11-23-2022, 08:29 AM
(11-22-2022, 04:10 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(11-21-2022, 01:31 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(11-20-2022, 06:29 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(11-20-2022, 01:56 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(11-20-2022, 12:57 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: I'm not all that left-wing. I firmly believe in law and order without which civil liberties are mere cant. I believe that precedent and protocol are the best guides for making judicial decisions. I trust small-scale enterprise more than I trust either a monopolist, a cartel, or the State as an owner and operator of productive enterprises. I believe that old standards of morality are guides until something other than selfish desire compels one to believe otherwise. I recognize that any significant achievement requires above-average sacrifice as investment or training. I believe in the hierarchy of competence as a rationale for paying those who do their non-trivial jobs well better than those who do not show lesser or less-remarkable competence. I prefer reason to anger and foolishness. I distrust demagogues.
If I disagree with some ostensibly conservative agenda, I certainly believe in old standards of educational merit and in personal conduct (generally including manners) consistent with the tried-and-true. When change is necessary, it usually becomes a new conservative norm. When the avant-garde fails, then tradition is a usually the best fallback.
You're not all that Left Wing? Are you sure about that, ever read/seen one of your own posts? I have and you're pretty much Left Wing. Guess what, Americans are going to have the right to kill Left Wingers. They already do, it just hasn't been made official yet. Biden and his ill-fated ilk are moving America closer to making it official EVERY DAY they're in power. So, what's the chances of a president or an attorney general surviving when about half the country wants them dead and a portion of the country doesn't care if they die? How close are we to that college boy? I'd say we are getting pretty close myself.
We are going to persist in achieving the changes we need to keep our democracy, economy and climate sustainable, regardless of violent threats from your side, and if you guys and your militias pursue a violent course-- if we are smart enough to keep the state on our side--, we will fight and jail you or whatever is necessary to stop you and we will take your guns permanently away from you.
I think Brower's statements are enough to show that he is not a crazy far leftist, but considerate and rational, which is a kind of conservatism. That you overlook this and make violent statements Mr. Classic is evidence that you are an extreme, crazy right-winger.
Thank you, Eric. People who suggest violence as Classic X'er does typically end up on the fringe of society until they give such up (best choice!); otherwise they get blown away or put away when they try to realize their hatred in violent deeds.
The Wolverine Watchmen who plotted to kidnap the Governor of Michigan face long sentences in which they will, among other things, lose their opportunity to use their favorite toys (their guns). People are starting to get long prison terms for the Capitol putsch.
Some things must change; some thing must not change. Divine right of kings, slavery, male dominance, and feudalism all had to disappear. Such a fad as the Sexual Revolution did far more harm than good. Some ideas with huge investments in thought behind them, like Marxism-Leninism, have proved horrible. Basic needs and desires of people remain far more consistent over time than many recognize. Human nature is so complex that we rely heavily upon fiction to most fully understand it.
Classic X'er does not recognize that the word "American" means very different things to different people, and that if someone successfully redefine the word into some narrow and authoritarian meme that hurts people and desires to impose some new version of Manifest Destiny where such is unwelcome, then we can endure not only horroir from the government but defeat in an apocalyptic war. "American" includes people who don't look like me, don't pray as I do, have sex in ways that I wouldn't. and don't have the same culture as I do. Someone took a gun into an LGBT place in Colorado Springs and tried to mow a large number of people down. He killed five. There was recent chatter among American fascists of plans to attack Jewish places of worship.
One thing is clear: little creates more trouble with little benefit than does cruelty. Classic X'er reeks of cruelty in his words/
I'm not advocating for violence.
No, but you are defining people in the political mainstream as pariahs. That is the first steep to either politicide or genocide. Your exude anger and see nothing wrong with others sharing much the same anger that you have. Anger and the entitlement to do bad things to people deemed pariahs put people behind the gates of Hell that greet its inmates with such terms as "Arbeit Macht Frei" or "Jedem das Seinem" .
This site
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/
has not been updated since Professor E. J. Rummel passed away on March 2, 2014. Rummel associated practically all mass killing not itself war with repressive, tyrannical government. (The genocide against Armenians and Assyrians in the rotten Ottoman Empire during World War I, the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine, the Holocaust and Porajmos (Gypsies) in Greater Hitlerland, and mass death often far away from front lines in Greater Tojoland were not vital to any war effort. There have been big killers such as Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi A-murderin', Satan Hussein, Hangman and Butcher Assad, the Kim dynasty-in-all-but-name in North Korea, and Leopold II of Belgium (in his "Congo Free State"). See also the Rwanda Genocide.
Tyranny kills, whether the tyrant is Ivan the Terrible or Vladimir Putin differs in time, or Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet who differ in ideology.
Donald Trump's MAGA cult has shown that Americans who care about honest elections, due process of law, and a heritage of Constitutional government can no longer be complacent about such. Some arrogant beast is always in the wings awaiting the opportunity to dispense with honest elections, due process of the law, or Constitutional government with either the Commie appeal to eviscerate capitalism or some fascist who wants to turn workers into serfs or kill off millions of people.
Some people will gladly destroy democracy to ensure maximal profits from labor driven to work harder under harsher conditions for much less or allow them to achieve some ideal that involves the expulsion or murder of millions.
Quote:I'm telling you that violence is coming as long as the Democrats continue what they've be doing all along and continue on the path they're hell bent on taking the country down with or without it's consent.
