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Chris
"Government ... does not exist of necessity, but rather by virtue of a tragic, almost comical combination of klutzy, opportunistic terrorism against sitting ducks whom it pretends to shelter, plus our childish phobia of responsibility, praying to be exempted from the hard reality of life on life's terms." Wolf DeVoon
"...Make America Great Again. I'm interested in making American FREE again. Then the greatness will come automatically."Ron Paul
JP nails it once again.
"Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration is minding my own business."
Calvin Coolidge
LOL I saw that yesterday...
Yep that's how they think conservatives are. Look at Hollyweird's reaction towards conservatives. Look at lady Gag Gag did, what she thought was a parody, right before the election.
The thing is most liberals I have encountered lack common sense and are dumber than a box of rocks (my apologies to rocks). Which is why they think all conservatives are like people (the people portrayed) in the movie, Deliverance.
“The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner
Conservatives have no more realistic a view of them.
The MSM sqeaks and squawks about how evil and terrible stereotypes are, then shows nothing but stereotype "liberals" and stereotype "conservatives", while reasonable people are deplatformed wholesale.
And if you think liberals never get deplatformed, stick the name Ted Rall in your search engine. Fifteen years ago he was nationally syndicated. Now autoincorrect changes his name to Ted Talk.
I suspect you're mistaken. I suspect most of the liberals you encounter never let on they're liberal, because reasonable people have enough common sense not to talk politics in public these days.
This is how they make divide and conquer work.
I converted a liberal to voting conservatives in federal elections just the other week. Whatever government does must be done on the most local level possible. If Washington is running your local fire department you need to convince tens of millions that your fire department is more important than gay marriage, abortion and their own local fire stations to get it fixed. If Washington keeps its fingers out of it, it's much, much easier to fix.
I've typed this here before. It works. It's fun to see the light bulb come on.
“The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner
No, I didn't. A lot of the people I just described vote Democrat. They don't necessarily feel very good about it. But they do it.
You know refugees from Deliverance. You know conservatives with enough sense not to talk politics in polite company. Why do you assume all people sensible enough not to talk politics are conservative? Do you really think all the seventy million Democrat voters heave bricks and burn buildings? All 70,000,000? If there were that many, they wouldn't have to bus them in to the latest preplanned battleground, would they?
What this country needs is more politics discussed in polite company.
“The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner
Yep.
And, this whole blasted "division" has been done on purpose. "The Liberals are evil! The Conservatives are evil!" is just a sham show to make people hate & fight their neighbors when TPTB are running the whole thing.
And, as long as people fight each other instead of standing together, we get exactly what we have right now- total take over by TPTB & Liberty For All no longer important.
There is no spoon.
I didn't say it did. I said it was out of date.
I did say that was the only one I could find. How about you? How's your google fu? I trust my own observations, and reported them for what they're worth, if anything. If you prefers double blind studies, see if you can find one that's not a decade out of date.
You made a claim, and I asked you for sources defending your claim. You failed. That is not my problem.
Feel free to trust your own observations. If your experience is an equivalency in understanding between the two ideologies, then I genuinely pity you for the company you keep.
Why There’s Not a Dime’s Worth of Difference Between Any of Them (Democrats and Republicans)
By Thomas DiLorenzo
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/12/...ves-dangerous/December 23, 2015
The late Senator Everett Dirksen once said “there’s not a dimes worth of difference” between the Democrats and Republicans in Congress. The subsequent four decades since he made that remark have certainly proven his prescience. The current “Paul Ryan budget,” which seems to have been written, line by line, by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, is slam-dunk proof of Senator Dirksen’s observation.
Thomas Mullen has just published a new book, ?, that goes a long way toward explaining why this is. Mullen traces the philosophical underpinnings of conservatism and “liberalism” (in the American sense of the word) and shows that they both contradict the true American creed, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents, that the sole purpose of government is to protect our natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The two most influential conservative authors who have shaped the thinking of British and American conservatives, Mullen argues, are Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke. Hobbes believed that man’s natural state was “a state of war” of “everyone against everyone.” This, says Mullen, is “the basis for all conservative thinking. Not only does man need a government, but one powerful enough to ‘keep him in awe’”. It gets worse. Hobbes also believed that “because the condition of man . . . is a condition of war of everyone against everyone . . . it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to everything, even to one another’s body.” (Hobbes’s own words). This of course is the exact opposite of the American creed of natural rights to life, liberty and property, including one’s own body.
