For those on the left

[nothumb]

Ok, this guy favors personal choice, responsibility and self-determination. To this end he is moving over to a party that wants to meddle in all sorts of personal choices to a greater degree than any US government before, often trampling states' rights in the process (medical pot, gay sex, euthanasia, etc ad nauseum). He's going to a party that talks about freedom and self-determination abroad while quietly supporting or tolerating undemocratic allies the world over. (Not that this is a new policy, both parties have pursued this for decades).

This is your typical straw-man argument against leftist thought, throwing out ludicrous sounding examples, most of them out of context and nearly all of them misinterpreted. He offers no constructive alternatives.

He also does nothing to dissect the arguments against the significance of the Iraqi elections. Months later there are indeed legitimate criticisms. While elections are a powerful symbolic gesture, what good is a government that operates in secrecy, has little or no discernible power and brings about less, rather than more security? The US is still the only significant source of military power in Iraq, by our own admission. And if we understand a government as those who posess "A monopoly on the legitimate use of force," (to put it in Weber's terms), there is literally no government in Iraq at this time.

I, too, have a ton of quarrels with the cultural left in this country. But this doesn't push me to the right; only a superficial mind sees my reaction against the fuzzy-thinking, self-absorbed feel-goodism of our so-called left as a 'right wing' reaction. Rather I have been pushed further left, until some of my views almost seem to come full circle into conservatism.

NT

[kurto]

What an articulate response. I can't imagine you'll get the same in return.

[jaxmike]

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What an articulate response. I can't imagine you'll get the same in return.

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I will get to my response to him, but with the major mistakes in grammar he has in the first part of his reply, I thought your assertion that his response was articulate was quite funny.

[jaxmike]

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What a confused person that author is! If he truly feels that way and this is not a stunt, I, for one, am glad he walks over to the dark side!

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Funny, later in this post you will claim that people are "misunderstood", yet you are glad he is going to walk "over to the dark side!". He simply said that he is leaving the radical left that they have become. He hasn't become a Republican, he feels he has been abandoned by the radical left wing of the Democratic party.

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By the way, Thompson is practically an unknown among "liberal pinko" people. His claims about being active in the "movement" are been examined. Stay tuned, it could turn out to be more fun than expected.

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Such doubt and denial. Calling him a practical unknown, yet he has credentials going back decades.

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He misunderstood. Recently departed Sontag, who possessed, if anything, an incisive analytical mind, simply made the (important) refutation of the term "cowards" which was routinely used in the U.S. to describe the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocities. They were a lot of things, but "cowards" was not one of them! It never is, when you sacrifice your own life. (Other writers, some of them from the Right, as well, made the same distinction.)

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You revise, he misunderstood, same difference. The fact is that she insinuated that their act was (in a way) courageous. I am not sure that I totally agree that a suidice bomber is by definition not a coward. I think that religion is a very powerful force, and what to us seems "not cowardly" can be seen as exactly that from a different point of view.

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It is highly important to (try to) be as accurate as possible, when analysing things. Which is the exact opposite of the rushed language-in-limbo model of the thinking process of the likes of Rush Limbaugh.

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I think the intelligencia overestimates their own, well, intelligence at times. Analysis is important, but to discount one persons anyalysis in favor of your own can be, well, arrogant. Some things are not black and white, some are. I discount the idea that Rush Limbaugh gives any less thought or consideration to what he says than Sontag or Mailer.

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"Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile statistics."

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He misunderstood, again. Norman Mailer, as prone to scandalous overstatement as he is, and as fond of media attention, did not disparage the dead, as the article's author insinuates. Mailer's true sentiments can be found, among other texts, in the interview he gave to the magazine American Conservative. Sample:


When 9/11 occurred, there was an immense guilt mixed in with the rage. I was here in Provincetown, 300 miles away at the time, and the reality of it didn’t hit me directly, but after a while I began to perceive part of the key element in it. The terror of that act involved the TV audience all over America. It was as if our TV sets had come alive. For years we’ve been seeing scenes just like that on the tube and enjoyed them because we were so insulated. A hundredth of our psychic receptivity could enter the box and share the fear while 99% of ourselves felt absolutely safe. Now, suddenly, it was real. Gods and demons were invading the U.S., coming in right off the TV screen. That may account in part for the odd guilt so many felt after 9/11 as if untold divine forces were erupting in fury.
A lucid analysis, unlike Thompson's.

