If I could only write half as well as you can.....c'mon now, that bit only had a tinge of lavender around the edges.
It's Class Warfare Alright.
- Thread starter redivider
- Start date
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
name a country you'd rather live in besides ours.
Paraguay...
bedspirit
Active Member
I can't figure out exactly what ideology you're with. I think I hit the nail on the head when I said you sound like Levine. You're a partisan conservative, right? That's why you like the term statist. I think a lot of Libertarians and Liberals would argue that government has been hijacked by business interests. Businesses like high taxes and massive regulation because they won't ending paying the taxes and, if they're big enough and donated enough to the right campaign, they won't have to follow the regulation anyway. For example, McDonalds is exempt from complying with different parts of Obamacare. This arrangement works out for those already in business, because it creates a roadblock to others trying to enter the market.
You don't see it that way. For you government is like a caricature. It's like something from 1984. Big business isn't being coddled in your book, it's just barely getting by. I'm not sure how you explain the insertions of loopholes into the tax code, and all the handouts to big business. Maybe you just don't know about them or don't believe they exist. Sorry, man. I just can't see the government under the same lens as you. Your view, where the government is the only cause to our problem, is too simplistic. I don't buy the motivation. To blame a combo of gov't and business makes more sense to me because greed is the motivating factor.
bedspirit
Active Member
I'm not knocking it in general, only when the outcomes fuck everyone.
undertheice
Well-Known Member
i have no horse in this race. it's difficult to be considered partisan when there is no party that represents your views and, though i do appreciate certain aspects of conservatism, i abhor their increasing use of religion as a background for their ideology. my only interest is the liberty of the individual. back in the day i could have been considered a hard core liberal, but that entire side of the aisle has been hijacked by authoritarians and falsely compassionate sob sisters. i'm in it for the long haul and i know i'll never even come close to seeing the end of the path i propose. i know there is no end, merely another chapter and further gradual change. though i've heard of this levine, i don't think i've ever listened to him. i detest demagogues nearly as much as i detest this perverse notion of freedom through slavery that is the statists' grand theme.
how about this? i'm a realist. i understand that no dictatorship, not even a dictatorship of the proletariat, can lead to freedom and this is what i most prize. i realize that the most effective form of production is communal, but that it must be by consent of all parties involved. without choice in all things we are merely animals of the herd, ovine drudges bleating out our insistence that we are the supreme creation of millennia of evolution or design or whatever creed happens to be most popular at any given moment. i know that the individual must suffer. after all, degradation and poverty are our natural state and all else is the result of our freedom to create it. a life without pain is bland and insignificant and all attempts to escape that pain are both counterproductive and futile.
most importantly, i'm just another stoner. i'm an aging hippie with delusions of normality, the patience of job and a knack for both observation and an occasionally interesting turn of phrase. i don't mind giving all that i have to others, but i simply don't understand why i should expect the same of my fellow man. you must understand that this is not altruism, it is an investment in the future. i would like to think that my granddaughter and any other progeny my son may produce will have the same opportunities of liberty that i grew up with and that she/they will do something better with it than i have. i'd like to think that, but i have very little faith that she/they will be allowed those same freedoms.
well, i'm quite high at the moment and i love to talk about myself when i get a good buzz going. you did, after all, imply the question that led to this lengthy sermon. i doubt i've answered your queries, but i had a hell of a time failing to do so. have fun with the liberal thing. i won't be around much longer, so you'll have one less grey-haired old fool to try to subdue in your brave new world.
Carne Seca
Well-Known Member
Costa Rica with their living fences. 
I want to live there.
