If you want to find the people who are actually DOING something to secure freedom and provide equal rights, you overwhelmingly have to look at the right. Almost every left-wing position involves stifling someone's rights or taking away someone's freedom.
That's just plain dumb. You should pick up a newspaper once in a while instead of just watching Fox "news." Let me explain something to you. There aren't just liberals and conservatives in the country.
To the right, you have neo-conservatives dominating the party. These consist of authoritarian leaders such as Bush, DeLay, Cheney, Gingrich, and Rumsfeld, some of whom are no longer in power, but were instrumental in transforming the republican party into what it is today. The religious right led by Pat Robertson and a few others had a lot to do with it also, beginning in the early 80s. Republicans used religion to help them gain power by convincing the weak minded authoritarian followers that they were the party of "values" and "morals." |
So that's it? I provide a series of specific examples of conservatives through history and your response is that I'm dumb and that I need to quit watcing Fox News.
You then completely brush off what I pointed out about the Republican party throughout history. The Republican party started out as the abolitionist movement in the United States in 1854. It was founded by Christian conservatives (which I'm not one) to help organize to fight against slavery.
Since then, it has been the party of desegregation, the party of civil rights (it was Republicans who passed the 1965 Civil Rights bill with the majority of Democrats voting against it).
I'll also use your own words to point out who really is authoritarian: The person who thinks their opponents are "dumb" and "weak minded" or the person who does not. Once you have convinced yourself that your opponents are sub-human it's easy to start ruling them as if they were inferior eh?
Hence - why liberals try to use the courts to get their way while conservatives tend to use referendums and the democratic process.
Here's the kicker: Liberals try to get things like gay marriage or racial quotas through not through democracy but through judicial fiat. When challenges, they will argue that conservatives are too dumb and too brainwashed to "do the right thing".
So tell me, who's the authoritarian? The one calling people "weak minded" or the one who feels every should have the right to their opinion and vote their own conscience?
Notice how Mike gives no evidence to back up his assertions. The neocons like Gingrich are simply authoritarian. No examples. No evidence. Just a proclaimation that he is intelligent and wise and we need to just accept him.
Let's watch the train wreck continue:
There are still a few traditional conservatives in the republican party, but they are rare.
To the left you have the true conservatives, moderate democrats, and liberals. By true conservatives, I'm speaking of Goldwater conservatives. Goldwater stood for small, less intrusive government, balanced budgets, strong military. He was actually more of a libertarian than anything, but that's still somewhat left of center. It's moronic to compare modern politics to anything that happened back in the 1800s. Times are radically different today. |
Note again, just proclaimations. No evidence. He simply states what is what without any sort of rationale. He states that "true conservatives" are rare despite evidence to the contrary (such as the recent election in which the Republicans lost both houses of congress largely because conservatives are unhappy with Bush).
If you want to know how most libertarians vote, you can look it up. I have. Here's a clue: It's not for Democrats.
As for my evidence that I presented - the contemporary examples are ignored by Mike. While the examples from the 1800s and early 1900s are considered "moronic" because, well, there's really nothing to learn from history. Times are "radically" different today (though no examples are actually given to illustrate this radical difference in human philosophy).
You can't be serious. Granted, you weren't alive back then, but there are things called books where you learn about these things. If you get all your information from TV, you really aren't at all informed. Check out the Weathermen if you want to learn about radical liberals. There's even a movie about them if called "The Weather Underground." Check out Abbie Hoffman for one of the more colorful characters in 60s liberalism. You'll find that liberalism has actually mellowed over the years.
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More insults. Why can't weak minded people like me accept his obvious superiority? His strawman argument -- that the existence of radical liberals -- somehow undercuts the point I was making that today's liberals are reflexively anti-freedom of speech.
In fact, just look at his attacks on Fox News. Some little cable news channel is so scary to them that they have to attack its credibility at every turn (without providing -- you know -- evidence other than mindless links to other sites rather than doing what I did in the NYT article where I simply went to their home page and listed their top stories).
40 years ago, a Barry Goldwater could go on stage at Columbia and give a speech. Today, that same speech would almost certainly be interupted by someone attacking him on stage. Maybe only a pie in the face. But more likely being drowned out by "non authoritarian" liberals calling him a racist or a Nazi.
Mike seems to think that the existence of a thing means there has been no change. Well, we had crime 50 years ago too and there's crime today. Does that mean it's out of bounds to observe the changes in the rate of crime?
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Which brings us back to the actual part of this discussion that caused Mike to start foaming at the mouth:
Liberals are still angry because they are, in general, incapable of moving their agenda forward because the personality traits that cause someone to be a liberal in the United States largely preclude them from having the skills to be a leader. Those skills include the abiilty to make a coherent case. The ability to persuade other people. The ability to build empathy. These are basic skills necessary for leadership and the modern American liberal is sorely lacking them.
Without leadership, one cannot accomplish goals. And that failure creates frustration. Hence, liberals are angry.
And when someone wants to look back at people who would be considered liberals today, you would have difficulty (outside of politics and even there, it's a tough call) to even list leaders who would be considered "liberal".
When I first put that challenge up, we got FDR (I'll even grant that one -- 70 years ago) and then a really sad attempt to reclaim men from the 18th and 19th centuries who would today be certainly considered conservatives.
Look at Mike's responses for an example of why liberals are still so angry. He can't even formulate an argument or a debate point. He simply proclaims things as being "True" without any rationale and then just insults his opponents. Any reasonable person could read what I've written and know that I'm fairly well read.
If I point out that the abolitionist movement of the 1850s were mostly made up of Christians conservatives with the occasional violent John Brown, this (I think anyway) is pretty similar to the pro-life movement of today.
Note that I didn't just insist and demand that people accept my statements. I made statements and then I provided my rationale for it. Now, people can disagree with my reasons and debate those reasons, but at least we're debating actual issues.
Contrast that with the liberal response which is simply to call me names and insist I need to quit watching Fox News. That's basically his response. That's the liberal retort. Agree with him or you're a stupid sheeple.
This is why liberals are angry. I think they genuinely don't understand why they can't move their agenda forward. Was anyone here, left or right, convinced or made to even think about their own positions by anything Mike wrote? Leadership requires people to a agree with your course of action either by default but also through persuassion. Leadership also requires the ability to make people think about issues in ways they may not have previously.
To those reading this -- who is really the more "authoritarian"? The person who tries to convince you of their position with facts, evidence, and reasoning or the person who simply tells you you're stupid if you don't agree with them and states the correct beliefs? Which one do you think, if given power, is more likely to shut down their opponents?
