements Each
 |
| One of liberalism's many faces |
1. Liberals want to suffocate you with ever increasing laws and regulations.
FT: True and False both. That may not be their primary intention, but their efforts produce results that certainly feel that could be the case.
2. Liberals care more about the criminals than the victims of crime.
FT: True and False both. The move to treat prisoners more humanely started out as a good thing, but it's gone much too far.
3. Liberals want to imprison someone defending himself longer than the criminal who commits the crime.
FT: False. Although the idea of prosecuting anyone for defending him, her, or itself from attack of any kind seems absurd. In every case the attacker is to blame.
4. Liberals detest free thought and are extremely narrow minded.
FT: So it would seem –– to conservatives –– but liberals would say the same of us, so it's a stalemate.
5. Liberals want NO ONE to be able to defend himself with any weapon at all.
FT: False. That's much too broad a statement.
6. Liberals will lawyer you to death.
FT: True. It could easily be said they have literally sued their way to ascendancy.
7. Liberals hate ALL firearms and guns, stun devices, pepper sprays, knives, any type of self defense.
FT: False. They don't mind your having those devices –– in quantities and degrees of quality they monitor and tightly control –– they just don't want you to use them.
8. Liberals are extremely stupid and have no desire not to be stupid.
FT: False. That in itself is an incredibly stupid assertion. Liberals are among the smartest people in the world. If you don't believe it, just ask them.
9. Liberals want to circumvent and subvert the U.S. Constitution.
FT: True mostly. Liberals see the Constitution largely as roadblock to their march towards "Progress." They love it, however, when they can find a way to use quotations from it to further their aims and ambitions.
10. Liberals would enforce Political Correctness as though it were the law of the land.
FT: True. They have already made many giant steps in that direction.
11. Liberals are some of the biggest hypocrites in public life.
FT: True –– especially of some of the most prominent liberals, but not of the rank and file most of whom are either True Believers or who cynically support The Nanny State as their ticket to free lunches and free rides forever.
12. Liberals respect the First Amendment only when speaking THEIR views.
FT: True. If not true, it certainly looks that way.
13. Liberals believe that a liberal government ALWAYS knows what's best for everyone.
FT: True. If they didn't believe that, they wouldn't be liberals, but it doesn't matter much, because conservatives think the same thing.
14. Liberals are taxing citizens at higher rates than most kings of the past have ever done.
FT: Maybe true –– maybe false. We need Finntann to give us reliable statistics on that. Personally, I suspect it is true.
15. Liberals want everyone to follow every mindless trend or fad.
FT: False. As brainless a sweeping statement as any I've heard.
16. Liberals talk compassion for victims, yet would gladly create a multitude of victims by taking away our means self defense.
FT: Generally false, but partially true. Their compassion for victims is often bogus. Liberals love to use the tragedies and serious problems of victim groups to aggrandize their political power. Guns are not that important. Creating and perpetuating an ever increasing number of welfare dependents is at the heart of their ambitions.
17. Liberals are some of the most superficial individuals alive.
FT: False and very stupidly so. Many of the most brilliantly creative, enterprising, highly successful people are liberals.
18. Liberals want a constitution with one rule only: OBEY the GOVERNMENT.
FT: False. A vast over-simplification. It is true, however, that liberals favor and demand obedience and submission to their precepts and dictates as much as any fascist ever did.
19. Liberals look at life and society from a very narrow perspective.
FT: True and false. That could be said of any identifiable faction, minority or splinter group. Magnanimity has always been in short supply.
20. Liberals present myriad solutions to problems that don’t work, because liberals know so many things that aren't true.
FT: True. The near-quote from Ronald Reagan holds much validity. Liberals will never admit their "solutions" don't work, however, they will just tell you their methods haven't been tried well enough or long enough to prove their efficacy.
This is the first in a five-part series.
Tomorrow we shall examine the next twenty assertions
from Sunday's list of One-Hundred Reasons
Why You Should Hate Liberals.
~ FreeThinke
Interesting. I agree with Jack's statement yesterday, that many of the same statements could be asserted by liberals against conservatives.
ReplyDeleteWe have two factions, two gangs, dems and repubs, the crips and bloods of politics, fighting over which faction gets to rob, plunder, rape and tyrannize the populace, haul off the booty, and use it to buy votes.
You're missing the point, FT.
ReplyDelete(the following was "adapted" from Zizek)...
