Printable View
The terms "left" and "right" are kinda meaningless. I mean, the term conservative has been DISTORTED.Quote:
Originally Posted by hippifried
But in the real term, well, conservatism is about preserving 18th. century values.
I mean, modern conservatism is a profound reaction to the values in which the country was established.
Anyway, Paul claims to be a "conservative" because he says he's a strict constitutionalist.
Well that'd make him a liar. He's as big a Constitutional cherry picker as any of the radicals who think the Preamble is just a cute introduction, or fringers who think "strict constructionism" & "originalism" are synonymns or that the people are too stupid to know that they're trying to pull a fast one. So much for principles. When someone runs for the Presidency as often as Ron Paul, I'd be disappointed if he didn't have the talking points down.Quote:
Anyway, Paul claims to be a "conservative" because he says he's a strict constitutionalist.
Libertarians are not conservative. Anarchy is a radical concept. Follow the philosophy to its conclusion & you end up with no governance. We've seen the result of that. On one end, you have Somalia. On the other, you have massive fraud that crashes the world's financial systems. It's an invitation to corporatism (fascism), & the next step is dectatorial rule in lieu of governance. Libertarians are about pie in the sky.
Radical isn't conservative. Neither are strict constructionists who ignore the parts that allow for amendment or negate the concept of strict construction in relation to the Bill of Rights. Of the first 10 Amendments, this is my favorite:
Strict constructionists like to pretend #9 doesn't exist as they jump from 2 to 10, & lawyers & judges like to avoid it. That's some really scary stuff...Quote:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Then you have the "originalists" with their ouija boards to tell you what the legislators really meant instead of what actually got written into law.
I don't want a fanatic in the Oval Office. You think there's gridlock now?
You write: "Libertarians are not conservative."Quote:
Originally Posted by hippifried
Yes! Not in the traditional sense. I mean, if ya go back over a hundred years conservatism was about being against concentrated power. Whether it was state power or corporate power.
What the likes of Paul want -- actually, I'm not sure if he realizes it -- is corporate tyranny. I mean, if you remove the state, well, what takes its place? Corporations. And they aren't accountable to the public. You and I have a say on who the president is. We have no say on who the head of, say, General Motors is.
So, libertarians want (once again, I'm not sure if they realize this) is a radical corporate state.
I mean, in the absence of government there's no defense against corporate power. I mean, electoral democracy, as it were, would cease to exist. Corporate income taxes would disappear. As would all taxes. What happens to the police force? Well, it becomes private.
Roads? Sidewalks? Schools? Hospitals? Who builds them? And who would they serve? Well, if ya have the cash ya got 'em. And if ya don't, well, tough luck. I mean, it'd be a dystopian society.
You write: "Libertarians are not conservative."
Yes! Not in the traditional sense. I mean, if ya go back over a hundred years conservatism was about being against concentrated power. Whether it was state power or corporate power.
Ben, I think you have that the wrong way round -traditionally, conservatives have defended the concentration of power, the structures of the state that protect the status quo where that guarantees the unequal distribution of wealth and power: libertarians believe that liberty is denied by structures of power that do not change and do not distribute the benefits of the economy more widely -which is why libertarians tend to prefer small or no government to Big Government; why Libertarians tend to disapprove of Monarchy while conservatives believe it gives stability and authority to the state; and it is why libertarians want little or no taxation, while conservatives need it to fund the administration of the state, not to mention its wars.
Libertarians are not conservative. Anarchy is a radical concept. Follow the philosophy to its conclusion & you end up with no governance. We've seen the result of that. On one end, you have Somalia.
Anarchy does not remove government, this is a myth -Somalia is not anarchy, but chaos. The difference is that anarchy does not believe in a single, centralised, concentrated form of government. Studies of the bedouin of Arabia, for example, show that on the one hand they are resistant to taxation, government, and law: they are, allegedly, in terms of day to day practice, not very good Muslims compared to those who live in cities. However, what emerges from the desert is a nexus of norms which are law by any other name: in the absence of government, of police, of law, the bedouin have evolved codes of conduct which enable them to exist in a region where the competition for grazing land and water ought to have wiped out the bedouin way of life centuries ago -it didn 't. Tribe A steals goats from tribe B, some of the goats are stolen by Tribe C, and some of them are stolen by Tribe A. Blood revenge among the bedouin does not lead to an eternal sequence of killing -yes, Brother A may be killed for killing Brother B, but the sequence cannot go on indefinitely: the tribal elders intervene, and compensation through goods and moral recognition of blame (honour) resolves the dispute: consider: no government, no law, no taxation: and yet there is a code of behaviour, there are moral frameworks to resolve conflict; crucially, it provides the accepted framework within which life can continue. The crime syndicates that operate beyond the law have also their own codes of conduct, they are not 'out of control', they believe in it, or their businesses would go bust. And the Mafia is at its weakest when the families are fighting each other.