I want to live there.
bedspirit
Active Member
Man, that was cool as shit. I like that.i have no horse in this race. it's difficult to be considered partisan when there is no party that represents your views and, though i do appreciate certain aspects of conservatism, i abhor their increasing use of religion as a background for their ideology. my only interest is the liberty of the individual. back in the day i could have been considered a hard core liberal, but that entire side of the aisle has been hijacked by authoritarians and falsely compassionate sob sisters. i'm in it for the long haul and i know i'll never even come close to seeing the end of the path i propose. i know there is no end, merely another chapter and further gradual change. though i've heard of this levine, i don't think i've ever listened to him. i detest demagogues nearly as much as i detest this perverse notion of freedom through slavery that is the statists' grand theme.
how about this? i'm a realist. i understand that no dictatorship, not even a dictatorship of the proletariat, can lead to freedom and this is what i most prize. i realize that the most effective form of production is communal, but that it must be by consent of all parties involved. without choice in all things we are merely animals of the herd, ovine drudges bleating out our insistence that we are the supreme creation of millennia of evolution or design or whatever creed happens to be most popular at any given moment. i know that the individual must suffer. after all, degradation and poverty are our natural state and all else is the result of our freedom to create it. a life without pain is bland and insignificant and all attempts to escape that pain are both counterproductive and futile.
most importantly, i'm just another stoner. i'm an aging hippie with delusions of normality, the patience of job and a knack for both observation and an occasionally interesting turn of phrase. i don't mind giving all that i have to others, but i simply don't understand why i should expect the same of my fellow man. you must understand that this is not altruism, it is an investment in the future. i would like to think that my granddaughter and any other progeny my son may produce will have the same opportunities of liberty that i grew up with and that she/they will do something better with it than i have. i'd like to think that, but i have very little faith that she/they will be allowed those same freedoms.
well, i'm quite high at the moment and i love to talk about myself when i get a good buzz going. you did, after all, imply the question that led to this lengthy sermon. i doubt i've answered your queries, but i had a hell of a time failing to do so. have fun with the liberal thing. i won't be around much longer, so you'll have one less grey-haired old fool to try to subdue in your brave new world.
Actually, I was planning on voting for Ron Paul this time around. I'll give a Liberal a shot next time one of them proposes we change our monetary policy.
undertheice
Well-Known Member
liberalism is a dead horse being beaten for the amusement of the masses. its message has been sanitized and sanctified by the priests of public opinion. just as all counter-culture is eventually mass marketed, so too has all radicalism been bent to the will of the powerful. the changes offered are illusory and the hope for a better world is abused by totalitarian wannabes.
if you vote, vote for what government allows you to do for yourself and not for what political animals claim government can do for you. that folks like dr. paul stand almost no chance is an indictment of those false claims of change. the obamas, pelosis and reids of this world, while claiming to work for change, need the status quo in order to keep feeding at the public trough. those on the other side of the aisle, while they pay lip service to the basic tenets this nation was founded upon, are equally to blame for the confiscation of individual power. the media, whether slanted left or right, is complicit in the lies of the political elite and is dependent on maintaining that illusion of the false republican/democrat dichotomy. all government has inherently statist ambitions and can act only as a limiting factor on the potential of the individual.
Carne Seca
Well-Known Member
You always make these predictions that never really pan out....
Balzac89
Undercover Mod
I think their most important idea was the idea to have amendments.
That way laws can follow society, not the other way around.
undertheice
Well-Known Member
and i just love how liberals insist on a view of history that denies the changes in social mores. the elitists of the day were men of god given and nearly unlimited power or had their power granted them by such men. the very idea that any man who owned a spot of land could determine public policy was the height of radicalism. i suppose you'd prefer that illiterates and drunken buffoons were given the power to craft a nation, much like the tomfoolery that goes on today.
undertheice
Well-Known Member
yup, that eighteenth amendment sure was a winner. it was so popular that they followed it up with the twenty-first, though the latter was in a slightly different vein.
Perhaps blacks were only considered 3/5ths of a person for enumeration purposes only, but what evidence do you have that the others were not considered persons? I don't know if you realize this or not, but things were much different back in 1780, Slavery had existed for THOUSANDS of years, it was NORMAL. Women couldn't vote , and hadn't been able to vote for like FOREVER, it was NORMAL! Non Landowners? I couldn't find anything about them. please enlighten us with your superior intellect.
I bet if you read the Articles of Confederation you'll know what they intended. No crystal ball needed.