BCspace and Droopy unraveling

[_Drifting]

On a serious note, bcspace and droopy are representative of the frankenstein the republican party has created in the last six or so years.

Here beastie has bought into a Hollywood produced strawman as illustrated by the fact that she can't accurate name anything the Tea Party stands for.

Unlike the Republican Party under Romney which stands for
...hang on...
.....wait...
...what....
............damn...

Carry on.

[_beastie]

On a serious note, bcspace and droopy are representative of the frankenstein the republican party has created in the last six or so years.

Here beastie has bought into a Hollywood produced strawman as illustrated by the fact that she can't accurate name anything the Tea Party stands for.

Nice try for a derail.

For people outside the unraveling bubble, it is clear that the Tea Party, alone, is not the Frankenstein. The parts of the Frankenstein are apparent to mainstream republicans.

http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/11/0 ... d-l/191294

[_Droopy]

On a serious note, bcspace and droopy are representative of the frankenstein the republican party has created in the last six or so years.

Here beastie has bought into a Hollywood produced strawman as illustrated by the fact that she can't accurate name anything the Tea Party stands for.

I know, bc.

I think that one of the really salient differences between conservatives and the Left, generally, and one that has always given educated conservatives the clear edge in any debate over the last several generations, is the way in which both sides approach each others worldviews, with conservatives immersing themselves in the study of the Left from its own primary sources, while leftists, more often than not, immerse themselves in their own philosophy while studiously avoiding actually reading and digesting the ideas of their opponents, finding it beneath them to do so.

The alternative has been the creation of the classic alternative cartoon universe of greedy capitalist Republican fat-cats, Archie Bunker working class bigots, monobrowed southern rednecks, snake-handling fundamentalists, and closeted Klansmen that are the surreal caricatures the Left must deploy in the arena of politics because it has very little to deploy in the area of ideas.

Beastie, Graham, Analytics, and a number of other people you could name who are the core posters here (and also the most inveterate and uncompromising anti-Mormons) all represent this long standing tendency nicely.

Look, I just finished Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Frederick Engels last month, including some substantial rereading to get the gist of the fundamental concepts I thought most salient (and a lot of underlining). When do you think was the last time any of the libs in this forum cracked the cover of a serious book by a major conservative theorist or social critic? When do you think was the last time any of these folks actually read an issue of National Review, Commentary, American Spectator, The New Criterion, The Hoover Digest, or anything of the kind?

We know the answer.

That Archie Bunker was not a real human being but an archetype created by Norman Lear to represent his own hermetically sealed Hollywood construct of what a conservative should be from within leftism's own self-constructed sphere of gnostic insight and moral self-sanctification has long been understood. What is less understood is that conservatives, for the most part, look at liberals through the lens, not of cartoon caricatures, but of history and of their own words and ideas, which is why authentic education so frightens the Left and why our public schools, long dominated by the Left, have become the intellectual ghettos that now define most of them and why they have now given themselves over wholly to vo-tech training, behavior modification, and attitude reform over substantive academic content (what was once called "liberal" education).

[_Droopy]

Here beastie has bought into a Hollywood produced strawman as illustrated by the fact that she can't accurate name anything the Tea Party stands for.

Unlike the Republican Party under Romney which stands for
...hang on...
.....wait...
...what....
............damn...

Carry on.

And here, Drifting, you are engaging in another major fallacy of reasoning and analysis - conflating the Republican party with conservatism, which has never been a legitimate comparison because the Republican party has never, at least during my lifetime, been a conservative party per se.

Indeed, Dr. Thomas Sowell makes the very point you bring up here, and very nicely:

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomasso ... page/full/

Nice Losers
Thomas Sowell

Mitt Romney now joins the long list of the kinds of presidential candidates favored by the Republican establishment-- nice, moderate losers, people with no coherently articulated vision, despite how many ad hoc talking points they may have.

The list of Republican presidential candidates like this goes back at least as far as 1948, when Thomas E. Dewey ran against President Harry Truman. Dewey spoke in lofty generalities while Truman spoke in hard-hitting specifics. Since then, there have been many re-runs of this same scenario, featuring losing Republican presidential candidates John McCain, Bob Dole, Gerald Ford and, when he ran for reelection, George H.W. Bush.

