Fellowship of Punditry

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Cul Heath

Mick Arran

Jeffrey Barbose

Inspector Lohmann

Eric M. Fink

Michael Lane

Rep. Mark B. Cohen

The Fellowship is accepting new members. Inquire within.

The Sages

  • David Weinberger
  • Jon Lebkowsky
  • Jay Rosen
  • Rebecca MacKinnon
  • Nova Spivack
  • Dan Gillmor
  • Jim Moore
  • Lawerence Lessig
  • Ed Cone
  • Jeff Jarvis
  • Joi Ito
  • The Titans

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  • Oliver Willis
  • Burnt Orange Report
  • Jim Hightower
  • Wonkette
  • Political Animal
  • The-Hamster
  • Matthew Yglesias
  • Pandagon
  • Altercation
  • Informed Comment
  • Donkey Rising
  • The Decembrist
  • Buzz Machine
  • Orcinus
  • Brad Delong
  • Eschaton
  • The Left Coaster
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    Distinguished Colleagues

  • Tom Burka
  • The American Street
  • wood s lot
  • Rox Populi
  • Scratchings
  • Blond Sense
  • Cut To The Chase
  • Bad Attitudes
  • Rook's Rant
  • Dohiyi Mir
  • Stout Dem Blog
  • A Violently Executed Blog
  • American Leftist
  • Easy Bake Coven
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  • Abuddhas Memes
  • ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES
  • Post-Atomic
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  • Friends of the Fellowship

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  • Chuck Currie
  • To The Teeth
  • Radically Inept
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  • Serial Blogonomy
  • The Bone
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  • Into the Blogosphere
  • George Orwell

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    Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

    In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

    If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

    But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

    Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

    Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

    In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

    All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

    At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

    Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

    John Stuart Mill

    Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

    The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

    The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.

    Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

    A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

    Mark Twain

    Don't let schooling interfere with your education.

    All generalizations are false, including this one.

    A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

    Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

    Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

    The Public is merely a multiplied "me."

    Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we."

    Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

    Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

    Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

    Winston Churchill

    The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

    I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

    Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.

    Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

    Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

    However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

    In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

    Otto Von Bismarck

    When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.

    I have seen three emperors in their nakedness, and the sight was not inspiring.

    Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.

    Be polite; write diplomatically ;even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.

    Voltaire

    A witty saying proves nothing.

    If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

    When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

    I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.

    To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.

    Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

    It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

    The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.

    Karl Marx

    Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

    All I know is I'm not a Marxist.

    The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

    Thursday, May 27, 2004

    Conservative Opposition to Bush

    By Nick

    One thing is becoming clear: Bush is not conservative. He is a social conservative, a ficisical reactionary, and a foreign policy radical. Unfortuantly, with so much ideology, his policies have been driven by political and ideological pressure instead of facts, expertise, and thoughtful deliberation.

    Well read and thoughtful conservatives are becoming nervous of the implications that Bush might have on conservatism. George F. Will notes. "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts." Even a Neo-Conservative war supporter Robert Kagan asserted, "All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now."

    I cannot argue with either statements, they are reality (true conservatives tend to have a knack for understanding current realities). Again, it boils down to a lesson that all Americans should remember: Always seperate Ideology from reality. Much of Bush's problems could probably be summed up by this blurp from the washington post contrasting the idea hierarchies of past with the current administrations:

    Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist with the National Center for Policy Analysis, said policy ideas typically bubble up from experts deep inside federal agencies, who put together working groups, draft white papers, sell their wares in the marketplace of ideas and hope White House officials act on their suggestions. In this case, ideas are hatched in the White House, for political or ideological reasons, then are thrust on the bureaucracy, "not for analysis, but for sale," Bartlett said.

