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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Liberalism's love of autocracy |
| 2010-05-24 |
Ann Althouse[W]hat if we could just be China for a day?... You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions...and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment. I don't want to be China for a second, OK, I want my democracy to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness. But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions. So said Thomas Friedman on "Meet the Press" today. And the funniest part of him saying that wasn't the horrible vision of America as a dictatorship...though it must be hilarious to think of America as a dictatorship, because famous funnyman Woody Allen said it too: ... Nor was it the fact that he said it and at the same time tried to deny that he was saying it with all that "I don't want to be China for a second, OK" business. No, the funniest part was that he said it right after he deplored the way the political center has been "decimated" in part by the "an Internet where I can create a digital lynch mob against you from the left or right if I don't like where you're going." He's reminding us Internet folk of our lynch-mob powers and then throws us the rope to hang him with that wish that "we could just be China for a day." Come on, everybody, let's destroy Thomas Friedman for saying he knows all the "right solutions" and wishes — or would wish if he could get away with it — that we could have a dictatorship to get it done. A love of autocracy often lurks beneath the liberal veneer. There's this idea that the right answers are known and the people are just too deluded and distorted to see what they are and to vote for them. And Friedman openly deplores the internet, which decimates moderation because there are people like me who who persecute elite truthbearers like him. Ooh! It's a lynch mob. Ha. Sorry. I don't want the rope. I just want to laugh at you. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #5 Hey Tom could read Mao's Little Red book at the breakfast table and Jewish Lit, but just put a plain dustcover on the Judaica and no one's the wiser.///Sarc off The two aren't mutually exclusive. I mean, Judaism is pretty doctrinaire in some ways as far "perfecting humanity" I mean, hardcore Jews are all about either your mother, mothers mother mother is this and does this, this, and this,or else. To come to our camp, you have to do XYZ. And its a little heavier on the doctrine than being, oh I don't know, a casual Protestant. |
| Posted by: GirlThursday 2010-05-24 13:26 |
| #4 Now, now. As a man who knows what's best for everybody, I think Tommy Boy would make a fine zampolit in his imaginary communist fascist democracy. And I'll bet they wouldn't even make him share that big mansion of his with the unwashed proletariat. His only potential problem may be if that Jew "thing" commies and fascists sometimes have a problem with comes up. And that'a big "if", Tommy Boy... |
| Posted by: tu3031 2010-05-24 12:59 |
| #3 The whole point of the progressive movement is this: Humankind is perfectible. If only we stupid, clueless, evil non-progressives would get out of their way, they, the truth-bearers, the enlightened ones, the smart ones, would create heaven on earth. Mama Gaia will be proud of them. Tom Friedman wants the power to tell the rest of us what to do and how to do it, because he's smart and he has the answers. He's quite certain of that, and if for some reason he doesn't have the answer, his like-minded friends do. That you disagree with him and them means that you are wrong, and you have to get out of his and their way. If you won't do it willingly then you have to be forced. It's for your own good. Humanity can be perfected. The progressive movement never quite understands a key point: perfection is in the eye of the beholder. Robespierre, after all, thought that Danton was wrong, and he helped implement a Reign of Terror to convince his countrymen. How progressive. That's where autocracy, progressive or not, always leads. Terror. Lenin understood this better than most, and he (and Trotsky, and Stalin) used terror to advance their perfect ideas. As did Pol Pot, Mao, Castro, Napoleon, and others. The wreckers, the kulaks, the jews, the blacks, the revanchists, the infidels, the 'other', must be made to yield. Terrorize them and their families -- hell, terrorize their villages and country. It's for your own good. Why can't you see that? |
| Posted by: Steve White 2010-05-24 12:42 |
| #2 Not execution. They harvest organs out of dissidents when they are alive with no anesthetic. |
| Posted by: newc 2010-05-24 12:14 |
| #1 Sounds like ole Tommy boy is in the market for organs. Kidneys or heart been giving you problems? Relief is just one dissident execution away. |
| Posted by: ed 2010-05-24 11:29 |