The point is NOT whether any of these charges are "factually correct, it's why in order to retain their sense of balance liberals/ conservatives NEED the fantasy of "the other corrupt American" trying to destroy America? As Freud points out paranoia is not simply the illness, it’s a false attempt of recovery. The true zero point is where your whole universe disintegrates. Paranoia is the misdirected attempt to reconstitute your universe so that you can function again. If you take from the paranoiac his paranoiac symptom, it’s the end of the world for him.
Because, even if what the Liberals/ Conservatives claimed about "other" Liberals/ Conservatives was up to a point true, anti–Liberalism/ Conservatism is formally wrong, in the same sense that in psychoanalysis a symptomatic action is wrong. It is wrong because it serves to replace or repress another true trauma, as something that inherently functioning as a displacement, an act of displacement, as something to be interpreted. It’s not enough to say anti–Liberalism/ Conservatism is factually wrong, it’s morally wrong, the true enigma is ,why did the American political parties need the figure of the "corrupt other" for their ideology to function? Why is it that if you take away their figure of the "corrupt other" their whole edifice disintegrates.
...divided we fall.
The repression necessary for societal control MUST be justified. And without an enemy...
ReplyDelete...we'd have to begin to address the real problems of our nation and economy.
ReplyDeleteDid neither of you read my little essay called ENEMETIC? It was published months ago in these pages.
ReplyDeleteBelieve me, I DO get the point. But I am interested in eliciting thoughtful responses to specific charges.
The point being that we need to UNITE against the innate desire human beings have to TYRANNIZE one another.
It's both comical and vastly depressing that in our political discourse today we deal almost exclusively in dismal, brutally unflattering forms of caricature.
But then, so did The Founding Fathers -- and so have they all throughout history.
The only interest most have in truth is trying to find ways it could best be twisted to serve the selfish interests and pet causes of the seeker.
After we go through this particular exercise, I may take the trouble to list One Hundred Reasons Why You Should Hate Conservatives and see how THAT plays out.
Hopefully whatever value there might be in this list will emerge as you go through it in manageable chunks. I confess I dismissed it pretty quickly: it was pointlessly barbed and too long.
ReplyDeleteIt could be edited and rephrased into something more worthwhile, for example:
2. Liberals care more about restorative justice than retributive justice.
Is that not better in every way?
Restorative justice? You can't "restore" something that never was.
ReplyDeleteHere's a novel idea for you, jez, why not simply support plain old "justice"?
ReplyDeletePrecision!
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteHi, Jez.
ReplyDeleteYou should have seen the list before I spent several hours translating it into intelligible English.
I imagine it's still available in it's 'raw' form posted at GeeeeeZ in three sections among the comments t a post Z made two or three days ago.
My "answers" to the first twenty charges are as sincere and fair-minded as I could possibly make them, but I posted all of that in hopes it would be a springboard for some sort of meaningful discussion.
'Barbed' is fine with me as long as it's not witless or mindless -- like Ducky's last remark which I just erased.
I confess I dismissed it pretty quickly: it was pointlessly barbed and too long.
ReplyDeleteDo you not realize that might be regarded by some as a sign of mental laziness? ;-)
Your idea of rephrasing the second remark, however, is exactly the kind of thing I had mind when I suggested sharing thoughts. I only wish you -- and others -- would do a lot more of it.
"Restorative as opposed to Retributive" has a nice ring to it, although far too erudite for the makings of a good slogan.
Thersites is right, however, in saying it's impossible to restore something never owned in the first place.
Perhaps "Reparative" v. "Punitive" would make better sense, although admittedly it's less euphonious?
You may be surprised to learn that, even though I am by nature conservative, I am not much in favor of punishment per se.
Ideally, we would work towards a society that provides endless incentives for cooperative, creative, productive, amiable behavior, while doing everything possible to make the alternative as unattractive as possible.
I don't, however, believe for an instant that this could be achieved by legislative or judicial fiat and administered successfully by a government bureaucracy.
Just as the Industrial Revolution worked to "dehumanize" the lower classes by pushing them into the daily performance of dismal repetitive tasks within the prison-like confines of "dark satanic mills," the Labor-Progressive-Socialist-Fabian "Whatchmacallit' has done similarly with the establishment of faceless, heartless bureaucracies with ever-increasing numbers being relegated to the hellish tedium of endless key-punching and paper-pushing.
