The Long March Through FAIR: How Big Can the Tent Become?

[_Tarski]

Franco was a dictator and autocrat, and beyond that, I have not studied much about him. However, to the degree Franco's Spain exhibited a fascistic orientation or economic principles, it partook of the Left.

I see so below you accuse me of not having an education and yet I have studied Franco and the Spanish civil war.

What are you trying to argue here? Of course he did? And? So does socialism. Socialism is the antithesis of liberalism (in its original sense).

I am talking about the sense you despise--you know the 60s and all that. Socially permissive values etc. This is what Franco opposed. He wanted to preserve traditional social values (and he opposed communism).


The problem with you Droopy is that you are only able to think in binary terms. In reality, there is no god given notion of left and right. Plenty of political phenomena take place at right angles to the right-left axis mundi that you envision. You just force everything onto that template with a kind of manic zeal.
When you stop thinking about the world as if there were pre-existing, platonic, opposing forces (right and left), then you will have learned to think.
Until then all you are doing is using the term "left" as a catch-all label for everything outside the little circle of your ideological prejudices. The left is just your "other".
You are no more sophisticated than someone who blames everything on the devil (whom, I am sure, you think is a leftist).

[_Kishkumen]

What a strange twist. MDD favoring liberal Mormons over conservatives. I bet Droopy is right. Interesting.

[_Droopy]

Droopy:

What are you trying to argue here? Of course he did? And? So does socialism. Socialism is the antithesis of liberalism (in its original sense).

I am talking about the sense you despise--you know the 60s and all that. Socially permissive values etc. This is what Franco opposed. He wanted to preserve traditional social values (and he opposed communism).

And?

The problem with you Droopy is that you are only able to think in binary terms.

Typical leftist throwaway line in lieu of argument.

In reality, there is no god given notion of left and right. Plenty of political phenomena take place at right angles to the right-left axis mundi that you envision. You just force everything onto that template with a kind of manic zeal.

When you stop thinking about the world as if there were pre-existing, platonic, opposing forces (right and left), then you will have learned to think.

More traditional running away from the argument into nebulous pablum about "labels." This is almost always the place modern leftists run away to when the cold light of critical analysis is focused on their beliefs and value system.

Until then all you are doing is using the term "left" as a catch-all label for everything outside the little circle of your ideological prejudices. The left is just your "other".

All indicative of what is apparently the fact that you haven't been paying attention to a thing I've written in this or any other forum for the last ten years. I've clearly and, on occasion, in nuanced terms, defined the "Left" as well as the core contemporary schools of modern classical liberalism a number of times. Sorry you missed it.

You are no more sophisticated than someone who blames everything on the devil (whom, I am sure, you think is a leftist).

Satan is the ultimate leftist because he is the ultimate denier of what it is, at the very core, to be human, as well as the perverter of that core. Satan wants us to believe that we can "be as gods," through politics and ideology, while at the same paradoxical time, wishes to reduce us to the level of animals consumed and driven by our biological appetites. Perhaps, as in Brave New World, we will at last be able to achieve a little bit of both.

Or perhaps we'll just be left with the grey, dispiriting, soul and imagination killing mediocrity of democratic socialism.

One cannot say of the Left that it isn't a plate of abundance, so many are the evils and ontological vices to choose from.

[_Kevin Graham]

What a strange twist. MDD favoring liberal Mormons over conservatives. I bet Droopy is right. Interesting.

Not really Trev. I had refuted LeSellers and Vance in a couple of related threads and it was shut down even though the "liberals" were clearly winning the debate. Loran, LeSellers, Vance and other like-minded idiots, refuse to educate themselves on this subject and insist on rehearsing the FOX News mantra. All they are really interested in is self-indoctrination by the likes of morons like Sowell and whatever the rabid Tea Party comes up with. LeSellers had the audacity to say "Taxed Enough Already", perfectly ignorant of the fact that we're in a period of extremely low taxation. In a debate I had with him a few months ago about public schools, one of his followers said I actually made some very good points and that she agreed with me. It was at that point the mods stepped in and shut it down. LeSellers, Vance, Loran, the whole lot of these Right Wing morons, have never been able to debate this matter intelligently. All they've ever been interested in is regurgitating the usual Right Wing paranoia about the government.

The simple fact is public schools are more diverse in quality because they have to accept all the bad students. It has nothing to do with bad teachers or whether the school is publicly or privately owned. It is about demographics and geography. Period. Anyone who has ever worked in the public school system or any parent who has ever been in the market for a new home and shopped in the richer areas (where schools are just as good as private schools that arbitrarily reject bad students) knows this well enough.

[_EAllusion]

Fascism is any highly authoritarian political ideology propped by intense nationalism. It's also oft associated with corporatist economics, but I don't think that's the heart of the matter. It's traditionally put on the right in the simple dipole political continuum, but to call it leftist or rightwing isn't exactly helpful.

