Leftinesses Unite!!!
Someone’s talking some sense out there.
Gotta defend ourselves immediately!!!
The poster massappeal and I have been having a little colloquy on the thread Why Romney is Likely To Win Nomination regarding Ron Paul. Massappeal is a typical kneejerk leftiness clone in this regard, accusing Paul of being consciously allied with right-wing “racists,” “nativists” and the like.
With all due respect to you, and to the power of the Corporate PermaGov, and its paid media, how is Ron Paul, longtime cozy friend of racists and nativists, in any way someone for progressives to celebrate?
—snip—
Ron Paul and his followers sound familiar to these ears. Not unlike the last time the US had this level of income inequality (1920s, and there was a vibrant neither-left-nor-right popular movement that united against (in their words) Koons, Kikes and Katholics.
And so on.
I answered massappeal at some length, but the blather just kept on spewing. So now I am going to try to make my point on a slightly larger stage.
Read on if you have even a shred of an open mind still available to you after consuming the various leftiness journals, blogs and media outlets that are the analog of Fox News for dedicated Dems and their like.
As Shakespeare wrote:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Bet on it.
Y’know what I hear here, massappeal?
I hear the pot calling the kettle black.
You are in a sense doing the same thing that you accuse Ron Paul of doing. You are using “code words” to paint him as a white supremacist just as you are accusing him of using the same code word method to identify himself to the haters as “one of them.”
You write:
I’ll just observe that the language the Pauls use in talking about the 1964 Civil Rights Act is strikingly similar to language used by many segregationists at the time, and since.
For me, that sets off a warning signal—not unlike the one that Ronald Reagan set off when he opened his general election campaign in Philadelphia, MS with a speech endorsing “states’ rights”.
—snip—
The fact that the political faction of which he’s a prominent leader has a long and ongoing history of being a haven for many followers with racial, ethnic and religious prejudices that have as their target me and many of those I know, like, and love—that matters to me.
Oh.
He believes that the federal government has gotten much too intrusive into the lives of its citizens. Not “just” the Civil Rights Act…in fact, his son states quite emphatically:
Let me be clear: I support the Civil Rights Act because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws.
Ron Paul is saying that the solution to this problem of intrusive government is to take away a great deal of the federal government’s power and give it back to the states, the basic idea being that localized government is more easily controlled by its citizens. In a representative democracy those citizens are supposed to be the ones who ultimately decide what it can and cannot do.
You then say that many white supremacist types have also used the words “State’s Rights.” This is true. Then you say that because Ron Paul uses those words, you suspect that he is allied with those forces that “have as their target me and many of those I know, like, and love.”
Apples are round.
Oranges are round.
Therefore apples are oranges?
Please.
Your thinking is extremely cloudy here.
I believe that the federal government has accrued way too much power over the past 30 years or so. I further think that the rapidly burgeoning surveillance state in which we and much of the rest of the world now live is the greatest threat to the concept and effective practice of democracy to have appeared on the face of the earth since the European fascist movements of the ’30s. I really do. I also think that a possibly workable halfway measure to stop that surveillance state from becoming even more intrusive is to take power away from the federal government…especially from its intelligence services…and return it to more localized control.
I say “halfway measure” above because I really think that the entire United States of America should be broken up into its 5 or 6 component parts as sovereign states that govern themselves, but I cannot imagine that happening any time soon. The massive power of the USA has been a regressive force in the world, a vicious killing machine responsible for the death and/or ruined lives of literally millions of people for well over 60 years. Time to stop that shit, massappeal. Time to stop it. For our own sakes as well as that of our millions of victims. Why for our sake? Because it just isn’t working, that’s why.
It just is not working anymore. If it ever did.
In a recent post here I wrote about my upbringing in the Long island, NY area in the early ’50s through the early ’60s. Here is what I said:
I lived in Freeport (on Ray St. right next to the Baldwin border) from 1st grade through 3rd grade. Early ’50s. For me at that time it was a paradise of sorts. There were docks and boat basins at the western end of Ray St. and I went snapper fishing and/or crabbing there almost every summer day. Kids were everywhere and Casino Pool (a salt water swimming pool near the waterfront) was my other hang. Freeport was almost Tom Sawyeresque then. Little adventures that seemed so big. Lots of friends, a functioning extended family…my mother’s parents lived with us and my father’s parents were a 15 minute drive away. Bicycles, little girls to pursue (No one had actually been kind enough to explain sex to me, but it was everywhere.), Little League baseball, a really good library, what I remember as a very happy school experience…even the year that I had to deal with crabby old Mrs. Duntley.