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You don't cite some of the other things that were said by Mailer. He said that the 3,000 dead on 9/11 would a tolerable level of terror,” annually. On the convention in New York (what his advice would be to Republicans "What we need for New York is a large-scale riot. Some of those activist kids will be crazy enough to do a lot on their own, but we can do better with a few of our guys, well-placed, ready to urinate on the good American flag." Your insinuation that Mailers comments were taken out of context is NOT consistent with Mailer.

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"Events of that day were likely premeditated by the White House, Gore Vidal insinuated."

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He misunderstood. Vidal did not mean that the 9/11 atrocities were somehow planned by Washington. He was critiquing American foreign policy's gross injustices, which brought "the chickens home to roost", a critique not unlike the infamous one by Ward Churchill - albeit in a more moderate take!

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Misunderstood. Sure. Here are a couple quotes from Vidal.

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We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.
...
Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan ... [because] the administration is convinced that Americans are so simple-minded that they can deal with no scenario more complex than the venerable, lone, crazed killer (this time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it 'cause he hates us because we're rich 'n free 'n he's not
...
The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.

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Sorry, but it seems like he is insinuating exactly what Thompson charges.

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"Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on a mediocre day."

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Well, this one, in sheer numbers, is, unfortunately, correct. Al Qaeda, "at its most atrocious" i.e. on 9/11, killed some 4,000 people. The United States, in its standard military campaign mode kills ten times that -- easily.

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I guess we have an ideological difference here. I don't see them being remotely comparable. How about this comparison. How many people has Al Qaeda liberated? How many people has the US liberated?

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Chomsky did not condone or support the 9/11 atrocities, as his enemies (or stupid people) tried to claim. He was doing the tough part, he was trying to analyse the situation and its background.

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I have no problem with that per se. I just don't think Chomsky is right.

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You may disagree with him (as I do, partly) but, unless you enjoy being a mindless yahoo, you cannot dismiss the need for critical analysis in favour of the macho, unthinking belligerent stance of "shoot now, ask questions later". That's precisely how the mess that is Iraq was created.

__________________________________________________

The above has already been posted on a BJ website.

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I still think the REASONS behind Thompson leaving are interesting. It's not any one thing, its the whole direction of the left that hes lost touch with. I think there are a lot of people like him out there.

[kurto]

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I will get to my response to him, but with the major mistakes in grammar he has in the first part of his reply, I thought your assertion that his response was articulate was quite funny.


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Wow. You're really trying to hard to be 'jaxian.' You constantly mispell, write inarticulate sentences, have no concept of logical syllogisms, etc.

I would crap my pants if you ever wrote a response as intelligent, mature and reasoned as his.

I see no need to carry a change of underwear.

[jaxmike]

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[ QUOTE ]
I will get to my response to him, but with the major mistakes in grammar he has in the first part of his reply, I thought your assertion that his response was articulate was quite funny.


[/ QUOTE ]

Wow. You're really trying to hard to be 'jaxian.' You constantly mispell, write inarticulate sentences, have no concept of logical syllogisms, etc.

I would crap my pants if you ever wrote a response as intelligent, mature and reasoned as his.

I see no need to carry a change of underwear.

[/ QUOTE ]

Keep up the flames. You still aren't right.

[natedogg]

While Cyrus focuses on one paragraph that mentions some famous leftists' responses to the Iraq war (and defends the leftists with some non-sequitor quotes and by pretending to know what they *really meant*), that is missing the forest for the trees.

The essay's broader critique of modern american liberalism was dead on.

Some far more relevant comments that ring utterly true:

These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender “disparities” are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen.

and

America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition.

and

..the contemporary left’s entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.

Blisteringly accurate in my opinion.

For an even better critique of today's modern american liberals, check out Coyoteblog's latest post:

http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blo...st_of_ind.html


natedogg