MaxedOutMama
Sunday, July 24, 2005
The Quietist's Political Evolution
So many people who espouse very liberal principles are now leaning toward the independent or right side of American politics. For that, you can thank Ronald Reagan.
But very few of them explain why with quite the definitive punch that The Quietist uses. Don't miss this post:
So the big crisis you see is people wanting stuff like food, clothing, medicine and books? Really?
Stuart Heady is demonstrating political narcissism - projecting your point of view upon other people. It's profoundly detached from reality. It's profoundly disrespectful of the people for whom you pretend to care. It's navel-gazing raised to a historic extreme, and it has so little relationship to the hopes and aspirations of the real people who live on Planet Earth that it's astonishing. Most of all, it is not liberal. It is moonbattery, and it is moonbattery upon the people who are dying of preventable diseases, unnecessary violence and/or sheer poverty and crime in poorer countries around the globe.
Furthermore, the "economic imperialism" of which Stuart complains is an accusation that can more properly be levelled at Europe than the US at this time. Europe is isolationist, and doesn't want to trade on an equal basis for commodities the poorer countries can most efficiently produce. That was George Bush's point at the last G8 conference. If you want to help Africa, let them sell in your markets on an equal basis!
But for old Stuart, the worst heresy possible would be to treat Senegal and Mauritania by the same standards with which we treat each other, to believe that they should be able to develop their own countries as we in the West have developed ours. Stuart has to preserve his fable of big bad America just messing up the whole world, which leads to a bunch of severely neurotic behaviors and thoughts.
Liberalism of this stripe is a species of political cult. There's no other way to put it. It's profoundly destructive and fights bitterly against any recognition of reality. And because it is a cult, it is spinning in and causing a desperate paranoia among its true believers.
But very few of them explain why with quite the definitive punch that The Quietist uses. Don't miss this post:
If you agitate all through college for "social justice" (without ever stopping to think what that even means), and then move directly onto K Street in Washington when you graduate, or go directly into law school and onto the do-gooder busybody groups, you will never be forced to deal with the reality. Nobody in the favela is clamoring for socialist revolution; no, the educated children of the wealthy who have never been in a favela do that. Nobody in the favela wants revolution, they want JOBS, and no pampered rich college kid from the US is going to give that to them by calling Bush a fascist and writing for the Socialist Worker newspaper. Every campus activist and rich angry leftist ideologue should be forced to live for a year in a Brazilian favela. If they still insist on socialism, then I'd like to hear their arguments. But until then, I'm convinced, like Phillippe above, that they're full of shit.The problem is that being seriously liberal requires an active attempt to put your principles into effect, and that the liberal "side" in American politics has gotten all frothy and insubstantial. To demonstrate, I produce Stuart Heady's Jurassic Park brand of leftist thinking in this Common Dreams article entitled "The Greatest Main Missed Chance On Earth":
I learned conservatism not because I was taught that way in school or at home, but while watching my most cherished leftist ideals and principles sink into (and contribute to) the impoverished swamp of the Brazilian favela as I volunteered there. So I ask my leftist friends, am I a "racist" now? Am I "anti-worker?" Screw you.
All these Harvard and Yale educated people, all these children of John F Kennedy. What was his legacy if not the courage to think on an historic scale?So what's keeping you from thinking? Go right ahead, we'd be willing to listen.
We don't just need alternative policies that get us back to a status quo, we need to address a paradigm shift on a scale that may be unprecedented in politics since the American Revolution.Ookay, tell us more.... Human rights? Equal opportunity? No more massacres?
Resource depletion versus population growth and the growing desire for a middle class lifestyle in the world, could mean the need for three or four planet Earths if resource consumption at the present pace does not abate. Yet all economic planning is based on the assumption that consumer growth has no limits. The stress that is already being caused by this needs to be front and center.Bwahhhahahahaahahahaa. I can guarantee you, sweetie-pie, that this was not the reason that people voted for him. Perhaps you believe the vast right-wing conspiracy (which is Beth, as it turns out) selected him for his brilliance in the oil industry? BZZZZZT. We have found the weakest link. Bush failed in the oil business. Not only that, the US is not a planned economy. Not only that, CO2 consumption has levelled off in the industrialized countries.
The Bush administration came to power because people felt that Bush, with oil industry interests behind him, might have a sense of this situation.
So the big crisis you see is people wanting stuff like food, clothing, medicine and books? Really?
