A fundamental problem we have is a Republican establishment who still act like it is 1980, who think empire is about supporting corporations, billionaires and an industrial military complex. They are as much the problem as the leftists, basically in cahoots with the DNC to sell out the middle and working class.
I don't agree. Musk is a leftie, Bezos is a leftie. Just look at their policies.
The conservatives are for freedom, while the left yearns for a return to slavery. Why else would they create regulations that shackle people to a bloated government?
Bezos without doubt. But Musk may be coming around to the right, and paying the price. The WSJ reported today that Tesla sales to Democrats have dropped 40%. due to his statements on political topics.
I think the Two-Party System is one of the elephants lurking in the room, and we should address it, since Americans believe that it's INEVITABLE that we MUST have it. The two-party system is BULLSHIT, and was always meant to be, like so much of the rest of the bullshit we're fed as "The Way Things Are."
Because we in the US are so incredibly brainwashed and those with critical thinking skills still on "Function" are seemingly quite the minority, I think we, as in, those of us who CAN think critically, need to do as our slave-drivers do, and keep repeating, over and over and over, the basics that we, the Critical Thinkers, take for granted.
Things such as:
* A two-party system is nonsense and sets us up for continual Divide & Conquer
* We should NEVER trust politicians, no matter what
* The idea that we are "voting" must be addressed
* The idea that we need a CENTRALIZED GOVT must be addressed
* The idea that a STANDING ARMY is necessary must be addressed
* The fact that our INCOME is taxed, still, even though the bill to allow this anathema was never ratified, must be addressed.
* The fact that we are 'kept" people in reality, but told we have "rights," must be addressed
Okay, you get the idea. Add your own, folks. If you can't think of more, I'll add more later.
I mean this to be a response to you, WHD, but not ONLY to you... I suspect you'd agree with me, anyway. ;)
A caution I would have about the more freedom vs more government rhetoric explaining the left-right divide; is that the left also wants freedom... freedom from responsibility. While many of us on the right like classical liberty, the left is the faction of licentiousness. Accountability sometimes has to be enforced... by force. Whereas most rightists want to use force when it is genuinely necessary, the left wants to use force when it is not necessary.
Maybe it was a successful psyop by leftists to condition me (and a large portion of the general populace) to think of "freedom" as mere lack of restraint. This psyop is what leads to social liberalism and all its evil, whether defund the police, drugs, gay rights, sexual immorality, etc. Is doing whatever the hell you want to do actually what "freedom" even means?
IMHO freedom means a lack of restraint. In the context of left-right struggle, freedom means freedom from being controlled by the left. Because the left's desire to control the rest of us is the sole source of the left-right difference.
I fail to see why it needs to be more complicated than that.
True. This is better, making it specific. We want freedom from the left (something I want badly). Just like how our ancestors wanted freedom from the tyrannical British government.
The left wants a strange chimera of anarchy and socialism. We, the right, oppose murders and thefts, and liberty from the state overextending unjust authority.
I suspect that the leftists anarchist e.g. the leftist "anarchist" who assassinated McKinley (who was really a socialist), want to destroy the government and social structure, so that they can get in control. Then nothing like anarchy will be allowed.
Not literally. Some activity is permissible while some activity is not permissible. The English usually abide by "everything that is not forbidden is allowed".
That was the idea of the Constitution. The powers of the federal government were listed and limited. All other powers not listed belonged to the states and individuals. Didn't stay that way long, though.
True, and Americans as well, but I think the authoritarians in the deep state want everything to be forbidden unless explicitly allowed. We are more that way now than when I was young.
Ethnically and culturally Americans are English. We fought the revolution in order to protect English legal traditions from the inventions of the new British government (and we didn't want to pay the taxes either).
The legal joke is that in England, everything that is not forbidden is allowed. In Germany, everything that is not allowed is forbidden. In France, everything is allowed, even if it is forbidden.
As for history, the terms "left" and "right" as political shorthand was first used during the French revolution. The leftists were the revolutionaries, while the rightists supported the king. Remember that once the leftists completely took over they killed the king, his family, and tens of thousands of other people in order to force the revolutionaries' wacky utopia to come into being.
Yes, the leftists themselves have reversed the labels they used for themselves at least three or four times.