And later on I wrote:
Merrick was…different. It was a couple of years later in my life…we had moved to Pittsburgh (a disastrous decision on so many levels) and Merrick (North Merrick, to be precise…not as affluent as the waterfront areas, to say the least.) seemed as if the same kinds of people who lived in Freeport were trying to be middle class and not quite making it because they had to try so hard. And it was violent, Supe. I do not remember a single violent incident amongst the kids when I was in Freeport…well, there was a fat bully who lived on our block but the older kids and the mothers pretty effectively nullified him right out of the box…but from 6th grade on out in North Merrick it was “Danger on the playground!!!” and “Danger walking home from school!!!” almost every day. Kids sharpened the buckles of their garrison belts and fought with them, carried razor blades in their pomaded pompadours…it was really funky. Look at Joey Buttafuoco’s face. Like dat. Italian, Irish and working class Protestant versions thereof.
Like dat.
—snip—
A strange little town.
Upwardly mobile and at the same time downwardly moral
This got me to thinking…maybe I lived through a sea change in the American psyche during that period and that was the real reason that Merrick…about a mile due east from Freeport…seemed to be so different. I wonder if any child in the US…constantly surrounded by the immense forced socialization machine that we laughingly call “the media” since then…has had an extended period of ease and innocence in which to safely grow.
i wonder. I really do.
Ron Paul apparently thinks the same thing, and he is trying to stop that massive killing/socialization machine using electoral means to do so. He’s a moderate in this sense. Believe it. If he fails to do so…and I am beginning to think that his efforts are doomed, not by any fault of the ideas behind them but rather because of the absolutely effective mind-control power of the mass hypnomedia (another factor in the surveillance state’s successful rise)…if he fails in this attempt, it is going to take much more radical means to stop this federal/multinational creature from gobbling up the lives of every human being on the planet.
i do not want to see that radical means come to pass, but neither do I wish to live on a lockstep planet. Clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp, mentally goose-stepping off into that Brave New World that Aldous Huxley so presciently envisioned 80 years ago and Shakespeare saw through another age’s glass 320 years earlier.
MIRANDA: O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!PROSPERO: ‘Tis new to thee.
Prospero knew.
Clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp.
Not me, baby.
Not me.
Bet on it.
I’ll go down dancing first.
Bet on that as well.
Wake the fuck up.
You been had.
Later…
AG
rather than simply kneejerking your way to the polls next November?
Y’know…kneejerking is an important factor in goosestepping, don’tcha all?
Yup.
What’s sauce for the goosestep is sauce for the Gandalf, too.
Or something like that.
Bet on it…if of course you have anything left with which to bet after the last three years of ongoing theft by any other means necessary and profitable.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
Wake the Fuck Up.
Another hit piece, this time capped by a picture of Ron Paul in Confederate drag. A piece absolutely full of half-truths, innuendos and crafty little elisions.
Wake the fuck up?
Your so-called “peace” president is in the midst of starting yet another war, this time in Central Africa. He is transforming the American military into an analogue of the Skynet idea that propelled the “Terminator” series, a robotic, unmanned drone system that kills with no remorse and leave no witnesses or culprits to be tried. The tentacles of his intelligence services are reaching further and further into the private lives of American citizens under the guise of “anti-terrorist” action and the police forces of major U.S. cities are being inextricably allied with Federal Intelligence controllers.
On the economic front his so-called “advisors”…controllers, really…are almost all veterans of the highest levels of the corporate and academic system that produced our current economic woes in the first place.
And you tell me to wake the fuck up?
Get real.
This piece-of-shit article that you throw at me under the rubric of “Wake the fuck up?”
It’s from the New Republic.
Here is what the ever-moderate Wikipedia has to say about this mag:
“Support for Israel,” “Martin Peretz” and “…these interests as Peretz defines them almost always involve more war.” There’s a trifecta to die for.
Literally.
