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Mockerator |
Compared to you guys, I'm starting to sound like a friggin' moderate. Oh, I totally agree with what you're saying but wish I had said it first. | |||
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| Mockerator |
Bryan Suits, who is a local conservative talkshow guy, cracked me up this morning. He was talking on the air with his producer and said something like "And I don't at all agree with your girlfriend, Payton Manning, on this issue." He was referring to MSNBC's sycophantic leftwing apologist Rachel Maddow noting "I've never seen Payton Manning and Rachel Maddow in the same room at the same time."  | |||
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Master Baiter |
I think I've decided that being a moderate is the same as being a pussy. Only I'm not traditionally radical right wing. Mostly because I'm more of a secular humanist than most liberals. I see religion as just one more con-job. I think religion was simply an excuse to explain away the "self-evident" truths of human rights. Nobody can ARGUE with rights from god, if they're a believer. God trumps monarch. Me, I say HUMANITY trumps god. And it's no more than a semantic discussion when people are too afraid to admit that their rights, while human in nature, aren't bestowed, but recognized as a default subset of being human. Making them divine is truly only for the benefit of people who are conditioned to bow their knee to some kind of all-powerful monarch, rather than demand freedom as a birthright. It's easier for the ignorant to get their heads around rights coming from divine edict from an all-powerful king of the universe, rather than as part and parcel of our human choices, our human will, our human reality. I think we need to take a more active role in our rights, and STOP treating them like things bestowed from above. To me they are more precious because the exercising of them is an act of free will. We'd do better to recognize that there are consequences to both trying to curtail the rights of our brethren, as well as consequences for exercising our rights in general when they become inconvenient truths to the politically powerful. It's all well and good for us to play the God card at that point, but chances are, God isn't going to come out of the heavens at that very moment and kick the asses of anyone who steps on our rights. It doesn't work that way. Take now. While I respect the religious freedom of guys like Beck, and I understand that in his head, because he's a believer, that he can't really see freedom as a human thing, an act of human will. To many guys, that would make it less important. People who aren't secular humanists think it's the height of hubris and arrogance to say that human-based things are important enough in their own right. Not me. I say GOD himself is a human construct. And that doesn't make the idea bad. But it is a kind of shortcut. Or rather shorthand to explain away a concept that's difficult to articulate. Namely self-determination, self-actualization, and acts of will which have self-authority. Saying "because God says I can" seems to carry more weight in cultures that understand abuses of power than stuff like "because I said so, and I write my own destiny." It's WAY harder for a person to admit they're in charge of their own life. Much, much easier to say that God controls the puppet strings. And that's why I'll never be a Beck. While I'll never be one of the Christian right. I can find secular humanistic validity in liberty and freedom. I think Beck's "Faith, Hope, and Charity" jag, is basically RELIGION. And religion, while a freedom, is not the basis of the US Constitution. It's simply protected by it. As is the freedom to believe in any religion, or no religion. This is also why I'll never be Ann Coulter. I don't think the left's problem is that they are secular and godless. It's that their Gods are cult-based, rife with chosen-people syndrome, and are every bit as religious as the devout. Reality is suspended the same way. And freedom and liberty are not central to the idea set. What is? Power and Control. That's where Beck has it right. But the problems are not that we take our eyes off of GOD, but that we've taken them off of Freedom and Liberty. | |||
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| Mockerator |
No, I actually agree with that. I think that is why Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" when referring to what humans, by nature, are entitled to. You know me. I have no problem at all with trying to discover, commune with, and philosophize about the nature of existence and ultimate things. But "God" is like writing your wishes and desires in bold print. "Man should be free" sounds good. But look at this: "God declares that man should be free." There's more oomph to that last one. Our rights must be founded in more than just bold print and anchored in something more substantial than just arguments from authority, for if one person can claim that God says one thing, another can say that he says another. But we can reasonable say that it is self-evident that all life desires to continue to exist. We can say, given the history of the world and the abuses that flow from it, that most societies are divided into classes. They are often divided into mystical or superstitious sub-species of humans (priests, kings, chieftains, Mullahs, whatever). So when Jefferson asserts that "all men are created equal," I think there is much self-evidence for this because, apart from any superstitious anointing we may do, we are all indeed born in similar existential circumstances. We are all helpless babies of flesh and blood. And even if this is not the case, it's still a very good idea to start with the