Etzelnik wrote:

I don't understand you. Do you not believe that men have the duty to try and alleviate the flaws of the world around them?

Sure I do. But there are ways to do it, such as blame liberals for everything (even when blaming them for playing the blame game), and then there are other ways to do it.

Etzelnik wrote:

And where have I mentioned money in any way? I have only said that the liberals seek to revoke religious freedom and freedom of speech. Was has that to do with Mammon?

You mentioned rights to run businesses. Where is that right in the Bible or in constitution anyway?

Religious freedom and freedom of speech sure are mentioned in the constitution, but the problem with this is manifold. The constitution being a secular point, it immensely diminishes the value of the whole discussion about it for me as a self-identified believer in the superiority of spiritual values. By those values, freedom of religion and speech have a different form regardless of any constution. And for anybody non-American pretty much everything you say looks like outrageous America-centrism (now tell that you don't care about non-Americans either).

In my view, there are ways to seek a solution constructive to the soul, staying true to universal spiritual principles, which should be valuable in themselves, even if not effective in the secular sense. What I see you doing is not only secular, not even narrowly party-political, but ideologically blind. Your approach woudl gain a lot with more focus on religious perspective.

Etzelnik wrote:

It's difficult to tell whether you're being obtuse or dishonest. Yes, the Masterpiece suit was brought by LGBT activists. That doesn't change the indisputable fact that the liberals as a group were opposed to the baker and in favor of Colorado's tyrannical behavior. I challenge you to show me as many liberal articles as you can in defense of the baker. I will match you, 10 to 1, with liberal articles in favor of Colorado.

A politically sensible approach would be to define liberalism first and then count them later. This single issue defines pro-LGBT-ists versus anti-LGBT-ists, not liberals versus the rest.

Don't get me wrong. I find lots of problems with liberals too. Just as I do with conservatives. This is why I don't want anything to do with either of them. Religious people should be above and apart from both.

The whole LGBT thing (and minority/female quotas and whatnot) is the way of the world that cannot be helped politically, except by totalitarian means like in Russia. And you don't want to move to Russia, right? Because there are worse things in Russia that are off, even though the LGBT issue is settled the "right" way there. So, in perspective, the LGBT issue is small. Do not blow it out of proportion. The big issue is that the world is doomed.

If the point is that we should remember to see the people behind the ideology, I agree. Even those spouting pernicious nonsense are still made in the image of God. I also agree mainstream conservative in the Anglo-American world has huge flaws.

And, yes, I agree the left is a monolith, not just because not everyone on left of centre is an extremist, but because there are actually different ideological and philosophical traditions interacting here. Old fashioned liberalism, in the broad sense, has lost ground to perspectives rooted in Marxism and post-modernism, even in the relatively mainstream left. I don't think this can be denied. The LGBT activists and their ilk aren't channelling Locke or J. S. Mill, but Gramsci or Adorno. I would say that just about almost everything that has come out of Marxism and most that has come from post-modernism, post-structuralism, etc. has had a baleful influence. The paranoid, collectivist reduction of society, culture, and politics to an exploitative interaction of a few broad classes comes from these sources, and is taking over even the centre left. Like pure Marxism, all these strains are dangerous precisely because they reduce individuals to categories - we saw this with Kavanaugh, who often was attacked more as an allegory than individual - and because they see all norms, institutions, history, except a few sentimentalised ones belonging to the lower classes, as indelibly tainted by their origin in an exploitative system (ideology). In Marxist terms, these institutions and values are bourgeois. This is one reason Marxism so often ends in slaughter and tyranny - what do bourgeois norms and institutions like the rule of law and basic fairness, even between different classes (or the party and everyone else) have to do with proletarian justice, after all?

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

Like pure Marxism, all these strains are dangerous precisely because they reduce individuals to categories - we saw this with Kavanaugh, who often was attacked more as an allegory than individual - and because they see all norms, institutions, history, except a few sentimentalised ones belonging to the lower classes, as indelibly tainted by their origin in an exploitative. In Marxist terms, these institutions and values are bourgeois.

I see most attacks on Marx also as attacks against more like an allegory, not against the person or his ideas. This is particularly so given the fact that hardly anyone politically active (in the United States or broader in the West) explicitly or knowingly operates with reference to Marx or Marxism. And even implicitly there is nothing much in Marx to serve as a guideline or explanation for the behaviour of the current mainstream left. The political parties straightforwardly self-labelled as Marxist or Communist, who would include members most likely to have read Marx or Lenin or Trotsky, have always been an ignorable minority.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

... what do bourgeois norms and institutions like the rule of law and basic fairness, even between different classes (or the party and everyone else) have to do with proletarian justice, after all?

