Imagine my astonishment to find that Scylla doesn’t much like hippies. I don’t suppose it would shock the shit out of you to know I was there. Not with Kesey (if only!), but Haight-Ashbury, 1967. About 90% of the ugly shit you describe, none of which I deny, can’t be fairly blamed on the counterculture ( a term I much prefer to hippy, except when talking to another grizzled veteran of the Acid Wars).
When the media started exploiting the situation for content, all hell broke loose! Thousands, and I mean literally thousands of runaway kids showed up expecting to be fed, housed, drugged and loved. My heart nearly broke when I saw a girl about fourteen scarfing a can of dog food. Yes, they were running toward an illusion, going to San Francisco with flowers in thier hair.
But they were running from a truth, a truth grey, heartless, uniform, and, worst of all, hopeless. Go to school, pick yer box, climb into it and run your gerbil wheel til its time to retire and go wait to die.
Now, understand, there were really very very few actual “hippies”. Just about entirely, they were the invention of the very media that doted upon them. Kids who had never seen a hippy, dressed like one and ran off to meet the “real thing”. When they got there, each mistook the other for authenticity, while the Founding Wierdos had taken off for the hinterlands to get away from it.
And give credit where credit is due: in an impossible situation, with no allies and a no “power base” whatsoever, they improvised and did so magnificently. Naive? Sure. Clumsy, inept, romantic, foolhardy! All of that.
But then that day, when I first saw a bus full of schoolkids riding by, laughing and making “peace” signs out the window. That glint of sunshine through the grey wall of Obedience.
I’m surprised you think I got something against hippies. Now go get a haircut and find a job!
I sincerely envy you your experience. In the summer of 1967 I was born, while my father went back to Vietnam for his second tour. If he doesn’t harbor any particular dislike for hippies (other than specific instances of contempt for specific individuals and incidents,) than I don’t see how I can seeing as I wasn’t even there.
Oddly, it was he who gave me a copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as great reading, and providing an excellent insight into this time. If you’ve read it I’d love to compare notes, perhaps in MPSIMS. If you haven’t, do, you’re in for a treat.
Wolfe does a nice job of describing the best, the worst, and the just plain silly aspects of that time. I’d love to hear what one who was there had to say about.
Whooooaaaa, don’t be labelling me with your hangups, man. Just becaused I used one example that showed a negative impact of the counterculter, you don’t get to label me as THE MAN. One example is not a blanket indictment, you know? Like I said bad stuff about specifics in the Chinese Revolution, but that doesn’t mean I hate the Chinese.
Anyway, you’d be mistaken to assume I have anything against granola-headed tree-huggers, other than a general abhorrence of fanatics and zealots of any ilk of which the counterculture had its share.
I cannot swallow this. There is a very clear logic to the homey old maxim, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” To defend the current U.S. educational system on the grounds that screwing with it might make it even worse strikes me as unconscionable.
That’s not to say I’m against military reforms that will improve our fighting capacity. I am in favor of ending the ban on gay military service. But that is because I consider our present military superiority to be fleeting; that we must consider future challenges, not just present ones, since at present there really isn’t any major threat to national military security. To say that we should play around with the military just because there’s “room” because it “already kicks major ass” is outright silly. It’s something akin to rewriting the Bill of Rights because it already does a butt-kicking job of protecting individual liberties.
If vouchers can be shown to have been tried and failed (I have heard this claimed, but only by ultra-biased NEA sources that I trust about as much as the Family Research Council), that is an argument against vouchers in whatever form they were implemented. But it sure as heck is not an argument against educational reform in general, when our pre-college educational system is the laughingstock of the industrialized world.
I think you are trying to have your cake and eat it, too. I understand why you don’t want to be labeled as a Social Darwinist, since that particular school of thought hasn’t been fashionable since Britain was an imperial power to be reckoned with. But you do say:
So you’re not a card-carrying Darwinist, just a closet case.