Hobbes is the eloquent voice of concern -man in the state of nature, living a life that is brutish, nasty and short: Hobbes was forced to flee England during the revolutionary wars, he was horrified by the breakdown of law and order and the violence that ensued, and developed a theory of power which was intended to make such chaos impossible in a well-governed state. But over time, and not just in England, chaos -not anarchy- would have yielded to some kind of order; just as it will in Somalia.
Not in any sense. Radical is opposite of conservative. Radical, liberal, conservative, & reactionary are adjectives, & mostly describe an attitude &/or approach toward issues more than preset positions.Quote:
You write: "Libertarians are not conservative."
Yes! Not in the traditional sense.
Language matters. That's how we describe who we are & what we think. How we think. If the descriptives themselves cause confusion in both the user & receiver, how can anyone expect to be understood? The pollitical dialog, worldwide, is totally disfunctional. This is where it starts. There's been a concerted & successful effort to muddy & misconstrue the language for the last several decades. So now it gets harder & harder to keep it civil because nearly anything you say is some kind of condescending insult to somebody.
All puditry is lies. We've allowed ourselves to get caught up in the rancor & animosity, when we really aren't involved in that aspect of the argument.
Didn't I already say that? Corporate control of government is the definition of fascism. It's just feudalism without the genetic componant of the aristocracy. We're getting closer every day.Quote:
What the likes of Paul want -- actually, I'm not sure if he realizes it -- is corporate tyranny.
Anarchy is absence of rule. Utopian anarchy actually works if everybody's on the same page & the moral code is adhered to. Collective decisions are made by acclimation. People work together. The collective society is everyone's first consideration, & altruism is the common mindset. Sounds great. Now back to reality. The more people gathered together in close proximity, the higher the likelihood of some going after more than their fair share. Add shortages to the mix, & will sprout like weeds. Welcome to chaos. The problem with Somalia was that they were knowlegable of western systems, where ownership is the be all & end all. You can't have utopian anarchy based on private property. That's why libertarians are living in the smoke of a pipe dream. The Ayn Rand worshiping egoist cult is even crazier.They're the lunatic fringe of the libertarian lunatic fringe. Like her, they deny the very existence of altruism, & claim that mo9rality is something that needs to be thought out. Huh? Enlightened self interest huh? Welcome to Somalia. It doesn't get more enlightened than picking up a gun & taking what you want, if there's no thought for the other guy.Quote:
Anarchy does not remove government, this is a myth -Somalia is not anarchy, but chaos.
The universal right is to be free from victimization at the hands of others. That doesn't happen when everybody adheres to the moral code. "Everybody" doesn't. That's the flaw in all the oh so very carefully thought out social systems & philosophies.
The more I think about it, the less sure I am that anarchy is anything other than a temporary situation -Somalia is not experiencing anarchy because there are forms of order imposed on people -the pirates have an organisation of some sort, the al-Shabab have their own agenda -the state may have failed, but that is not the same as anarchy -indeed, it is because the failure of the state has given space for micro-organisms (politically) to flourish that makes re-building the state such a hard task in Somalia -unless one group gets big enough to impose some order -as the Taliban did in Afghanistan in the 1990s-and it isn't helped when foreign troops enter the country with their own agenda. But after all, one reason why Italy is such a mess is that the Kingdom of Naples and Siciliy was never properly integrated into the republic, the orgaised crime syndicates of Sicily, Calabria, Campania and Puglia took advantage of the absence of effective state power by creating a niche for themselves which even a modern state like Italy cannot erase -or rather, replace. Pure anarchy seems to me to be a moment of transition, the transition from bourgeois to communist rule in Russia in 1917-1919, a time when nobody really knew who was going to end up running the country'; the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in its wildest phases in 1966 and 1967 was anarchy -neither the Party nor the Army could control the Red Guards. People can't bear it, they form some kind of protective body to give order and coherence to their lives. Then someone comes up with the bright idea: I will run the show for you, and in return, you give me a wage for doing it -hence taxation, and hence Charles Tilly's description of the state as a protection racket. Problem is, it works.
Anarchy, or anarcho syndicalism, isn't the absence of rule, regulation or management.Quote:
Originally Posted by hippifried
It simply challenges positions of authority. And, again, the burden of proof is on those who have authority to prove it is legitimate. This applies to, say, a husband controlling his wife or to the domineering state structure, as it were.