Now-now, how is rule of law or basic fairness a bourgeois value? And how can an actual bourgeois value, such as instituting the distinctions of prosperity between employees, business owners, and consumers, anything to do with basic fairness?

For example the LGBT gang keeps pressing the button of basic fairness and drags people to court to be judged according to law, no? So, rather than abolishing basic fairness, the idea is to redefine it and then to employ it with redefinition for their own purposes. Just like it happened/is happening with marriage - they did not abolish it but redefined it so that it is on the way of becoming a pointless thing.

Every effective political party behaves the same: Hijack as many clickable concepts and slogans as possible for a sufficient populist impact, grab power and then keep it, ultimately by whatever means. Is anybody ready to argue that the political right is demonstrably any less self-serving than the left? A feasible solution to dampen such tendencies is to establish a truly multi-party political system where coalitions are a must. Two parties is clearly too few.

Last edited by seigneur (10/05/2018 7:26 am)

The whole LGBT thing (and minority/female quotas and whatnot) is the way of the world that cannot be helped politically, except by totalitarian means like in Russia. And you don't want to move to Russia, right? Because there are worse things in Russia that are off, even though the LGBT issue is settled the "right" way there. So, in perspective, the LGBT issue is small. Do not blow it out of proportion. The big issue is that the world is doomed.

​I did move to Russia, well, Belarus, which at the moment is mostly a kind of cultural off-shoot of Russia. Strangely I never had any interest in having children when I was in the UK, that changed after some time in Belarus, so they are doing something right. If you are not LGBT, if you are practicing Orthodox or Catholic, like outdoors pursuits or repairing cars it probably isn't too bad, though a lot of people can be quite poor by Western standards and have lots of more prosaic problems with health, food, housing etc. which I guess is probably why LGBT issues don't attract that much attention. 

seigneur wrote:

I see most attacks on Marx also as attacks against more like an allegory, not against the person or his ideas. This is particularly so given the fact that hardly anyone politically active (in the United States or broader in the West) explicitly or knowingly operates with reference to Marx or Marxism. And even implicitly there is nothing much in Marx to serve as a guideline or explanation for the behaviour of the current mainstream left. The political parties straightforwardly self-labelled as Marxist or Communist, who would include members most likely to have read Marx or Lenin or Trotsky, have always been an ignorable minority.

​
I would have broadly shared this view up to a point (in places like France or Portugal Marxism has had some major political influence since 1945) till recently. I am not sure about Jeremy Corbyn and some of the people at the top of the British Labour Party at the moment. Corbyn's director of Communications was a member of the 'Stalin Society' (apparently dedicated to protecting Stalin's achievements from deviationist slander), has written in defence of Gulags and such, there is this stuff about how highly they think of chairman Mao, Enver Hoxha etc. They just keep it pretty quiet, so you may be right that they no longer explicitly acknowledge the influence of Marx, even if it is present.


 

Last edited by FZM (10/05/2018 8:51 am)

FZM wrote:

... a lot of people [in Belarus and Russia] can be quite poor by Western standards and have lots of more prosaic problems with health, food, housing etc. which I guess is probably why LGBT issues don't attract that much attention. 

Yes, I have also noticed that LGBT (and so on) only becomes a pointed issue after society has accumulated luxuries beyond a certain level. At the subsistence level, subsistence is the issue and everything else is a non-issue; which makes for a rather decent life on the moral plane.

FZM wrote:

Corbyn's director of Communications was a member of the 'Stalin Society' (apparently dedicated to protecting Stalin's achievements from deviationist slander), has written in defence of Gulags and such, there is this stuff about how highly they think of chairman Mao, Enver Hoxha etc. They just keep it pretty quiet, so you may be right that they no longer explicitly acknowledge the influence of Marx, even if it is present.

Of course there are those familiar with Marx, even Marxist-Leninists from the 60's and 70's. But are they the stringpullers of, say, current LGBT activists? This LGBT thing is so rampant that it even spreads to churches like wildfire. Are the same-sex-happy pastors informed by Marx? Hardly.

We have a broader downfall of culture at hand. It's to do with the fact that to discipline one's own sexual member is very difficult regardless of the ideology, whether you are a conservative like Wolfowitzor a liberal like Strauss-Kahn.

Political ideology should be kept separate in matters like these. Just investigate the crime allegations.

Last edited by seigneur (10/05/2018 11:09 am)