The closest thing to fascism in America is the far right, so uh, case in point.

[_sock puppet]

It would be interesting if, at some point, the incipient postmodernists, humanists, and "progressives" in the Church would "come out of the closet" and make their views on points where the gospel intersects politics, political philosophy, and social order, clear.

This could make, indeed, for some interesting reading.

Droopy, Mormonism teaches it is okay for a member to think whatever he or she may want regarding Mormon teachings, just so long as the member does not tell others, particularly in public, that he or she disagrees with what the COJCOLDS teaches.

It might be interesting reading for you, but do you really want to encourage other members to express to others, including you, their dissenting views? That is, do you really want to encourage other members who may have to date done nothing with which the Mormon Church would take issue (harboring bottled up, unexpressed dissenting views) to actually express those views (something the Mormon Church tells its members not to do)? Are you encouraging heresy? Are you encouraging disobedience by spirit brothers and sisters, just to satiate your own curiosities?

[_Droopy]

Fascism is any highly authoritarian political ideology propped by intense nationalism.

Which mirrors quite nicely a number of socialist regimes throughout the 20th century, beginning with the Soviet Union.

It's also oft associated with corporatist economics, but I don't think that's the heart of the matter. It's traditionally put on the right in the simple dipole political continuum, but to call it leftist or rightwing isn't exactly helpful.

Fascism, as initiated and delineated by Benito Mussolini, was a phenomena of the Left and a school or sect of socialism and socialist thought. The problem with fascism is that, beyond its small body of core concepts or tendencies, its rather a kind of sponge that is capable of absorbing any number of ideas and emphasis while still remaining "fascism." Its always been a bit of a moving target, definitionally, but its designation as a phenomena of the "right" is primarily a leftover trope of the Popular Front of the WWII era, and its deep ideological penetration into the psyche of much of the the western intelligentsia.

The closest thing to fascism in America is the far right, so uh, case in point.

This is useless unless the term "far right" is given some definition and examples offered. For example, the behavior of the Obama administration with regard to, just for one example, the virtual government expropriation of GM, and the crushing of its stockholders in favor of overwhelming control of the company by UAW and the government itself, is very close to a classic fascist modus operandi; nationalizing a major corporation in all but actual fact, through the thorough domination of that corporation by government regulation and union control (a kind of eclectic syndicalism, for all that).

[_Droopy]

Droopy, Mormonism teaches it is okay for a member to think whatever he or she may want regarding Mormon teachings, just so long as the member does not tell others, particularly in public, that he or she disagrees with what the COJCOLDS teaches.

1. CFR regarding the bold face portion.

2. Does the Church teach that it is "OK" to think whatever one wishes regarding core, established doctrine relative to one's status within the gospel as "valiant," "faithful," and as "enduring to the end" within a gospel framework, or are you simply saying that, so long as one keeps his mouth shut and doesn't openly advocate apostasy, one will retain one's membership?

[_Droopy]

Not really Trev. I had refuted LeSellers and Vance in a couple of related threads and it was shut down even though the "liberals" were clearly winning the debate. Loran, LeSellers, Vance and other like-minded idiots, refuse to educate themselves on this subject and insist on rehearsing the FOX News mantra. All they are really interested in is self-indoctrination by the likes of morons like Sowell and whatever the rabid Tea Party comes up with. LeSellers had the audacity to say "Taxed Enough Already", perfectly ignorant of the fact that we're in a period of extremely low taxation. In a debate I had with him a few months ago about public schools, one of his followers said I actually made some very good points and that she agreed with me. It was at that point the mods stepped in and shut it down. LeSellers, Vance, Loran, the whole lot of these Right Wing morons, have never been able to debate this matter intelligently. All they've ever been interested in is regurgitating the usual Right Wing paranoia about the government.

The simple fact is public schools are more diverse in quality because they have to accept all the bad students. It has nothing to do with bad teachers or whether the school is publicly or privately owned. It is about demographics and geography. Period. Anyone who has ever worked in the public school system or any parent who has ever been in the market for a new home and shopped in the richer areas (where schools are just as good as private schools that arbitrarily reject bad students) knows this well enough.

And for the upteenth time the least knowledgeable, least intellectually qualified, and least educated person on almost any subject enters the room and indulges in his typical fantasies of self important intellectual grandeur.

Some of the statements in the short spleen venting above so defy easily obtainable common knowledge, empirical fact, and simple rationality that they could, if one wished to indulge oneself, be written off as the ravings of a madman.

But I only think Kevin is "borderline," in this sense, far be it from me to say that he's as of yet taken the full plunge into the abyss.

[_Darth J]

Some people might get the mistaken impression that Droopy is desperately avoiding MsJack's questions posed to him in another thread. Probably Droopy just isn't seeing it, so I'll helpfully provide a link to it:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=20252&st=0&sk=t&sd=a