Tiassa: "Obamanoia seems to be moving more and more toward violence. This is not a good thing." Maybe it is- like it's not a take-over, but the clumsy protestations of the perps during their overdue take-down. They don't scare me. "Oh, right. It's Obama. So all the rules have changed." Especially the one about not changing. Times are.
I've liked and worded in Chicago, of course it's liberal. Can't own a gun, taxes are high, very few Repubicans ever get elected. Liberal. Perhaps not liberal compared to moonbat Nancy Pelosi, but Liberal for the MidWest.
It did? I haven't heard from much of anyone who's shocked. No, "they" (major media figures) didn't. The reporting of their drunken slut behavior was toned way down from the circumstances, rather than exaggerated and lied about, and the vocabulary was restrained. This absence of the namecalling aspect is worth noticing. Yeah, it's like the whole 90s slimefest never happened, except for the parts that now happened to W in the 00s as revised and edited. People are talking about this ugly boil as if it were a recent and unprecedented reaction to some ill-treatment of W&Co (never really specified), and didn't exist otherwise. Cops throw you in jail for having a gun (and beat you up one the way), that's "liberal". Richard Daley mayor for life, that's a "liberal" mayor. How do you know? Because he was a Democrat. Democrats are "liberal". If the local corporations bribe and nepotize their way into positions of power in the Statehouse, and buddy up with organized crime to rob the local taxpayers, often using organized racism and drug phobia as a means, police violence and police intimidation as a tool, that's all "liberal" malfeasance in Chicago. Why? Because it involves the Democratic Party. Why would that make it "liberal"? Because the Atwater heirs repeated the assertion over and over on their "news" media of choice. The parrot-training has reached the point where we see these people equating authoritarian with "liberal" - they are the same thing, in these peoples descriptions. Stalin was a "liberal". Hitler was "liberal". Mao was a "liberal". The Teamsters union is "liberal". They see no absurdity in that - even sillier, they run the implication both ways: Reagan was not an imperialistic authoritarian expanding the intrusions of government in daily life at home and in other countries' politics abroad, because he was a "conservative" - someone who did that would be a "liberal". In the book "The Once and Future King", Arthur as a child spends some time as an ant. In the anthill there were were only two adjectives: "done" and "not done". How that came to be is not detailed, but we see one possible path: gut all adjectives of their meanings, so that the only information they carry is approval and disapproval. Then you would need only the two words, one for each of the meanings you can actually communicate.
Seems simple enough to me We'll see if the trend continues to develop. In this particular context there's only so far the belligerence can go before it falls off a cliff. If history shows that it is indicative, it will be insofar as it marks a milepost along a certain progression. The question is what comes next.
In America, "Liberal" is synonymous with "Left". Anything to the Left of center is "Liberal". What definition would you prefer? The original meaning, aka "classic liberal" is no good because that would mean I'm a liberal. And if a classic liberal is a liberal, what's a conservative? A royalist?
Don't get into the political spectrum debate with Ice. It's a waste of time. It could happen dozens of times and it still wouldn't be indicative of much of anything. This is a large country with all manner of boobs and idiots. Finding one shitty story about one stupid occurence and posting it as some sort of indicator of what may come next is patently ridiculous.
So now you are equating all that stuff I mentioned with "left", also? Authoritarian you equate with "left"? Say it or deny it. Anything that made the slightest bit of sense, or was used with consistency, would be an improvement. You have slid into equating both "left" and "liberal" not only with each other (silly enough - you'll never be able to say anything intelligible about the influence of Humphrey vs Nixon on US politics, for example), but with Hitler, and the Mafia, the Chicago mob, now. That's just goofy. And it neatly deflects the point: who was our little Photoshop jockey talking about, as "very, very liberal", so that he was worried about their reaction to his Obama picture as plagiarized by the overtly racist posterspreaders? Count has suggested, and I agree, that he was talking about "people like" Obama's pastor. Do you agree? Trends and patterns of event don't mean anything?
Authoritarianism can be of the left or right, as you know. Communism is an authoritarian left wing regime. Of course any form of statism involves some authoritarianism. It's a package deal.
