West on the West

[Kishkumen]

I echo Doctor Steuss' thanks and appreciation for your contributions to this forum. I have never seen you post anything that did not make a positive difference. Not everyone is or needs to be a dedicated classics scholar like you, but the world would seem a poorer and less interesting place if no one was. I'm obviously not anything close to a classics scholar, but I feel that my intellect and appreciation of culture and language have been greatly enhanced by what I have learned from people dedicated to studying the classics and preserving the best of ancient culture and thought.

Greetings, Gunnar! Thank you very much for the compliment. I try to make a positive difference, and, when I feel I am not, I try again. I am glad that in the balance I might be making more positive contributions than doing harm. I enjoy history, language, and especially Classics. I think the latter is inherently worthwhile, and I think it is important for us to understand the subject because of the many centuries we have referred back to that past. I only understand the very smallest bit of it, but I am fortunate to get to spend the rest of my life learning more. I also have the great pleasure of understanding a little bit of what brilliant people like Symmachus are up to when they come around to share their erudition.

[Cultellus]

Many thanks for posting this, Kish--but god, it makes me sad. I especially found the Cornel West quotation meaningful. Unfortunately, this reinforces my growing perception that we who lean left are cannibalizing ourselves with our own purity tests. What was once a healthy critical questioning has morphed into a type of self-mortification that's slowly but painfully killing us.

Yep.

[Kishkumen]

Many thanks for posting this, Kish--but god, it makes me sad. I especially found the Cornel West quotation meaningful. Unfortunately, this reinforces my growing perception that we who lean left are cannibalizing ourselves with our own purity tests. What was once a healthy critical questioning has morphed into a type of self-mortification that's slowly but painfully killing us.

Yeah. Cornel West is, in my opinion, great. I love to see him in action because I usually agree with him, and he finds himself at odds with both conservatives and progressives. Obviously he is more in line with progressive perspectives, but I don't see him going to the extremes that some Marxists do. The cannibalizing I have seen time and again, and it *is* sad.

I used to look down on conservatives who were mixing too much religion into their politics, ignorantly supposing that America's left was more rational, being more secular. Now I see that there is plenty of religious fervor to go around. The question is not whether one is rational or not, but rather what kind of belief system one brings to the table and how one believes that system should impact the lives of everyone in the country.

Choose your poison, I like to say. On the whole, my poison leans left, but there is toxic sludge in every brew, and we should realize that both sides have their narcissists, knaves, and inquisitors. Both sides are motivated in part by fervent beliefs that cannot be proven. This is not to say that everyone is equally bad or equally good. Obviously I choose my poison based on what I think, on the whole, is the better choice at the time.

[Moksha]

Do you still post at the Klan Times-Picayune?

I never realized penguins were so not clever or funny.

Events of the past Cultellus, plus the nature of Ajax's remark insinuating that Howard, as a predominantly African American University, would eschew mathematics in favor of racial polemics. Some remarks are meant as acute displeasure rather than being good-natured. Even penguins need to stand for something.

[ajax18]

Thanks for responding Kishkumen

To me liberty is first and foremost my right to vote,

I think a citizen should have to be a net taxpayer to vote, similar to how we have to be willing to fight or go to war to earn the right to vote. I know you'd disagree and that my view is extremist so no need to comment or argue that point here.

then to exercise my freedom of speech,

Do you think conservatives should be permitted to post on Facebook and Twitter as part of the public square? Or is it a deal where Facebook is a private company even though subject to significant Democratic government pressure, and therefore if conservatives want to voice their opinion on say "the chinese origin of the corona virus be it natural or lableak, whether lockdowns and eternal mandatory masking are constitutional, support Trump for president, report on Hunter Biden's deals with the Ukraine, than conservatives should have to get their own version of Facebook to do so. Or do you view conservative content as being so dangerous that it must be censored regardless of which server might dare to post it?

and my right to own property.

