GENIUS FORUMS

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-Tomas quips earlier: Life was so much better when the nutjobs were all Democrats.

-Pye-
*lol* yes, thank goodness there were the likes of Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, and the ever-paranoid Richard Nixon to keep them dems in line ;)

-tomas-
Oh yeah, it was Nixon who drafted me. Big choice offered: 1. Ft. Leavenworth federal prison, 2. go to VietNam and kill old men, women & children or, 3. cross the border into Canada.

Why VietNam?
1. I ain't into shacking up with other men in a six-by-nine foot cage.
2. Get a chance to further hone the hunting skills.
3. Been there, done that.


-Tomas earlier: Liars should always be exposed, no matter what their party.*

*Unless, to be honest with you, they're from my party and they're telling a
really effective and useful lie. In that case, I can kind of relax the rule.

-Pye-
A conservative sentiment, if there every was one.

-tomas-
It cuts both ways. The party in power makes the rules. Presently, the Democratic party has a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, and a 40 vote majority in the House .. yet, the supposed lack of 'health reform' is seemingly being blamed on the Republicans for not wanting to stick it to the teeming masses. Barack Obama is not able to quote correctly just how many Americans are uninsured. The real number is about 36 million but Obama places it at about 46 million (he counts the illegals as Americans. Just how he plans on coming up with the money he hasn't a clue .. wonder if it's because he's never had to work for a living?


-Pye-
You'd like Plato, Tomas. He puts forth just such an argument for the necessity of the philosopher king to maintain the ignorance of the plebes.

-tomas-
Yes, Plato, Aristotle, Chaucer, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Milton, John Donne, Hawthorne, Melville, T.S. Eliot - dead white men all. How barren would be my life without that background? University had/has its moments* :-)

*I try to take a course in some discipline, each and every year at a local community college, state college, or big-city uni. Gotta stay fresh, can you dig it?


Edited for: sticking it to the teeming masses.


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Tomas asks: Care to put a rounded-out number on 'the seriously wealthy few' ??

Oh, heck, Tomas - you don't need me hunting up these well-publicized facts and figures regarding the upward funneling of wealth. You see it variously documented as "90% of the wealth held by 3% of the population" and other similar proportions.

I'd much rather comment on this:

I try to take a course in some discipline, each and every year at a local community college, state college, or big-city uni. Gotta stay fresh, can you dig it?

Can I dig it? Are you kidding? I fusking love having an adult-returning in any of my classes. I probably get one or two every semester in the 3-4 courses I teach at the big uni each term. They raise the bar just by being there. It's funny too: sometimes the adults think that they cannot measure-up to all the bright young minds and are shy about participation, like they're not "supposed" to be there and the youth might "resent" them; on the other side, college-age students seem to shy-up in front of all the experience compacted into that older fart sitting there. Neither seems to know they are admiring each other :) The presence of an adult-returning also allows me to bend the discourse into a larger-world sort of way from all the fractal perspective those years can bring. In fact, the greater the mix of ethnicity, age, economic and religious background that packs the room, the better.

As it is, I am usually teaching roomsful of upper-middle-class mostly white kids who suffer from the usual myopia that privilege can bring. It does not take long, however, for me to fill them with all the necessary discomfort that eventually produces learning :)

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Conservative: Traditions need kept because they have always worked in the past (not much for gay marriage here).

Liberal: Traditions are human creations; must flex with new circumstances.


Where I'm a resident though not year-round, The jokers who argued the Bush/Gore fiasco of 2000, are at it again. Interesting that Jerry Brown (California's Secretary. of State) doesn't want to get involved and Arnold Schwarzeneggar (California's Governor) doesn't take sides .. but .. the judge in the case, wants the governor's input.

Side note: (Former California Governor) Jerry Brown is a Jesuit, never 'legally' married obviously because he'd no longer be 'allowed' to be Jesuit.. but sexual relations are okay :-/

Pye: Kindly expand on this a tad more :-) -- it won't be till Monday/Tuesday that I'll respond, though.

PS - I realize you'll be busy with Fall uni duties, preparations etc ...

Pye posited: Conservative: Traditions need kept because they have always worked in the past (not much for gay marriage here).
Liberal: Traditions are human creations; must flex with new circumstances.

Tomas asks: Pye: Kindly expand on this a tad more

Consider the traditions of [most] civilizations: Nuclear families (with internal hierarchies of their own); different 'races' of men in naturally hierarchical order; belief in god and the enforcement of religious practice; the punishment for blaspheming (watered down in the west to verbal soul-damnation; but escalating in perversity in the middle east); hierarchies of class/power; the insistence upon war as necessary and natural; the withholding of space and resource from others in the form of privatized nature. Might makes right.

Given the conservative belief in the fixed nature of human/natural hierarchy, these things that have been present in human history are present for a reason; hence, they must be the natural order of things, they would say.

