Wow, someone in Washington was RUDE! oops ... guess really not, false alarm! If someone was imagined to have ween "rude" to W? The nice thing is that we don't really have to wonder do we? While I was out looking a bit for specific quotes, I ran into this.
From Salon no less!
As this post demonstrates, long before Barack Obama achieved any significance on the political scene, I considered blind leader loyalty one of the worst toxins in our political culture: it’s the very antithesis of what a healthy political system requires (and what a healthy mind would produce). One of the reasons I’ve written so much about the complete reversal of progressives on these issues (from pretending to be horrified by them when done under Bush to tolerating them or even supporting them when done by Obama) is precisely because it’s so remarkable to see these authoritarian follower traits manifest so vibrantly in the very same political movement — sophisticated, independent-minded, reality-based progressives — that believes it is above that, and that only primitive conservatives are plagued by such follower-mindlessness.
The problem here is that "progressives" believe they are "smarter" because they belong to the dominant elite political party / class. "Authoritarian follower traits". Note how insidious ... the pour soul writing that column sees the danger, but doesn't understand that left is CONTROL and right is CHAOS. He still buys the formulation that the left created at WWII with "grand theft label" as they usurped "liberal" for their own use and labelled the far left control National Socialist (Nazi) Hitler government "right wing". A travesty of Orwellian naming!
When our labels no longer attach to the concepts that formed them ... eg. "liberal" root "LIBerty!" becomes detached from it's root and used in place of "statism, totalitarianism, authoritarian", is it any wonder that the Sheeple become confused?
The quote from Thomas Paine that was added to that column is right on:
UPDATE II [Thurs.]: Here is what Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason, had to say about all of this:
[I]t is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
As is true for so many things, Paine grasped the crux of the matter and expressed it as well as it can be expressed.
'via Blog this'
No comments:
Post a Comment