Inthecase of justice, your precision is an "unjust" perversion. No thanks..
ReplyDelete12. Liberals respect the First Amendment only when speaking THEIR views.
ReplyDeleteFT: True. If not true, it certainly looks that way.
-----
One way your free speech rights have been limited by progressives. One.
ReplyDelete19. Liberals look at life and society from a very narrow perspective.
FT: True and false. That could be said of any identifiable faction, minority or splinter group.
------
So which is it?
Progressives are:
1. A faction
2. A minority
3. A splinter group
I'll match my view of life, art, philosophy, science, economics, sociology with any Libertarian.
The very fact that I recognize a wider culture as relevant puts me way ahead in the game. The fact that your supposed answers to this trite nonsense are given in the spirit of seriousness (technical Existential usage) is not an indication that you are self aware.
Restorative wasn't a very carefully chosen word -- I notice now that it means a lot more than I thought it did. Reparative is probably an improvement. My priority for justice is reducing recidivism.
ReplyDeleteSorry, but what are you repairing? And who are you to decide what needs repair? Sounds like hubris to me.
ReplyDeletePhysicisn, heal thyself.
Political Correctness, Canardo.
ReplyDeletePOLITICAL CORRECTNESS!
You seem to be in one of your viler moods today, Ducks. Did you get bad news from the doctor, or did someone, perhaps, walk out in you?
I hope not the former.
The harshness of your tone and high degree of bravado betrays either grave self doubt or enormous conceit.
Apparently, there's a good deal more to this list than I had first thought, myself.
"You know you're really onto something when all they can think to do is heap scorn upon you."
~ Amos Dungcaster
Farmer, your just upset because you're a right winger who believes any toothless sister fucker should have dominance over a Harvard grad.
ReplyDeleteSee, get the point, FT?
Measuring the success of our judicial system by the recidivism rate sounds like hubris to someone who sees no issue with humans trying to enact Absolute Justice?
ReplyDeleteWho knew?
I should have added HATE SPEECH laws to the ways that liberal activism has abridged the right of freedom of expression.
ReplyDeleteI am firmly against prohibiting and punishing HATE SPEECH not because I love it, but because it puts us firmly in the road to Thought Control –– the worst form of despotism imaginable.
If one particular expression is deemed "illegal," and therefore punishable by fine, imprisonment or ostracism, etc. then ANY form of expression could be deemed "offensive" and prohibited by ANYONE in POWER for reasons that may be entirely arbitrary -- or for no reason at all.
Conflating THOUGHT with ACTION sets a dangerous precedent.
"If men are precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences ..., reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter."
~ George Washington (1732-1799)
FIVE WAYS LIBERALS THWART or ABRIDGE FREEDOM of EXPRESSION:
ReplyDelete1. Political Correctness
2. Hate Speech Laws
3. Legislation or Court Edicts forbidding the public display of Christian Symbols in places where such have been loved and enjoyed by the vast majority since time immemorial
4. Attempts to limit, restrict or prohibit the purchase of still-legal products in stores and restaurants.
5. Attempts to STANDARDIZE the culture through Court Edicts or Legislation emanating from the Central Government and Federal Courts.
wtf does our judicial system have to do with "justice"? Due process is not justice. It's what "creates" a recidivism rate.
ReplyDeleteAs Hesiod said in "Works and Days", Perses, lay up these things in your heart, and do not let that Strife who delights in mischief hold your heart back from work, while you peep and peer and listen to the wrangles of the court-house. Little concern has he with quarrels and courts who has not a year's victuals laid up betimes, even that which the earth bears, Demeter's grain. When you have got plenty of that, you can raise disputes and strive to get another's goods. But you shall have no second chance to deal so again: nay, let us settle our dispute here with true judgement which is of Zeus and is perfect. For we had already divided our inheritance, but you seized the greater share and carried it off, greatly swelling the glory of our bribe-swallowing lords who love to judge such a cause as this. Fools! They know not how much more the half is than the whole, nor what great advantage there is in mallow and asphodel.
ps- mallow and asphodel were both considered by the Greek's to be a "poor man's food" that grew "wild".
ReplyDeleteNow one from Hesiod's pen to your ears...
ReplyDeleteAnd now I will tell a fable for princes who themselves understand. Thus said the hawk to the nightingale with speckled neck, while he carried her high up among the clouds, gripped fast in his talons, and she, pierced by his crooked talons, cried pitifully. To her he spoke disdainfully: `Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you, songstress as you are. And if I please I will make my meal of you, or let you go. He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger, for he does not get the mastery and suffers pain besides his shame.' So said the swiftly flying hawk, the long- winged bird.
