Posted on 07/31/2008 8:30:17 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Today's liberalism is completely wrapped up with the notion of self.
...
For dramatic proof, go to the streets of a liberal enclave like San Francisco, Seattle or Vermont. There will be plenty of expensive boutiques, antique dealers, health spas, sushi bars and upscale coffee shops. But you won't see very many children. The reason is not that right-wingers have dumped buckets of birth control pills into the San Francisco municipal water supply. The simple fact is that many on the liberal left today just don't want to have children. A 2004 U. S. survey showed that a typical sample of 100 unrelated adults who called themselves liberal will have 147 children. That contrasts with the typical conservative, who is likely to have 208 children per 100 unrelated adults. That's 41% more.
...
This birth gap presents a quandary for politically active liberals. Not wanting to be inconvenienced with raising their own children, they still want to see their ideas perpetuated. Professor Darren Sherkat of Southern Illinois University worries that because conservatives "who have lots of children" are not being matched by those on the political left who "may well not have kids," these demographic trends will push the country in a more conservative direction. (Data indicates that 80% of children end up adopting the political attitudes of their parents.) To counterbalance this trend, he argues for increasing immigration and expanding the black population. He also hopes that childless liberals will "be able to reproduce themselves in strangers," by taking on jobs as teachers, writers and other people of influence. The idea is to let conservatives raise their children, while liberals influence them through the schools and universities.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalpost.com ...
OK, so some that choose not to have children aren’t selfish.
But, the majority of folks that I’ve talked to flat out TELL ME that they don’t want children
SPECIFICALLY SO THAT THEY CAN BE SELFISH
and buy all the lattes, new cars, McMansions, designer clothes, etc, that their income affords.
Well you know that the left understands just what you said,
and that they will fight tooth and nail to make sure you can’t avoid their indoctrination.
I’m just suprised that they are so open about it. Leftists usually keep their nefarious purposes hidden and use other excuses for their policies.
SPECIFICALLY SO THAT THEY CAN BE SELFISH
and buy all the lattes, new cars, McMansions, designer clothes, etc, that their income affords.
Buying all the luxuries that you can afford isn't selfish. Selfishness is pushing higher tax rates so you can distribute the income to those that "deserve" it.
In my worldview, it is.
Such as, for example, would it be more selfish to get breast enhancement surgery, or donate the money to help post-mastectomy patients?
But I agree about the leftist view of selfishness - THEY are the greedy ones, seeking to control wealth that they did nothing to earn themselves.
The donation would certainly be more altruistic than the surgery, but I wouldn't characterize the surgery as selfish, as it's done at no one else's expense.
Counter-example: I collect military firearms. I recently acquired a real minty Nazi-marked Femaru M37 handgun, which set me back around $500. The only possible use for this (for me) is for pleasure, as I have plenty of other more appropriate guns for self-defense. I could have donated the $500 to a charity. If I'd chosen the correct charity, that $500 may well have saved someone's life.
Was buying that gun a selfish act?
Hey, we’re all sinners, and I’m sure I would have done the same in your shoes - what’s the harm, right?
Yes, it was selfish. And, yes, I probably would have done it, too.
I have a different perspective on “someone else’s expense” lately. It comes from the fact that all resources come from and belong to God. We’re just entrusted with a certain amount to steward.
I certainly don’t condone, however, another human telling me how to steward those resources, especially by force (government).
definitely. Good day and God Bless.
We all do things at times that a majority of people don't approve of, but God knows our hearts and our motives. I've had to make some very difficult choices in the past. If you know that you're aligned with the will of your Higher Power, you know you're doing the right thing.
I'm on my own in that respect (other than the advice of family and friends).
I should've specified: such terms tend to treat their subjects simply as nuisances or worse.
Since children are human, what impression do you get from "human-free"?
I'm not so sure that "childfree" has a positive connotation, any more than "childless" has a negative one.
I can't think of a term along those lines where "-free" isn't supposed to sound positive: proponents of "gun-free" or "drug-free" zones don't think that guns or drugs (in general) are good things.
Maybe "child-free" is an exception, but I don't see how. Is there some reason why it is?
The term would simply describe something as having the characteristic of humans being absent, i.e. the Moon is currently human-free. As such, it's a value-neutral term.
I can't think of a term along those lines where "-free" isn't supposed to sound positive: proponents of "gun-free" or "drug-free" zones don't think that guns or drugs (in general) are good things.
I've seen the term "content-free" used to describe a book or movie that's devoid of information, so there's a negative example. The term "context-free" is neutral. The term "sugar-free", while sometimes used as a positive in advertising, can also have be used negatively ("of course it tastes lousy, it's sugar-free"). The term "value-free" is used both positively and negatively.
“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ . . . It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own . . .The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students . . .
When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization.
We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . .
You have to be educated in order to be . . . a participant in our conversation . . .
So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.
We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours . . . I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students.
Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents . . .
I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”
-‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.
Oh, I've always seen the term differently and wouldn't use "human-free" if I didn't want to imply some negative side to human inhabitants.
From what I've found online, others (here not talking about you, primarily) would disagree. Even so, I'd still limit my own use of "-free," heh.
I've seen the term "content-free" used to describe a book or movie that's devoid of information, so there's a negative example. The term "context-free" is neutral. The term "sugar-free", while sometimes used as a positive in advertising, can also have be used negatively ("of course it tastes lousy, it's sugar-free"). The term "value-free" is used both positively and negatively.
- I've seen it used negatively too--but in cases when people are simply quoting the term as used positively (in the same way that you and I have heard "sugar-free" used negatively). Maybe I've seen some sarcastic uses too.
- I've always viewed the use of "-free" in "context-free" as sarcastic. Usually I get the sense that people who use it are parodying other "-free" terms and implying that people behind "content-free" stuff consider content a bad thing.
- Yes, in my experience, "context-free" has been generally neutral. I haven't seen it applied to areas where a missing context is problematic or otherwise undesired (of course, your experience may vary).
Even so, again, I generally see "-free" as trying to sound positive about some non-presence. "This car is radio-free" wouldn't make sense to me without some sense that car radios (or something related) are Bad Things.
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