quote:Originally posted by BaoQingTian: Sorry, I didn't spend much time searching to find more recent info, but I think it's safe to say some of these made it to the front kiosk at borders
Air America is just the liberals latest attempt at a radio station. There have been others. And just like the conservatives like Limbaugh, they spew forth the same type of vile propoganda. Face it, both parties are willing to sink equally low in spreading their divisive politics.
But are they really the same thing?
Compare the titles you list:
LIES (AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM) THE GREAT UNRAVELING LIVING HISTORY THIEVES IN HIGH PLACES BIG LIES STUPID WHITE MEN
...So, the opposition is lying, incompetent crooks. Yeah. Nothing new. Now, here's some titles from the opposite end of the spec:
How To Talk To a Liberal (If You Must) Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism The Enemy Within Liberalism is a Mental Disorder Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism
All also, notably, New York Times bestsellers.
Accusing liberals of treason? putting them on the same level as terrorists? Liberals are "the enemy"?
For the last time, yes, there are people on the left who say some unfortunate things. But what is considered mainstream rhetoric is far more threatening on the right.
Even Michael Moore, considered the poster boy by many for the worst in left-wing political punditry, spent an entire chapter in Dude, Where's My Country mulling over finding common ground with people on the other side politically. Some how I don't think I'm likely to find anything equivalent in Coulter or Hannity.
And bumper stickers? Well, they've never been the high ground for political discourse, but then, they're almost as easy to make as comments on a message board or posts to your blog. Take a look at www.cafepress.com if you think otherwise.
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Let's be fair, Michael Savage is not a rational or sane person, I don't think his books, (I believe 3 and 4 on your list?) should be considered mainstream, as they are products of a seriously deluded paranoic sideshow of the political punditry world.
I agree with you here, I don't use political bumper stickers, or other slogans for public display because it makes me feel like part of a herd mentality, and it is very passive agressive, like when your neihbor leaves a note on your windshield (don't you hate that?). It makes a statment without inviting response, yet people who sport them consider themselves brave and proud of their beliefs, even though they have the liberty of remaining seperated from those who see the display. There should be less of this unanswerable posturing going on.
"And bumper stickers? Well, they've never been the high ground for political discourse, but then, they're almost as easy to make as comments on a message board or posts to your blog. Take a look at www.cafepress.com if you think otherwise."
However I have to object to what you are doing here, which is very similar to sporting a bumper sticker. When we argue about a topic, I don't think its appropriate to say "look at this if you don't believe me." It simply invites the person to either agree with you or be accused of being misinformed; it also invites others to refer you to their evidence, and stops them from introducing their OWN ideas to the discussion.
Unfortunately I have seen to much of this lately, even real life. Other students refering me to websites which "represent their beliefs," rather than expressing them with words. This kind of manuever limits communication by overwhelming your oposition with a mountain of unanswerable evidence or exposition which is either irrelevent or impossible to validate.
A good debate doesn't include the words: "if you had done the research you would know..." Because "the research" is something that YOU need to do to make the argument. If you can't be persuasive without overwhelming non-contextual evidence, then you don't understand your own argument well enough to defend it at all. I knew someone in a study program with me overseas who made some outrageous claim about gender-identity, that girls and boys are taught to use different muscles through sexism, which is supposedly why men are stronger than women, sexism, not genetics. He kept insisting that if I "did the research" I would know, and since I wouldn't "do the research" I was obviously part of the sexist conspiracy against women to make them weaker. I knew whatever research he was talking about was likely flawed or slanted, and I didn't feel the need to spend my time looking at whatever activist literature he was talking about, (I believe it was a feminism activist website).
As a further aside I have noted of late that the average person I talk to is more and more convinced that having read about a topic makes someone an expert. This is perhaps a sign of the abundant faith that an unwise or impressionable person invests in the rhetoric of others, but it is also a disturbing trend. People now have the idea that you can get your education from a library, a correspondence course or a video, and as a result we are becoming seperated from other people and a real learning and communicating progress. The proper internalization of facts and methods comes best from intimate interaction with peers and teachers, and I fear that we are not only losing the ability to learn, but the ability to teach and listen to each other. A fact out of context can mean many things, which is why you can read a book about every President of the United States, and every book can be true and good, yet you will still not know how to BE president yourself. Being president isn't about knowing what the president knows (especially of late?), instead it is the culmination of a physical learning process and a growth that takes a lifetime of interactions. OSC dismisses much real learning, probably because he recognizes correctly that real learning requires real teaching, which is not always present at an American university. Is this the fault of his generation, the current teachers, or mine, the current learners and students, future teachers themselves.
