Archives for category: politics

 This is amazing.

All four of these strategies arose from the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical dead-end that traditional Marxism found itself in toward the end of the 20th century. Fortunately, postmodern philosophy has led them out of the "wilderness" of rational thought and objective reality, and brought them to the promised land; which, as it turns out, is a neo-Marxist revival, accelerated by the fascist goals of leftist environmentalism.

I don’t even know where to begin.

On a side note, isn’t fascism incompatible with communism? How can you have, on the one hand, neo-Marxism, while on the other fascist environmentalism? What does fascist environmentalism even look like?

The intellectuals of the left have been unable to abandon their totalitarian/collectivist ideology, even after communism and national socialism proved to be crushing failures in the 20th century.(emphasis added)

Totalitarianism and collectivism are fundamentally different. Communism and national socialism (e.g. Nazi-ism) are opposites. Both are meant to be leftist ideologies? Really?

Last time I checked (which, admittedly, was in High School), you had communism on one end, and fascism (Nazis) on the other. Democrats and Republicans were in the middle, with the former tending to the left (communism) and the latter tending to the right (fascism).

Combining communism and Nazism and labeling them as Leftist ideologies seems, to me, to be quite revisionist.

But the new face of their same old tired ideas has been rehabilitated and madeover by their clever adoption of postmodern metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Slowly, but relentlessly, the dogma of multiculturalism and political correctness has been absorbed at all levels of Western culture in the last two decades–and after the end of the cold war, it has been accelerating. Slowly but relentlessly they have found new ways to discredit freedom, individuality and capitalism.
The new face of collectivist and totalitarian thought has been seamlessly integrated into most K-12 curricula and all other learning environments. have been at the forefront of attempts by leading academics and academic institutions to rewrite most of history and undo thousands of years of Western cultural advancement. (emphasis added)

IT’S A CONSPIRACY!

Not only is leftist ideology “postmodern”, with the use of postmodern as an adjective implying that it’s a pejorative label, but there’s a decades-long conspiracy in academia to rewrite history to be anti-American.

Wait, was that a little strong?

No, I don’t think so:

If the left understands anything, it is that in order for their ideology and its promised utopia to be born, they must thoroughly destroy America and undermine everything America stands for in the world.

The Left is acting against America. The Left is anti-American. Wait, what is American? Obviously, it must be whatever the Left stands against – e.g. Republicans. Republicans therefore must be the “real” Americans.

The only logical conclusion, of course, is that Obama isn’t a real American President:

Obama’s behavior now as President is not any different than it was when he was a mere community organizer. The people he associated with then, he continues to associate with; only now he is able to appoint them to key roles in the U.S. government. He has been a member of the New Socialist Party and enjoyed their support when he ran for office; he hobnobbed with former terrorists who are now "education experts"; and his wife and many of his friends and close associates at work and church never liked America much to begin with. (emphasis added)

So how was Obama elected, then?

Yet, he is the candidate who the majority of Americans voted for; and I can’t blame them entirely because essential information was kept from the general population by the media about Obama’s character

Yes, it was the media’s fault. Again. Why does Fox News continue to fail the Republican party? Why?

Did I mention that the point of the article was to explain why Leftist ideals are compatible with an alliance with Militant Islam?

I’m not even going to touch that.

But please, check it out. It’s a truly amazing piece of writing; one doesn’t often come across that level of delusion.

Let me leave you with this chart:

 John Hinderaker has made the remarkable claim that:

Many liberals don’t just want to defeat conservatives at the polls, they want to send them to jail. Toward that end, they have sometimes tried to criminalize what are essentially policy differences.

The “policy difference” Mr. Hinderaker refers to is the comment President Obama made:

President Barack Obama said Tuesday the United States lost "our moral bearings" with gruesome terror-suspect interrogations and he left the door open to prosecuting Bush administration officials who vouched for their legality.

In other words, President Obama has acknowledged that the legal arguments used to justify torture may have been, well, wrong. And thus, arguably, illegal.

Mr. Hinderaker seems to think that torture constitutes merely a policy difference, and not an actual crime. Furthermore, as Mr. Hinderaker talks about “criminalizing conservatism”, his statement involves a conflation of torture and conservatism – that to be conservative means supporting torture.

Given that torture is currently illegal in America, illegal internationally, and there are popular conservatives who don’t support torture, Mr. Hinderaker’s conclusion seems to reach somewhat his premises.

Joe Conason writes about the declining power of the term ‘socialized medicine:’

Why ‘Socialism’ Evokes No Fear

Once among the most frightening epithets in American political culture, “socialized medicine” seems to have lost its juju. Today that phrase sounds awfully dated, like a song on a gramophone or a mother-in-law joke or a John Birch Society rant against fluoridated water….

Mr. Canason indulges in some generic anti-Republican propaganda, but I believe his main thesis – that nationalized healthcare isn’t as frightening as it once was – is true.

I support nationalized healthcare for three reasons:

  1. America spends more on healthcare, per capita, than any other industrialized nation with national healthcare. Furthermore, despite spending more, the quality of America’s healthcare is inferior. I don’t mind paying more for a better product, but I refuse to pay more for an inferior product just to satisfy absurd, unsubstantiated beliefs in the inherent moral greatness of the ‘free market.’
  2. Health insurance is a zero-sum game. There’s a finite amount of ‘risk’ in the USA; insurance companies can only do better at the expense of other companies. They can, of course, try to reduce the amount of risk in their selection by promoting cheaper preventative techniques and healthy living. But this doesn’t actually solve anything – and the money health insurance companies spend trying to establish a low-risk, high-revenue portfolio is wasted. A (government) monopoly doesn’t have this problem: it inherits a well-balanced risk portfolio courtesy including everyone in the nation.
  3. We have over 46 million Americans uninsured. The private system isn’t built to over health insurance to over 15% of the population?

Allow me to offer some expansion on precisely how much more we pay. I’ve graphed some statistical information pulled from the OECD and the US Census data.

US spending per capita, controlled for inflation, has increased from under $200 billion in the 1960s to over $1.5 trillion today.

Rising GDP doesn’t explain this, as healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP has increased from 5% to 15%. Americans are spending a greater portion of their income on healthcare. Are we getting better service? I’m not entire sure. Not to mention, we’re spending more as a percentage of GDP than England (and a number of other nations with ‘socialized healthcare’).

Not only do we spend more as a percentage of GDP – staggering when you consider that the USA has the largest GDP in the world – but we spend more in absolute terms as well, per capita:

The US Healthcare system is highly inefficient, and – in my opinion – should be nationalized. By all means, allow doctors and hospitals to operate privately. But the vast majority of healthcare – routine, common, preventative – should be handled by the government.