But you, Perses, listen to right and do not foster violence; for violence is bad for a poor man. Even the prosperous cannot easily bear its burden, but is weighed down under it when he has fallen into delusion. The better path is to go by on the other side towards justice; for Justice beats Outrage when she comes at length to the end of the race. But only when he has suffered does the fool learn this. For Oath keeps pace with wrong judgements. There is a noise when Justice is being dragged in the way where those who devour bribes and give sentence with crooked judgements, take her. And she, wrapped in mist, follows to the city and haunts of the people, weeping, and bringing mischief to men, even to such as have driven her forth in that they did not deal straightly with her.
But they who give straight judgements to strangers and to the men of the land, and go not aside from what is just, their city flourishes, and the people prosper in it: Peace, the nurse of children, is abroad in their land, and all-seeing Zeus never decrees cruel war against them. Neither famine nor disaster ever haunt men who do true justice; but light-heartedly they tend the fields which are all their care. The earth bears them victual in plenty, and on the mountains the oak bears acorns upon the top and bees in the midst. Their woolly sheep are laden with fleeces; their women bear children like their parents. They flourish continually with good things, and do not travel on ships, for the grain-giving earth bears them fruit.
But for those who practise violence and cruel deeds far-seeing Zeus, the son of Cronos, ordains a punishment. Often even a whole city suffers for a bad man who sins and devises presumptuous deeds, and the son of Cronos lays great trouble upon the people, famine and plague together, so that the men perish away, and their women do not bear children, and their houses become few, through the contriving of Olympian Zeus. And again, at another time, the son of Cronos either destroys their wide army, or their walls, or else makes an end of their ships on the sea.
You princes, mark well this punishment you also; for the deathless gods are near among men and mark all those who oppress their fellows with crooked judgements, and reck not the anger of the gods.
Thanks for clearing up that distinction, Farmer. There was a real danger that we were all about to thoroughly confuse our societies' criminal justice systems with justice the ideal or virtue.
ReplyDeleteThat was a closeone -- Phew!
1) False, but that is a danger with the liberal disposition.
ReplyDelete2) See above. Take special note of Farmer's timely warnings about conflation.
3) Liberals support reasonable force in self defence, not carte blanche.
4) Applies to zealots.
5) False -- doesn't even apply to pacifists.
6) Liberals believe that all people should have equal protection and access to the law.
7) see 5
8) Liberals have no desire to becom conservatives.
9) I'm an ignorant foreigner.
10) I wouldn't.
11) The Tories are more open to that accusation in the UK.
12) False.
13) Liberals are as aware of the impossibility of perfection as any other political hue.
14) probably true, but most people were dirt poor peasants for most of history so that's not a rich comparison.
15) That's the essence of conservatism, where the trend is old enough to be considered a tradition. (that's not as old as you might have assumed)
16) Liberals don't make victims, criminals make victims. (That's not assinine, it's a rhetorical device. Oh all right, it's assinine. Now can we all please stop doing it.)
17) Superficiality can be found anywhere / everywhere.
18) Rule of law is vital, but not a complete constitution.
19) Maybe liberals tend to be more aware / accommodating of non-mainstream attitudes.
20) Liberals try things that don't work, conservatives keep doing things that don't work.
Thanks for taking the time, Jez. I hope you will follow through, and give us your responses to each of the five sections.
ReplyDeleteI hope you could see from my own comments to each assertion that we may not be as far apart as each of us might have thought?
I think that's true, but also many of the list's faults are simply unarguable.
ReplyDeleteIMO the adversarial nature of politics is a trap.
So you think it's "human" justice's role to make the victim's whole again after a crime, but let the offender go unpunished? And that prevents others from becoming victims how? And what perverse "incentives" are you now creating to help make people WANT to become "victims"?
ReplyDeleteSorry, but the purpose of "human" justice systems is NOT to make the victims whole OR punish offenders. It's purpose is to "heal" the community and reconcile the victim and offender to one another, so as to prevent the victim from exacting his "own" sense of "justice" through "revenge". It's intended to "break the cycle" of tit-for-tat/ eye-for-eye. Nothing more. Nothing less.