And a anarcho syndicalist society would be highly organized. Actually, more organized than so-called state-capitalism. And, too, would have legitimacy. As everyone would participate in the decision-making process.
I'm not advocating this type of society. I mean, this type of society has never been tried. It may simply not work. (And what people fail to point out is that America was more socialist than the former Soviet Union. I mean, the idea of socialism means people run their own lives.
The Soviet Union was a complete top-down dictatorship. Whereas at one point there were 40 percent of American workers in a union. So, well, that made America far more socialist than the Soviet Union. Again, the Soviet Union was NOT socialist.
Terms like capitalism and socialism have been rendered meaningless. America has never been a capitalist society. Of course, it has elements of capitalism. As, too, did the former Soviet Union. But socialism is: workers control of production. That has never been tried in America. Nor after Lenin took power in 1917. Actually, he crushed the remnants of actual socialism by destroying workers' councils.)
Bob Schieffer, Ron Paul and journalistic “objectivity”
By Glenn Greenwald
CBS News‘s Bob Schieffer is the classic American establishment TV journalist: unfailingly deferential to the politically powerful personalities who parade before him, and religiously devoted to what he considers his own “objectivity,” which ostensibly requires that he never let his personal opinions affect or be revealed by his journalism. Watch how thoroughly and even proudly he dispenses with both of those traits when interviewing Ron Paul last Sunday on Face the Nation regarding Paul’s foreign policy views. In this 7-minute clip, Schieffer repeatedly mocks, scoffs at, and displays his obvious contempt for, two claims of Paul’s which virtually no prominent politician of either party would dare express: (1) American interference and aggression in the Muslim world fuels anti-American sentiment and was thus part of the motivation for the 9/11 attack; and (2) American hostility and aggression toward Iran (in the form of sanctions and covert attacks) are more likely to exacerbate problems and lead to war than lead to peaceful resolution, which only dialogue with the Iranians can bring about:
You actually believe 9/11 was America’s fault? Your plan to deal with the Iranian nuclear program is to be nicer to Iran? This interview is worth highlighting because it is a vivid case underscoring several points about the real meaning of the much-vaunted “journalistic objectivity”:
(1) The overarching rule of “journalistic objectivity” is that a journalist must never resolve any part of a dispute between the Democratic and the Republican Parties, even when one side is blatantly lying. They must instead confine themselves only to mindlessly describing what each side claims and leave it at that. Their refusal to label Mitt Romney’s first campaign ad to be dishonest — even though it wildly misquoted Obama — is a perfect example; so, too, was their refusal to call torture “torture” on the ground that Bush officials called it something else. This is also what The Washington Post‘s Congress reporter Paul Kane meant in his widely disparaged attack this week on those who condemn the media’s “cult of balance”; when Kane defended the political media’s trite, reflexive both-parties-are-at-fault coverage of the Super Committee’s failure by saying “news coverage should always strive to present both sides of the story,” what he means is: whenever Democratic and GOP leaders say different things, it’s the job of opinion writers — but not us objective reporters — to say what the truth is; our job is simply to faithfully write down what each side says and go home.
To these types of journalists, “objectivity” compels that lies and truths be treated equally and never resolved — that is, when the dispute is between the two parties (they allow themselves exceptions to this mandate — their overt swooning for George Bush and contempt for Al Gore in 2000 was probably the most blatant example, and they also eagerly seize every opportunity presented by sex scandals to self-righteously rail against a political figure because sex is apolitical and thus entails no danger of being accused of political bias — but, in general, mindless neutrality in disputes among the two parties is the prime commandment of their objectivity religion).
(2) When it comes to views not shared by the leadership of the two parties, as in the above excerpt from the Paul interview, everything changes. Views that reside outside of the dogma of the leadership of either party are inherently illegitimate. Such views are generally ignored, but in those rare instances where they find their way into the discourse — such as this Paul interview — it is the duty of “objective” reporters like Schieffer to mock, scorn and attack them. Indeed, many journalists — such as Tim Russert and David Ignatius — excused their failures in the run-up to the Iraq War by pointing to the fact that the leadership of both parties were generally in favor of the war: in other words, since war opposition was rarely found among the parties’ leadership, it did not exist and/or was inherently illegitimate (in a March, 2003 interview, Schieffer explained what a great job the American media did in the run-up to the war). Relatedly, only members in good standing of the political establishment command deference; those who are situated outside that establishment — and only them — are to be treated with mockery and contempt (that is what explains the overt scorn by “objective journalists” toward, for instance, the Occupy movement).