Bush 41 first succeeded when he ran for election as if he were another Ronald Reagan ("Read my lips, no new taxes"), but then lost when he ran for reelection as himself-- "kinder and gentler," disdainful of "the vision thing" and looking at his watch during a debate, when he should have been counter-attacking against the foolish things being said.

This year, Barack Obama had the hard-hitting specifics-- such as ending "tax cuts for the rich" who should pay "their fair share," government "investing" in "the industries of the future" and the like. He had a coherent vision, however warped.

Most of Obama's arguments were rotten, if you bothered to put them under scrutiny. But someone once said that it is amazing how long the rotten can hold together, if you don't handle it roughly.

Any number of conservative commentators, both in the print media and on talk radio, examined and exposed the fraudulence of Obama's "tax cuts for the rich" argument. But did you ever hear Mitt Romney bother to explain the specifics which exposed the flaws in Obama's argument?

On election night, the rotten held together because Mitt Romney had not handled it roughly with specifics. Romney was too nice to handle Obama's absurdities roughly. He definitely out-niced Obama-- as John McCain had out-niced Obama in 2008, and as Dewey out-niced Truman back in 1948. And these Republicans all lost.

In this year's first presidential debate, Obama out-niced Romney. But, when he lost out doing that, he then reversed himself, became the attacker, and ultimately the winner on election night, despite a track record that should have buried him in a landslide.

When you look at this as a horse race, there is no question that the Republicans deserved to lose. But the stakes for this great nation, at this crucial juncture in its history and in the history of the world, are far too momentous to look at this election as just a contest between two candidates or two political parties.

Quite aside from the immediate effects of particular policies, Barack Obama has repeatedly circumvented the laws, including the Constitution of the United States, in ways and on a scale that pushes this nation in the direction of arbitrary one-man rule.

Now that Obama will be in a position to appoint Supreme Court justices who can rubber stamp his evasions of the law and usurpations of power, this country may be unrecognizable in a few years as the America that once led the world in freedom, as well as in many other things.

Barack Obama's boast, on the eve of the election of 2008-- "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America"-- can now be carried out, without fear of ever having to face the voters again.

This "transforming" project extends far beyond fundamental internal institutions, or even the polarization and corruption of the people themselves, with goodies handed out in exchange for their surrendering their birthright of freedom.

Obama will now also have more "flexibility," as he told Russian President Medvedev, to transform the international order, where he has long shown that he thinks America has too much power and influence. A nuclear Iran can change that. Forever.

Have you noticed how many of our enemies in other countries have been rooting for Obama? You or your children may yet have reason to recall that as a bitter memory of a warning sign ignored on election day in 2012.

As the Brits love to say, "Quite."

[_Analytics]

I think that one of the really salient differences between conservatives and the Left, generally, and one that has always given educated conservatives the clear edge in any debate over the last several generations, is the way in which both sides approach each others worldviews, with conservatives immersing themselves in the study of the Left from its own primary sources, while leftists, more often than not, immerse themselves in their own philosophy while studiously avoiding actually reading and digesting the ideas of their opponents, finding it beneath them to do so.

The alternative has been the creation of the classic alternative cartoon universe of greedy capitalist Republican fat-cats, Archie Bunker working class bigots, monobrowed southern rednecks, snake-handling fundamentalists, and closeted Klansmen that are the surreal caricatures the Left must deploy in the arena of politics because it has very little to deploy in the area of ideas.

Beastie, Graham, Analytics, and a number of other people you could name who are the core posters here (and also the most inveterate and uncompromising anti-Mormons) all represent this long standing tendency nicely.

Look, I just finished Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Frederick Engels last month, including some substantial rereading to get the gist of the fundamental concepts I thought most salient (and a lot of underlining)....

You really think Frederick Engels is one of the left’s “primary sources”? I can see how reading that could be useful if your objective is to sound educated by throwing obscure historical references at your interlocutors. I always assumed that was your objective.

Now you are claiming that your objective is to immerse yourself in the left’s own philosophy? If that’s what you are attempting to do, you are tragically failing by reading Engels. If you really want to understand those who you brand as “the left”, you need to address their actual sources. Economics by Paul Samuelson is the ubiquitous starting point for understanding how the left views the economy.