W/O "Balance" and "Symmetry", there is no "beauty" and/or "justice.
So now, let us celebrate the Thargelia, once again, and recognize that "humans" cannot exact "justice"... they can ONLY make "peace". And all attempts, no matter how "well intended", at "creating" justice are on their face and de facto, "unjust". For an eye for an arm is not, and never will be, "justice."
Who do you choose for "victim" at this years festival? I suspect the men with the largest purses will be found "ugliest" in your eye. ;)
Scapegoater, thy name is "Democrat". ;)
ReplyDeleteInstead of "encouraging victimhood" and an "appearance" of weakness, a sensible person would seek to encourage "strength" and self-empowerment. For as Nietzsche has noted (GoM)... As it acquires more power, a community no longer considers the crimes of the single individual so serious, because it no longer is entitled to consider him as dangerous and unsettling for the existence of the totality as much as it did before. The wrongdoer is no longer “outlawed” and thrown out, and the common anger is no longer permitted to vent itself on him without restraint to the same extent as earlier— instead the wrongdoer from now on is carefully protected by the community against this anger, especially from that of the immediately injured person, and is taken into protective custody. The compromise with the anger of those particularly affected by the wrong doing, and thus the effort to localize the case and to avert a wider or even a general participation and unrest, the attempts to find equivalents and to settle the whole business (the compositio), above all the desire, appearing with ever-increasing clarity, to consider every crime as, in some sense or other, capable of being paid off, and thus, at least to a certain extent, to separate the criminal and his crime from each other—those are the characteristics stamped more and more clearly on the further development of criminal law. If the power and the self-confidence of a community keep growing, the criminal law also grows constantly milder. Every weakening and deeper jeopardizing of the community brings its harsher forms of criminal law to light once again. The “creditor” has always became proportionally more humane as he has become richer. Finally the amount of his wealth even becomes measured by how much damage he can sustain without suffering from it. It would not be impossible to imagine a society with a consciousness of its own power which allowed itself the most privileged luxury which it can have—letting its criminals go without punishment. “Why should I really bother about my parasites?” it could then say. “May they live and prosper; for that I am still sufficiently strong!” . . . Justice, which started with “Everything is capable of being paid for; everything must be paid off” ends at that point, by shutting its eyes and letting the person incapable of payment go free—it ends, as every good thing on earth ends, by doing away with itself. This self-negation of justice: we know what a beautiful name it calls itself—mercy. It goes without saying that mercy remains the privilege of the most powerful man, or even better, his beyond the law.
ReplyDeleteFor the quality of mercy is not strained.
Ooops, wrong link above. They must have taken Michelle's version down. :(
ReplyDeleteI guess that I'd best refer to the original.
For Mercy only seasons justice on the earthly plain. Most victims and the rest of us lack the "strength" to exercise it. And those who would "lend it strength", do but defeat the proportions and symmetries required for true "mercy". For the font of true mercy lies at the feet of the "strength" of the victims, not that of the local authorities.
Well, Thersites, theories are one thing; Reality, quite another.
ReplyDeleteFrom where I sit RESULTS are all that count.
I'm afraid I have become an inveterate pragmatist.
Jez,
ReplyDeleteIt would interest me to learn which of the list's faults you regard as inarguable and why -- a piece of work, I admit --, but my interest is sincere.
Farmer: I almost certainly used the wrong word.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I will almost always prefer the policy which reduces recidivism the more reliably and cheaply.
Sad, but true, FT.
ReplyDeletePower is NOT something that the vast majority of citizens in a "luxurious" Republic will ever attain. For those who benefit most seldom care to "share it" equally.
There is justice, and there is "just is". Best affirm the latter than make things worse. I, for one, believe that our society already supports enough "parasitism" and am far too weak to support "more" of it.
...for Astraea has left the building.
ReplyDeleteExeunt.
ReplyDelete" ... [Astraea] is always associated with the Greek goddess of justice, Dike ... "
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you realize how unintentionally comical that must sound, Thersites? ;-)
And yes I do realize it must be pronounced Die-Key, but most would not at first glance anyway.
Fancy "Gloriana" having drawn inspiration from Greek mythology! I wonder if her subjects ever knew?
The Britons were Romans, once, FT.
ReplyDeleteAs for Dike, she often stands by Nike on the podium... only one or two steps lower. ;)
Could she, perhaps, have benefited from the services of a good podiatrist? ;-)
ReplyDelete