idea that we are all created equal given what flows from the opposite approach which is usually tyranny by our supposed "betters." Some may be satisfied to be ruled and to be told what to do, but that is not what America is about. There will always be men (such as Obama and his minions) who think by divine something or other (divine intellect, in this case) that they should be the administrators of government and that the rest of us should just shut up and do what they say. That is always the force we must be on guard against and that must be beaten back. (Eternal vigilance.) One vulnerability of the idea of human rights based solely in a god-like appeal to authority is the danger of being countermanded by some other appeal to authority, whether based on a different conception of god or to a more earthly Messiah-like authority such as Obama. But such American appeals to God are not all bad. If you read the Progressive thoughts on society and government (and surely Beck has gotten into this), there are no self-evident rights that belong to man because he exists, in their view. Rights are things granted by government. I'm not making this up. It's what Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and their ideological cronies said and believed, and what Progressive nitwits such as Obama still do believe. When an American patriot makes an appeal to God for his rights, it typically means that rights are not things bestowed on us by government but are ours by birth and that we form government in order to protect those inalienable rights, and that we do not form government in order for government to bestow our rights, including a bunch of FDR-like made-up "positive" rights such as the right to health care, the right to a college education, the right to a car, the right to a microwave oven, the right to an iPod, etc. I'll gladly admit that many religious people today do not think that clearly on what this means, but it's what Jefferson meant in the Declaration of Independence. He did not mean that we would have a government whose laws would be dictated by priests, although the mealy-mouthed Progressive enemies of freedom would, of course, characterize it as such. As deeply religious as the founders were, they came out with a conception of a Federal government (which was an act of their will) that was a freedom-based conception of mankind. I do sometimes tire of the knee-jerk appeals to God by many conservatives in regards to the basic structural issues of government. But out of the Declaration of Independence and out of our experience of freedom in the Colonies (which is why people came to America in the first place) came a conception of a political arrangement where God may have been central in people's hearts, but on paper he was relegated to the back benches. When god was spoken of he was spoken of in the most general of terms so as to mean "not from man" in practice. This wasn't Christian doctrine, per se, that was being instituted by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, although the way in which Christianity was practiced in many of the states, there was plenty of precedent for a religious state. Instead, the purpose of this form of government was to keep people free. Some, like you, anchor that freedom in a secular will. But when unanchored in anything but human will you can very easily get all the abuses and horrors of the uber-secular French Revolution and the bloody aftermath. Alternatively, if you anchor a society in nothing but some very precise and narrow conception of god then you can get all the horrors of some of the Islamic countries or some of the past Christian-theocracy countries. Jefferson walked the right balance. Rather than "god" being a scare word, it's a word that surely means "more than just the will of humans." But the rights he spoke of in the Declaration of Independence as being among those endowed by our Creator are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." He very well could have said "worshipping god, obeying His authority, and working for Heaven on earth." That would have been a much different conception of society, but one that was quite consistent with the idea that most people had of a Creator. The Founder's conceptual difference was regarding what level of society one's duties to one's Creator would be carried out. In the American conception, it would not be the goal of the national government. It would be a more private and personal pursuit. The Founders had ample experience, even inside their own individual states, with how quickly religious freedoms (and other freedoms as well) could be stamped out once the state got into the business of religion. A Rousseau-ian "man's will" conception of society is pretty much the Progressive conception of society where man's will can do anything because mankind is a blank slate. A more Jeffersonian approach, although I don't know if he thought of it in these exact terms, is one with an eyes-wide-open conception of human nature and its limitations. I think it was also a conception that man's station in life is as a part of reality, and not master of reality itself. Certainly where the Constitution differs from either Obama or the Robespierre French Revolutionaries is that there is a cautious, even pessimistic, attitude toward human beings. It wasn't about going off half-cocked on the "will of man" and creating a perfect society. There are important considerations other than our zealous passions and will when forming a society that we hope is just and that will last. The exposition of the will of man within such a society is the very definition of freedom. But such a will implanted into the scope and goals of government itself is absolutely disastrous, as we're seeing now. A "Progressive" type of government wants to be the will while drowning individual man's will. These distinctions are extremely important. Certainly grounding government in "because god says so" is not the opposite of such a thing and is not the resolution to this problem. And yet there are elements of that if one understands God as a more Jeffersonian abstract standard rather than specific dogma. And I think it works in that regard. | |||
