[ale] Well isn't this special

[Tim Watts]

Ironically, it's largely our American individualism that has brought us
to this point. We would rather sit in our comfy, consumer private
Idaho's than exercise our civic powers. Our culture encourages us to
pursue only our narrow selfish interests and discourages us from banding
together, finding common ground and exercising collective power. Divide
and conquer. The System needs a population of "individualists".

Using the terms Left & Right in a general context can only be
misleading. Each camp is multi-dimensional, overlapping and
contradictory. Collectivism and individualism are only bad in their
extremes. So what isn't? The Ayn Rand world view is so simplistic and
extreme it's not even funny. I was a fan of her in high school; then I
grew up.

Saying we have more to fear from the Left than the Right is kind of like
saying we have more to fear from electricity than gasoline because
getting electrocuted would be worse than being burned alive. There's
quite a number of assumptions going on there, no?



On Tue, 2010-09-28 at 23:32 -0400, Greg Clifton wrote:

> Say what you will about Bush/Cheney, and they were FAR from perfect,
> but they never said they needed a "civilian defense force as powerful
> and as well funded as the US military" which the current occupant of
> the White House has. There can be no purpose for such a force except
> to repress the people. Hitler's brown shirts come to mind.
> 
> Also, if you will check your history, it has been the LEFT wing
> Socialist/Communists who have murdered more [of their own people] than
> any Capitalist country.  Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Ho Che Min, Pol
> Pot, Castro, The Shining Path, Kim Jung Ill, Chavez; pick your
> favorite dictator and see if you can find ANY right wing regime that
> has been nearly as bloodthirsty as those on the left.
> This is not to say that I am in favor of a RIGHT wing dictatorship or
> anything near it. But to put things in historical perspective, we have
> more to fear from the Left than the Right because, in general, the
> left is more collectivist and the right is more individualist.
> 
> 
> GC
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 10:48 PM, arxaaron <arxaaron at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>         On 2010/09/27, at 17:36 , Watson, Keith wrote:
>         
>         > At first I thought it was a hoax or April Fools joke. It's
>         not.
>         >
>         > Government Seeks Back Door Into All Our Communications
>         > http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/government-seeks
>         >
>         > U.S. Tries to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet
>         > https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html
>         >
>         > keith
>         
>         
>         
>         While the overwhelming majority of attacks on our Civil
>         Liberties
>         with regards to Information Technology have come from greed
>         driven corporate corruptions of our copyright, patent and
>         privacy
>         laws (e.g. the DMCA), the fear mongers of the U.S. death
>         machine
>         industry are now blatantly backing the corporate efforts to
>         enforce
>         total censorship control over every aspect of our
>         communications
>         networks.  We are no longer simply fighting the predictable,
>         right
>         wing Corporate Welfare State protectionism that invited
>         unwarranted and unconstitutional invasions of privacy by
>         AT&T and other conglomerate network service providers --
>         what we are seeing now is a coordinated effort to pervert this
>         democrative technology into a weapon for creating and
>         entrenching a Globalized Corporate Police State.
>         
>         <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism>
>         
>         The Obama administration has made some respectable
>         headway addressing the morally and financially bankrupted
>         nation they were handed, especially when considering the
>         inexcusably petty, spiteful, obstructionist and infantile
>         behavior
>         of their opposition.
>         
>         None the less, when it comes to issues of civil liberties,
>         this administration is almost meeting the definition of
>         fascism as completely as the satanic horror show regime
>         that preceded it.  President O has done almost nothing to
>         slow the burning of the U.S. Constitution undertaken by
>         the 8 year national nightmare of Cheney, his Narcissist
>         Hand Puppet, and that regime's legacy of torture, mass
>         murder and treason.
>         
>         The regime change has slowed the national march
>         into fascism, but this juggernaut has been building
>         momentum for 30 years.  Between the whining,
>         phony, infantile teabaggers, the increasingly rabid
>         repub-lie-con attacks on the American working class,
>         the alarmingly arrogant bile of entitlement being
>         spewed by the gluttonous wealthy pig elitists and
>         the relentless onslaught of hate mongering Corporate
>         media propagandist lies, the forces pushing us into
>         the dark Orwellian world of 1984 have become
>         formidable.
>         
>         peace
>         aaron
>         
>         
>         
>         
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> 
> 
> 
> 
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________
One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that
to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.
-- Agatha Christie

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