At heart my biggest fight in this world is to secure the rights of working people to their paychecks. I think money should be distributed not according to who needs it the most but according to who produced it. The right to give or not to give to charity should belong to those who produced the wealth.

Of course, it is a lot more complicated than that. Liberty, freedom, and rights are malleable terms. People throw around these terms ignorantly and irresponsibly. We should start every discussion on these topics by establishing common ground or at least a definite focus. Otherwise we are wasting our time talking about it. Conservatives and progressives have very different ideas about what our rights and liberties should be.

I couldn't agree more.

[Kishkumen]

I think a citizen should have to be a net taxpayer to vote, similar to how we have to be willing to fight or go to war to earn the right to vote. I know you'd disagree and that my view is extremist so no need to comment or argue that point here.

So, I am not exactly sure what this means. By net taxpayer, do you mean someone who pays more in federal taxes than they receive in federal benefits? This is an interesting and complicated question. In response, and in light of your other comments in this post, I would say that anyone who is willing and able to work should have a job, and if they do so most of the time, they will be taxpayers on some level, and I think they should be able to vote.

That said, shouldn’t we be able to employ most everyone? How many people truly relish in being unproductive and are so by choice? I rather think that ceteris paribus most everyone would prefer gainful employment of some kind to sloth and unproductivity. Ergo, work might be a more salutary standard for voting, provided that voting is not predicated upon the vagaries of market forces.

Do you think conservatives should be permitted to post on Facebook and Twitter as part of the public square? Or is it a deal where Facebook is a private company even though subject to significant Democratic government pressure, and therefore if conservatives want to voice their opinion on say "the chinese origin of the corona virus be it natural or lableak, whether lockdowns and eternal mandatory masking are constitutional, support Trump for president, report on Hunter Biden's deals with the Ukraine, than conservatives should have to get their own version of Facebook to do so. Or do you view conservative content as being so dangerous that it must be censored regardless of which server might dare to post it?

Great question. Should Facebook and Twitter be private companies or public utilities? If they are public utilities then we can tell them they must allow any kind of information to be published therein, provided it is not obscene. Do pizza parlor pedophiles count as obscene? LOL. In any case, I think that private companies should set their own standards, or perhaps they should not be private companies. At the end of the day, I doubt we will see freedom of expression in a libertine fashion in which anything goes, including pornography and conspiracy theories. Everyone will seek to enforce their own standards, and we should just admit that the standards are both contentious and also somewhat arbitrary.

At heart my biggest fight in this world is to secure the rights of working people to their paychecks. I think money should be distributed not according to who needs it the most but according to who produced it. The right to give or not to give to charity should belong to those who produced the wealth.

Great thoughts. What if labor were truly valued and not subordinated to capital in the way it is? I love the idea of the employee-owned company, for example. So if labor were truly valued, most everyone was gainfully employed, and people were empowered to make political decisions, then we might have a very different political and economic landscape. We might have less political polarization. As long as our elites can keep us engaged in mutually abusive political deathmatches, they will be able to continue exploiting us all.

[canpakes]

I think a citizen should have to be a net taxpayer to vote, similar to how we have to be willing to fight or go to war to earn the right to vote. I know you'd disagree and that my view is extremist so no need to comment or argue that point here.

I’d note that it’s virtually impossible to live in this country and not be paying taxes of some sort. Even children pay taxes on their simple toy purchases. And gauging ‘net taxpayer’ is difficult, as you can no sooner suss out what portion of a renter’s monthly check is devoted to the embedded property taxes as you can determine how much more benefit you receive from infrastructure and defense than you pay via your own taxes.

This is likely why the right to vote is based on simpler methodology.

Do you think conservatives should be permitted to post on Facebook and Twitter as part of the public square? Or is it a deal where Facebook is a private company even though subject to significant Democratic government pressure, …

These are two completely different questions, and not - as you might be imagining - two sides of a same issue.