And so Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Pol Pot were liberals - yes or no. At the same time Chicago mayors Richard Daley, father and son, both liberals. Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito - liberals. Is that the sense here? Because entertained as I am at the thought of people viewing Chicago, city of the big shoulders, hog butcher to the world, as a "liberal" metropolis, I can't help but think this loss of ability to distinguish is bound to cripple thought as well as communication. So who was our Photoshop jockey talking about, when he referred to the "very, very liberal" of whom he was wary?
Myth and identification Only when it rolls to the right. I would refer you to Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme: The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word 'people' with the word 'state'. Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Now the program does not deal with this nor with the future state of communist society. In rolling right, the Soviet Union, for instance, stunted its development beyond that dictatorship. Indeed, it stunted the dictatorship of the proletariat and ossified, having already transformed into a more institutional dictatorship. It's a similar mistake that Chavez is making: the revolutionary institution is oxymoronic. The revolutionary power must stay with the people. Top-down "revolutions" are no revolutions at all. People might trust the state with much, but it can never administrate spirit. Transformative revolutionary power cannot be made effective through the surrogate of state institutions. History is quite clear on this point. ____________________ Notes: Marx, Karl. "Critique of the Gotha Programme". 1875. Marx & Engels: Selected Works. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970. Marxists.org. Accessed August 24, 2009. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm
In the simple sense of equating liberal with left, yes, except for Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, of course. But liberal does also sort of imply a certain effete, ineffectual, indecisiveness as exemplified by your favorite cartoon character. And people like mayor Daley certainly wouldn't fall under that category. Neither would Stalin and his buds. So I suppose there is something to your point about "liberal" refering to the non authoritarian left. Keeping in mind, of course, that any form of statism requires some authoritarianism.
I fail to see how a dictatorship, of the proletariat or otherwise, can be anything but markedly authoritarian.
The Dems were. A Dem named Hutchinson from LA challenged the artist to come forward. Some of the media responses to the poster have been hugely disingenuous. (I know we disagree here but bear with me.) It shows him as the Joker. There's a number of quips that could be made about this, and none of them are racist. Jesus. It's the frigging Joker, not a "minstrel in reverse". I'd like to see the ratio of people today who had greater familiarity with the idea of a minstrel than the Joker, grouped on age. Nooo, the only thing missing is Mikulan's perspective. Note: Obama's in white face because the Joker's in white face, and the mouth - "like Ledger's Joker's", you tiny-brained git, Mikulan - has been grotesquely slit wide open, like Ledger's Joker's. It's shock value and popular culture, for crying out loud. There. Rggh!
A passing moment That's beside the point. The dictatorship of the proletariat is supposed to pass. It didn't. Stalin took the Soviet Union crashing to the right. And it was Lenin who published, in 1920, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. The dictatorship of the proletariat failed precisely because it ossified. It invested itself in a conservative political posture, one of preservation and retention instead of transition, and properly corrupted just like any new institution will. The proposition must be resolved before a successful revolution is possible.
But the inherent dangers of revolution must be recognized for what they are, in the context of the human psyche. We can't go dismissing Stalin - and Pol Pot, and the various Kim Ills of the world - on grounds that they deviated from the program. On context of the dialectic, they were (to their minds) on the road to eventual, perfect Communism. It's a damned rare person with the moral strength to resist the imposition of his will. I'm not even sure I could manage it. This is why Communism is so great - and so dangerous. We cannot blame it on the right. They have their own travesties to correct.
I don't know the dude, and you'd have to go some to convince me he was actually shocked, outside of political posturing. Who else have you chosen to represent "the Dems"? That's almost irrelevant. The poster has all the racist overtones of its image, regardless of what the Joker looks like - and if you notice, the image has been tweaked a bit to emphasize those overtones (the whiteface, the coon "robber mask" eyes, the cleanup of the original and key, central bedragglement, etc). If the original Joker had been a black man, that movie might have set off race riots. It's not a theoretical or symmetrical situation involving two academic entities labeled "black" and "white" - it's the production and spread of an artifact in the culture we have, and the racist underbelly of this country recognized it immediately.
