Fact is
people don’t understand ‘right” and “left” anymore.
Had this conversation with Pascal last night, in one of my more lucid moments.
People think of “right” and “Left” as opposite sides of a coin, yadda yadda.
Well.
If there is good and evil, does that mean somewhere there is a mighty rope with God pulling on one end and the Devil on the other end?
That is ludicrous. It presumes the existence of a force of evil that is equally powerful as the Creator. And that is ludicrous, because it doesn’t exist.
Good and evil can be accurately defined as the State of Existence of the Creator’s grace, and the Absence of the creator’s grace.
Pascal evidenced- and accurately so- that ‘if the left is the problem, the right is not the solution” but that is only accurate if you have no understanding what the Right actually is.
Pascal’s statement is much more accurate if you say “if Democrats are the problem, Republicans are not the solution” And he’s right.
But Democrats and Republicans are not “left” and “Right”.
I think it is easy to define “right” as “the presence of reason” and “left” as ‘The absence of reason”. People in the republican party, and actual conservatives, can be varying degrees of both. As can liberals, and democrats.
But right thinking is thinking wiht reason, and left thinking is the absence of reason- emotion only, so to speak. And we all occasionally let our emotions rule us.
21 comments Og | Uncategorized
Maybe one way to express the yin-yang of the thing is that the Left is emotion and the Right is reason.
Not sure that either is good or evil inherently. They need to be balanced.
But TODAY’s leftISTs **are** evil.
M
You did not report my position accurately. LOL. I’ll put that aside for now you chain yanker you.
You made an error by saying that the Left employs ONLY emotion, and display “absence of reason.” Here’s proof.
You must recall that I suggested and you agreed that occasionally the Right goes too far in its corrections to the Left.
That overshoot provides the Left with REASON. Like with GOP earmarks (as if the Dems didn’t). Earmarks were and are a fact. They were played up to the hilt as reason to remove the GOP from power. There was lack of balance, but there still was reason.
Thus the use of reason is neither foreign to the Left nor beneath them. They’ll simply use it when it serves their purposes.
Maybe you are confusing using reason and speaking truth. That last was and probably still is a Clintonian evasion. Bill was widely believed to be so cocky about his abilities, that he is alleged to have quipped:
My point is while the Left undoubtedly will rely upon lies and emotions or upon the truth and reason, whichever suits their purposes, and it is also true that the media and many in the GOP will at best let it slide, or worse go and foster it, the Right is not allowed such vagaries. When the Right succumbs to emotion and illogic, the whole world knows it.
“You did not report my position accurately”
You did not report your position at all. You have a blog, USE IT. goofball.
And, you’re wrong. You’re confusing “left” with “Democrat” again.
No i’m not. It is you who are confusing all the Left with its wacked-out fringies.
You can deny that they allow themselves more options than they allow the Right all you want, but your denial won’t stand up to tests. Unless you choose to adopt the Left way of thinking that is.
LOL! “Left” and “Right” are abstracts, and therefore have absolute meanings. Get on point.
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right,
but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right.
There is only an up or down. Up to man’s age-old dream —
the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order —
or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Ronald Reagan, 1964
My stated position was that Left and Right is Marxian and thus intentionally illusory to take our minds off of where all the bickering between “Left” and “Right” is really leading. To which you quipped that it was to Hell in a handbasket.
I’m gonna have to give you the keys to this site so you can correct your omissions. And I will continue to argue with you just to annoy you, and deliberately misstate your positions, so you will start stating them yourself. LOL!
Goofball.
And I never agreed with your assessment of “Left” and “Right”. I told you I know facts. I knew them then, and I know them now.
Gee. Thanks Mom.
ROFLMAO!!
Don’t MAKE me pull this car over, or sohelpmeGod, one of you is going to WALK to Michigan!
Now simmer down back there!
M
This, from the allegedly Right, President Bush’s Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, in a brief to SCOTUS: “Nothing in the Second Amendment properly understood … calls for invalidation of the numerous federal laws regulating firearms,” is not right but down.
Exactly how many ways does George W Bush have to govern to the Left before we recognize that, albeit at slower rate but with more dishonesty about its intentions, the GOP with the Dems, are both taking us down? The same cabal is trying to scare us into nominating a left-leaning Guiliani, or another allegedly religious fundamentalist Huckster, or completely abandon principles to back McCain, just so we “stand a chance at” defeating the Leftist Boogeywoman.
The “Left” leads us down with the Hillary threat, and the “Right” follows down by backing a Rudy McHuckster.
My bottom line is if the Right is so easily scared off its principles, and can so easily be led by the Left, it cannot in any way be seen as an independent abstract ideology. The concept of a Right independent of the Left is a false concept.
You’re conflating the Republican Party with the Right. In so many ways, the two are not the same.
The sets overlap on a narrow set of policy stances — mostly on national defense. On the rest, the party is a coalition and the right wing doesn’t have the influence it thinks it ought to have.