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| Mockerator |
I'm probably technically an independent. I have made no blood oath with the Republicans and would dump them for a conservative Democrat (or conservative Whig, or conservative Federalist, or conservative ACORN party if that ever materialized) in a heartbeat. Our loyalty belongs to the Constitution and our founding ideals. We should not do what the legions of useful idiots have been talked into doing (or, via their own selfish and ugly nature, have willingly joined onto) and become willing sycophants in the war between what MEP Daniel Hannan called the productive classes and the unproductive classes – on the side of the government sycophants. (Here's an excellent American Thinker essay on the subject.) That is the nature of the beast at the current moment no matter what political label you put on it. It's freedom vs. tyranny. But, good god, I agree with you about the term "moderate." That is a term usually used by the wimpy fence-sitters or by the self-righteously smug. You know the kind. They set themselves above the fray (sort of like Obama does) and say they can see "all sides of the issue." Well, that's all well and good, but having taken a look at the sides, you need to come down on one side or the other, the Constitution or the Progressives. Which is it? We all won't come down on the same side on every single issue. But if we actually have principles and believe in certain things we will always tend to come down on one side or another (and there are, of course, more than just two sides). But to call oneself a "moderate," at least in my eyes, is to say that you have taken a scissors to your testicles and stand for nothing other than wanting to be seen to be holier and smarter than thou. | |||
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| Master Baiter |
I'm technically an independent too. I'd never be caught dead in either of those stupid parties. It really never bothered me that the founders bandied around God in their thinking. I don't care that Beck thinks everything is about God. Again, I'm pretty sure it's just a semantic argument that saves us time having to face that we and we alone are in control of our destinies, we're just too wussy to take personal responsibility for it, so we CALL it God. I think it stems from people who have truly experienced tyrannical rule. Who've been subjects or serfs. The only thing monarchs respect, after all, is power. And even they had to say their power came from God. So it's tit for tat when trying to blast apart the idea of a monarchy, that nah-ah GOD bestows our rights. That'll shut up those pesky monarchs. It's actually a radical idea. All through the bible we don't have God really disbursing FREEDOM and LIBERTY to everyone in bondage. At least not regularly. And when he did, it was a big deal. Pretty much, The God of the old testament dealt with us like a monarch would. Dispensing capricious, arbitrary judgements and wrath. And when he became a god of laws, those laws were often apparently deliberately mystical, arcane, and foolish. For a guy like Beck, to say that our American Freedoms come from the same god who inspired the book of Leviticus, with all its silly ritual cleansing, "bodily fluids and you", and how to properly sacrifice to him, is almost funny. This is a god who would have us stone people to death for completely ridiculous things like blasphemy (that's the ultimate squelching)... A God who supplies true freedom and self-determination through rights (including free speech) granted to the created is a far less self-absorbed creature. Again, what you've got to see through here, is that the people who think they can take the moral high ground, get the power. Lefties do it through harping on victims and disadvantages and a lip-service approach to helping those who they corral into a sense of not being able to help themselves. While the right, traditionally, tries to hijack Christian values, in an almost eerily parallel way to how radical muslims hijack islamic values. But a political party cannot take symbolic possession of a religion and still espouse Freedom and Liberty. Not logically or rationally. And so that's why I say until Freedom trumps religion (which is what I believe the founders were aiming for by separating church and state, and having no state religion), it'll be a game of who gets to speak for God or the Elite and God-like. But if you step back and realize that the truly subversive thing (in the light of the sum total of human history) about the American system of government, is that when individual liberty is the law, and nobody has to believe alike, it's harder for elites and clergies and big governments to step on your rights. It really doesn't MATTER where they come from, as long as the answer is "not you guys". The second anybody gets into the business of doling out rights, privileges, or perks for belief, there is tyranny. That's just how it works. The price of hitching your destiny to a tyrant, a tyrannical belief system, or even a religion, is that you are bound by that belief system's strategy of control over your rights. | |||
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| Mockerator |
A nice bit from Brother Jonah:
