I Believe in Man

Take everything you wrote, replace it with it's opposite, and you have described libertarianism perfectly.

***

While the lefties are distrustful of people who wish to manipulate their part of the material world as they see fit, the righties are frightened nearly to death by anyone who wants to define their own spiritual reality as *they* see fit.

According to righties, you are not allowed to:

- Love who you wish to love

- Believe in any god but Jesus

- Use science to understand nature

- Live happily in America if your skin is darker than Type II on the Fitzpatrick scale

Yes, the lefties believe we should be happy shivering in the dark rather than disrupt the balance of nature, but the righties believe we should be happy straining under the yoke rather than disrupt the balance of society.

this argument about doing what is right reminds me of a dicussion I had in my philosophy class

for example,

An innocent victim is fleeing a murderer. The victim comes to cross-roads. She lays a false trail leading to the left, dropping her handkerchief and leaving footprints in the mud. Then she carefully goes on the right-hand road, ensuring no footprints are visible for a while, hoping that the murderer will see the false trail, come to believe that she went left, and thus permit her to escape. The victim has done nothing wrong according to most people’s moral intuitions. Observe that the act is in a significant way different from lying. For while asserting a sentence commits the speaker to the truth of what the sentence expresses, laying a trail and dropping handkerchief does not commit one to anything. In doing it, the victim does not invite the murderer’s trust. The murderer when following the false trail does not do so out of trust in the victim but out of trust in the inductive generalization: “Where there are footprints, there likely a person has gone.” Following an inductive generalization is very different from trusting a person. The murderer would have no right to feel betrayed by the victim were the murderer to learn what happened. Here we have deception but no lie and no moral wrong.

Or consider the victim hiding in the bushes from a murderer with a shotgun. She puts her hat on a stick and hangs props it up a yard away from herself, so as to ensure the murderer’s aim goes awry. In doing so, she intends that the murderer should be deceived as to the victim's location. But she is not lying. There is no trust violated. The victim did not commit herself to anything. Indeed, no communicative act was engaged in. Surely what the victim did was right, and the murderer would have no right to feel wronged or betrayed.

However, in both of these examples Kant has to judge the act wrong, since it violates both forms of the CI in exactly the same way lying does. If all people escaping from murderers stopped to lay false trails, then the false trails would no longer succeed at deceiving murderers, and likewise if all people hiding from murderers were to produce false physical evidence as to their location, then such physical evidence would not be believed: the murderer would shoot everywhere but under the hat. And the deceptive act, just as an act of lying, fails to respect the rationality of the person deceived. It attempts to manipulate that person to ensure that she should act in a way contrary to the ends that she has set for herself. It thus uses the other person as an automaton for achieving the deceiver’s ends, and hence fails to respect the other person as an end. Therefore, Kant would have to condemn intentionally deceptive acts on exactly the same grounds as he would condemn lying, regardless of which form of the CI is in play.

I understand what they want, and much of it is good (Civil Rights for Everybody), but their lack of ability to distinguish between what is good and what is nonsensical (Civil Rights for Terrorist POWs - NO! They get Geneva Convention rights, and that's it!) and what is openly destructive to the commonweal utterly befuddles me.

Evan Sayet explains it this way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaE98w1KZ-c

Here's an Executive Summary by someone on FreeReupblic, for those who have time to read but not to watch a speech: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Thought/hl1020.cfm

And for people who don't have that kind of time either, there's an "executive summary" of sorts here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1806173/posts

High points:

* Liberalism looks at human history and sees that none of man's ideas have succeeded in creating a world without war, poverty, crime and injustice. So, since all of man's ideas have proven to be wrong, the real cause of war, poverty, crime and injustice must be found -- can only be found -- in the attempt to be right... because without that, we would have nothing to fight over ever again (nothing to kill or die for, as John Lennon says).

* The obvious solution is to reject everything that civilization has ever accomplished, to disavow the systems that have brought us this far. And the only way they can do that is by tearing down the Right and elevating the Wrong until they're at the same level, and by denying that there's any difference between the two.

* Rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry, because no matter how sincerely you gather the facts, or how earnestly you look at the evidence, no matter how disciplined your reasoning, your conclusions will be nothing more than a reflection of your own prejudices and presumptions. Therefore, the only way to eliminate bigotry is to eliminate rational thought. Indiscrimination of thought becomes a moral imperative, and critical thinking becomes a hate crime.

* In a vacuum of discrimination -- that is, of reason -- success, by its simple existence, is proof of some chicanery. Therefore, siding with failure becomes an act of justice. And in a vacuum of discrimination, good, by its simple existence, proves itself the beneficiary of some prejudice; evil must be the victim of some injustice. Therefore siding with evil and against good is an act of justice.

R3 maybe the left will go back to looking forward and not back once all the boomers are out of the way. If you look at when we started to say hey there is a limit it started when the boomers hit the age when they should have stopped going to dead concerts and start to build and produce.

The endless summer BS of many boomers is what is holding us back now. They just don’t want to grow old and step aside just like in the 70’s they just wanted to party till the end. It is hard to reach for the stars when you are doing blow and staring at your navel. The death of big ideas and dreams is not all the boomers fault but their what’s in it for me attitude does not help.

Its funny how the intellectual left says we have to stop and go back but there leaders seem never to lack for anything from Volvos to private jets. The boomers seem allergic to hard work, why else would they come up with Tune in, Turn on and Drop out. That saying sums up why in the end they will be remembered as the did nothing generation.