If Kerry had pointed out that, as someone intimately connected to the Heinz Ketchup story, he was aware of how the consumer economy of the 1950s was created, and that all the nostalgia about that era was based on endless resources such as cheap oil, he would have been in a great position to lead us forward into a needed discussion about consumer economics, international debt, peak oil, global warming and how all the dots connect.BWAHAHAHAHAAHAAHAAAA! I can just imagine Kerry, sitting on his marital fortune, explaining to the rest of us that we had to get used to being poor. The entire country would have succumbed to a burst of merriment. We came close when he was talking about conserving power while he had SUV's himself, plus the mansions, etc.
These people are crossing our borders at the rate of nearly 10,000 a day, partly as a result of policies that cut down forests for beef cattle and displace peasants from traditional subsistence farming.It's amazing, isn't it? How much more idiotically divorced from reality can you get? People are coming here to get away from a subsistence lifestyle, not because the possibility of living that way doesn't exist in Mexico. It does.
This "British Empire Lite" model of colonialism should be recognized for what it is- the source of a lot of anger towards America and one of the prime sources of terrorism. Our foreign policy has been getting more and more ruthless and farther and farther from the values state in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.Oh, please. Please. Go read Pedro's story about the Brazilian favela. Please. People are so angry with America that they are trying to stampede the borders? People are running from Mexico because Mexico doesn't have the same social system as the US.
People who have a reasonable hope for The future don't blow themselves up In a last ditch attempt to have attention paid. We can't end terrorism by throwing gasoline on the fire at every opportunity.They aren't blowing themselves up for attention. They are blowing themselves up to get into Paradise, to get a free pass from being held accountable for their sins. The guys who just blew themselves up in Britain had all the things you think people are craving, and they most certainly had a reasonable hope for the future, physically at least. Free medical care, education, the dole, etc. They had all that plus very low unemployment, etc. They were living in the socialist paradise you seem to think will cure all ills. But it wasn't enough. They want the Caliphate, the triumph of Islam and the 72 virgins.
Stuart Heady is demonstrating political narcissism - projecting your point of view upon other people. It's profoundly detached from reality. It's profoundly disrespectful of the people for whom you pretend to care. It's navel-gazing raised to a historic extreme, and it has so little relationship to the hopes and aspirations of the real people who live on Planet Earth that it's astonishing. Most of all, it is not liberal. It is moonbattery, and it is moonbattery upon the people who are dying of preventable diseases, unnecessary violence and/or sheer poverty and crime in poorer countries around the globe.
Furthermore, the "economic imperialism" of which Stuart complains is an accusation that can more properly be levelled at Europe than the US at this time. Europe is isolationist, and doesn't want to trade on an equal basis for commodities the poorer countries can most efficiently produce. That was George Bush's point at the last G8 conference. If you want to help Africa, let them sell in your markets on an equal basis!
But for old Stuart, the worst heresy possible would be to treat Senegal and Mauritania by the same standards with which we treat each other, to believe that they should be able to develop their own countries as we in the West have developed ours. Stuart has to preserve his fable of big bad America just messing up the whole world, which leads to a bunch of severely neurotic behaviors and thoughts.
Liberalism of this stripe is a species of political cult. There's no other way to put it. It's profoundly destructive and fights bitterly against any recognition of reality. And because it is a cult, it is spinning in and causing a desperate paranoia among its true believers.
Comments:
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It's difficult to express really but everytime I read one of these I get the feeling the author is trying to say that everything would be fine if people in underprivileged situations would learn to be happy that way and stop trying to improve their life.
Because you know there is only so much stuff and I don't want you getting part of my share.
Because you know there is only so much stuff and I don't want you getting part of my share.
# posted by 
: 6:45 PM
: 6:45 PM
Tommy, I have slowly come to believe that your impression is accurate.
I prefer the traditional brand of liberalism, which has to do with freedom, self-determination, responsibility, respect and forbids denying opportunity.
I prefer the traditional brand of liberalism, which has to do with freedom, self-determination, responsibility, respect and forbids denying opportunity.
I don't know if the word liberal first went bad when the right started trying to use it as a negative trait or if it lost it's way first. But either way as it's practiced now the negative trait fits. It's so screwed up here that the labels don't really fit anymore, and it's just compounded by the fact that in Europe they frequently use them in exactly the opposite direction.
# posted by : 7:33 PM
: 7:33 PM
Tommy - the traditional American liberalism is Chirac's worst nightmare. Seriously. I think "liberal" became a bad word when so many people adopted this very strange brand of thinking that has strong totalitarian elements.