So look what the average conservative protects - seeks to conserve, as the way it's always been done: family values; women being "women" [whatever that's supposed to mean]; two, very straightforward genders, clearly delineated by nature (and no mincing in between); a strictly male-oriented definition for any human being (and the demotion of anything otherwise, including nature itself - there to be dominated); the elevation of war as noble, necessary and a natural consequence; the persistence of power hierarchies and protection for the elite; the use of religion - still - as an element of power, control, and tyranny. Gays can't get married or raise children (not the natural configuration); atheists can't be moral (not natural to disbelieve); nature is there for our domination/consumption - not PETA-hugging or placing above our own profit motives; women can horse around in power plays, but they'll never be in the inner sanctum of hierarchy; (not natural); it is right that wealth flows upward (socialist distribution not natural); peace & love not natural, hence efforts to end all violent conflict doomed.

It's ping-pong in the paragraph above, and plenty more can be said. The liberal view that human beings themselves are the conscious (or not-so conscious) creators of their own systems, institutions, traditions - and that these things are not written irremediably in the stars, but rather created and upheld by specific people at specific times in history for specific reasons - well, this liberal view prevents them from wanting to protect traditions just because they have been working in the past. Laws and assumptions have historically been changed by human beings as their knowledge of the world expands - this in itself is proof of the need for social evolution, along with our circumstantial evolution of life in the multi-diverse, technological age.

Children, for instance, are more adaptive than we think, the liberal might say, so being raised in a non-traditional home is not the 'anti-natural' crisis the conservative might fear. (In fact, there is some incisive liberal criticism of the traditional family as a seat of malfunction and neurosis in itself, with its role-binding, binary sex-manifestation, weird kind of tyranny of dependency); War, the liberal might say, is not some humanly destined activity, but rather it is the deliberate action on the part of living persons at that place and that time for whatever gain is assumed to come of it; The god idea has unfolded into the religious relativity that it is, the liberal might say, and so conserving the absoluteness of any given religious law is to remain in the dark ages.

Finally, the hierarchy is simply an ego-driven invention on the part of mighty human beings. The reality, for many liberals, is that everything is in interdependency, so the idea that nature and resources are infinitely squanderable by the Big People is absurd: it will be our own death sentence as we gobble up the very thing that gives rise to us; sustains. "Nature" doesn't need the human being at all - in fact, it seems to do better for itself in abundancy without us around. We seem to be the only creatures whose behavior is completely opposite to that of life: Life's - evolution's - tendency is to diversify and multiply. The human tendency is to reduce the amount of life that grows around them - removing everything from weeds to animal species to insects to just a few nutrients re-introduced into the soil of all our single-crop dominances. We're anti-evolutionary in behavior. But not because we're hardwired for doom; rather, because of our own malfunctioning ideas - our conceptual sickness. It's our creation, and hence, our obligation to correct, as things evolve. Finally, not a very sustainable hierarchy - that mighty man with all his bright reasoning - not when a tiny microbe can fell him in an instant. Hierarchy is willful ignorance; pure hubris.

It goes on and on, but it's because of these two disparate fundamental views on the nature of the world that each of these thinkers clash on all of the above-mentioned issues, and more. Each has a belief about the nature of the phenomenal world and each protects that view in their endless arguments.

Conservatives conserve those traditions; liberals wish to evolve them.

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. . . the supreme irony . . . is that both fundamental world views take their cue from the same historical moment and its resounding impact: Darwin and his theory.

For the conservative, it is the reality of survival of the fittest and the right of might to make its way.

For the liberal, it is the process of evolution and the adaptivity of life to changing conditions.

A statement if there ever was one of Darwin's impact upon the historical human psyche.

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Re your last post, Pye: great observation - in fact you've packed this entire thread full of great observations which have immeasurably improved my understanding of the political spectrum, at least as it occurs in the USA - the extremes don't seem to be quite so delineated here in Australia, or perhaps it's just that they don't find as full an expression here, owing to far less of an influence of fundamentalist religion in our society.

Pye wrote:Consider the traditions of [most] civilizations: Nuclear families (with internal hierarchies of their own); different 'races' of men in naturally hierarchical order; belief in god and the enforcement of religious practice; the punishment for blaspheming (watered down in the west to verbal soul-damnation; but escalating in perversity in the middle east); hierarchies of class/power; the insistence upon war as necessary and natural; the withholding of space and resource from others in the form of privatized nature. Might makes right.

-Thanks Pye, for the elongated answer. I've cut it back to what I really want to know.. Which is (please respond to the below):

This is just one problem with the idea of an international institution with coercive powers to enforce international law. Proponents of such an idea contend that such an authority would liberate the nations of the world from the Hobbesian state of nature in which they find themselves. But with the creation of such an authority, the problem of insecurity still exists: the nations of the world would now be in a state of nature vis-a-vis this new authority, whose behavior they would be unable to restrain.

If you understood anything about history, the form of liberation is clear.

It's not some meaninglessly abstract concept disonnected from reality - like "freedom" - possessed by the common man!

Go on, ask me to elaborate - I'll think about whether I can be bothered reiterating the same shit in different words!

I'll give you a video in worldly matters to see if you can get a hint. Then, if you demonstrate that you're worth it, I'll engage in dialogue. I might even be so generous as to tell you if I decide you are not worth it, why you are not worth it. This, of course, translates into your second and last chance....capiche?