The French people who opposed the monarchy in favor of representative government would now be called the "right" no matter which side of the assembly they sat on. The U.S. leftists switched the word 'liberal' from meaning 'favoring less government' to the opposite meaning in a speech by FDR in 1946. The leftist media switched the colors of the left-right in 1980 so that the Democrats wouldn't look like "reds" on TV. And so on.
I never get tired of pointing this out. But no one seems to remember or care what I said. After I’m dead no one will be left to point out that the left always twists words to lie about what they really are. IMHO we need to call them leftists and stick to it, even though they will doubtless try to change it again. They do it consciously and intentionally.
To quote a 2002 LA Times article by a leftist who wanted to switch the meanings again, "Some Democrats have opted for the former strategy. They prefer the term progressive to liberal and hope to sidestep the old Roosevelt terminology [i.e. when he reversed the meaning of 'liberal''] altogether... A bolder strategy would be to reclaim the liberal tag."
The right never seems to catch on to the left's label-switching game. It always seems to fool us.
"Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."
Very true. Words have literal definitions, so it can be hard to name political factions after them sincerely. For example, conservative and liberal really shouldn't correspond to left or right, yet they do only by popular convention.
Many untruths here. 'Twas the Right that was into censorship, meddling in personal affairs, and filling up the prisons back in the day. Legalizing homosexuality is reducing government. Social engineering to make homosexuality celebrated is serious government meddling. Hanging negros from the bridge for violating curfew is rather meddlesome. Giving negroes the right to sue for millions of dollars if they hear the N word at work is meddlesome.
Two axes are needed. One for equality and one for amount of government. A half century ago most of Team D was in the lower left, with Carter and Clinton doing some upper left things. Team R was a coalition of lower right and upper right. Nothing small government about either Bush. Donald Trump has been dragging Team R kicking and screaming into the upper left, which Team D has become the special interest party, so it is not a mix of lower left and lower right.
There was a huge surge in regulation during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Significant deregulation under Carter and Reagan. Prices on trucking, rail freight, and air transport were deregulated during this time. Thanks to inflation, the federal minimum wage had been steadily dropping since 2009.
Thanks for commenting. Many untruths there, though. I won't refute them all. Obviously, my position is that the left-right spectrum is a one-dimensional, between two poles: More government - less government. No upper-left, etc. "Hanging negros from the bridge for violating curfew" is not less government, it is not rightist.
There was absolutely no net deregulation in the Reagan administration, let alone Carter's. Literally a half-dozen regulations were repealed in that time, while tens of thousands of substantive new ones were created. The "Era of Deregulation" is a leftist invention, a total lie. It never happened and nothing remotely like it happened in the U.S. in the last 100 years, and that can be proven beyond any doubt.
Absolutely. (As long as the free speech advocates are serious about free speech, and not just advocating free speech until they get in power, and then revoking free speech (I think you know who I'm talking about)).
I care less about heart of hearts vs. what people are currently doing. Unlike Keanu Reeves' character in "The Devil's Advocate" I cannot read souls. If someone is currently working to liberate, I give them cred. When someone works to remove liberty, they have negative cred.
And yes, this applies to Libertarians. Many in the LP were just Republicans who either wanted legal drugs or legal gay stuff. When the courts enforced the not-passed Equal Rights Amendment and imposed gay marriage, I saw many Libertarians celebrate. I mourned, as I knew all sorts of affirmative action mandates were to follow. Which happened in short order, and then extended to propagandizing elementary students.
Those Libertarians lost cred. The Religious Right has more cred NOW, because they are now the ones advocating social liberty.
Similar arguments apply to immigration. In an idealized propertarian society, immigrants would have to pay for the private roads, etc. and they wouldn't get welfare. So open borders would be a pro liberty position. But since we have public spaces, elections, and a welfare system, open borders is an anti-liberty position.
Yes, some issues cannot be as black-and-white as libertarians believe. Humans and our systems of interaction are complex and there will always be gray areas.
"Many in the LP were just Republicans who either wanted legal drugs or legal gay stuff."
They also wanted to watch movies and play video games for free, hence their opposition to intellectual property, even though IP is a new kind of private property and libertarians should love it. If you are on the right side if the L-R spectrum, and want more freedom, are you for or against IP rights. It isn't as clear as libertarians would like to think.
