Posted on 09/12/2008 11:38:39 AM PDT by goldstategop
“...rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws.”
Right. I suppose trichinosis (from pork) and syphilis just kinda drop out of thin air on a person’s head. And the menstrual flow contains a lot of blood, which can pass on disease.
Sorry, there may be a little substance later on, but flat-out ignorant idiotic statements such as this near the beginning of a huge stream of text tend to make me stop reading. Liberal verbosity is not my idea of a good read.
</shakes head>20+ paragraphs of liberal psychologist babble and they still miss the point. This is a perfect example of why I stopped trying to reason with liberals a long time ago.
——Leftists really are more “intellectual” than those on the right, in the sense that when ideas clash with reality, leftists cling to their theories, and try to force the world to conform to them.——
Thus the phrase “communism has never worked because it has never been applied completely”
He actually agrees with you. Read beyond the first paragraph. The part you read is merely a summary of pop-psychoanalysis of the GOP so popular among the left today, which he spends the rest of the article arguing against.
I'm amazed how many people on this site never read beyond the first few sentences of an article.
“Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies?”
Shows such utter ingorance in the first paragraph, therefore I reject the article for now, but am intrigued and may come back to read it later when I have more time.
Working-class and rural Americans will vote for pro-business Republicans because their economic interests ARE best served by those capitalist dynamics and entities that actually create real jobs, stimulate the economy, and afford them opportunities to earn a decent living—or even get rich—by their merit and earnest labor, as opposed to the Democrat dynamics of big government dependency, regulation, red-tape bureaucracy, inefficiency, coercion, forced replacement of the family with the state, socialistic torpor, and so on.
Yup. That notion is unique to American Protestantism and, to a degree, post-Vatican 2 American Catholicism.
It's what prompts Alan Bloom to declare that American Christians are really closet Gnostics. I think he's right, to an extent.
That's why it's usually a good idea to read an article beyond the first paragraph. If you had, you'd realize that the purpose of the first paragraph is to lay out a popular liberal view that the author later argues against.
But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws.
No rational or health related? How about eating undercooked pork, something which may have happened in days of old.
A little science: Even free of trichina, raw pork is not always safe to eat raw; it contains other hazards. The infectious hazards include Salmonella, Campylobacter, Listeria monocytogenes and Yersinia enterocolitica.
Sex with whom? Matt Foreman, outgoing executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, acknowledged what the medical community has known for decades: The homosexual lifestyle is extremely high risk and often leads to disease and even death.
Do these Socialist just have to make things up or don’t they know any history.
Interesting.
Interesting.
Skimming the piece, I didn’t see where the author later refutes that initial bogosity in any way. It doesn’t address economic reasons for voting, thereby dealing with that first ignorant salvo—it focuses mainly on morality and psycho-social dynamics as far as I can tell.
But if I’m wrong, and you wish to point out where in the article that first assertion is “argued against,” please do so.
Perhaps the most interesting comment in this is the idea that the individual is not the most important aspect of society. Rather it is the family because here one sets self aside for the betterment of the group. This is essentially why libertarianism is wrong—one does not have the right to do wrong.
Thanks for posting this.
If you want a nice take on the roots of the current ideological struggle read Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.” It boils down to a question about the perfectability of man. Liberals see man as perfectable if everybody was just more enlightened. Conservatives see man as inherently imperfect and selfish (think orginal sin) and accept that moral compromises must be made (some people will alway be poor, etc.) I explained it to a friend this way: Were you sadder when 100,000 people died in a flood in India, or when your dog got a cactus thorn in it’s paw? The reason liberals are constantly disappointed is that few things are a safer bet than human frailty. They see conservatives’ refusal to accept their grand vision as a character flaw when it is ultimately a more realistic way of understanding human nature. That’s the main reason the liberalism is in many ways a noble fool’s errand.
Well said.
bump
Oh, that’s easy. Love for God, Country, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, and the right to self-defense. All which we have here in America and no where else.
I'd suggest there's a significant element of "Emperor's New Clothes". A person who reads something that is supposedly brilliant but is totally incomprehensible may be loath to admit that he can't understand it for fear of it reflecting poorly on his own judgment. Hucksters who know how to exploit that fear can write gibberish and get hailed as geniuses. Indeed, the more nonsensical the gibberish, the greater would be the required intellect of anyone who could understand it, and thus, by inference, the greater the intellect of the person who wrote it.
bfl
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