Tomas requests:

Thanks Pye, for the elongated answer. I've cut it back to what I really want to know.. Which is (please respond to the below):

This is just one problem with the idea of an international institution with coercive powers to enforce international law. Proponents of such an idea contend that such an authority would liberate the nations of the world from the Hobbesian state of nature in which they find themselves. But with the creation of such an authority, the problem of insecurity still exists: the nations of the world would now be in a state of nature vis-a-vis this new authority, whose behavior they would be unable to restrain.

Tomas, I am apparently failing to make the connection between conserved traditions and what you are envisioning above. As for myself, I would not be pointing to a Hobbesian state of nature as the central problem. I would be pointing to the practice of human "authority" altogether. This only works with children, and every parent knows it has an expiration date. Authority is for children. The more of it we promote, the more childlike we remain.


(Leyla Dominatrix, in attitude and image. Perhaps you overestimate the capacity of most males to be able to politicize ("think about") an image such as this? Never mind I find it a self-defeating one. Oh well . . . you'll get lots of traffic from males looking to repeat their mother-shame with your slamming authoritative 'tude . . . ;)

Pye wrote:Tomas requests:

Thanks Pye, for the elongated answer. I've cut it back to what I really want to know.. Which is (please respond to the below):

This is just one problem with the idea of an international institution with coercive powers to enforce international law. Proponents of such an idea contend that such an authority would liberate the nations of the world from the Hobbesian state of nature in which they find themselves. But with the creation of such an authority, the problem of insecurity still exists: the nations of the world would now be in a state of nature vis-a-vis this new authority, whose behavior they would be unable to restrain.

Tomas, I am apparently failing to make the connection between conserved traditions and what you are envisioning above. As for myself, I would not be pointing to a Hobbesian state of nature as the central problem. I would be pointing to the practice of human "authority" altogether. This only works with children, and every parent knows it has an expiration date. Authority is for children. The more of it we promote, the more childlike we remain.


(Leyla Dominatrix, in attitude and image. Perhaps you overestimate the capacity of most males to be able to politicize ("think about") an image such as this? Never mind I find it a self-defeating one. Oh well . . . you'll get lots of traffic from males looking to repeat their mother-shame with your slamming authoritative 'tude . . . ;)

Oops, placed the wrong part of your response than planned on. I'd situated on a different area altogether. Will go back and find the right area that had been contemplated. Am blind (since VietNam) in my left eye, makes for a sometimes 'distorted views' on a computer screen. Typing speed is about 15 wpm.

As for my children, we had our first (the boy-girl twins) in 1969 and last one (our daughter) in 1998 .. about 30 years apart and another four children spaced in the middle. We have grandchildren older than our 11-year-old. We haven't changed much in our authority outlook though.

I had some serious beatings from both parents, had there been a 9-11 dialer back then, I would've dialed it right-pronto. My Mother died October 8th of this year, didn't attend the reviewal or the funeral. However, was at cemetery (in North Dakota) for the grave digging (opening) and body lowering and filling in of the soil and sod. She mellowed somewhat with age, though died a religious fanatic, a born-again christian and all the toxic thinking that goes with the territory.

PS - Am back at University taking another pre-law class :-)
And yes, I'm the oldest fart there :-|

PPS - Leyla is an easy (but mostly pleasant) read, I've a neighbor somewhat like her, flies off the handle without a moment's notice ;-/

deja vu suggests: I'm sure Pye meant childish, not child-like?

yes. you are more correct.
not been my sharpest, or most discrete.
been home with the flu . . . .

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-dejavu-
On a quite different note, Tomas are you a freemason?

-tomas-
Yes, I am.


-dejavu-
I seem to remember you were. What's the hidden agenda?

-tomas-
It's only hidden from non-members. If you are an out-and-about kinda guy, there's no stopping you from approaching a Mason and asking to attend some non-member function. It's pretty much how I did it, if you don't ask it ain't gonna happen. There's very little that I would change had I to do it all over again. It's gotten me in doors that would have otherwise been closed (locked) out of.

dejavu wrote:

It's pretty much how I did it, if you don't ask it ain't gonna happen. There's very little that I would change had I to do it all over again. It's gotten me in doors that would have otherwise been closed (locked) out of.

To hell with those doors then.

Those doors do not lead to hell.

Men may be thick, but women are cowards!

Says the man who never fails to defend them?

Lucky for you I don't give a flying fuck for anyone's categories but my own!

The world hasn't yet learned how to play with itself. The world thinks it has to 'work'!

Yeah, great. Thanks for that wonderful insight.....

Pye wrote:Never mind I find it a self-defeating one. Oh well . . . you'll get lots of traffic from males looking to repeat their mother-shame with your slamming authoritative 'tude . . . ;)

Yeah? Me? I'm still waiting....................

: )

Do you find that the flying nature of the fuck tends to change your categories over time?

Nah, just my imperatives.

What about that Rhett Hamilton guy? Didn't you have the hots for him? :D I know Tomas wants you badly, but he's in the U.S.

The only person I get the hots for, love, is myself--and then I have to do something about it.....