One can recognize certain similarities between the allocation of power and resources and social development. Evolution has absolutely nothing to do with it. The prevalence and institutionalization of so many truly horrible ideas is more than enough proof that the Marketplace of Ideas and Social Evolution are capitalist fantasies. The “good ideas”, or the principles of society that have “evolved”, tend to preserve the existing distributions of wealth and power.
Rapid Change > Instability
Instability = Bad
Ergo Stability, the result of slow change, is good.
The fact that most people believe that this is a good thing is due more to collective fantasy and manipulation by those in power than a genuine appraisal of the status quo.
Do not mistake me for a Marxist. I am as committed a capitalist as any conservative. Yet I refuse to buy into much of its idealistic rhetoric and logical yet wholly unsubstantiated claims. Capitalism is good because it makes money, not because it is inherently fair or because it causes positive social change.
So yes, I would argue that there are powerful srains of Social Darwinism in conservative philosophy, and certainly in conservative rhetoric. Thus it is unsurprising to me that conservatives, or at least the common perception thereof, tend to be those who have “survived” their imagined process of natural selection.
I realize I am painting with a brush wide enough to shellac the broad side of a barn in three strokes here. Many social conservatives are religiously motivated, but just as often the way a fiscal conservative thinks spills over into social spheres, resulting in social conservatism on some issues.
So where does this leave us? To crystallize, I think that conservative thinking, despite its pretexts of ultra-rationality and unemotional long-term thinking, is essentially rationalization and justification for obedience and is symptomatic of the power that is wielded by Authorities over our minds.
Yes, I am certain that homey adage was kicked around when admitting woman and blacks into the military was considered. And it is as irrelevant today as it was fifty years ago.
This is selective misinterpretation. Perhaps you can direct me to the passage where I said that we should tinker with the military for sheer amusement only. Come on, Danimal. Obviously the admission of openly homosexual men and women is intended to effect a practical, tactical end.
Your analogy also proves my point. The Bill of Rights has not been “rewritten”, but how many constitutional amendments have been passed since then? Ever hear of the Establishment Clause?
The rest of your post is academic. We can disagree about vouchers until the cows come home and achieve very little.
I think the difference is that
(i) conservatives pull others forward by placing a conservative hand in that person’s hand, whereas
(ii) liberals push others forward by placing a liberal hand on the butt of that person.
The exact same argument can be made – with more ready example, in fact – about liberalism, at least as manifested by the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party’s base is, historically, made up of three groups:
labor unions
minorities
East Coast liberals who have been voting Democrat for generations – for so long they probably, if pressed, couldn’t immediately give you an explanation as to why, other than something such as, “In this house, we vote Democratic.”
All of the above groups (changing somewhat with the labor group, because many of the workers are also gun-toting hunters) are “obedient” as hell. Is their voting history and the reasons for it not an example of “rationalization and justification for obedience?”
As you watch Jesse Jackson refuse to come out of his bunkers in Florida, letting his speech get more and more incendiary and divisive, and watch his supporters follow behind in lock-step, ask yourself if that is “symptomatic of the power that is wielded by Authorities over our minds.”
I guess if I had to be labeled anything, I would be labeled conservative. The label applies much more readily when it comes to politics and fiscal policy than in other aspects of my life, where I tend to be libertarian or even left-of-center.
I think federal programs for the most part are overly bureaucratic and bloated, slow, costly, out of touch, ineffective at local levels and can be discriminatory by region, by race, by sex, by income.
I resent so much of my paycheck going weekly to fund the above. I would much rather see people have more control over their own money, and more people empowered to increase their own prosperity.
This is not a comparison of conservatism and liberalism. Milo, though I respect your point of view and your style of argumentation, I think you are being disingenuous.
You follow up with perfectly fair criticims of the democratic party. But you conclude:
No. The Democratic Party doesn’t do that. Government relief programs on both the federal and local levels are not by definition bloated and overbureaucratic.