[_Droopy]

You really think Frederick Engels is one of the left’s “primary sources”? I can see how reading that could be useful if your objective is to sound educated by throwing obscure historical references at your interlocutors. I always assumed that was your objective.

Now you are claiming that your objective is to immerse yourself in the left’s own philosophy? If that’s what you are attempting to do, you are tragically failing by reading Engels. If you really want to understand those who you brand as “the left”, you need to address their actual sources. Economics by Paul Samuelson is the ubiquitous starting point for understanding how the left views the economy.

This is desperation of a high, high order. When the Left actually begins denying substantial elements of its own historic and ideological core - which many on the Left feel they must do periodically when people begin catching on to what the Left is really all about (as Lord Acton so eloquently said, "Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas."), then one knows the bluff has been called.

Of course, Marx, Engels, and the other early disciples of Marxian socialism are not the only historic core of leftist economic thought (although they have certainly been the most influential). The Left has both important pre-Marxian antecedents as well as post-Marxian variants on the Marxist theme as well as quasi- and non-Marxist visions. All of these, however, are of a piece at their core regarding the general view of the human condition and of human nature (and hence, economics) and share substantial ideological elements, even when they disagree doctrinally here and there as a matter of academic/philosophical emphasis.

Don't melt down, Analytics, its not necessary.

In any case, the contemporary leftist view of the economy, generally, is still deeply influenced by Marxist conceptualizations, assumptions, and, perhaps at a deep level, attitudes (if not clear doctrine) even though not in the doctrinaire, 19th and early 20th century sense. The real core of much of contemporary economic thought among much of the Left can be found in the social and economic critiques of American, free-market society found in Cultural Marxism and in the generally anti-capitalist/collectivist and statist mentality of "progressivism" (the longstanding Newspeak term for "the Left"), broadly speaking.

[Anonymous]

This is desperation of a high, high order. When the Left actually begins denying substantial elements of its own historic and ideological core - which many on the Left feel they must do periodically when people begin catching on to what the Left is really all about (as Lord Acton so eloquently said, "Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas."), then one knows the bluff has been called....

It isn’t desperation of a high (or any other) order—it is comedy of a high order. The irony is comical that in the same thread where you bemoan the left “studiously avoiding actually reading and digesting the ideas of their opponents,” you go on to claim that you immerse yourself in the study of the left from its own “primary sources” when the example you cite proves you do nothing of the sort.

If you think I'm wrong about this or that, you need to take on the actual arguments of mainstream economics--pointing out real or imagined similarities to the views of historical figures isn't an argument.

[_bcspace]

For people outside the unraveling bubble, it is clear that the Tea Party, alone, is not the Frankenstein. The parts of the Frankenstein are apparent to mainstream republicans.

Like a balanced budget and limited government, I know. Nothing heinous about that unless you're someone like beastie...

[_beastie]

Nice try for a derail.

For people outside the unraveling bubble, it is clear that the Tea Party, alone, is not the Frankenstein. The parts of the Frankenstein are apparent to mainstream republicans.

http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/11/0 ... d-l/191294

Just repeating this as an invitation to see what I'm actually talking about, versus what droopy and bcspace imagine I'm talking about. Listen to the clip.

[_Analytics]

Nice try for a derail.

For people outside the unraveling bubble, it is clear that the Tea Party, alone, is not the Frankenstein. The parts of the Frankenstein are apparent to mainstream republicans.

http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/11/0 ... d-l/191294

Just to review a few of his conservative credentials, David Frum was George W. Bush's speech writer and is credited with coining the term "axis of evil." He's been the editorial-page editor of The Wall Street Journal, the editor of National Review and a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.

In the video, David Frum says "Republicans have been fleeced, exploited, and lied to be a conservative entertainment complex."

Joe Scarborough asks him to name names. Frum replies, "there are too many to name."

He goes on to say, "The followers and the donors and the activists are so mistaken about the nature of the problem the country is facing. I mean, just a simple question. I went to tea-party rallies and I would ask, 'have taxes gone up or down in the last four years?' They could not answer that question correctly."