Look at all the LAWS we have. Has it made us a good country to live in? Laws are a joke when those with the POWER granted by WEALTH can simply ignore them, or re-write them, or tweak them to their own advantage...
What I think is the fundamental issue here is what do we really NEED beyond the Constitution? LIFE, LIBERTY, and the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS... We're talking about personal autonomy, personal freedom (of course that comes with the responsibility to do no harm), and NATURAL LAW... We don't need no stinkin' governance. We need to live and let live and the let living must be FAIR, not meted out by rich men who profit from fuckery and war, war, war.
If anyone is struggling to find a true north, I would recommend listening to the defected KGB agent, and lover of freedom, Yuri Bezmenov. Several of his interviews can be found on y tube.
And any person would gain useful insight from going back in time, to hear first hand, the mindset of communism.
But that's not what your party is doing. GOP is about giving the extremely rich more wealth and giving the rest of us nothing. Have you seen a tax cut aimed at the middle class alone? The rich are enjoying less taxes than everyone else. Mine may be 30% but their's are less. They tend to keep their wealth instead of reinvesting it in companies. Everyone takes a cut while they just keep getting richer. Look at how much a day's wage paid for in the 1970s vs today.
It is necessary to understand that LANGUAGE FUCKERY is a huge tool, and one that has long been used to confuse us, and most importantly, in the game of Divide and Conquer.
I think people should consider this Language Fuckery a lot, lot, lot more than we do. It is kind of critical to how we figure out what to do, and whom to do it to.
A fundamental problem we have is a Republican establishment who still act like it is 1980, who think empire is about supporting corporations, billionaires and an industrial military complex. They are as much the problem as the leftists, basically in cahoots with the DNC to sell out the middle and working class.
Yes, they have become the enemy within. As if the enemy without wasn't bad enough.
I don't agree. Musk is a leftie, Bezos is a leftie. Just look at their policies.
The conservatives are for freedom, while the left yearns for a return to slavery. Why else would they create regulations that shackle people to a bloated government?
Bezos without doubt. But Musk may be coming around to the right, and paying the price. The WSJ reported today that Tesla sales to Democrats have dropped 40%. due to his statements on political topics.
Nothing says "freedom" better than Communist lingo such as "enemy within"!
I think the Two-Party System is one of the elephants lurking in the room, and we should address it, since Americans believe that it's INEVITABLE that we MUST have it. The two-party system is BULLSHIT, and was always meant to be, like so much of the rest of the bullshit we're fed as "The Way Things Are."
Because we in the US are so incredibly brainwashed and those with critical thinking skills still on "Function" are seemingly quite the minority, I think we, as in, those of us who CAN think critically, need to do as our slave-drivers do, and keep repeating, over and over and over, the basics that we, the Critical Thinkers, take for granted.
Things such as:
* A two-party system is nonsense and sets us up for continual Divide & Conquer
* We should NEVER trust politicians, no matter what
* The idea that we are "voting" must be addressed
* The idea that we need a CENTRALIZED GOVT must be addressed
* The idea that a STANDING ARMY is necessary must be addressed
* The fact that our INCOME is taxed, still, even though the bill to allow this anathema was never ratified, must be addressed.
* The fact that we are 'kept" people in reality, but told we have "rights," must be addressed
Okay, you get the idea. Add your own, folks. If you can't think of more, I'll add more later.
I mean this to be a response to you, WHD, but not ONLY to you... I suspect you'd agree with me, anyway. ;)
A caution I would have about the more freedom vs more government rhetoric explaining the left-right divide; is that the left also wants freedom... freedom from responsibility. While many of us on the right like classical liberty, the left is the faction of licentiousness. Accountability sometimes has to be enforced... by force. Whereas most rightists want to use force when it is genuinely necessary, the left wants to use force when it is not necessary.
Maybe it was a successful psyop by leftists to condition me (and a large portion of the general populace) to think of "freedom" as mere lack of restraint. This psyop is what leads to social liberalism and all its evil, whether defund the police, drugs, gay rights, sexual immorality, etc. Is doing whatever the hell you want to do actually what "freedom" even means?