Ron Paul’s beliefs are not good for Israel and endless war supporters like Peretz, Booman. Not good at all. They’re not good for the same kinds of people in the larger mass media field either…and I do not mean “Jews” by that statment, because I believe that Israel is simply a client state of the American Permanent Government, an entity that is, has and will continue to use its presence as a burr under the saddle of the Islamic states under whose lands a great deal of oil lies buried.
Blood for oil, Booman. Blood for oil. And war for blood as well. War for bood and blood for money. Ron Paul has squarely and publicly placed himself in opposition to that whole system, and the mass media organs that provide said system with an extremely high level of control over the minds of the people that it dominates will oppose Mr. Paul any which way it can do so. By non-personing him in the really large media and by running little hit articles like your fave in the New Republic as well. If say The National Review headed up an anti-Obama article with a photoshopped picture of him in a field slave’s outfit grinning and eating watermelon and then published the same sort of half-truths and three-quarters lies as the New Republic article that you so kindly linked, you would be all over them.
But NOOOOOOOooooooo…
You swallow this shit whole.
Why?
Because it’s right up there on top of the leftiness menu.
I’ll say it again:
The DemRats and the RatPubs are owned by the same interests. Our whole political system is just good a cop/bad cop scam. Ron Paul is proposing an end to the scam. Nothing more and nothing less.
Was he a different man in 1976? Probably. I was. Did he make some errors as he learned his craft? Once again…more than likely. I certainly did. But the real question remains…who is he now?
Here’s who he was in 2002. I’m betting he’s still there now.
Get over this knee-jerk liberalism thing, Booman. You’re better than that. We’re all better than that, hopefully.
And…always remember that if the knee jerks hard enough, it will always and forever eventually end up placing a foot right square in your mouth.
If not in other, even more…sensitive…areas of your agenda.
Bet on it.
AG
The next thing you’ll do is tell me I should overlook Pat Buchanan’s anti-Semitism because he’s right about two or three things.
I don’t give a fuck about Pat Buchanan because he is now just another blathering TV head.
I remain unconvinced…on the evidence of his many statements…that Ron Paul is a racist, Booman. I am not not asking you to overlook anything; I am simply suggesting that you stop swallowing whole the guff that is coming out of the leftiness media. Take a serious look at this guy…now, not in some mythical 1970s time when no one even knows who wrote what or why or where or when something was said or even knows if it really exists.
NOW!!!
Trust neither the rightiness media nor the leftiness version thereof, Booman. They all lie. Obama’s really a Kenyan Muslim out to sabotage the U.S. and Ron Paul is a fundamentalist white supremacist out to set up the Fourth Reich.
Riiiiiight…
But you are subscribing to one of these ideas.
Hmmmmmm….
Look for yourself.
Do for self!!!
AG
Arthur, I appreciate all the effort you’re putting into this conversation. I’m sure there are liberals or leftists out there who have an ideological commitment to increasing the size and power of the federal government. I, however, am not one of them.
I suspect that replying to everything you wrote above, and everything that Rep. Paul wrote in 2002, would create more heat than light, so in this post I’ll just respond to one of Paul’s statements:
“In a free market, businesses that discriminate lose customers, goodwill, and valuable employees — while rational businesses flourish by choosing the most qualified employees and selling to all willing buyers.”
This strikes me as an abstract, almost Platonic, view of the world. It has, in my experience, limited connection with the world as it is.
“Free market” – the standard economic definition assumes many buyers, many sellers, perfect information, and economically rational participants (i.e., actions governed solely by economic self-interest). The economics of a pre-1964 typical small town in the Deep South (e.g., Philadelphia, MS) bore little resemblance to a “free market”—and it wasn’t because of the excessive size and power of the federal government in 1960 (or 1930, or 1890, or 1850 or 1810). It was because of a set of power relationships based heavily (even primarily) on skin color.
I’m well aware that federal governments can abuse their power. I’m also well aware that state and local governments can abuse their power. (For the record, I’m opposed to both.)
That statement may well be rather abstract and “Platonic,” but then again, judging from Ron Paul’s almost obsessive commitment over 30+ years to not only expressing his ideas but trying to put them into practice on the highest levels of U.S. government, he believes that they are also quite practical.
Take say Apple Corp…by far the most successful corporation in the U.S. over the past several years. Does that statement of Ron Paul’s not apply on every level to the running of that company? “…choosing the most qualified employees and selling to all willing buyers.”