Bullhist! Contrary to MAGA myth, Joe Biden won the Presidency fair and square. We Democrats will continue to hold the majority in the Senate and perhaps even expand that majority by one seat. The part of the electorate most amenable to Trump ideology has been dying off while the younger vote is heavily D. So figure that the average Presidential voter starts voting at age 25 and quits voting at age 85, and a shift from voters about 5% more R than D to one about 20% more D than R at a rate of 1.6% a year (almost all above age 50) gives about a 1.5% shift in the electorate over four years.
The people who participated in the shameful Capitol Putsch on January 6, 2021 sought to nullify a Presidential election on behalf of the Sore Loser who lost the popular vote 81 million to 74 million and in the Electoral College (the one that counts) 306-232. If any recent Presidential election is in doubt, it is that of 2016 in which rumors of involvement by Russian secret agents increasingly become what the 45th President seeks to suppress.
Quote:Continue ignore the obvious if you want, like you've been doing for years. But make no mistake, it's coming and it's coming sooner than later at this point. Eric says ten years but it will be starting within 10 years.
To the contrary. I see indications that we are passing the moment of peak danger (January 6. 2021 and the worst times of the Trump-bungled response to COVID-19). We are beginning to see Democrats redefine conservatism by adopting the virtues of conservatives of old times while recognizing that different traditions which work similarly well can work together to develop some consensus because they agree on freedom of conscience, the work ethic, political freedom, business enterprise, Constitutional government, and law and order. I see the pattern of a new puritanism on sexual matters, one that promotes monogamy and disparages sexually-oriented violence whether LGBT-bashing or domestic violence and cracks down hard on child pornography and sexual abuse of children while recognizing date-rape as rape and homophobic violence for the criminal violence that we must all abhor*. We get LGBT rights at the expense of spouse-beaters, date-rape, and child-abusing perverts, which on the whole is more sexually repressive. Some people deserve repression on behalf of helpless people. Mainstream LGBT people intent on allowing people of the same gender the same rights as people of opposite genders in marriage and adoption sacrificed the child-predators to get what they wanted. Like most straight people
Quote:PB, you don't seem to understand the difference between a 1st generation American like yourself and the multiple generation Americans like Us.
You are wrong about me (my latest immigrant ancestor was born in the Channel Islands in 1833), and about the premise that persons who are first-generation Americans are less "American" than someone whose ancestors came to the British colonies before the American Revolution. If anything, people who have emigrated from some political or economic Hell-hole may have a better definition of what constitutes "American-ness" than you do. Unlike you, they better know what is at stake.
Democracy matters. Ask many immigrants. They can know as I don't what genuine democracy means from first-hand knowledge of what tyranny and crony capitalism do to people where they came from.
Quote:You don't seem to understand our heritage or what the American flag and what the term American means to Us either.
Turn the American flag into a symbol of something disgraceful, like your perverse dream, and it will be just another rag. I'd sell out American fascists to liberators who decide that a democratic America is better than the tyranny that they are then fighting. I'd sell out any perpetrator of genocide to practically anyone. I shed no tears when Saddam Hussein was announced to have died of a well-deserved hanging.
The word "American" includes people who do not look like me, do not pray like me, betray their origins in their speech patterns, or eat very different foods. OK, German-American cuisine is infamously insipid, so I tend to lenjoy something more exotic.
I have more in common with an Iranian liberal than I have in common with an "American" fascist. One is a hero and the other betrays everything precious about our Empire of Liberty. (The United States of America is no longer a nation-state). Indeed, I strongly encourage you, should you be a praying man, to pray for the Iranian people so that they can cast off a monstrous, dehumanizing regime.
Quote:We fought a WAR to free ourselves from the British rule and we fought another war with the British to keep our freedoms and independence intact. We fought a WAR to free slaves and keep the country intact aka reunited under one flag. We fought two world wars in the name of freedom and independence under the American flag that represented both fought by individuals who were willing to fight and die for both. What do you know about being an American or what it takes to be an American? Do you know how hard it is to be an American?
I was born here, you idiot. That is the easiest way to be an American. I need no recapitulation of the history of America's main wars as a lecture. I was fortunate enough that because of the time of my birth (1955) I was too late to serve in the Vietnam War unless I became a career soldier in time for the liberation of Grenada, Panama, or Kuwait.
We have it comparatively easy -- far easier than it is to be a citizen of, for example, the People's Republic or the Russian Federation. That's before I mention such Hells as Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, or Somalia. I understand that the Twin Cities have plenty of Hmong and Somalis. Maybe you might want to ask them what America means to them.
[/quote]Do you understand the sacrifices associated with the flag that we acknowledge when we remove our hats and place our right hand on our chest during the national anthem? What would a childults tethered to parents know about either of them?[/quote]
I have no problem saluting Old Glory. With two fewer stars it left no question that the horrors of Dachau and Mauthausen would be no more. This is also the flag associated with the civil rights struggle for Southern blacks. It is also the flag that signaled the end of the horrible rule of serial mass-murderer Satan Hussein.
Speaking of being tethered to my parents -- I was "tethered" to them in their last years. My mother had Parkinsonism, and my father deteriorated into senility in which he became abusive. It's truly distressing to see someone that one had known for sixty years, upon whom I could trust at all times, became an abusive parent. I can only imagine how difficult life is for a small child who knows nothing else.
*I have been gay-bashed despite being straight. After that experience I became a militant supporter of LGBT rights. I convinced several conservative people, including a born-again Christian who thought homosexuality a perversion and some rich man who had been a successful entrepreneur. Law and order, folks.
I have no children, but I would rather that one of them came "out" as gay or lesbian rather than that I found out that that kid had been arrested as a car thief.
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.