Let me start by saying that this is not an endorsement of any particular party, candidate, or course of action. For one thing it would be awfully presumptuous of me to think that anything I could do or say would influence you more than stark reality, the thing about truth is that it’s unpersuadable- it doesn’t change because of the excellence of the argument or the eloquence of the presenter.
Likewise you have no expectation or entitlement to know anything at all about me like what I had for breakfast (a spinach quesadilla) or especially what I choose to do in a voting booth unless I tell you and at that I’ll likely lie my ass off unless my answer is inconsequential and then I’ll probably lie just for sport.
I’m not your mommy or daddy, or your child.
I’ll also repeat this just in case it’s slipped out of your consciousness-
DocuDharma and The Stars Hollow Gazette are explicitly non-partisan. You may freely express your support for any candidate. They are also public so if you publish an unpopular sentiment or inconvenient truth only your discretion and the obviously mean spirited nature of cross blog stalking protect you from consequences and suppression in other forums. Nor are your ideas immune from criticism and discussion here, but you won’t be sanctioned for anything except violating the normal rules of behavior.
Another thing that I don’t think people ‘get’ about me politically is that I’m really pretty conservative. Sure I’m in favor of confiscatory wealth taxes; strict environmental, fraud, business and financial regulation including criminal imprisonment of guilty managers, officers and directors in the general population just like any common cut purse; transaction taxes, punitive tariffs and currency controls; and dismantlement of the corporate welfare system including carbon energy, genetically modified agriculture and factory farming, and the military industrial complex including the subsidized National Security Theater, Prohibition Morality Police, and Privatized Prisons.
But I’m generally against changes to our Constitution. I like the Electoral College and filibuster because I think they help preserve minority and regional rights.
And yes, I do realize that the filibuster is not “Constitutional” except that part which says that Article One institutions (the House and Senate) get to establish their own rules.
On the other hand I am in favor of Article Three Court packing because the exact number of Justices is nowhere enshrined even nearly as well in our founding document or its amendments and has been set by legislative precedent (a power explicitly given to the Legislature by the Constitution and subject to Executive Veto) at various configurations between 6 and 10 (see, no historic preference for odd numbered tie breaking either).
FDR was right.
The nature of evil
The Republican Party is composed of 30% of the population who are either avaricious scoundrels or hopelessly bigoted or both. They propose policies, and enact them if possible, that reflect their evil nature. I am not one to sugar coat the stark inhumanity of their souls and while I admire the idealism of those missionaries who think they can educate them away from their willful ignorance I find them fundamentally foolish, their energy misguided, their faith misplaced.
Ignorance does not equal stupidity. They are cunning, ruthless, and resourceful and they look upon you as naive rubes, mere marks to be exploited and harvested like sheep. The trouble with Kansas is that there are so many Kansans in it and they are happy being evil, not that they are dumb.
And of course they’re not limited to Kansas, would that they were. The War of Northern Aggression was primarily motivated by the fact that northern states aggressively didn’t recognize the obvious moral superiority of the South and it’s peculiar institution of race slavery and instead condemned it as hateful and uncivilized. This itself was not was not without a class economic component as over half the wealth of the entire United States was held in the value of human cattle, its breeding, and labor.
Representative Democracy
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.
Mr. Lincoln’s argument goes something like this- At the beginning of 1854 race slavery was legislatively excluded from more than half the United States. With the incorporation of Kansas and Nebraska that legislation was superseded by mandate for a local plebiscite and the Supreme Court subsequently found in Dred Scott that the property right to own, work and breed human cattle for profit once granted to a citizen under that laws of any State must be equally enforced in all States in the absence of Federal legislation which was impossible to achieve due to bi-partisan acquiescence in the institution of slavery.
Lesser Evilism
Remember the Whigs! In 1852 the party fractured along pro and anti slavery lines and was never again a national political force. By contrast the Democrats were the party of slavery uncontested and united.
Does that mean loyal Whigs should have supported Millard Filmore?
I guess that depends on whether you think it would have delayed or prevented the War of Southern Rebellion and that “compromises” such as compensating the owners of slave wealth and shipping their Cain marked property back to Africa like the inhuman savages they were was less evil.
Wesley Culp died assaulting the hill named after his Uncle defending slavery and compromise after all. I’m sure his family and dog loved him and missed him terribly.
Greater Evilism
I suppose you expected me to talk about War Crimes. About torture and ovens and extermination. When I was younger I used to wonder what could bring an entire nation to such depths of depravity that they could condone and ignore aggressive war.
Now, unfortunately, I know.
And the question is what I must do.
Out there is a hill with my family’s name on it and when I visit it will not be to compromise or defend evil of any sort.
I will wear a white rose.
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I was once one of the beguiled – and then I became an Army volunteer in Vietnam.
Some of us only learn the hard way but it is the surest way to learn.
When the Pope speaks to the faithful [yes I was once a Catholic too] some incredibly believe the fairy tales. I did. We were all young once. Maybe the Pope does yet believe but it is difficult to see how.
We may have traveled very different paths, ek, but we mostly seem to come to much the same conclusions.
But I do not believe the believers are necessarily the same as the Pied Pipers leading innocents to the slaughter.
Best, Terry
Meaning I like your thought processes here. I don’t think you’re far off the mark, either.
There is so MUCH that we ALL need to ponder and PURSUE!
Yes, the “white rose”! We must always have a “white rose”!
Amazing how fear is being used to influence these days.
Sad too.
to explicitly not come out of your shell, and yet you managed to provide some food for thought.
I don’t think Republicans are evil–many are but not the bulk of them. They are, like most of us, confused and are looking for simple answers that fit in with their mythological framework and tribal identity. On balance, the non-rich among them, tend to be in denial and just want everything to be e-z to understand–if you’re poor you’re lazy end of story; anything more complicated would mean to think straight and then who knows what will follow.
The Democrats are not much better–ever in denial that politics is about power only and if you don’t have it you don’t play. And, worse, they are in denial about the historical changes, i.e., then end of the Republic, that happened in the years following 9/11. And that they have noticed that all the mainstream media has become a propaganda organ for the plutocracy, including their precious NPR and they believe the mainstream narrative without, it seems, any interest in checking out whether the assumptions are true–they just are because–well, just because.
Yup they said it. A billion bucks spent on ads for this flesh feast of oligarchy manufactured neuro-liguistic programming.
Absolutely, White Rose Society indeed!