I would have no problem with Schieffer’s adversarial behavior here if this were also how he treated claims made by David Petraeus, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton. But one would never, ever see that. Part of this is what Jay Rosen calls “the Church of the Savvy”: journalists revere power and political success and thus revere those who wield it in their world (Washington) while scorning those who do not (like Paul). But part of it is also that their function is to defend the political establishment of which they are a part and glorify its orthodoxies — defined as: the approved views of the leadership of the two parties, which in turn reflect the interests of the private factions that control both parties — and, conversely, to try to delegitimize any views and/or persons posing a challenge to it.
This is why one sees truly adversarial conduct from establishment journalists applied only to those who are relatively powerless and marginalized (i,e., OWS), or to those views that have no currency within the political establishment (Paul’s foreign policy/civil liberties arguments) . These journalists are, first and foremost, advocates, defenders, and spokespeople for prevailing establishment wisdom and institutions. They have every right to advocate for those views, but it is anything but “objective.” The problem with the Bob Schieffers of the world isn’t that they ooze political bias and subjectivity; most human beings do. The problem is that they’re fraudulently presented as journalists who don’t.
(3) There is another standard media bias at play in this Schieffer interview which I’ve written about before: most establishment media figures, by definition, are hard-core nationalists who scorn any ideas that suggest their country is at fault for anything. The very suggestion that the United States of America might have done anything to provoke rational hatred against it and thus helped cause 9/11 is like poison in Schieffer’s soul. Similarly, the very suggestion that the U.S. is the aggressor when it comes to Iran — rather than the other way around — is heresy to him (the idea that the U.S. seeks war with Iran will be slanderous to Schieffer up until the minute the first U.S. fighter jet drops a bomb, at which point the war will instantly become necessary and just). That’s because — and this relates to the prior point — their ultimate political allegiance is to the U.S. political establishment (the same one over which they claim to act as Watchdogs), and they cannot abide any arguments that that establishment engages in bad acts: it can periodically make “mistakes” or exercise “poor judgment” (almost always totally understandable and driven by good motives: they over-reacted to 9/11 out of a noble desire to keep us safe), but never engage in truly bad acts. Bad acts are only what America’s enemies do, not America’s political leaders.
That’s why — except on the rare occasions when a Ron Paul worms his way in and causes a glitch in the matrix — one almost never hears in establishment media discourse anyone advocating the view that is commonplace in the Muslim world and many other places on the planet: that the real aggressor is the country that is continuously bombing, invading, drone-attacking, occupying, overthrowing, arming and covertly subverting countless other countries. Media stars like Schieffer find such views so wrong — offensive even — that they should not even be aired, despite how commonplace and influential such views are in so many parts of the world. That’s why he cannot even maintain his objectivity mask as Paul expresses those views: it’s like someone is dumping chlorine down this throat. Again, Schieffer has every right to be a blind nationalist; he should just stop feigning “objectivity.”
Along those lines, Radley Balko has argued [link fixed], with ample documentation of the media’s almost unanimous opposition to any form of liberalization of drug laws, that the real bias media is authoritarianism: loyalty to those who wield power. That’s unsurprising: after all, when you watch a media star on TV, what you are seeing in almost every case is an extremely well-paid, high-ranking employee of a major corporate conglomerate. They are the consummate insiders in every single sense. Except in the rarest cases, it would be irrational to expect them to be adversarial to the establishment which is responsible for their status and which lavishes them with so many rewards. Those admitted to the royal court don’t make a habit out of agitating against the King; quite the opposite: they become his most loyal and devoted subjects, the ones most eager to protect and defend the monarchy which guarantees them their wealth and status. That’s all the Bob Schieffers of the world are doing. Again, there’s nothing wrong with it per se, or at least not unusual. It’s just the very opposite of “objectivity.”
Contrary to popular wisdom, there aren’t two types of journalists: those who express opinions and those who are objective. The two types are those who honestly acknowledge their opinions and those who deceitfully pretend such opinions do not influence their journalism. One reason modern establishment journalism has become so corrupted and worthless is because of the conceit that they engage in some sort of objective reporting that is free of bias and opinion, even as they are the stalwart defenders of a clear set of political opinions and interests (those wielded by the same power factions which they pretend to hold accountable). Any time someone is tempted to believe these fairy tales of objectivity, they should just re-watch this Schieffer interview.
Ron Paul Interview On DeFace The Nation 11/20/11 - YouTube
Ron Paul from 3 years ago. Nothin' has changed.... Sadly. Now Europe has a deepening crisis....
Ron Paul - Wall Street Is Only The Beginning! - YouTube