Great sentiments for the Christian Community, a prescription for defeat in the political arena. Our founders would never had taken up arms and created this great nation. President Lincoln would not have consented to allow 620,000 Americans to die on our soil to end slavery and save the Union. During the 1964 Civil Rights Act, when less than 40% of the Dems agreed to support in the pre-vote caucus, a 83% majority of Republicans went to the public and shamed enough of the Dems to raise the final vote to 61%, thus passing the Johnson initiative. When Bush decided to invade Iraq, few dared to stand up and say, bullshit! When Johnson put the full force of our military into Vietnam, nobody wanted to risk being called a commie sympathizer.
Polite speech I find most advantageous for bridge games and supper clubs. Political speech requires bite, thought and passion. The burning of King George effigies became step one in pre-free America, you don t get much more negative than that. Our country has a proud history of free and passionate speech and little has every been accomplished by compromise of principle in order to ‘get something done’. Rush Limbaugh, a great commentator and entertainer, did a segment on ‘Great Moderates in History’. The segment lasted 5 seconds, there really are none are there.
Another closer to home observation. The best bloggers on this site are those who are most persuasive. Their swords are sharp. Dull swords hurt less and cut less. One of them consistently calls for bland, polite discourse, all the time making the point with a very sharp sword, otherwise this article would need not be written. Poetry and pleasant compromising talk have little to do with politics.
I respect Limbaugh and Bill Maher, they aren t afraid to take off the gloves and speak their minds without worrying about being bland, moderate and polite. What makes them so effective in their influence is not only a sharp sword, but wit and humor. Both take blows constantly, but they stand and fight back, my hat is tipped to both.
There are a few bloggers on this site that keep me coming back, two that are consistently in left field with catchers masks on, one great patriotic American, and one talent that should be writing novels and dislikes everybody. None are polite or capitulating. If I want polite, moderate pap I ll watch the evening news.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey, I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say GREAT blog!…..I”ll be checking in on a regularly now….Keep up the good work!
Excellent! My hat tips to you as well.
The light of truth is the best disinfectant.
“Polite speech” is just another way to say suppression.
Muy whole point about civil speech rests right there in your first paragraph, other examples of which litter almost every comment you make to everyone on here. Tell me, please, since I am so utterly clueless, how that did anything to advance the debate or made anyone who was not 110% in agreement with you to not toatally tune you out, as I am going to do. It’s your approach that makes me not want to listen, which is the whole point that I have made here and have tried to make before. You push me away, throw dirt on me, then wonder why I won’t listen. Hmm, I wonder too…
I don’t know how well you do in negotiations, maybe you treat people here in a way you would never treat someone in person as do a lot of people on the internet, but the first rule in negotiation is to not insult the person you are negotiating with. Passion does not excuse insulting someone. I brought up Martin Luther King Jr. because he was very passionate in his words and convictions, but he did not call individuals clueless, or any other host of names.
Silly girl, they always have alternatives. Perhaps their passion offends you and you cannot hear them. My wife Mary wonders how someone as gifted as you can be so utterly clueless on matters political. I share her wonder.
The article is about style and congeniality, not on one view or another.
First I admonished you for focusing on the micro points , or leaves, missing the central point of the tree of which was passionate speech.
Now it seems you’ve again ignored the tree and gone macro, taking on the whole forest of capitalism vs. socialism.
OK I’m game, let’s nutshell things.
You like Stuart Mill believe man is basically evil and needs government control to keep us honest for the betterment of society, the socialist or nanny state path you so diligently plod.
I read tonight how he believed all evil started when a man put a fence around a plot of land, called it his, and the people were stupid enough to believe him. He believed all belongs to all, anything else is selfish. Basic socialism.
We believe service to ones God and family through self serving motives (profit) create a situation that is best for all. Actions that hurt those he seeks profit from will soon hurt him. He must compete for the blessings of those he services or others will come along and take his customers.
I give you pre-Reagan Bell Telephone. Once, without competition and out of control as to constant price hikes and disregard of customer complaints. Now dozens of smaller companies from cell to voip compete. They are constantly trying do make the customer happy to keep them. You can apply that model to all big and small business.
The governments job, as the founders submitted, was to keep the peace inside the country, and regulate safety and taxes to products coming in from outside the country. Citizens can easily remove or replace a bad company, but the vehement of government rules at the point of a gun, and no amount of power will ever satisfy the beast.
Reagan said it best, “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is our problem”.
Not the thoughtsand views of others as bitching, but the lack of any presented alternative. Other than say get government out of the lives of people, what would you do? How would you handle the social ramifications of widespread deregulation and removal of the government from the private sector? How would you deal with those issues that caused the government to step in to begin with?
I hear NOTHING of this sort of conversation from conservatives. It’s like taking a teenager who is used to a roof over their head, clothes on their back and three squares a day and turning him out on the street, expecting him to all of a sudden know what to do, how to do it, and to be able to do it. All the while the unchecked vultures and opportunists who thrive in a capitalist system (think Carnegie and the like) are circling overhead, waiting for the first signs of weakness. Now magnify that by millions……If you think the American public of today is ready to handle that kind of pressure and responsibility, think again… Heck, they don’t even want to think for themselves, that’s why they rely on some blog on the internet for their information about what’s going on and taking it to town halls to use in protests….
As to your first point, I could barely remember Lock and Mills, but upon looking them up as a result of your comment, I found they were both esoteric statist who merely disagreed upon who much freedom a state could give a citizen dependent upon whether man was inherently good or evil. Same coin, different sides. As to Rousseau, as a French minor, I know him well. You have a point there and would do well to remember his most famous quote, “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they.” Socialist beware.
You view the thoughts and attempted persuasion of others as ‘Bitching €, well you could easily say that of Rousseau. You throw insults more than any, and then bitch about being insulted, while propping up Gandhi and King in front of you so you look magnanimous. For good measure you throw your Dem legacy under the bus, as if that will make the current crop of snakes look better. I proudly stand by my party from Lincoln.
You surprise me today with a dull defense. A poor attempt to pick off the leaves, while leaving the tree untouched. It seems if somebody makes a point in a fashion you feel uncivil, you are unable to grasp the point. Perhaps instead of punditry, you should aspire to a post in diplomacy. There you can carefully smith your words into the pabulum of bland mediocrity. No passion, no humor, no change.
Oh, and by the way, in the 1960′s the Dems were the party the white Southerners belonged to in remaining protest of Abe Lincoln and the Republicans freeing the slaves…. Since most of the politicians left over from that era became Republicans, a la Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, I’d rethink patting the REpublican Party on the back for that one…
Gandhi, Martin Luther King and many other peace makers across time achieved their aims without screaming at people, calling them stupid, and looking for insults where none existed…. Maybe they were on to something, ya think?
The difference between the success of the American Revolution and the failure of the french one was all in who was chosen as inpriration. The American Founding Fathers chose proactive thinkers like Locke, Mills, and Rousseau, who had a philosophy but also had the system in place to make it happen.
The French chose Voltaire, who although he was a very observant and sharp critic, had nothing constructive to add and no systems to recommend.
Substance wins the day- merely bitching about a problem solves nothing, at best it draws attention to an issue. No matter which you choose to do, personal insults don’t encourage anyone to listen to you, they just piss people off and turn them away.
Yes, discourse can be overly polite, but there’s no need to go to the total opposite extreme. The negative is black is not black, it is not automatically white.