04-13-2022, 04:29 AM
(04-12-2022, 10:20 AM)David Horn Wrote:(04-11-2022, 03:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I have debated climate change on a number of forums for a couple of decades, and the most consistent pattern among climate science deniers I have found, by far, is neoliberalism. As George Monbiot phrases it, anyone who says climate change is real, say the deniers, is "a communist trying to take your money away". Neoliberal free-market, Reaganomics ideology believers, mostly-Republicans, are against taxes and regulations, and removing regulations (again referring to Monbiot) is a big part of this, so that companies are "free" to extract fossil fuels without having to pay for the damage they cause, because then their profits will disappear. Neoliberalism is the biggest threat to our climate and to the living world.
It's been my experience that the people most adamant about freedom are the first to complain about its results. You can't empower people to do whatever they want and gripe when they do exactly that, but I've found that to be the case all too often. Take guns. If you want to immerse the culture in firearms, don't be amazed when murder and mayhem ensue. And let's not forget that freedom to do what you want implies the freedom to do what I and others wish as well. The most obvious contraction is abortion, but drugs, gender fluidity and "bad behavior" are on the list too.
Even the Nazis often used the word freedom. As one would expect from people who inspired Orwell to expose the worst lie possible, the transformation of words themselves into lies, the sort of lie that most cripples human communication essential to the full exercise of full humanity, When "freedom" becomes the pretext for destroying the freedom of others, such indicates that those using such language have destroyed the meaning of the word.
Right out of the Nazi anthem, the infamous Horst-Wessel-Lied
Die Strasse frei, den braunen Bataillonen
my translation:
the streets (rendered) free to the (Nazi) brown-shirt militias -- as is much of Nazi expression it is putrid German.
The presence of ruthless, armed, hostile, politicized militias on "the streets" strongly suggests either that democracy is dead or in imminent peril. Nazis would call for "freedom" from the "slavery" of the Treaty of Versailles, only to enslave subjected peoples upon Nazi conquest. The Nazis made gun ownership a civic duty for Nazis, but took away from Jews even the right to keep dogs. (I have said this many times: dogs are among the safest and most effective defenses to crime -- mostly as deterrents. Muggers, rapists, and burglars dread dogs about as much as I would dread a bear or cougar. One behaves oneself in the presence of dogs lest one risk a horrible attack. Some would-be rapist hiding in a bush with testosterone raging who encounters a little girl walking a dog might have a deservedly-unpleasant encounter with the Big, Bad Wolf even if the dog is "only" a Yorkshire tiger -- whoops, terrier..
In any event the militia called for in the Second Amendment is typically an ad hoc formation as a defense against such obvious menaces to the order of the early USA as slave revolts, Indian attacks, and pirate depredations (all obsolete) or a defense against invaders before the real Army arrives (mercifully we have never needed this. Some of the arguments for militias have sounded much like lynch mobs, obvious banes to democracy. If anyone thinks that armed, politicized militias are solely a menace from the Right, then consider that in 1945 the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia overthrew the democratic government in 1948 with the aid of "action committees" that were armed, politicized militias. Yuck! When order breaks down (Chechnya, Yugoslavia, Rwanda), armed, politicized militias often bring about great evil.
If we are to take away freedoms, then we must do so only in protection from abuse. The right to drive a car and the right to drunkenness are obviously incompatible. I can make an obvious distinction between homosexual relationships between adults (we might as well recognize love between two men who can love men but not women or between two women who can love women but not men as a good thing because love is itself essential to a full human life, but sexual abuse of children is predation and not love; I can also add that homophobic attacks are menaces to people other than LGBT. Therefore I can say that adult homosexuality should be lawful, but sexual abuse of children and violent attacks on people for real or imagined homosexuality must be treated as serious crimes.
My reputation on drugs is well known here, but we all know what addiction can do. I am for the legalization of marijuana only because the laws against it do more harm than marijuana Opioids, meth, and cocaine are very different.
Eventually we will run out of fossil fuels, as prices condemn people to use electric vehicles or find alternatives to the culture of the private vehicle. Global warming obviously necessitates a reduction in the use of fossil fuels. People who define themselves by their consumption (as in egregious expenditures on fossil fuels through fuel-devouring vehicles) assert something specious and often doomed. Practically all technologies can go obsolete, and the gas buggy is one of them.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.