IMHO freedom means a lack of restraint. In the context of left-right struggle, freedom means freedom from being controlled by the left. Because the left's desire to control the rest of us is the sole source of the left-right difference.
I fail to see why it needs to be more complicated than that.
True. This is better, making it specific. We want freedom from the left (something I want badly). Just like how our ancestors wanted freedom from the tyrannical British government.
The left wants a strange chimera of anarchy and socialism. We, the right, oppose murders and thefts, and liberty from the state overextending unjust authority.
I suspect that the leftists anarchist e.g. the leftist "anarchist" who assassinated McKinley (who was really a socialist), want to destroy the government and social structure, so that they can get in control. Then nothing like anarchy will be allowed.
At the end of the day, all the ideological terminology is superfluous. It is a battle between good and evil.
We want liberty from the tyrannical state.
Freedom to do what? Tell gay people they can't get married?
A gay man can marry whatever woman he wants to.
Ideally, all activity including no activity must be punishable.
Not literally. Some activity is permissible while some activity is not permissible. The English usually abide by "everything that is not forbidden is allowed".
"everything that is not forbidden is allowed"
That was the idea of the Constitution. The powers of the federal government were listed and limited. All other powers not listed belonged to the states and individuals. Didn't stay that way long, though.
True, and Americans as well, but I think the authoritarians in the deep state want everything to be forbidden unless explicitly allowed. We are more that way now than when I was young.
Ethnically and culturally Americans are English. We fought the revolution in order to protect English legal traditions from the inventions of the new British government (and we didn't want to pay the taxes either).
The legal joke is that in England, everything that is not forbidden is allowed. In Germany, everything that is not allowed is forbidden. In France, everything is allowed, even if it is forbidden.
As for history, the terms "left" and "right" as political shorthand was first used during the French revolution. The leftists were the revolutionaries, while the rightists supported the king. Remember that once the leftists completely took over they killed the king, his family, and tens of thousands of other people in order to force the revolutionaries' wacky utopia to come into being.
Yes, the leftists themselves have reversed the labels they used for themselves at least three or four times.
The French people who opposed the monarchy in favor of representative government would now be called the "right" no matter which side of the assembly they sat on. The U.S. leftists switched the word 'liberal' from meaning 'favoring less government' to the opposite meaning in a speech by FDR in 1946. The leftist media switched the colors of the left-right in 1980 so that the Democrats wouldn't look like "reds" on TV. And so on.
I never get tired of pointing this out. But no one seems to remember or care what I said. After I’m dead no one will be left to point out that the left always twists words to lie about what they really are. IMHO we need to call them leftists and stick to it, even though they will doubtless try to change it again. They do it consciously and intentionally.
To quote a 2002 LA Times article by a leftist who wanted to switch the meanings again, "Some Democrats have opted for the former strategy. They prefer the term progressive to liberal and hope to sidestep the old Roosevelt terminology [i.e. when he reversed the meaning of 'liberal''] altogether... A bolder strategy would be to reclaim the liberal tag."
The right never seems to catch on to the left's label-switching game. It always seems to fool us.
"Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."
Robert A. Heinlein
Very true. Words have literal definitions, so it can be hard to name political factions after them sincerely. For example, conservative and liberal really shouldn't correspond to left or right, yet they do only by popular convention.
Great essay. Of course, only "right wing" is a thing as we never hear "left wing" attributable to anything by the left-wing legacy media.
Many untruths here. 'Twas the Right that was into censorship, meddling in personal affairs, and filling up the prisons back in the day. Legalizing homosexuality is reducing government. Social engineering to make homosexuality celebrated is serious government meddling. Hanging negros from the bridge for violating curfew is rather meddlesome. Giving negroes the right to sue for millions of dollars if they hear the N word at work is meddlesome.
Two axes are needed. One for equality and one for amount of government. A half century ago most of Team D was in the lower left, with Carter and Clinton doing some upper left things. Team R was a coalition of lower right and upper right. Nothing small government about either Bush. Donald Trump has been dragging Team R kicking and screaming into the upper left, which Team D has become the special interest party, so it is not a mix of lower left and lower right.
There was a huge surge in regulation during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Significant deregulation under Carter and Reagan. Prices on trucking, rail freight, and air transport were deregulated during this time. Thanks to inflation, the federal minimum wage had been steadily dropping since 2009.
