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Exploding Heads at Kasama

Submitted by Alcuin on Sat, 01/07/2012 - 9:03am
Departments: 
Department of Stop it! You're killing me!

There is a hugely funny comments section in response to the Kasama Project re-posting Glenn Greenwald's Salon piece on Ron Paul. Talk about exploding heads! I almost ruined my keyboard, eating my breakfast cereal and reading the comments! And Carl Davidson learned something! Rich.

Comments

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

Kasama:

It’s perfectly legitimate to criticize Paul harshly and point out the horrible aspects of his belief system and past actions. But that’s worthwhile only if it’s accompanied by a similarly candid assessment of all the candidates, including the sitting President.

Exacty.

Submitted by MontanaMaven on

Well, that was disappointing. I like reading Greenwald's take on politics, but love Exiled and Mark Ames. If they are saying he can't be trusted, it's disheartening. I've gone through a pile of people who I admired and then were disappointed in. Sigh. Life is complicated and getting to consensus is very very hard. I will continue to read, but must keep my critical thinking questioning hat on.

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

I guess I won't stop reading either...

I'd like to make the Cato Institute stuff straightened out. Though strange bedfellows proliferate these days.

Submitted by MontanaMaven on

I'm finding odd agreement with some of the right libertarian take on government the more I read about left libertarianism. But the right loves private property and the left doesn't. I've found by opening up a discussion amongst so called conservatives and NPR liberals about the what their ideas of anarchism is, I find nobody really knows. My liberal friend said, "The Anarchist Cookbook", right? It's about making bombs.
And another one said, " I think it's about causing chaos. Screwing up the system."

But those ideas are wildly off what I have read so far as far as the left version. Anarchism seeks horizontal organization and voluntary participation in any organization. It seeks both working communally and respecting the individual. The left libertarians are anti-authoritarian and, from what I can tell, the right libertarians haven't fessed up to their love of Big Daddy and the belief in some sort of hierarchy.

Oscar Wilde in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism".

"He who would be free," says a fine thinker, "must not conform." And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of overfed barbarism amongst us....Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under Socialism and Individualism will die out

Submitted by Alcuin on

Ask just about anyone for the definition of anarchism or cynicism and they'll get it wrong. But because there is such intense pressure to stay within socially accepted norms, cynicism has been hijacked to mean a negative outlook on life and anarchism has been hijacked to mean someone throwing Molotov cocktails. Both words represent a reality much more complex than those definitions would indicate and it takes a contrarian or a rugged individualist to do the research necessary to find out what those words really mean.

We're all crazy, like you said earlier, right? The first step in dehumanizing people is to define them as "beyond the pale". Once that is done, then it becomes O.K. to discriminate, victimize, and ultimately kill. The pressure to stay between the lines is immense.

Submitted by Alcuin on

I like to take the "best of" from lots of people - just because Greenwald was involved with the Cato Institute doesn't necessarily make him a bad person. Christians like to say that the only perfect person was Jesus Christ and I think they have a point there. The problem always ends up being heuristics - the short cuts that we use to understand the world. Life is a lot more complicated than any heuristic model that anyone can come up with. We all have feet of clay ...

Submitted by MontanaMaven on

As we try to come up with something communal and individual, it would be nice if Ames and Greenwald could get along.

Turlock