That sounds about right.
Now say Apple had chosen not to hire the many Asian and Jewish people that work for the company. Or females. Or Hispanics and African-Americans. What then? What if the Apple stores had segregated Genius Bars or simply refused to sell to ce5rtain segments of the population? Not so “Platonic” now, is it? Sounds pretty damned practical to me.
Lissen up here, massappeal. This guy is no dreamer, and…much as he may look the part sometimes…he’s no scrawny, redneck Texas chicken farmer either. He’s a trained and successful M.D.; he was an officer in the U.S.A.F and he decided to get into politics because of a longstanding interest in economics.
Wikipedia
“After that day, all money would be political money rather than money of real value. I was astounded.”
Racist?
Fascist?
No, just an economics wonk at work.
Now, here we are in a world-wide economic crisis that has been caused by bad economic policies, and yet both of the most likely Republican and Democratic nominees are bought and sold subjects of the same system that is failing before our very eyes.
Maybe we need some new approaches. These for damned sure aren’t working very well.
And then here you are (or were anyway, before I called you on it), gassing on about Ron Paul’s supposed racism and nativism.
Unbelievable.
But true.
Unbelievable.
Kneejerk politics at work.
What would Plato say?
I dunno, but his master Socrates would ask you some questions and then let you get your little head all tied up in a knot.
Unbelievable.
AG
Thanks again for the response. Again, I don’t think I’ve called Rep. Paul a racist or a fascist. (If I have, again, I apologize—to him and to you.)
Just to go back to my Philadelphia, MS example for a moment:
*What’s your view of the economics that prevailed in Philadelphia in, say, 1940, or 1840?
*Was it an example of “free market” economics?
*If so, how and why?
*If not, how and why?
*What share of the responsibility did the federal government bear in either case?
Oh no?
Snd further…what “Philadelphia, MS example?’
And to whom are those questions being asked.
AG
Oh.
That one:
The “economics” of Philadelphia, MS? It was totally racially-based, more than likely. Slavery pre-Civil War, segregation-based (and thus wage slavery-based) post-Civil War.
An example of “free market” economics? No. Not in 1840 and barely in 1940. A “free” economy would include the right of people to live wherever they damned well please. The real problem then…and now, but to a much lesser degree…was that no matter where people of color chose to live, their circumstances didn’t improve very much if at all.
But this is not then, and neither is it the time of the beginnings of the Civil Rights era.
I repeat…in one state (or town or corporation) that enforced segregation and in another that did not today, the idea that (As Ron Paul has stated it):
would function quite well.
It functions quite well even now.
Ron Paul seems to think that left to its own devices, the society would have ended segregation by purely economic means. We’ll never know now, but it makes sense to me. Those northern states that began to see the light and included the vast talents of non-European workforces into their systems at equal educational opportunity and equal pay would eventually have economically outstripped the states that did not do so, and the necessity of competition would have brought us…all of the states… perhaps even further in this regard than we have come so far.
But…we’ll never know, because that did not happen.
Instead a top-heavy federal apparatus became even more top-heavy on its journey to the present day breakdown that we are now witnessing.
Ron Paul’s vision?
Strip that top-heavy apparatus down and let competition dictate what happens.
Could he be disastrously wrong?
Sure.
But another sort of disaster is already well upon us. Somebody come up with a better idea?
Anybody?
Please!!!???
And the silence of the sheeple ensues.
Baa baa baa.
So it goes.
Isn’t it lovely that the Yale Wiffenpoof song…Yale, spiritual Skull and Bones home of the worst of the worst PermaGov hustlers…sums it all up so nicely.
Enough.
This goes nowhere.
I’d do better talking to the furniture.
AG
Thanks for your response. We agree that Philadelphia MS and places like it had, for centuries, economies in which “free markets” did not exist and were (forcibly, brutally) not allowed to exist. Further, that the economies of Philadelphia and places like it did not exist because of an excess of power within the federal government. In fact, the use of federal power was, as it turned out, twice necessary to move Philadelphia’s economy in the direction of “free markets”: first, in the Civil War and Reconstruction, and second, during the Second Reconstruction, better known as the Civil Rights Era.
