Poor, Pitiful Palin

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Redux

Silly me. I thought pro-American means having those core values of respecting the fact that we are all not required to think alike and one is free to express an opinion regarding what is best for the country w/o having his/her patriotism questioned.

A rhetorical question for you …..why is it that those who claim they put “country above party” (you, Merc, UG) are most often the same ones who are so intolerant and dismissive of the views of fellow citizens?

What we're dismissive of is views that amount to active support of less-than-democracies, that don't amount to active support of liberal democracies and the capitalism whereby they flourish (though you yourself are less hostile to capitalism than some bad examples we could name presently strutting the national stage), and in your particular case, your steady effort at uncalling (to coin some Newspeak) a spade a spade in insisting that socialistic policies instituted by the present Democratic Congress and Administration are somehow not socialistic. We know what socialism looks like, and we know what it does too -- punkers were simply a quick visual manifestation of socialism-driven goofballery, with their damaged clothing and their somebody-tied-me-to-a-chair-to-give-me-these haircuts. No; I quite dislike ugly styles. Even worse are styles vying in their ugliness.

I think there's a disconnect between your raw intellectual powers and your political allegiance -- voting Dem is for dull-normals. People who live without values that can actually be valuable. That sort of suboptimality. There isn't, by contrast, a disconnect between my politics and my brainpower, nor is there for Merc or Classic.

We're not intolerant. We're just able to make value judgements and to live by them. Some ideas and ways are worth more than others, and we three, anyway, seek the ways that are worth more, forsaking the ways that are worth less -- with the space or without it. (And we're the loudest about it, which is why I noticed.) Now you, by contrast, inasmuch as you have so internalized white liberal guilt that you believe it to be a moral structure and a road to virtue, are left trying to imply that we'd better live life without values, as your posts suggest you do. We are what not paralyzed by white liberal guilt looks like and sounds like, and I guarantee that's a better road than what you've hitherto trod.

"Fellow citizen" -- how would that equal "wise?" I'll quote Heinlein (as seems inevitable )

Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.

Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again, too. Who decides?

A lot of subtle and provocative tensions between those two suspension points. The question of how wise the million could be was brought home to me sharply in the Clinton and Obama elections, not so in Carter's.

We do not see that the "difference of opinion" adds up to being pro-democracy, pro-liberal social orders, pro-prosperity enough. Because of your liberal guilt, you're not enough of an apostle of democracy. Were you enough of one, you'd be ravening to cut Ba'athist throat, among those of other nondemocrats viciously opposing the democratizing and enriching effects of globalization. This would not necessarily make you a nice guy, don't get me wrong -- but it would be enough, aye, even a surplus. I think we three would only raven about it if we were in a particularly bad mood; we're not quite proof against the sable bird. Still, we cannot despise cutting totalitarian throats, and we have no reason to object to their passing from this world to another. It means they can't enslave our fellow creatures here. That is valuable.

Failing to destroy foreign tyrants, and domestic ones, is NOT "best for the country." Our troubles don't come from places of democracies. They come from places of tyranny, of undemocracy. So do not fail to destroy these things of villainy.

Thus we do; thus, you do not.

Thus, you could be doing. We wouldn't kick you out of the treehouse for trying.