And I am glad you like to see people empowered to increase their own prosperity. How do you feel about the EITC then? Or government-funded education?
I do not want to get too OT here. Nor do I intend to turn Scylla’s most interesting thread into a dicksizing contest. I am just curious.
I agree that in this particular case it is not relevant. The reason it is not relevant is that the current U.S. military superiority is not guaranteed to last for all time. Other world armed forces will in the future seek to establish parity or dominance over our own, and we must continually seek to improve our own. I agree with you that admitting gays into the military would be such an improvement.
What I do not agree about is that the current dominance of the U.S. military is an argument in favor of “playing around” with it. If the U.S. armed forces were currently capable of being beaten by a potentially hostile country, that would be more reason to try to improve our military capacity, not less.
Blacks were first admitted to the U.S. armed forces in the Civil War, at a time when the Union army was getting humiliated by numerically inferior forces, so the analogy doesn’t apply to today’s U.S. armed forces. I am not aware of any time in U.S. history where women have not served in some military capacity; the WACs were established in WWI, so I don’t know what you mean by “fifty years ago.”
Sorry if I’ve misinterpreted you. I agree that it is obvious that the admission of open gays is intended to effect a practical, tactical end. That is the point I was trying to make. It was not clear at all to me that your statement “There is room to play around with the military since it already kicks major ass” had anything to do with practical benefits to American war-fighting capability to be derived from admitting open gays.
Yes, there have been 17 amendments passed since the Bill of Rights, 8 of which protect individual rights. I would say that each of those 8 was passed to correct a deficiency in the Bill of Rights. Failing to outlaw slavery was a fairly obvious deficiency, or at least it’s obvious in hindsight, and the 13th amendment corrected that. I have no objection to correcting problems with the Bill of Rights or with the military, it’s the propounding of “there’s room to play around with it,” rather than “there’s a problem needing to be fixed” as an argument in favor of reform that was bothering me.
Your reference to the Establishment Clause mystifies me. It’s in the 1st Amendment. That’s part of the Bill of Rights. It hasn’t been changed. No subsequent amendment even refers to it.
Danimal, we are working at cross purposes. I will try to make myself absolutely clear.
I stand by my statement that since our military is state of the art, there is room for experimentation.
This in no way whatsoever implies that we should perform experiments for their own sakes. Our superiority is certainly not preordained, and must be worked for.
My statement is an objection to those who would be unwilling to take measures to improve the military because it is already state of the art. Since we must continuously work to preserve its status, it is our obligation to innovate. Reread my remarks in the context of puddleglum’s objection. The cost of a potentially failed reform is lower since our military is already preeminent.
Sorry I was unclear. I was referring to the due process clause in Article I of the 14th Amendment and the subsequent legal interpretation of it as a revision of the Establishment Clause.
I didn’t see after that statement what, exactly, you say I am being disingenuous about.
My statements about the liberal base of support are pretty self-evident, aren’t they? And the rest is my opinion, why I support conservative political viewpoints more often than not. I’m not being disingenuous about my opinion.
So, I’m confused about what you’re talking about.
I would say I made observations, not criticisms. (Well, maybe it’s apparent I am critical of what Jesse Jackson is doing.)
Damn, you liberals sure are sensitive.
Is there some other representative party of liberal views I am not aware of, other than the Democratic Party? For the record, I don’t think Socialism or Communism do that, either.
We might be getting hung up in semantics, here. And I may be politicizing a thread that Scylla didn’t want to take to necessarily take (or, at least, leave) in the political arena. By my views on liberalism and conservatism go back to politics invariably. That’s where each viewpoint has the most likelihood of affecting people in general, through implementation of policy.
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Mixed emotions. It seems to be an incentive to get people at the very bottom and on welfare to work, up to a point. After a certain income level, however, it appears to offer a disincentive to continuing to pull oneself out of poverty. This runs counter to my desire to personally empower people.