People such as David Brooks and Michael Lind are the worst kinds of useful idiots. But notice the paints they have in their palettes. They're the same pigments the left uses to advance and sell their agenda: image construction and manipulation. For David Brooks, all it takes is a clever stroke of his pen to define what the Tea Party movement supposedly is. If he can make it work in his mind then he supposes it must reflect reality. But reality offer cares very little for our preconceptions, including mine. We must keep going back to reality (if we are honest and sincere) and see what the truth is. But one doesn't get that by writing clever prose from an ivory tower. But that's just how these people think and operate. (I simply must soon read Brother Sowell's new book., Intellectuals and Society.) | |||
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| Master Baiter |
The difference between the tea party people and the leftist intellectual elite can be boiled down to one thing: lying. The tea partiers don't have to lie about what they are about. The left does. The left HAS to alter its vocabulary to fool people into thinking they are, in fact doing things "for our own good"... they wouldn't be able to do what they do if they were honest about the Marxist and Communist european roots of their belief system. Both are "back to basics" movements. Er, but the tea party movement seeks its basics in the Constitution and the founders, the left seeks theirs in Marx, socialism, and European communism. | |||
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| Mockerator |
I was just listening to Washington State's own Rep. Adam Smith on the Michael Medved show. "Democratic douche-bag" doesn't even begin to describe him. How people can sell out the freedom and foundational principles of this country with such Biden-like smarmy smiles and lies is disgusting to me. | |||
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| Mockerator |
Ditto | |||
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| Mockerator |
People do seem to spend a lot of time putting words into God's mouth. God told me to do this. God told me to do that. I don't know. I don't have any trouble with the idea of inspiration, and even of inspiration coming from spooky and unknown places. But it would just sound too grandiose to my ears if I said "God says I should do this and such." We know from experience that people think God is telling them to fly airplanes into buildings, burn people at the stake, etc. We can thus admit that any claim to "God says..." is very fallible. Certainly it's quite possible that reality might poke and prod us in some way. A brief look at quantum physics (without even having to go into wacky new age interpretations of it) shows that such a thing isn't all that far-fetched. But to think reality is slipping us crib notes in exact detail is not how I think it works. However it works, we have a part to play in whatever ideas, creativity, or inspiration we receive, create, or take part in. I guess in some ways the whole "God said to..." is appealing because it allows us to pursue OUR stuff but do it under less selfish-sounding labels. So, yeah, not taking personal responsibility is a part of it. I agree.
Still laughing about the Beck Leviticus thing. And Cuntlosi. But, yeah, I think that makes more sense. God is like the forward movement, the urge "to be," the urge to live, the urge even (as many religious traditions claim) to be moral and do justice. God is the fire in the engine of the soul and we are the little engine who could, or can't, or won't, or doesn't particularly like railroad tracks. But ever since the Big Bang the universe has been about spin (a different kind of spin, but maybe that's where the Democrats get it), energy, force, impetus, combining, creating, and evolving. As conscious, feeling beings we have at least a basic glimpse of the mystery of existence as we inherently live it. It's energy and forces combined with immaterial sentience to make this extraordinarily bizarre and weird-ass circumstance we inhabit. No instructions. We figure it out as we go along. With deep insight we might glimpse the astonishing implications of awareness. We might imagine just how deep this goes and suppose God as real, perhaps even necessary, if indefinable and unfathomable. But the relationship between ourselves and ultimate truths remains fuzzy, appealing, disturbing at times, and usually quite intriguing. But to take all that ineffability, wonder, mystery and boil it all down as "God told me to go bowling every Thursday" is to miss our own part in the act and very probably to misunderstand the primal forces. We seem to be an explicit rendering of those forces that otherwise exist in a quite different way. God doesn't particularly need a bowling alley, but we might like one. | |||
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| Master Baiter |
That's really an interesting way to put it. It's clear to me that every conception of god is human-limited. And it's also clear that it's probably healthier to recognize that, in order for the ineffable quality of the universe to be parsed by us as genuinely UN-limited. We now assume arrogantly that the major monotheistic religions are more "advanced" than these silly polytheistic societies like Pagan Roman or Ancient Greek, or Hindu, or various animistic cultures. We have no problem looking at Greek mythology and saying, oh well, they were just trying to understand GOD in all his mystery in the form of elaborate myths. Uh, yeah. In some ways it's almost lazy to lump God together as one entity. But again, it's kind of a shorthand... a way to separate the mystery from the sort of understandable. But that's precisely what we need the freedom to do. Find our own beliefs and worship all the great unknown any way we want. To arbitrarily declare that Christianity is what the founders intended, kind of sells their terrific idea short. The Freedom of religion is bigger than Christianity. And when you PRESS a constitutional scholar, or even Beck, they always admit that it doesn't matter if you are a muslim or Buddhist or Wiccan, you can be an American. So it's all the more curious that they can't shake that last bit of chosen people syndrome when it comes to arguing the role of religion in our culture. The right is notorious for this. It's like they say Freedom of religion is OK, as long as Baby Jesus is large and in charge. | |||