This is why conservatives believe that only government can keep “our dark nature at bay,” writes Mullen. It is why they typically support law enforcement, no matter how inept or criminal the enterprise of policing becomes. “Rarely will you see conservatives side with an alleged victim of police brutality,” he writes.
It was Hobbes who also wrote that “subjects” can never change the form of their government, no matter what. “This completely contradicts the [American]Creed’s assertion [in the Declaration of Independence] that the people have the right to alter or abolish their government and replace it with another,” writes Mullen. Lincoln was obviously a Hobbesian, since this idea was at the heart of his new and fanciful theory of the “perpetual union” held together by the threat of murdering hundreds of thousands of dissenters.
Edmund Burke agreed with this notion that “the people are permanently bound by the contract made by their ancestors.” He also believed that rights to life, liberty and property were not natural or God-given, but granted to us by politicians. That is why conservative politicians like Rick Santorum, for example, went on NPR to mock the idea that government “shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom . . . shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues.”
Burke believed that “our rights” were not just government grants, but also the result of “longstanding traditions.” Consequently, modern conservatives rarely, if ever, criticize let alone repudiate such things as FDR’s New Deal. Conservative Newt Gingrich even once hailed FDR as the greatest president of the twentieth century. “Some day, conservatives will defend Obamacare,” Mullen quotes Tom Woods as saying. For conservatives, “to challenge the sovereign power, regardless of how objectionably it is wielded, is to endanger all of civil society.” This helps explain the extreme hatred that conservatives have displayed toward Yours Truly in particular, and LewRockwell.com in general. “Conservatives from Hobbes to Burke to Rick Santorum believe government power should regulate all areas of life,” Mullen accurately concludes.
Conservatives are also centralizers, following Hobbes’s belief that “the sovereign power should never be divided.” They are therefore enemies of another important part of the American Creed, federalism or states’ rights.
Conservatives in general also embrace various forms of mercantilism as their preferred economic policy. They will support competititon, but then they call for government intervention to make sure “the right people” win. This is because they incorrectly view economic activity as one big “war” with winners and losers. They tend to be ignorant of the truth about voluntary market exchange being mutually advantageous.
“You can hear Hobbes every day in neoconservative rhetoric” warning of the “instability” in foreign countries, writes Mullen, and of the alleged “need” for the U.S. military to intervene everywhere on earth where such “instability” exists. We heard this when George W. Bush said we need to “fight them over there so we won’t have to fight them over here,” and is also the argument that was made to “justify” the Korean and Vietnamese wars. From all of this comes the truly totalitarian idea of “American exceptionalism,” writes Mullen.
“Liberals,” on the other hand, are inspired (whether they recognize it or not) primarily by Karl Marx and Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. “[I]t was Rousseau and Marx who laid the modern foundation for liberalism.” Hatred of
“inequality” is what animates all “liberals.” Whereas socialists “seek to abolish private property,” liberals want to “heavily regulate and redistribute it.” The latter are fascists, in other words, no different from conservatives, really.
The denial of the thousands of natural human differences, and their compulsion to have the state force “equality” on everyone, explains modern “liberals.” It even explains, says Mullen, why liberals even “insist on positive laws that prohibit anyone from refusing to associate with homosexuals.” He cites the case of the Christian couple who owned a bakery and refused to bake a wedding cake for a homosexual couple. Liberals naturally sought legal penalties.
Rousseau, the intellectual father of communism as much as Marx, was a fountain of horrible ideas. He was also the intellectual inspiration for the French Revolution, and whose ideas are also now the Official American Creed, as announced by President Barack Obama in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Paris this year. (Obama claimed that “we” also believe in the French Revolutionary slogan of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”). Among Rousseau’s main ideas, as embraced by Obama, the leader of American liberalism, are: man must give up all of his natural rights to the sovereign power; government will grant us whatever civil rights we are to have; the sovereign power must be absolute, indivisible, and inalienable; government should prohibit economic inequality, no matter what its source; being a “virtuous citizen”means having absolute loyalty to the state; children should be indoctrinated into this statist idolatry as early as possible; the state should replace the parents with regard to education; governmental power should be centralized in the executive branch; we should pretend that all government action is the result of carrying out the wishes of “the whole people”; and “truth” is determined by “the majority will,” as defined by a political elite. Marx agreed with all of this, and “departs from Rousseau merely in his ideas about what political action is necessary to resolve the problems caused by private property.”