My belief is that the party is going to come to grief because the Right has a greater constituency among the American people than the Party does, and the Party deludes itself that the situation is the opposite.
M
I am well aware of the difference between what is thought of as the Right and the GOP. But in my model — which I haven’t presented in years — there is a clear distinction of which Reagan made use in another speech circa 1983.
But even with our current acceptance of what is “right,” the problem remains that the Right still sees the GOP as its agent of choice.
But the Republicans will take us down just as assuredly as its alleged opponent, the Democrats. That is why I had this cartoon commissioned many years ago: RepublicRatsâ„¢ and for which many a friend has complained that I tarnish ALL Repulicans with its message. The Right is just so entangled with the GOP.
Do you begin to see yet why a distinctly different abstract is needed? Our two party system could not rid the country of slavery until the Whigs collapsed. And I don’t see our two party system being able to shake the “progressive” march to universal enslavement until what you call the Right is really independent of what you call the Left. That is why the concept of up and down concepts needs to be recognized and promoted as Reagan felt it should.
The Right is just so entangled with the GOP. Habitual silence constitutes agreement, and the GOP has effectively silenced, marginalized by the pejorative far, what you call the Right.
Pascal: You got to get beyond this. “Left” and “Right” are abstracts, not people. Democrats and Republicans are people. All dems and repubs are varying degrees of “left” and “right”. You can no more blame the “left” or the”Right” for anything than you can blame “black” or “white” for anything.
Left and Right form an ideological corral that cannot be broken out of until one recognizes that the corral and its limits are purely artificial that serves not oneself.
Even that Buckley quote that Alger brings up from time to time recognizes this. Hardly anything resembles a Right leaning institution anymore because the what you keep calling the Right is no longer anchored where it was when Buckley first observed it. It is NOT absolute because Right is so tied to Left that it has followed. Soldiers even march left foot first. The body must follow where the left foot leads.
Sorry for the delay. It’s explained below.
When you wrote above
I told you in IM that I detected a bit of the influence of C.S. Lewis regarding Dualism in that. He and I agree with you, but there is more to be gained from it.
It has taken me this long to dig up that connection. I think you’ll like it. I have more thoughts that relate to this. We can discuss that later should God grace me with remembering them.
Lewis took down Dualism with quite a nice flourish in the chapter titled “The Invasion” in his book Mere Christianity.
I am going to spare you the build-up (although it is well worth reading) and jump right to the end.
Lewis described metaphysically what you and I witness in both the natural and man-made world. Parasitics like friction and decay accompany all work or potential for work. The laws of thermodynamics make it clear that loss in inherent to physical existence, but it is potential which makes both existence and decay possible. (You, Og, may well see in this my musings about the first Commandment.)
Lewis said this about the bad force.
My next step is to test your asserted definition and see if it serves you well.
Which side, Left or Right, still adheres to the first command of God in the Bible: “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.”
You will say the Right, and you’d be correct.
Now which, Left or Right, claims to have logic and reason on its side with respect to that command? Which side on the human population question has optimism and uses faith (in God or the future or human potential, etc.) to go with its logic, and which side has pessimism and stark limits based on a future that cannot be guaranteed?
Strictly on their ability to project an appearance of wanting to act responsibly, the Left has the easier claim to being both logical and reasonable.
I know you can see a confrontation building over what is evil and what is good. From Alger’s comment, he already sees it this way.
I would add that optimism and pessimism need be considered too. I am not sure how to make the case well yet. You want to keep prodding me?
Well here is an example of the problems we on the Right have to contend with. From two men who lay claim to being religious.
My distrust for an alleged pundit of the Right, Michael Medved, increased when he remained silent (constituting agreement?) when the radical Anglican Bishop Spong asserted in an interview on Medved’s show: “This is not a loving God because His commandment is absurd.”
For your and my purposes Og, assuming we still have the same goal, I think there has to be a far better distinction of Left from Right.
More than a year ago I came up with something close to what that might be at BTB I think. I haven’t found my copy yet. I hope my memory does not need to be refreshed by Alger or whomever’s blog I left my comment at.
I think my definition had optimism and pessimism intertwined in it. My concept of Left and Right relies on two very different views of responsibility, liberty and justice. They are fundamentally difference. Each side believes the future should be managed differently.
There is that word again: Belief. You know how I worry about how secularism and atheism provides cover for many anti-theists much like Islam provides cover for many radical Islamists.
And hidden in all this I think we will find the reason why our Western secularists tolerate Islam and not Judeochristianity.
[…] Forces Back here I started talking about left and right, and I could never get anyone to grasp, for a moment, what I was talking about. I looked at “left” and “Right” as pure forces; nobody could comprehend what I was talking about and even Pascal would not divorce himself from his own prejudices about the terms ‘right” and “Left” for the purposes of the thought experiment. […]