Can a leftist be considered a faithful Latter Day Saint?

[_Roger Morrison]

Hi Droopy, ya really Dropped something here. :-) As they say, "there are no stupid questions." So that is settled. You mention some place in your posts about, in your time or something to the affect of your age... What is that? How old, and of what era are you? Maybe a little background re education, profession, vocation, family status, etc?? Warm regards, Roger

[_huckelberry]

equality of results, that one is perhaps particularly far out there.

I suspect that some people can be found supporting some things a bit like a few of droopies fantasy liberal views.

I am a liberal and would not support ar agree with any of the proposed liberal views. Hard to discuss views which I see as strawmen.

But equality of results is such a bizarre view of liberal ideas. hallucinatory.

Perhaps the beginning argument would be clearer if it was worded: To be a liberal you must be an atheist and you should not be that if you are to be LDS in good standing.

[_Droopy]

WHAT??
This from the guy who wants control and dictate sexual morality, and limit marriage to only the traditional forms?

CFR?

I'll believe that you don't want to control peoples lives when you vote for the legalization of pot, stem cell research, and equal marital rights for gays and individual conscience concerning termination of fertilized ova.

Your undisciplined and fragmented mind make it difficult to debate with you Tarski, but I'll just point out that clearly, the leftist and conservative definitions of the term "freedom", and its associated attributes are understood in vastly different ways within these two philosophies.

Conservatives tend to understand "freedom" as freedom to act within a moral and ethical universe of known and accepted restraints that condition the limits and prerogatives of freedom. The Left has no such conditioning metaphysical template, and grounds its understanding, as your examples above show, on a notion of radical personal autonomy that respects no lines of demarcation between itself and the social order (this breaks down, of course, in the economic realm, where the Left takes the position that money and resources can only be morally legitimate in a commons).

Oh, you want to control alright. You want to mandate a Bible based society. You also want the right to ruin things for the rest of us who plan of having some use for trees and clean water well after you are expecting blond Jesus to come and clean up the smog and toxic pollution with a wink and a smile.

Keep pulling your hair out and stamping your feet in this manner Tarski, it's a good indication that I've got you up against the wall.

[_Droopy]

You are just being simple minded. "The Left" is not a monolithic reality except in the mind of the ditto-head collective.

Dittohead collective? Interesting. One usually only finds collectives in places like North Korea, Cuba, and Woman's Studies departments.

The list put up by Droopy is worse than a cartoon, worse than a strawman. It is a hodgepodge of misstated, wildly exaggerated, notions, that at best, are related to positions that are individually held by someone somewhere, but as a block, held by no one that I know of.

Strange, theses ideas have been held by many millions of leftists (and thousands of its prominent intellectuals for, oh, a century and a half at least (if you don't count the Lefts earlier predecessors, like Hegel, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Comte etc, which would drive the dates back farther)).

What does John Conyers believe Tarski, about, say, the proper scope and responsibility of the state? Or how about Al Gore? What does Elenor Smeal, Kim Gandy, Naomi Wolfe, or Gloria Steinem think about the nature of human life and its moral qualities under various conditions, or of the appropriate relationship between the sexes? What to these leading feminists believe about marriage, family structure, and the boundaries of human sexuality?

What does Hillary Clinton think about capitalism and the role of free markets in, say, the health care industry?

Could you describe the general political, social, and economic beliefs of Antono Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, or Theodore Adorno (or Ted Kennedy)?

Tarski, what does KARL MARX beleive about economics and the nature of human social order?

It is an invented, culled and then cobbled conglomerate unrepresentative in matter and spirit of any ideology in actual play. It is dishonestly dismissive of the center and slightly left of center that make up the real Democratic party. If you think Harry Reid holds, on the whole, to those views, then you are in la la land.

The fact that you do not seem aware that you are making an utter and unambiguous buffoon of yourself does you no service Tarski. You've outdone yourself.

The Democratic Party has pretty much marginalized any centrist or Kennedy era liberals the have remained in the party since the eighties. At present, the Democratic Party is best understood as, what would be known on the Continent or in the U.K. a Fabian or democratic socialist party, with leanings among some of its prominent members to Neo-Marxism and Neo-Communism.

I would prefer to say that, based on its long standing ideological drift and its policy prescriptoion, its essentially a party grounded in elements of Frankfurt School Cultural Marxism blended with the remnants of the social radicalism of the sixties with the remains of the ideology of the New Deal and Great Society nanny state.

