Posts tagged Conservatives

Re: Anarchist/liberal violence (Updated)

RyanBooth: “I’m not particularly concerned whether they are members of your particular collective…”

For reference, I am an Anarchist, I’ve lived in Santa Cruz in the past, and I’ve corresponded with some of the kids at SubRosa. But I am not a member of the SubRosa collective. 

RyanBooth: “Anyway, you’ve confirmed what I thought: that trust-fund college dropouts aren’t enjoying their funemployment … “

Well, if that’s the conclusion you want to draw, have fun drawing it. But whether or not that’s what you originally thought, it’s not what you originally said, and this strikes me as moving the goalposts. What you claimed was that there were specific organizational connections and “coordination” between (1) the possibly Anarchist rioters at the May Day riot; (2) the definitely Anarchist organizers in the SubRosa project; (3) the non-Anarchist organizers of the unrelated, permitted immigration/worker’s rights rally that was held earlier in the day. 

After the first round of questions and comments you silently dropped the claim about formal connections between (2) and (3). Now you seem to be dropping the claim that there is are any formal ties between (1) and (2) as well, in favor of some vague hand-waving based on some impressionistic sketches of dirty ingrate hippies, dirty immigrants, and effete liberals all “confluing” with each other, perhaps on a spiritual level or something, even though there are no formal ties or organizational connections between the groups you’re lumping together. Well, OK, whatever. But then we’re back to the original question. Say X is violent, and X happened to meet Y one day in Y’s public place of business, while X was passing through, and while X was there they saw a flyer about this other event, which Y didn’t organize, and which is not actually the event that Z organized, either, but which was scheduled to take place on the same day as the event that Z organized, and which was inspired by political ideas that maybe kind of loosely remind you of Z’s political ideas, if you squint at them hard enough, and none of these guys have any actual personal or organizational connections with each other, except for casual acquaintances or some kind of vague resemblance when viewed by Ryan Booth, and at the end of all this, there’s some big deal to be made about the “confluence” of X’s violence and Z’s political rally and by the way X also kind of creeps you out because it reminds you of this fictional story you once read or saw or whatever. No doubt you have some serious political concerns about each of the folks being discussed individually — problems with the rioters, problems with SubRosa and Anarchists in general, problems with immigrants-rights activists, and problems with political liberals. Fine; I even agree with you about some of that (I have problems with the rioters too, and plenty of problems with political liberals.) But these problems are problems you can address individually, to the person or group actually responsible for the thing you have a problem with, without drawing some kind of fantasy org chart based on “strong confluences” that allows you to act as if SubRosa or liberals or whoever is somehow responsible for acts they had nothing to do with. And I have to wonder what purpose this kind of guilt-by-free-association game is supposed to serve. 