“Ron Paul seems to think that left to its own devices, the society would have ended segregation by purely economic means. We’ll never know now, but it makes sense to me. Those northern states that began to see the light and included the vast talents of non-European workforces into their systems at equal educational opportunity and equal pay would eventually have economically outstripped the states that did not do so, and the necessity of competition would have brought us…all of the states… perhaps even further in this regard than we have come so far.
But…we’ll never know, because that did not happen.”
I agree that seems to be what Mr. Paul thinks. The reason it doesn’t make sense to me is that northern states had, generally speaking, “economically outstripped” the states of the Deep South for many generations without “free markets” working their magic. That’s not to say it couldn’t have happened. Just that, in the world as it is, it didn’t happen.
We can and do agree about the dangers of the National Security State. And while I think utopian visions (such as that of Ron Paul’s, or of Milton Friedman’s) are often helpful, I try not to let visions of the “world as it should be” blind me to the realities of the “world as it is”.
I wrote:
You write:
“It didn’t happen” then because the slave (and later segregated, slave wage-earning) population didn’t have many alternatives other than to stay and work in the South. As slaves they could only run for their lives, and during the post-Civil War de facto segregation times…right on through today, but gradually improving…leaving the south for the north did not generally do a whole hell of a lot to improve their situations. Had the Civil Rights Bill not been passed, Ron Paul seems to believe that some states (and companies within them) would have recognized the economic advantage that non-segregationist policies would offer, and thus massive workforces of refugees from the south would have flocked to those states and worked for those companies under better conditions than those that were created post-Civil Rights Bill times. Eventually the south would have had to either get on board with that idea or lose a huge part of its remaining workforce.
But as I said, this didn’t happen.
Instead, we have built an ever-increasing federal bureaucracy that now controls almost every aspect of our lives. During this buildup…on a 1 to 1 scale as far as I am concerned…the quality of life for all Americans but the very rich has steadily decreased on every level. It’s time for a change, and amongst all of the presidential candidates, Ron Paul is the only one who seems to understand both the problem and how to solve it.
We cannot continue on this centralization path, massappeal. It will be the death of this country. Would Ron Paul’s approach work better? I really don’t know, but something has to be done and he is the only one who is offering anything but the same-old same-old, good cop/bad cop, DemRat/RatPub PermaGov ideas, so he’s the one that I am supporting.
Will he win?
I give him about a 5% chance now, maybe less. The media has once again almost completely non-personed him, and on the evidence of his recent performances in the debates as opposed to his early ones, I think that he is getting discouraged as far as the Republican nomination is concerned. A third party? Maybe, but not so far.
So it goes.
But…he’s right. So I am supporting him.
So that goes as well.
AG
your thinking has become so confused. Stop looking for presidents to do something radical. They are incapable of doing anything radical. That’s our system. If you want radical change, you must build it from the ground floor.
Thanks again for your response. While Ron Paul “seems to believe that some states…would have recognized the economic advantage that non-segregationist policies would offer”, you and I agree “this didn’t happen”.
However, it is not accurate that “we have built an ever-increasing federal bureaucracy”. The size of the federal government (relative to the overall population and size of the economy) has at times increased and at times decreased over the past several decades.
As for the “quality of life for all Americans”, in the post-war era (1946-73), there was strong economic growth, reduced income inequality, reduced poverty rates, expanded civil rights and liberties, and increased size of the federal government.
Since 1973, economic growth has slowed, income inequality has increased and the size of the federal government has not expanded significantly.
The country certainly has major problems as we enter the fourth year of the Great Recession, and expend nearly $1 trillion annually on the National Security State. And if you support Ron Paul for president, by all means support him vigorously. But just be clear that the arguments you’ve advanced (so far) don’t hold up well (in my view) to rational, fact-based examination.
I called Rep. Paul a “longtime cozy friend of racists and nativists”. Two points:
1 – I should have written “longtime cozy political friend”, for which my evidence is some of the writings Paul published in his newsletter in the 1990s, and the longtime, well-established segregationist and nativist strands within the libertarian movement in the US. Thank-you for pressing me to clarify and correct that point.
2 – Again, I didn’t call Ron Paul a racist. If I had wanted to, I would have. I didn’t, for many reasons. One reason (not the most important) is that my experience is that such charges tend to generate more heat than light in political discussions.