Regardless, is the significant Democratic pressure to do anything in particular (what is it you have in mind?) greater than the Republican pressure levied by lawsuit and cancel culture tactics because a company won’t bow to what a political party wants it to print, against that company’s own plainly stated terms of service, and by co-opting that company’s intellectual and physical property without compensation?

Seems as though the much greater threat and hypocrisy rests on the Republican side of things. As example, please review Truth Social’s policies regarding what is permitted to be propagated through their platform, and what is not. Compare and contrast that to Facebook to illustrate the unseriousness of the Republican position.

At heart my biggest fight in this world is to secure the rights of working people to their paychecks. I think money should be distributed not according to who needs it the most but according to who produced it. The right to give or not to give to charity should belong to those who produced the wealth.

People do not ‘produce money’. People may produce value, or labor, or provide capital. It’s The Fed that ‘produces money’. : D

Jeff Bezos may be a gazillionaire, but he got there via the efforts of millions who work for him, and other millions who provide a market for products that he moves through his warehouse. He doesn’t ‘produce money’, nor has he achieved what he has without the cooperation of millions of others who helped him get to where he is today.

[ajax18]

Jeff Bezos may be a gazillionaire, but he got there via the efforts of millions who work for him, and other millions who provide a market for products that he moves through his warehouse. He doesn’t ‘produce money’, nor has he achieved what he has without the cooperation of millions of others who helped him get to where he is today.

I actually agree with that.

In the famous words of Peter Gibbons in Office Space, What would I do if I had one million dollars?" Nothing. I'd lay in bed and sleep all day.
Lawrence the hillbilly replies: You don't need a million dollars to do nothing Peter. My brother is broke and he doesn't do *****. There's way too many people like that in this country. When we finally get a new country, we'll kick everyone of these people out and send them to your country.

Whoever said this, be it De Tocqueville or Winston Churchill, this is the truth about what is happening to the American experiment.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."

https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/202 ... o-said-it/

[canpakes]

When we finally get a new country, we'll kick everyone of these people out and send them to your country.

How will the taxation system work within your new country, and how will you determine who votes?

How will your new government ensure that everyone is gainfully employed?

Will Moms need to leave the country if they’re the ‘stay at home’ kind?

[ajax18]

How will the taxation system work within your new country, and how will you determine who votes?

We could start out just having customs taxes, taxes on luxury goods, mild sales taxes, and property taxes. We'd make sure that income tax never exceeds that of competing countries. That most likely would be enough given that government welfare programs would be few and far between. If we didn't have to impose an income tax it'd be a flat 10% on everyone like tithing. But it probably wouldn't be there for long. Any country that forced us to invade we would not just occupy and serve as the world's free police service. We'd conquer, pay our soldiers with the conquered land as the Romans once did. We take the resources and make the new country a Republican states of America province. OPEC would be gone and gasoline would be cheap. Groups like the Taliban would be exterminated. Not only would we rid ourselves of radical Islamic terrorism but we'd make a profit from it rather than letting such necessary self defense actions add crushing debt for our taxpaying citizens.

How will your new government ensure that everyone is gainfully employed?

Rather than just writing people checks, we'll have the government find something for everyone to do even if what they do turns out to be worthless. Yes that will cost some tax dollars but I think it will still be a lot less than what we would pay in the Democratic states of America. No disability abuse. If you're still alive, we'll find something for you to do and a way to contribute.

Will Moms need to leave the country if they’re the ‘stay at home’ kind?

The moms that never marry, flippantly divorce their husbands because they have unreasonable expectations, the mom's who think that anytime a man is not at work he should be babysitting the kids, the moms that have 6 or 7 kids from 3 or more different baby daddies, the mom's who choose to start having children in high school... In short the welfare queens will leave the country of their own free will and migrate to the Democratic States of America to be with people that share their values, ideals, morals, and economic policy.

Thankfully most women are not like this so we'll have no trouble finding worthy women to help build our rising generation and teach them conservative values.