In some cases, people need education and help with their mind-set about being dependent on something or someone other than themselves for their prosperity, if there is no really good reason for them not to be self-supporting.
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Giving all of our children the best education possible, from sea to shining sea, is a national responsibility. But it’s best handled at a more hands-on, local and state level, where it can better reflect the will of the people in the communities where the education is going on - provided it meets national standards that it simply can’t be allowed to drop below.
The federal government’s role in education is questionable, in my opinion.
And I do support private education efforts and innovations such as charter schools, particularly for areas where those national standards aren’t being met. Vouchers I’m less sure of, because I worry about how they will affect public schools and the education of children who have little choice but to go to them. I voted against the proposal we had for them in Michigan this November.
I don’t think we are getting hung up on semantics. I just don’t think it’s fair to parley criticisms of the Democratic Party into criticisms of liberalism, which arguably died when McGovern lost. Personally, I believe that the Democratic Party is every bit as interested in rewarding its contsituents as any other party and has lost sight of its truly liberal goals.
Moreover, I don’t refute conservatism by picking on DeLay and Lott. Or even Reagan, tempting as it may be.
And here is where I believe the Democratic Party has sadly drifted.
And despite our opposite sides of the political spectrum on many other issues, I think we are in complete agreement regarding EITC and educational initiatives. I am all for the EITC encouraging people to get off welfare, but not applying it broadly enough to act as a disincentive. I agree that more local control over schools is necessary, provided that they meet national standards and don’t try to tamper with the separation of church and state. And provided that charter schools meet these same criteria, I am all for them.
If the Democratic Party is liberal, I’m Newt Gingrich. The Democratic Party is equally in the pockets of big business and moneyed interests as the Republicans.
“There’s a conservative politician whose record has me kind of worried, Frank. He presents himself as a moderate, but he used to be an adamant opponent of both abortion rights and gun control. He voted with Jesse Helms against a bill which would have protected HIV patients from discrimination - and sided with Helms during the Mapplethorpe controversy - he also once described homosexuality as “abnormal sexual behaviour!” He talks a good talk on the environment, but his record has been iffy at best; among other things, he helped undermine the Endangered Species Act on the snail darter case… fought for the construction of a nuclear reactor in his home state… and pushed for a free trade agreement on timber with no conservation meeasures. He was an outspoken proponent of the Gulf War… and has, over the course of his career, voted for the neutron bomb, the B-2 bomber, the Trident II, MX and Minuteman missiles, and backed Star Wars!!”
“So who is this neanderthal?”
“Why, it’s Al Gore, of course!”
Liberal? Oh yes. The Democrats are quite liberal when it comes to letting large corporations get whatever they want regardless to the damage to the social fabric and the environment. Much like the Republicans!
If you want a real left wing party, check out the Greens, or (in Canada) the NDP or Greens. But the idea of the Democratic Party being left-wing is the result of that little tale of two shitties you’ve got going on down there.
Uh, Milo… if you are conservative in your politics and your beliefs about fiscal policy…what remains for you to be “left of center” about? The laundry detergent you use?
Thank you for the excellent response, Scylla. I’d like to adress a few of your points:
In short, you claim that evolution is preferable to revolution. I agree with you whole-heartedly. However, I do believe that revolution is preferable to stagnation - that in certain cases, violent change is better than no change at all.
Take the Civil War (or however you prefer to call it). Ignore the fact that wars like that are not caused by select individuals, but simplt happen by the convergence of events, a thousand people making ten thousand decisions, many of them short-sighted and emotional. Of course a peaceful civil reform would have been better than all that terrible violence. If, say, laws had been passed in 1862 which would have ended slavery slowly, peacefully by 1880, many lives would have been saved and 150 years of animosity woyuld have been adverted. But are you sure that such laws could have been passed, and accepted by the south? Was there, in fact, a viable anti-slavery movement in the southern states at the time? I don’t believe there was. In fact, prior to the war, legislation was passed limiting even further the rights of slaves and those who wished to help them. Besides, IIRC, Lincoln did not include “immediate freedom to all slaves” on his election platfoem, though some of his more radical supporters may have implied it. Yet it was reactionary elements in the South who preferred seccession over any possibility of change - change which, with their influence, would probably have been slow, rational, and peaceful.