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| Mockerator |
I think Janice Shaw Crouse states things plainly in ObamaCare is Tyranny, Not Legislation
Many people don't see it that way, even those who are arguably not leftist kool-aid drinkers. But I think Crouse has exactly characterized the situation and even Brother Goldberg gets all mealy-mouthed and PC in what is, for him, a very PC opinion:
Unless and until the rank and file understand as Janice Shaw Crouse does that this ObamaCare is tyranny, not legislated good intentions, we are lost. I was thinking last night about how to characterize what is going on. Lies? Yes, certainly. A power grab? Without a doubt. But I find myself taking this more and more to biblical proportions and thinking of this push by the Democrats to enslave us as evil. Now, "evil" is a very big word. Surely even many staunch opponents of ObamaCare see it as just well-intentioned folly. But I do not. I listened to a douche-chilling interview by Michael Medved of Washington State's own Rep. Adam Smith yesterday. It was clear the man is a liar. He said he read the 900 page bill three times. That is impossible to believe. There is a wall of deception in politics right now that is going beyond a mere difference of opinion. No longer can you call what the Democrats are trying to do just "misguided." This is an attempted plundering of our country. It is evil. | |||
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| Master Baiter |
See? I wasn't being hysterical when I said: "CRY TYRANNY!" Thalo.net, ahead of the curve yet again. | |||
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| Mockerator |
Oh, hell yeah. Brother Levin chimes in with some excellent comments. This isn't a very long clip on YouTube and is worth listening to. | |||
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| Master Baiter |
He's absolutely right. It's an outrage. Tricorn on. Where's my damn musket? | |||
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| Mockerator |
I think it was Rush yesterday who said that if Cuntlosi (I don't believe he used that exact word) could just "deem" that the Senate bill had already passed (without actually voting on it) then millions of Americans could just "deem" that they had paid their taxes without actually having done so. Oh, I hope there is that kind of outrage if the Demoncrats pass this bill in a dishonest way. (And even equal outrage if they just pass it on an up-or-down legitimate vote.) | |||
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| Mockerator |
I'm not normally a big fan of crossword puzzles, but I did enjoy this one:  | |||
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| Mockerator |
The Failure of RomneyCare Grace-Marie Turner Let's hope this forever kills Romney's chances for the presidency. I never did warm up to this guy. Something just doesn't seem right. And this article lays out a case for Romney having the same statist cuntlosi mindset that is the plague of our times. He basically helped to institute state-mandated health care in Massachusetts. It's part of what drove Senator Ken Doll to say he'd be the 41st vote against ObamaCare. I heard an interview of Senator Ken Doll with local guy Bryan Suits the other day and Senator Ken Doll did not impress me at all. He's going to be a big liability to the Republican Party. Fine, he's with the Constitution on one issue, but remember how many of the far left hated ObamaCare because it wasn't leftwing enough or was a supposed windfall (it might be) for the insurance companies. Be very cautious about Senator Ken Doll.
Basically you'd have to be an idiot to vote for ObamaCare...or evil. We know exactly what will happen when health care is "free." Massachusetts is just another example of that. | |||
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| Mockerator |
One thing I very much enjoy is comparative religion, learning the ins and outs of the various beliefs. Although Joseph Campbell was a bit of a liberal clown at times, I can relate when he says that it's very difficult, if not impossible, to study the various religions and ever to have the kind of religious experience that people inside the religions often have. I think it's analogous to not being able to fully enjoy a theatre play if you're backstage and are one of the guys pushing the buttons to make the smoke, fire, and lightning effects on cue. To see behind the scenes is to spoil the illusion. Now, it's also true that some people say (C.S. Lewis? G.K. Chesterton?) that once you get past or destroy all these stage gods, only then do you get close to the real thing. One could still argue that there is still no real thing, but that "getting rid of our own constructs" way of thinking makes a lot of sense to me. And, really, we could apply this to our politics as well. Many have said that Obama was little more than a blank slate onto which people projected their own hopes and dreams. That's where Obama's specifically non-specific rhetoric during the campaign came in handy. But what if we get behind the smoke and mirrors and dispense with illusions. What do we have? We have Saul Alinksy with a nicer smile. | |||
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