Mullen also provides a concise overview of the dramatically-different philosophy of natural rights that informs the true American creed, beginning with the ideas of John Locke. He explains how “Locke’s view of man in nature departs from both conservatives and liberals on every substantive point.” The latter chapters of the book are more historical than philosophical, describing how America was transformed by the late nineteenth century from a more-or-less Lockean/libertarian society with minimal government, to a centralized, conservative/mercantilist empire in the spirit of Hobbes and Burke, with the “Civil War” as the great turning point. In a promised sequel, Mullen will write about how the centralized mercantilist empire of Lincoln was eventually infiltrated if not replaced by the socialist/egalitarian ideas of Marx and Rousseau. Both sets of ideas reject the fundamental American creed that individuals have natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that it is the sole purpose of government to secure these rights.
There is no spoon.
Uh huh. No more than I feel for yours, if this is your idea of conversation.
But the Jonathan Haidt study does help me clarify what I was saying. Political conversations in this country tend to center on, which of only two parties do you vote for? People who vote for one get called liberals, for the other, conservatives. But Haidt had a third group, moderates, who could identify with both liberals and conservatives. Way too many people these days are following the MSM's lead and acting like they don't exist. Nothing about them matters to the political but how they vote, and according to that, half are liberals and half are conservatives.
And yet, Haidt's liberal group could represent 15% or less of the population. His conservative group could be the same. I'm betting his moderate group represents 50-80% of the population.
So when Haidt says "liberal" he means 10-25% of the population, and these days, "liberal" makes people think of 50% of the population. So who accounts for those other 35-60 million real, living Biden voters?
They are the people I was talking about. There are insane leftist ideologues who are intolerant and sociopathic and beyond hope. But there are a whole hell of a lot more moderates registered Democrat.
If we write them off as if they're BLM, and they write us off as neocons, or as Westboro Baptist Cultists, the powers that be defeat us.
That's why the MSM never, ever points cameras and microphones at moderates. According to the MSM, there's no such thing as a reasonable Man On The Street to interview. This is the strategy. We had better see that.
Haidt's other group, the Moderates, are legion. They scare the hell out of the cabal.
If you think the purpose of asking you for sources backing your assertion was for the purpose of some kind of conversation with you, then you are mistaken.
No, it does not do that at all. Everything you wrote after this sentence has approximately nothing to do with his study and is just an assemblage of your finest guesswork. Underwhelming.But the Jonathan Haidt study does help me clarify what I was saying.
Regardless, if you do come up with something demonstrating adherents to each ideology share an equivalency in understanding with each other, then feel free to post it.
Don't hold your breath. The insane 5% at either end of any spectrum bore me. The broad swath of moderates will decide what becomes of this country. They always do.
I have no interest in dividing them in half and lumping them in with the crazies. I leave that to the MSM and other shills.
I originally said conservatives have no more realistic a view of conservatives than vice versa. So long as conservatives view half of Haidt's moderates as liberals, and liberals view half of moderates as conservatives, that is a true statement.
No doubt that the division is done on purpose. At the same time we have the left actively arguing for the government to remove rights, rather than protect them. The left amazingly doesn't even defend free speech anymore. This makes me see the left as significantly more evil than the right. How about you?
Citizen of Arizona
@cleaner4d4
I am a libertarian. I am advocating everyone enjoy maximum freedom on both personal and economic issues as long as they do not bring violence unto others.
I've seen Republicans do the same thing. I've heard them argue marijuana dealers must be equated with heroin dealers, and no one may say different because gateway drug blah blah blah. They ruined a lot of lives.
There's plenty of evil and vanity. None of it stays on one side of any line. All of it concerns itself with "us" refusing to talk to "them".
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