Homepage
Music (down)
Design
| Thursday, October 02, 2008 |
| On Baby Boomers and Trust |
Glenn Beck has a right-slanted but otherwise good op-ed from the future. It's a good, short read.
I heartily agree with him about focusing on finding competent people and finding solutions (rather than blindly following either party). I also agree that the 2-party system is not a good one (did you know that in the early 1800's the two parties basically merged into one?). My support for Obama is tempered by a real concern about having Democrats controlling the Executive and Legislative Branches. I believe that it's best to have a liberal president, a conservative legislature, and a well-mixed judiciary.
Anyway, so yeah that I agree with, but one paragraph really jumped out with me that I have to take issue with:
"In retrospect, [b]the lack of trust and confidence you now have in your leaders was really the root cause of everything that's happened since[/b]. While our founding fathers designed a brilliant system of checks and balances, separation of powers and democratic elections, trust was the one thing they couldn't mandate in the Constitution." The lack of trust Americans have had in their government goes back much farther than "today" or even "recently" -- the last President the whole U.S. really trusted was Eisenhower (and with good reason; he was in my opinion one of the best).
The reason for that has a lot to do with Nixon, Carter, Vietnam, some of Reagan's more spectacularly disastrous policies in South America, Clinton's utter contempt for rules and responsibility, and G.W. Bush's utter lack of accountability or competence.
In other words: The Baby Boomers never in any way earned the respect that Beck demands. The liberal ideals of Johnson and the ridiculous welfare state it sought to create ended up making the government not a higher law but a pandering lap dog. It's hard to respect a government that not only screws up all the time, but is constantly trying to bribe you with poorly-managed (if well-intentioned) welfare programs.
It's also clear to me that regardless of who "wins" - the conservatives or the liberals - the extreme end is just as bad and in many ways very similar. Extreme leftism - Pure Communism - ends up being just as brutally slavish as the extreme of rightism, which is Fascism. IMHO Beck's use of buzzwords like "Comrade Sam" weaken his own argument that partisan politics that end up on [i]either[/i] side have the same result.Labels: Conservatives, criticism, liberals, politics |
posted by Steve @ 2:24 PM  |
|
|
|
| Wednesday, August 13, 2008 |
| Things are getting more complicated |
On one hand, the Culture Wars are escalating: In Tennessee, a man who hates liberals (and is pushed over the edge by not getting food stamps, which is as liberal a program as one can imagine) goes into a church which accepts homosexuals with the intention of killing as many people as possible. Another man attempts to assassinate the Arkansas Democratic party chair. Quasi-Christians (people who are very loud about being Christian and have a habit of undermining their faith through action) are actually praying for rain on Obama's speech in Denver.
On the other, the lines are blurring: There are liberals with guns, log cabin Republicans, and Dan Savage tells liberal dads to stop being "such a liberal puss[ies]" that are more worried about being politically correct than what is right, when confronted with bigots.
I had hoped that the battles of the Boomer generation were going to fizzle out, but it looks like they'll go out with a bang. At least this presidential election will not be 100% referendum about Vietnam.Labels: Conservatives, culture war, gays, guns, liberals, politics |
| posted by Steve @ 11:49 AM |
|
|
|
| Sunday, April 13, 2008 |
| Far-Right: (Still) Obsessed with the homos |
I looked about six months (maybe a year) ago at Conservapedia, the right-wing answer to Wikipedia, that "is free of corruption by liberal untruths," such as science or reason.
It's still going strong, though of course they've expanded slightly - they have 22 thousand pages now. I'm sure at least one or two isn't about God, liberals, or gays. Which sounds great until you realize that Wikipedia has roughly 10,000,000 (at a glancing guess; count if you like), and in about a hundred languages. The conservapedians also love trashing Wikipedia itself, claiming that the entry for "conservatism" is "over 4500 words of confusion without any mention of marriage, gun rights or personal accountability." I guess Wikipedia's authors lost the mouth-breathers when they started quoting Hobbes.
Ironically, Wikipedia has a fantastic entry about Conservapedia that tells the whole story about how it was created, why, and other things that are laughably terrible.
Anyway, the reason I check in every so often is because they have a wonderful "top 10 articles" thing that comes with Wiki, the code engine that runs the site. Once upon a time, it was the subject of an auto-clicker bot, but the numbers have shifted... towards different homo articles. And Hitler. In that article, Jews are mentioned twice, and homosexuals don't even merit a mention. Instead, there's a long section about how the Nazis liked to espouse evolution.
Wow.Labels: Conservatives, idiots, Internet, Nazis, school |
| posted by Steve @ 11:27 PM |
|
|
|
|
| About Me |
|
Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
About Me: I like to think about things, and I occasionally like to write what I think.
See my complete profile
|
| Previous Post |
|
| Archives |
|
|
| Links |
|
Blogroll
|
|
