http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20061016223725241
http://struggle.ws/ws/2002/ws69/lowpay.html

http://www.creators.com/opinion/steve-chapman.html?columnsName=sch



http://www.punkerslut.com





http://anti-state.com/forum/index.php?board=6;action=display;threadid=18415


http://www.mutualism.org

http://www.zetetics.com/mac/blog/00000930.html


http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/cops.htm

http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1890

http://infoshop.org/afterleftism.html

The Nine Conservative Statements

1. Because commerce is essential to America's prosperity, taxes should be lowered so the American people can be free to enjoy their property.

2. The importance of belief in the true God of the Christian tradition should be recognized, rather than false idols. Likewise, conservatives take a realistic view of the world as it is, rather than utopian pipe dreams.

3. In the same vein, conservatism is about a wise and intelligent approach to politics, without the hypocrisy and self-deceit inherent in liberalism.

4. Giving charity should be a hand up, not a hand-out, helping those who earn, rather than wasting resources on the lazy who don't appreciate it.

5. Conservatives support striking back at those who attack America, instead of turning tail and rolling over like the radical appeasers.

6. As with charity, responsibility should be shown to those who are themselves responsible, to discourage the parasites that weaken our society.

7. Conservatives share the idea of man as a fallen and imperfect creature. The Bible tells us that Man became sinful when he reached for the intellectual development promised by the forbidden tree.

8. Liberals spend their lives feeling guilty about all the things that America has earned. Conservatives know better than to fret about driving SUVs, eating meat, shopping at Wal-Mart, and all the other things about which liberals cry crocidile tears.

9. The liberal elite takes affront to the values of true conservative patriotism, and continually uses scare tactics about supposed "right-wingers" to justify ever more power to an amoral central government.

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Can you guess where the ideas for these statements where taken? The funny thing is, I don't disagree totally with all of the above, and I don't disagree totally with the source material. But like the source material, I believe conservatism needs to be taken with a grain of proverbial salt.

Note: I had the idea for this post before I took the quiz that led to the post about me being a liberal.


PS: Months after I wrote this post, I found this:




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Random Ideas

9/1/06 - Most of us have heard the phrase, "And Thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory forever" as is sometimes added to the Lord's Prayer (even though these words were not in the version of the Lord's Prayer presented in the Bible, supposedly by Jesus). This blurb here discusses those words.

Kingdom -- noun
Power -- verb
Glory -- adjective

Nouns are matter. Verbs are manifestations of energy. Adjectives (and adverbs) describe how the matter and energy are organized.

All these are aspects of each other. The Kingdom (that is, everything that exists) is the manifestation of God's Power and Glory, while the Power extends over all the Kingdom and is a sign of God's Glory. The Glory, according to something I read in a Biblical dictionary of Hebrew words, would refer to chabod, which roughly translates as "weight" or otherwise "importance". God has Power over all of the Kingdom, so God is pretty important. Each of these aspects are theoretically infinite; the Kingdom is infinite if you count the spiritual realm of Heaven as well as the material realm, referred to as "Earth" elsewhere in the Lord's Prayer, but not restricted to just this blue ball.

Nearer the beginning in the part that is in the Bible, the Lord's Prayer says, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven." Let's say that Heaven is like the "ideal" realm, kind of like in Plato. This is were everything that should happen, happens. In our realm, "Earth" or the material world (real world?), this does not seem to be the case. Morality/ethics asks us to try to do what should be done (I'm a genius, huh?). In my notes, I speculate that the fulfillment of what should be here in the "Earth" realm would making the Kingdom infinite, which I tie to the Buddhist idea of nirvana as samsara.

Whether the monotheistic idea is literally true matters less to me in this analysis than what it says about our moral/ethical role and general approach to the universe and spirituality.

Maybe a week or two after posting this in January, it occurred to me that monotheism is an important model (although of course, a partial and limited one) because it allows us to see the gulf between the ethical ideals we should strive to manifest on one hand, and the way the world actually is on the other. It occurred to me that this is why traditional Abrahmic monotheism pictures God as "holy" -- in Hebrew qodesh or separate from the unclean. There are valid critiques of this view of divinity, which is why I don't make it my only model. However, the idea of God's separate, pure holiness -- coupled with the ancient Jewish idea of sin as "missing the mark" brings home the idea that we have a lot of work to do to make the world a better place, but also that we can't expect our labors to make things perfect.

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12/24/06 - The same way that the market only works if certain conditions are met, and can't be applied to areas where those conditions aren't met, democracy (in the sense of majority rule) can only be applied in certain situations as well. These situations' conditions would include times when the behavior of an individual or a numerical minority would impact the majority of individuals around them. In situations where this is not the case, majority rule -- while the best form of "governmance" -- cannot be applied. (Thanks to Corporation Nation by Charles Derber for inspiration here)


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Well, Gee! I Guess I'm Liberal after All!

[from a quiz I took at www.lp.org, the Libertarian Party website]

ACCORDING TO YOUR ANSWERS,
The political description that fits you best is...

LIBERAL
LIBERALS usually embrace freedom of choice in personal
matters, but tend to support significant government control of the
economy. They generally support a government-funded "safety net"to help the disadvantaged, and advocate strict regulation of business. Liberals tend to favor environmental regulations,
defend civil liberties and free expression, support government action to promote equality, and tolerate diverse lifestyles.

Your PERSONAL issues Score is 80%. Your ECONOMIC issues Score is 40%.

Personal Issues
(Choose A if you agree, M for Maybe, D if you disagree.)

Government should not censor speech, press, media or Internet A [no brainer]
Military service should be voluntary. There should be no draft M [I got exempted for medical reasons, so ... well, my instincts say there should not be any draft, but who knows?]
There should be no laws regarding sex for consenting adults A [I still don't like abortion -- but see comments]
Repeal laws prohibiting adult possession and use of drugs A [might be a maybe; depends on public safety]
There should be no National ID card M [on one hand, it sounds like 1984; on the other, it might not be, and getting blown up by terrorists doesn't sound fun]

Economic Issues
(Choose A if you agree, M for Maybe, D if you disagree.)

End "corporate welfare." No government handouts to business A [again, a no brainer]
End government barriers to international free trade D [Trading this for that is one thing. The "race to the bottom" is quite another]
Let people control their own retirement; privatize Social Security M [I don't know enough to know how the private alternatives would work; maybe no one does -- though it does seem that Social Security is, as they say, "broken"]
Replace government welfare with private charity D [Yeah, like that would work -- see below]
Cut taxes and government spending by 50% or more M [Government and the corporate order of the "market" both suck. But government seems to be the only option we have right now to override the limitations of the market when the requirements for a free market aren't filled in a particular arena of public interest]

[By the way, this is funny and topical -- a Comparison of Libertarians and Anarchists: http://laughnet.net/product_info.php?cPath=22&products_id=510 ]



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