This is not an attack on Sterling as much as it is an aside on how I feel about standards for debate, sorry if I sound really pedantic at the moment.
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Savage may be nuts, but enough people agree with him, or at least are sufficiently amused by his point of view, to put him on the best-seller lists.
As to the rest, it was implied that a significant number of liberally-themed books on the bestseller lists is tatamount to liberals doing an equal amount of mud-slinging on a similar level of discourse, a point with which I do not agree. Do you have another way of making that counter-point in mind? I guess I'm not clear on what specifically you object to.
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I don't do bumper stickers, I hate them too. I also haven't read 1 book on either of those lists. I'm not going to get into a contest with you in which each of us tries to find the most distateful quotes, books, or any kind of media put out by either side just to prove my point.
I'm just saying that throughout your posts I've seen an attitude of 'liberals take the higher road.' I just think they're both down in the mud and muck. I see that you disagree. Mei you guanxi, it's cool.
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I have an incredible amount of faith in people to be stupid, blind and ignorant when it comes to alot of things. Extremism is in general the worst problem that faces our society today.
Whether your talking about a religious fanatic, or a political ideal, if a viewpoint can't change and adapt to the demands of the times, then that is a major problem. Michael Savage prays on the ignorance, xenophobia, hatred and nastiness of stupid people with narrow minds, of which there may be a great deal.
Nevertheless I've always had a little saying that infuriates most people I share it with, because it's so counter to the mob mentality that most Americans seem willing to live with: "If someone isn't a smart as you, their opinion doesn't matter as much as yours."
I love the reactions I have gotten by saying this. I don't mean to say that I am smarter than anyone, or that people should be opressed for being stupid, clearly you can succeed as a mightily stupid person in this country. No, I simply keep this thought in the back of my mind when dealing with people I feel to be stupid or ignorant, I remind myself that their opinions don't have as much weight, because they aren't the result of any real thought. That's all it is, I admire the products of careful consideration and judgement; the culture today tells us that everybody gets his say and everybody is exactly equall. The news will make you think that the opinion of some guy on the street who sits at home playing video games and eating potstickers (my roomate), is a vital and important factor in the shaping of national ideals. It just isn't so. And that's what I think of the Savage nation idiots, I fully expect most of them to be too stupid to effect any real change. Hopefully anyway
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Bao: Fair enough. I just wish to make it clear that there are reasons for why I feel as I do (as I'm sure there are reasons you feel as you do, and some of those are indeed clear to me.)
Orincoro: I agree that extremism is dangerous. I wish I could believe that a large number of ignorant people aren't dangerous. Sadly, large numbers of ignorant people seem to wait for strongly spoken leaders to tell them their problems aren't their fault and present them with a scapegoat.
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The Establishment is everyone. Especially those that oppose change. (I'm not saying whether any particular change is good or bad.)
The Establishment has had a powerful rhetorical tool for about a hundred years: claiming to be anti-Establishment. Anyone proposing change in the USSR was "counter-revolutionary." Today, anyone proposing change wants to turn back the clock. (I'm exaggerating. Nobody claims that gay marriage is an ancient tradition. I think.)
I saw this in a cartoon in Funny Times, and keep seeing it elsewhere. The claim that anybody endorsing such-and-such liberal position (in that case, opposition to the Iraq war) is vilified as "radical."
But it's rhetoric. Anybody established is establishment.
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I'll say something about liberalism in academia, since I'm in that environment.
At my (Southern) college, the faculty are overwhelmingly liberal. They don't persecute conservative students (or faculty). Sometimes I wonder what they're thinking. ("Critical thinking" doesn't really mean "deconstructionism.")
But they're nice people. I read a letter to the editor protesting a cartoon ridiculing academia, saying we never ask new hires their views on politics. She's right. But the cartoonist wasn't writing about *our* college.