Of course, I have the sneaking suspicion that it's Stuart's worst nightmare as well.
Shoot, now we've got totalitarians on the right, totalitarians on the left, and the large mass of people in the middle who are pretty much traditionally liberal in values, (endorsing live and let-live), but somewhat economically conservative a la Reagan.
And then we've got a "liberal" Supreme Court endorsing the right of the government to take people's property because they're not as wealthy as the other people who want it. How did we get here?
Of course, I have the sneaking suspicion that it's Stuart's worst nightmare as well.
Shoot, now we've got totalitarians on the right, totalitarians on the left, and the large mass of people in the middle who are pretty much traditionally liberal in values, (endorsing live and let-live), but somewhat economically conservative a la Reagan.
And then we've got a "liberal" Supreme Court endorsing the right of the government to take people's property because they're not as wealthy as the other people who want it. How did we get here?
How did we get here?
Unfortunately I think it's a result of only being a two party system(I know there are more parties but none of them are realistically viable). The only thing a party exists for is to win an election and anything towards that end is fair game. Pretty much everyone sides with one party or another and everything is filtered through that. Neither party has an interest in appealing to the center, just an interest in being barely more appealing to the center than the other guy.
Unfortunately I think it's a result of only being a two party system(I know there are more parties but none of them are realistically viable). The only thing a party exists for is to win an election and anything towards that end is fair game. Pretty much everyone sides with one party or another and everything is filtered through that. Neither party has an interest in appealing to the center, just an interest in being barely more appealing to the center than the other guy.
# posted by : 6:38 AM
: 6:38 AM
I have to say that I was pretty confused with the piece. Was he trying to say that we should do nothing? My aunt has spent years spending half of her time working with kids in Harlem and the other half of her time working with kids from the Favela in Brazil. I have spent time working at a orphanage in Nicaragua. I fail to see how this was a detriment to anyone.
Dingo - no. Remember, they closed out the tour by getting permission from the local people to build houses for those who they didn't believe would be a problem.
It's not aid that's bad, it's failing to give aid in a way that's truly useful for the community.
It's not aid that's bad, it's failing to give aid in a way that's truly useful for the community.
Yes, there are always externalities that you can't account for when a project is proposed, but I don't think that these sorts of projects can be considered failures. Next to the orphanage I was at, there was a power station that had recently been abandoned. Many of the kids that the orphanage normally tries to get to come to the day school where at the power station site, savenging what they could to take home as building materials for their homes. The nature of the homes were basically pieces of wood and brick put together by twine and found nails. If these families didn't have to send their kids out to scavenge all the time because they had sturdy homes, these kids would be able to spend a lot more time in school than in the garbage heaps. Education is were the real benefit to these communities will come from, but having a good home is a necessary step for this to happen.
Now, in the Brazil situation, the drug pushers gravitated to these newly constructed homes because they were better than what they could find else were. But, what if you built 5000 of these homes instead of 100. The situation would be much different. Was it the "liberal" progect that was a failure for this neighborhood, or the fact that it was unfortunately too limited?
Now, in the Brazil situation, the drug pushers gravitated to these newly constructed homes because they were better than what they could find else were. But, what if you built 5000 of these homes instead of 100. The situation would be much different. Was it the "liberal" progect that was a failure for this neighborhood, or the fact that it was unfortunately too limited?
I think I'm a bit older than either of you, and I know darned well that working with people in the community works better than just walking in from the outside and deciding what's needed.
Good intentions aren't enough. I think some of the more effective aid organizations establish long-term ties with a community and help it develop. That way it turns out to be more sustainable.
Good intentions aren't enough. I think some of the more effective aid organizations establish long-term ties with a community and help it develop. That way it turns out to be more sustainable.
Of course we are - very few people are really ideologues.
When you get people down to the nitty-gritty of figuring out solutions, you get a lot of agreement. In the end, it's about getting things done and what you want to do. Most people share the same purpose. Not only that, but our way of life should allow multiple possible solutions so that we can see what works the best.
Now, the political ranters do have a stake in creating gulfs where there are none, but no one who really cares about other people does.
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When you get people down to the nitty-gritty of figuring out solutions, you get a lot of agreement. In the end, it's about getting things done and what you want to do. Most people share the same purpose. Not only that, but our way of life should allow multiple possible solutions so that we can see what works the best.
Now, the political ranters do have a stake in creating gulfs where there are none, but no one who really cares about other people does.
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