Thanks for commenting. Many untruths there, though. I won't refute them all. Obviously, my position is that the left-right spectrum is a one-dimensional, between two poles: More government - less government. No upper-left, etc. "Hanging negros from the bridge for violating curfew" is not less government, it is not rightist.
There was absolutely no net deregulation in the Reagan administration, let alone Carter's. Literally a half-dozen regulations were repealed in that time, while tens of thousands of substantive new ones were created. The "Era of Deregulation" is a leftist invention, a total lie. It never happened and nothing remotely like it happened in the U.S. in the last 100 years, and that can be proven beyond any doubt.
And the most far right party is the Libertarian party.
And the most sensible is Anarchy... Community, local, cooperative.
Then drug warriors get Left cred and free speech advocates get Right cred under your projection.
Absolutely. (As long as the free speech advocates are serious about free speech, and not just advocating free speech until they get in power, and then revoking free speech (I think you know who I'm talking about)).
I care less about heart of hearts vs. what people are currently doing. Unlike Keanu Reeves' character in "The Devil's Advocate" I cannot read souls. If someone is currently working to liberate, I give them cred. When someone works to remove liberty, they have negative cred.
And yes, this applies to Libertarians. Many in the LP were just Republicans who either wanted legal drugs or legal gay stuff. When the courts enforced the not-passed Equal Rights Amendment and imposed gay marriage, I saw many Libertarians celebrate. I mourned, as I knew all sorts of affirmative action mandates were to follow. Which happened in short order, and then extended to propagandizing elementary students.
Those Libertarians lost cred. The Religious Right has more cred NOW, because they are now the ones advocating social liberty.
Similar arguments apply to immigration. In an idealized propertarian society, immigrants would have to pay for the private roads, etc. and they wouldn't get welfare. So open borders would be a pro liberty position. But since we have public spaces, elections, and a welfare system, open borders is an anti-liberty position.
Yes, some issues cannot be as black-and-white as libertarians believe. Humans and our systems of interaction are complex and there will always be gray areas.
"Many in the LP were just Republicans who either wanted legal drugs or legal gay stuff."
They also wanted to watch movies and play video games for free, hence their opposition to intellectual property, even though IP is a new kind of private property and libertarians should love it. If you are on the right side if the L-R spectrum, and want more freedom, are you for or against IP rights. It isn't as clear as libertarians would like to think.
Look at all the LAWS we have. Has it made us a good country to live in? Laws are a joke when those with the POWER granted by WEALTH can simply ignore them, or re-write them, or tweak them to their own advantage...
What I think is the fundamental issue here is what do we really NEED beyond the Constitution? LIFE, LIBERTY, and the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS... We're talking about personal autonomy, personal freedom (of course that comes with the responsibility to do no harm), and NATURAL LAW... We don't need no stinkin' governance. We need to live and let live and the let living must be FAIR, not meted out by rich men who profit from fuckery and war, war, war.
Never trust a rich man to make decisions for others.
"The policy of the Right is: Live and let live."
Unless you're gay, of course.
If anyone is struggling to find a true north, I would recommend listening to the defected KGB agent, and lover of freedom, Yuri Bezmenov. Several of his interviews can be found on y tube.
And any person would gain useful insight from going back in time, to hear first hand, the mindset of communism.
But that's not what your party is doing. GOP is about giving the extremely rich more wealth and giving the rest of us nothing. Have you seen a tax cut aimed at the middle class alone? The rich are enjoying less taxes than everyone else. Mine may be 30% but their's are less. They tend to keep their wealth instead of reinvesting it in companies. Everyone takes a cut while they just keep getting richer. Look at how much a day's wage paid for in the 1970s vs today.
Most of those "rich" are leftist billionaires. The GOP is not "my party". It is a wing of the leftist Uniparty, as they prove over and over.
But it's NOT "liberalism," at all. It's FASCISM.
It is necessary to understand that LANGUAGE FUCKERY is a huge tool, and one that has long been used to confuse us, and most importantly, in the game of Divide and Conquer.
I think people should consider this Language Fuckery a lot, lot, lot more than we do. It is kind of critical to how we figure out what to do, and whom to do it to.