    Folks, we must learn to seperate ideology from actual debate and practice. You see Ideology helps build coalitions between people with similar values, but when used to create policy it leads to distortions of cold reality. These distortions created the Vietnam War, World War II, Korea, and now the occupation of Iraq. Some have misinterpreted my critisism as "becoming an unofficial broadcaster of terrorism". To them, I will smile, and turn the other direction. They live in ideology world; I strive to live in the real world. Winston Churchill was a master of confronting reality, and he reminds us:
    "In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might."

    posted by Nick at 5/27/2004 09:24:00 PM |

    Comments:
    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
     
    Many of my friends are conservative, many even former conservative activists like myself, and I know of only one who is planning on "possibly" voting for Bush. The rest are simply not voting or considering another candidate.

    Progressives should not be afraid to exploit this growing rift between conservatives and Bush. Everyone should remember that Bush was not the Radical Conservative's favorite candidate in the 2000 primaries.

    Also, many moderate GOPers don't like Bush because of what he did to McCain in 2000. Bush represents the ruthless and mindless exercise of family connections for personal political gain. Many conservative activists feel a great deal of resentment that the GOP they built up over the last 20-30 years has been hijacked by W just because of his elite pedigree.

    Once they start viewing him as a threat to the conservative project, they could quickly destroy him. My intuition tells me this may be the only way Bush will lose.
     
    By the way, I enjoyed your post about conspiricy theories. Something interesting happened at rightrants.blogspot today. As we know Fox is a very outspoken Bush and GOP supporter. I suggested she take the political compass test (www.politicalcompass.org) and increadibly: She is exactly at center, slightly to the left of John Kerry! Though, she'd never vote for Kerry, their world views are almost perfect matches. It truly believe that any significant change will require moving outside of traditional politics. The rich have always acted the same, and the will always resist changes to their heirarchy. Revolutions against such heirachies more often than not result in people like Hitler, Napoleon, or Oliver Cromwell gaining full sovereigty. In what ever course we take, we must not rashly interfer with the delicate balances that keep order maintained. To destroy a single system of order in one swoop causes a mob of people who fight to fill it- usually making Totalitarianism necessary. At the same time, this does not prevent us from evolving our systems of production, distribution, and order to be more ethical, and egronomic- if you will. Socialist have it wrong, you cannot recreate man; and ironically Fascists are right: man is selfish and will pursue his best interests. Fascism was the last significant political innovation, and it's time to create a new one. Mussolini declared that if the 19th century was the century of Liberalism, than it will be that the 20th century will be the century of Fascism- "The century of the state". I say the 21st century shall be the century of the individual and community. I strongly believe that decentralization and interdepedence is a place to start the political-economic innovation in the 21st century.
     
    It's interesting that people who are actually politically quite similar to Kerry nevertheless won't vote for him. I forget what the word is, but partisan, corporate-politics today is essentially about setting up a false dichotomy and a tribe mentality, making people choose sides and then loyally supporting the chosen side without thinking. Needless to say, radical rightists like Bush thrive on this division.

    A lot of self-identified conservatives -- perhaps mis-identified conservatives -- would be more in keeping with their own professed positions if they voted for Kerry, but he's an "America-hating liberal" so they won't do that. Rush Limbaugh has spouted the Big Lie often enough that it's taken for truth by those who've heard it too many times. He and the whole right-wing media complex instill so much paranoia in listerners / viewers that the audience simply pre-judges everything rather than listening to multiple viewpoints (especially ones that don't fit in easily to the radical right's stereotypes); those other viewpoints are all appeasers, traitors, Amreica-haters, doubters, etc. etc. etc.
     
    Speaking of ex-conservatives, the article that's linked from this blog is pretty interesting. Critical thinking is anathema to the corporate conservative mindset.
     
    Sorry, that link above is broken. Here's the full URL:

    http://libertarianjackass.blogspot.com/archives/2004_05_01_libertarianjackass_archive.html#108560889697432792
     
    Thank you very much for the link! I think it will make a good post. Out of curiousity, is that your blog? I ask because I want to put up links to bloggers that read and respond to my posts. It's good politics.
     
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