You rightly complain about this kind of cheap rhetorical trick when it’s used to smear people in the Tea Party for violence committed by unhinged loners, whose subculture or statements happen to kinda sorta remind Keith Olbermann of something he once heard about Republicans which kinda resembles the signs at a Tea Party rally. You’re right to complain about that kind of nonsense; so why not hold yourself to the same standards that you expect of others, even when it comes to people that you like less?
<strong>RyanBooth:</strong> <em>”I’m not particularly concerned whether they are members of your particular collective…”</em>
For reference, I am an Anarchist, I’ve lived in Santa Cruz in the past, and I’ve corresponded with some of the kids at SubRosa. But I am not a member of the SubRosa collective.
<strong>RyanBooth:</strong> <em>”Anyway, you’ve confirmed what I thought: that trust-fund college dropouts aren’t enjoying their funemployment … “</em>
Well, if that’s the conclusion you want to draw, have fun drawing it. But whether or not that’s what you originally thought, it’s not what you originally said, and this strikes me as moving the goalposts. What you claimed was that there were specific organizational connections and “coordination” between (1) the possibly Anarchist rioters at the May Day riot; (2) the definitely Anarchist organizers in the SubRosa project; (3) the non-Anarchist organizers of the unrelated, permitted immigration/worker’s rights rally that was held earlier in the day.
After the first round of questions and comments you silently dropped the claim about formal connections between (2) and (3). Now you seem to be dropping the claim that there is are any formal ties between (1) and (2) as well, in favor of some vague hand-waving based on some impressionistic sketches of dirty ingrate hippies, dirty immigrants, and effete liberals all “confluing” with each other, perhaps on a spiritual level or something, even though there are no formal ties or organizational connections between the groups you’re lumping together. Well, OK, whatever. But then we’re back  to the original question. Say X is violent, and X happened to meet Y one day in Y’s public place of business, while X was passing through, and while X was there they saw a flyer about this other event, which Y didn’t organize, and which is not actually the event that Z organized, either, but which was scheduled to take place on the same day as the event that Z organized, and which was inspired by political ideas that maybe kind of loosely remind you of Z’s political ideas, if you squint at them hard enough, and none of these guys have any actual personal or organizational connections with each other, except for casual acquaintances or some kind of vague resemblance when viewed by Ryan Booth, and at the end of all this, there’s some big deal to be made about the “confluence” of X’s violence and Z’s political rally and by the way X also kind of creeps you out because it reminds you of this fictional story you once read or saw or whatever. No doubt you have some serious political concerns about each of the folks being discussed individually — problems with the rioters, problems with SubRosa and Anarchists in general, problems with immigrants-rights activists, and problems with political liberals. Fine; I even agree with you about some of that (I have problems with the rioters too, and plenty of problems with political liberals.) But these problems are problems you can address <em>individually,</em> to the person or group actually responsible for the thing you have a problem with, without drawing some kind of fantasy org chart based on “strong confluences” that allows you to act as if SubRosa or liberals or whoever is somehow responsible for acts they had nothing to do with. And I have to wonder what purpose this kind of guilt-by-free-association game is supposed to serve.
You rightly complain about this kind of cheap rhetorical trick when it’s used to smear people in the Tea Party for violence committed by unhinged loners, whose subculture or statements happen to kinda sorta remind Keith Olbermann of something he once heard about Republicans which kinda resembles the signs at a Tea Party rally. You’re right to complain about that kind of nonsense; so why not hold yourself to the same standards that you expect of others, even when it comes to people that you like less?

Re: Mariana Evica by Roderick Tracy Long: “Two things conservatives like to say…”

By “this guy” do you mean Roderick Long, the author of the article? If so, then I don’t think you’ve correctly understood the “view of Christianity” he espouses. As a matter of fact, Long’s post is not about promoting any view of Christianity at all. If you’ll look more carefully at the post, you’ll see that it’s about promoting a particular view of conservatism.

Raphael,… See More

Roderick explains what he means by “Austro-Athenian” in the tagline of the blog: ‘”Austro” as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, “Athenian” as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.’ It has to do with Roderick’s interests in the joint and several insights of Viennese philosophy, the Austrian school of economics, classical philosophy, and Athenian democratic theory.

Junto,

Man, I already read Ayn Rand’s review of J.H. Randall’s /Aristotle/ a long time ago [*], and it didn’t taste any better coming back up than it did going down.

Rand was many things, but a careful scholar of antiquity she was not, and especially not when she lapsed into this kind of world-historical theorizing. Her view of Plato, and of Aristotle’s relationship to him, is so wide of the mark as to be laughable. (For starters, if you think that Plato’s point is to doubt “the cognitive efficacy of man’s [sic] mind,” or to “deny and surrender … [the human person’s] particular mode of consciousness” then I can only say that your reading of Plato is a curious one. And would perhaps benefit from actually doing some, well, reading, of what Plato has to say about reason, consciousness and cognition.)

[*] Originally appeared in the Objectivist Newsletter May 1963; reprinted in The Voice of Reason, pp. 6-12; also excerpted in the Ayn Rand Lexicon under “Aristotle,” if I’m not mistaken.

Re: Business Flies Mexican Flag about U.S. Flag in Reno, American Patriot Cuts it Down

Ray,

What law would the barkeep face charges under? The Federal Flag Code (4 U.S.C. §§ 4-10) has no enforcement section and defines no penalties. The rules for the time, occassion, position, and manner of display of the flag are voluntary guidelines “for the use of such civilians or civilian groups or organizations as may not be required to conform with regulations promulgated by one or more executive departments of the Government of the United States” (4 U.S.C. § 5). Unless you are in the military or part of a government agency, there is no federal agency that has the authority to impose any binding rules on how you can or cannot display a United States flag on your own private property.

Leland,

So, on your view, as a conservative, it’s O.K. for “a real American hero” to barge into somebody else’s place of business with a combat knife, cut up their private property, and then steal their flag from their own private flag pole?

The chills I get from this video don’t feel like “pride.”