When I was looking for work, I was turned down from one job because I kept talking about teaching and research, and the chairman was only interested in whether I could help them reduce the number of white males in their engineering program. I was not just turned down, but yelled at for fifteen minutes, for "intolerance," by another chair. What I said that made him think I was intolerant: I said I enjoyed the departmental meeting. Yes, really. But I said it in a Southern accent.
It happens. But not everywhere.
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Ah yes, the tolerance and diversity police: the bastions of understanding and enlightenment in the world today
This is the biggest problem I have with the democratic party and its supposed "liberal" attitudes. Liberalism, at least the definition on which I was raised living in San Francisco, is pretty much the same thing as the American dream: everybody gets a chance, and you have to help people who aren't getting a chance. That colored my image of "conservatism," because if it differed in a substantial way, it was that conservatives withheld aid from the people who could not help themselves, on the grounds that this treatment was a help in its way.
Both viewpoints have their problems, and yet most people insist that one will work, the other won't, when in reality neither will, not in the present environment.
The former fails because if you "help" underpriveliged people, you end up patronizing, marginalizing, resenting, and crippling them in the long run. Though they benifit from short term improvements, they have a hard time developing an ability to function independently; or you grow too used to "helping" them, and begin to believe they are inferior and work to keep them "in their place."
By not helping underpriveliged people, you fail to help them, and they can die, kill each other, never improve their own lives, grow to hate you and each other, etc. The benefit is that some will be able to improve their own lives, and not feel patronized; this minority of people will in turn work very hard to make you believe that conservatism is the way to go, since it worked for them, and they don't want to turn around and share their hard earned wealth.
The latter is a good picture of what happens so often, especially in South American countries, where the middle class is some 5% of the total population, however it comprises the overwhelming majority of politicians, tourists to the U.S, and recipients of visitors from here. When US citizens go to South America, middle class people is who they are likely to meet, and that class has a vested interest in making the U.S. believe that current economic policies in the western hemisphere benefit everyone, rather than just that one small class that represents South America. We as Americans like to believe that we can overpopulate on the one hand, AND succeed as "everyman" on the other hand, and that ANYONE can do this.
I often hear that: Anyone can succeed, ANYONE.
True, but the current dynamic demands that not everyone can be that person, and we have a vested interest in making sure that only certain people ever do suceed economically, namely the descendents of already sucessful people.
There is no ready solution to this problem, but despite what I've been told by countless small minded people, the lack of a solution does not predicate that we stop worrying about finding one. I love that part of it the most: the part where I admit there is no ready-made answer, and they say "Ah HAH!" As if anything worth doing must be easy. But this is a cynical rationale, designed to ease the minds of those that would rather not consider the moral uncertainty of the modern world.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: That colored my image of "conservatism," because if it differed in a substantial way, it was that conservatives withheld aid from the people who could not help themselves, on the grounds that this treatment was a help in its way.
I think your perception is flawed. There are people who are harmed more than helped by certain types of aid, as you acknowledged, but I think a more fundamental tenet of conservatism is that such charitable help should be volutary, not enforced by the government. As a libertarian, I'd go further and say that such compulsory tax-funded charity is a form of armed robbery.
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In that case, there is no need of any government. Why should your tax dollars go to pay for a road you'll never drive on? You should only have to pay YOUR way, and if you get sick or injured, no-one should help you.
You have to define "charity." Isn't it like charity to provide poor children with education they can never hope to pay for themselves? We consider it a right to go to school, and a duty to pay our taxes for education, and we do it often with little hope of repayment in any way.
The real robbery is the government spending millions on housing drug offenders every year, then ratcheting up the penalties when arrests decrease year after year, in order to maintain the status quo on arrests and "law and order." The real lesson is that the beaurocracy always manages to preserve itself first, and its function second.
This particular point struck me as apros pos because I started thinking about how the negative reinforcement in this situation works SO much better than positive reinforcement. Consider that the rationale for tougher penalties and harsher prisons is "we have to be TOUGH on crime." Whereas the rationale for funding education is "we have to encourage learning."
Imagine how effective a program would be if we said it would "Encourage peacefullness." It sounds impotent, it sounds like it won't accomplish anything real.
Why don't we then say: "Lets go out there and FIGHT blinding stupidity." But we never seem to make that connection, we never fight ignorance, we always encourage participation. We go to "war" against drugs, and poverty, and hunger, but we "encourage" learning and reading. Why don't we fight stupidity? Why?
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