Or take the French and Russian Revolutions - certainly British-type evolution would have been preferable. However, you must remember one thing - neither the French nor the Russians are the British, who have always enjoyed more civil rights and an open society. Remember that England has always has had some form of parliment, as well as a free yeoman class and legal limits to the ruling powers, things that the other nations never had. In fact, ever since the 1500s, human rights had been slowly improving in England, while in France they were moving the opposite direction. By the time of the Revolution, the majority of the French were living under conditions of horrible poverty and opression, and most importantly - there was no sign that this was going to change. If my choice was between maintaining such an inhuman status quo and instigating fifty years of wars and atrocities, I’d have to go with the second option, because in the long run - things *have *improved. The French Revolution was the defining event of modern Europe, and without it, would we see the flourishing of (relatively) democratic states we see today? I’m not that sure.
As for Russia - it’s not very compareable. While there had been reforms in the years prior to the revolution (such as the freeing of the serfs in the late 19th century) the central government was so weak and orrupt that it had doomed itself. When the inevitable collapse happened, certain radical forces filled in the power vacuum. Yes, i would have preferred it if calmer, saner, more democracy-prone forces had seized control - but the Revolution itself was unavoidable.
Scylla, I think we may have a difference in opinion concerning definitions. While you call yourself a conservative, I call you a moderate, and your philosophy conforms to what I believe is the moderate way of thinking, and which I share with you. Yes, you are moderate Right, while I am moderate Left. Still, you have more in common with me than you have with the extreme Right, just as i have more in common with you than I have with certain Liberal elements. In fact, I believe you may have stacked the deck a bit with your arguments, comparing yourself - more or less in the middle - with people far to the left, while ignoring the fact that there are indeed a great many people far to your right, people with whom you do not necesserally agree.
Frankly, I believe that the great political struggle we face is not between Left and Right, Liberal and Conservative, but rather between Moderate and Extremist. In that fight, you and I are on the same side.
Sorry about the the long post. And again, thanks for the fascinating discussion.
Am I that easy to read, Maeglin? You are correct. Well, almost. I feel that if religious folks feel so strongly about homosexual unions being called ‘marriages,’ we should be pragmatic and just call it something else, as long as they get the same benefits of the union as a hetero couple would.
I also am very pro-privacy rights, limits on police power and I support abortion rights.
Whether that is libertarian or liberal depends on your individual viewpoint, I guess. I support the U.S. being strongly involved in foreign goings-on, so the Libertarians won’t have me.
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Perhaps … but I can hold those views and primarily support the Republican Party. Maybe I couldn’t once upon a time, but I can today.
My opinion of Democratic viewpoints on federal bureaucracy, taxes and spending drive me squarely over into the Republican camp.
Whether some of my views are conservative is up to the scrutinizer, I guess. They’re a few light years more conservative than Stoidela’s, of that I am certain. They’re also based on common sense and reason - another difference.
So, by choosing the Repubs based pretty much on money issues alone, you announce your priorities. Fair enough.
[sub]Psst: declaring how much common sense you have you are or how well you “reason” doesn’t really convince anyone of anything, you know. Why not just say what you want to say and let it speak for itself? If it is so well reasoned or rational, you can feel certain people will see it for themselves. And if it isn’t, they are just as sure to see that. Your opinion of it doesn’t really count, ya know? Feeling the need to inform people of your great reasoning skills bespeaks an uncertainty I feel sure isn’t your intention