Centrists and slightly left of center people absolutely do not make up the real democratic party, if you mean its popular base. The party's base is composed of social and political radicals from the fringes of American political life; the MoveOn.org and netroot activists, the Soros funded 527s, radical feminism, the homosexual lobby, the anti-self defense movement, the poverty industry, big labor, the government unions, the teachers unions, the environmental movement, the black power movement and the race hustling industry, and other leftist special internet groups. It has long ago abandoned its blue collar working class base for the fever swamps of leftist social transformation.

To describe Democrats in this way is akin the the way Ed Decker describes Mormons (which is in all more accurate). You both should be ashamed of your hypocrisy.

Name a "centrist" or "moderate" Democrat who has any standing in the party, or any leadership position on any congressional committee or standing committee.

Shall we start with the Speaker of the House? Opps...




[/quote]

[_Droopy]

Give me a break. I'm a conservative Republican, and even I recognize the ridiculous caricature of Cogs's post. Come on, you guys can do better than that.

All I can say is "put up or shut up". Find me a prominent or orthodox modern Democrat, or anyone associated with the media, academic, political, or special interest Left who does not hold to some form of the attitudes, sentiments, assumptions, and beliefs regarding the above issues approximately as I've described them.

Joe Lieberman? Sam Nunn? Bob Casey? Zell Miller? But they've all been excommunicated from their party for heresy.

Let's take a mainstream liberal from any venue. Let's say institutional politics. Let's take the past Vice President of the United States, Albert Gore.

[_Droopy]

Then cite some real "leftists." You should be able to find something.

We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.

This, from Hillary Clinton's 1969 commencement speech, should be enough for pages of commentary beyond this small beginning.

[_Runtu]

Then cite some real "leftists." You should be able to find something.

We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.

This, from Hillary Clinton's 1969 commencement speech, should be enough for pages of commentary beyond this small beginning.

What the hell are you talking about, Cogs? A 1969 commencement address spouting vague platitudes about holding to higher ideals than mere competition and acquisition? This is supposed to be an example of liberal belief? WTF? And it's deliciously ironic that the speaker went on to a rather lucrative career as a corporate lawyer.

[_Yoda]

My understanding is that in the early days of the Church, most members were Democrats. It was the Republican party who dragged Mormonism out of the mountains and forced them to join American society and put the church leadership in jail over polygamy. Church leaders had to assign people to be Republicans to create a Two Party system in the fledging new state of Utah.

[Guest]

I'll just make a list of funnies I've derived from Coggins's serious intellectualizing.

1. The very first great and central tenet of "The Left" which apparently encompasses people who have thought about politics from the 17th century to present-day worldwide is (drum roll):

Convenience Abortion! :LOL:

2. "The Left" and "Liberals" are, you know, synonymous and interchangable terms. Stalin, for instance, was one of the Twentieth Century's most notable Liberals.

3. There is no teleology in the Left, particularily in the grand-daddy of all Leftisms, Marxism.

4. Capitalism is virtually synonymous with Free Agency, because, Adam Smith was greatly unimpressed with Newton and his deterministic universe whereby one could make a science of things like, oh, personal choice. The concept of "free enterprise" necessarily entails the philosophical libertarian notion of "free choice."

5. It was, I believe, the anti-individualist known as Herbert Marcuse who coined this platitude in the hope to make everyone the same and stifle personal achievement, "But it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin."

6. "The Democratic Party has pretty much marginalized.." He uses that term "marginalized" way too naturally and without any apparent irony.

[_Gadianton]

How can a Mormon be both pro-choice and a good Mormon? Simple.

Don't have an abortion or "participate" in one.

There is nothing I'm aware of in the Church's doctrine or official policies that states you have to be against the legality of abortion.

There is nothing I'm aware of in the Church's doctrine or official policies that states what should be legal and what is moral should be the same thing. While the church definitely makes you wonder sometimes with it's crusade against same-sex marriage, it has never come out and said, to my knowledge, that the principles and ordinances of the gospel along with all their implications should entirely dictate lawmaking. That all the things immoral should also be illegal. This only exists for Coggins's world of "Conservatism". And it's just a little ironic considering he's the one complaining about "Liberals" wanting to force everyone to be good.

Does one have to be against the legality of drinking alcohol in order to be a good Mormon? (if so, there shouldn't even be a question about whether the new Mall allows it to be served) Should one desire the dreaded sin of masterbation to be illegal, and punishable by time in jail in order to be a good Mormon? Mormons clearly believe that "paid ministries" are against gospel teachings, does that mean Mormons must also hold that it should be illegal to generate an income from preaching?

Until people start getting disfellowshipped or ex'd for being pro-choice, Coggins can't say that being pro-choice is contrary to gospel to church teachings.