Regardess of your position on the merits, Asymmetrical Information gets this right:
No, abortion clinic protesters are not terrorists, or racketeers, or extortionists; they are people who want abortions to stop. Where would this nation be if Sheriff Park had had RICO at his disposal when Dr. King marched into town?
The tools used by our government aginst us are so much stronger nowdays.
Vodkapundit offers a revision of the political spectrum.
It did not ring true to me. I agree that the usual labels are wanting. The United States does not have conservatives who want to conserve the status quo. Most people who identify themselves as conservatives desire radical change. Of the self-identified conservatives I know, most are libertarians and want to roll back the New Deal or are religious conservatives who want a more traditional morality, or are both to one extent or another.
The real lens to view this problem is the dual nature of mankind. Each individual is an organism. As the character created by Dostoevsky says, one drop of my fat is more important to me than 100 freezing poor people. My skin ends here and what goes on inside my skin is vastly more important than anything going on outside. Yet, people are social animals and do not live alone. They build societies and institutions. If observed by a scientist they would be called social animals - never found solitary except by necessity.
The norm for human organization is collectivism. The tribe, the clan, the kingdom are all collectivist entities. The nature of a collective is that the individual is viewed as a part of an organic whole. Shakespeare in “Measure for Measure” expressed the best justification of monarchy ever written. Sure the king takes all the production of the nation, but like the stomach, he receives to send out to each organ of the body nourishment befitting their contribution to the body politic. If the nation were a single organism, the sacrifice of any individual to the overall good of the whole would be no more unjust than the sacrifice of a white blood cell in fighting an infection. The organism is the unit of value, not the individual cell that might have to die to preserve the whole.
Viewing a people, a clan or a nation as an organism is a metaphors. At this level we make metaphors to control action; so that saying entity x is metaphorically similar to entity y is to argue that we should treat x as y.
I am an organism. If I got dangerous skin cancer on my arm I might decide to cut off my arm so that I might live. That is how an organism may act. If you view your nation as an organism, you might decide that some group was detrimental to the nation and determine to exterminate it for the survival of the nation.
The fact is that people are the atoms of moral action. Individuals pay the price. My nerves end at the end of my skin. If we simply refuse to literalize metaphors we would have a clearer picture of the moral landscape
I don’t think anyone is saying that the people of Iran or Egypt or Palestine are bad people. The people of Munich are not bad people, I spent my last vacation among them. They are good people with the same everyday concerns as you or me.
Ideology motivates people to do things. In the United States for the last 200 or so years we had a very good ideology and did good things. Our performance in WWI and WWII compared to almost any world power on any historical scale would attest to that. A bad ideology can make your neighbor spout such nonsense and call for such bloodletting that you are taken back. I want to know what you believe, and if your belief includes killing me if I disagree with you or that your religion should be followed but no other religion should be allowed to be followed, no matter how nice a guy you are when you need my help, I think that you are my enemy.
I don’t like war. I fear we are about to get a dose of it. Like a dose of clap or a test result of “positive - it is cancer”. Well beyond our control or desire or foresight. The Western world is not able to meet their demands. What they ask is no less then the end of Western Civilization. Nothing else will satisfy the beast.
Maybe we should fight this war now instead of leave it for our children.
So we are back to that. How many millions of dollars did the US government piss down the drain under Carter on the US Synthetic Fuel Corporation?
If billions of dollars could make American citizens use less oil, what is it for? So that the Chinese economy can buy oil less expensively and manufacture goods less expensively, so that consumers in other countries can drive more at lower cost?
But we are dependent on foreign oil and other people could shut off our supply. Guess what, the way the world is now we are dependent on foreign capital. Neither the capital nor the oil come in because of altruism. Capital, foreign and domestic, can move out in seconds and if people decide not to invest in America you and I are going to see our standard of living evaporate. Factories will close without capital just as they will close without energy. The only security today is to offer value to other people so that they will cooperate with you. It is not the oil card that is powerful, it is money. Russia has lots of oil and exports oil, yet Russia is getting poorer and weaker while China does not have much oil and imports oil, yet China is getting richer and more powerful.
Two more miners died, shut down the coal mines for an entire state. Meanwhile, over 800 truck drivers per year die in road accidents. Do nothing. In political decision making it is all about sizzle, It is all about the mob. Eight hundred truck drivers per year is about two deaths per day, every day. Their wives and children and friends miss them just as much as a coalminer’s family/friends do. Let us shut down the interstate trucking routes for having ten or a dozen times the deaths that extraction of coal has.
There will be no reform. Once the Constitutional restraints on a majority voting benefits for their members fell, the play out is inevitable. Since there is so much wealth in the US, the distribution is the paramount concern of everyone and everything. Three lines in the tax code could make me rich, A different three lines could impoverish me. Everything is the tax code for all practical purposes. Or Antitrust law, if that meets the public narrative better. Oracle got Clinton to sick aintrust department on Microsoft, ushering in an era of Euroweenies dictacting the details of technicl specifications for your computer and laptop and your server and everything.