CarlManvers2019
Writers Blocked Douchebag
Say, what are his chances of being assassinated or receiving a massive slandering campaign to destroy him
Majority of Americans Want to Scrap First Amendment, Polling Finds
- Thread starter LifeisTiresome
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Say, what are his chances of being assassinated or receiving a massive slandering campaign to destroy him
Terthna
Professional Lurker
And if those improvements stick beyond his term as president, I suspect you'll also see reduced support for revolution in that country.
D
Deleted member
Guest
Respectfully, restoring a monarchy is Counterrevolution.
CarlManvers2019
Writers Blocked Douchebag
I expect a revolution from out of the country or funded by those outside of it, they don't know that they need Communism to survive, there will still be "revolutionaries" and "students" wanting one
Depends on the country. There are still a number of monarchies around the world after all.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
A counterrevolution is still a revolution. Besides, the last time Brazil had a monarch was in 1889; at this point, any distinction is meaningless, in term of practical effect.
The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
It just seems Orwellian to label reactionary monarchists as left-wingers because they think the government should actually do things. I think that analysis is kind of unhelpful.
Again, who the hell does that?
The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
When you claim that the essence of the American right-wing is classical liberalism, you do that in substance.
The mainstream of American right wing thought is absolutely. What it means is that you are a part of a fringe ideology, which is pretty much inarguable with monarchism.
ShieldWife
Marchioness
Oh, of course, there is massive amounts of propaganda, laws, and efforts to bring down the family. Feminism is one of the major players here in the push to eliminate marriage, reduce child birth (at least among middle class whites), and to reduce the role of parents in their children’s lives.
Gays doing their own gay thing isn’t a major factor in the behavior of straight people. A straight couple isn’t going to get divorced or refrain from having kids because there is a gay couple across town.
I don’t accept your idea of ends. Very often no end exists for a thing which exists in nature. Biological features do have ends, or sets of ends, in that they have an evolutionary purpose. Wings may have evolved to allow a bird to fly, but that doesn’t mean that a bird using its wing for something else, like pushing a twig into a next with it, is immoral or an abomination. In fact, the wing may well have many purposes which are secondary to its primary purpose.
So things have no purpose at all. A rock sits on the ground, it has no purpose until a human picks it up and decides on what might be done with it.
How ever you define the purpose of some biological feature, there is no morality attached to that purpose. Hair might be for keeping a person’s head warm, but there is no immorality in Rapunzel letting her hair be used for a rope. There is also nothing immoral about shaving ones head and using a hat for warmth or even letting ones head be cold. Morality and purpose are distinct ideas.
Using sexual organs for pleasure in no way undermines their use for procreation. In fact, one could reasonably argue that the ability of sexual organs to cause and/or experience pleasure are secondary purposes (to the degree they exist) of them.
How is vagina sex between a husband and pregnant wife more conducive to procreation than anal sex? Imagine a scenario: there is a heterosexual husband and wife, they have children and believe in having more, the wife is pregnant and both feel like getting frisky. How is there a moral difference between anal sex and vagina sex? Neither can result in pregnancy. Neither undermines the ability of the wife to give birth or get pregnant again later.
It seems that by purpose idea that the priest would be the biggest sinner, for he has completely forsaken the purpose of his reproductive organs while the kinky couple has merely used them in a slightly different way which doesn’t interfere with the supposed end.
Okay.
Yeah, Roman Catholicism wagging its finger at people and telling them it's wrong not to procreate - while out of the other side of its mouth extolling complete celibacy as something spiritually superior?
The underlying reason for the doublethink is historical. Many of the late-classical "church fathers" whose views influenced medieval Latin thinking came from a cultural background in which any form of physical pleasure was considered evil, simply because it was physical not spiritual. So a couple having "fun" together simply because they enjoyed, well, "doing it"? Bad, bad, bad!
But since if nobody reproduced the human race would die out, and then the oh-so-spiritual people would have no one to mooch off, they realized they had to make a concession: okay, alright, have sex in order to make babies, otherwise it's bad!
Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas comes along and dresses it up in clever Aristotelian arguments. But that was all basically rationalization.
And none of it is even remotely Biblical.
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If you think these cases did that, you are clearly not paying attention. Ever heard of the term "color revolution" and everything covered under them? Those are far more spectacular (and sometimes far more questionable on legal/sovereignty grounds) examples of the same thing. This isn't even an internet age phenomenon, internet is just yet another means through which this is done, and in a more primitive form it was done a lot by both sides of the Cold War, through application of positive and negative coverage in more conventional non-state media. Hence your average authoritarian, or semi-democratic country either bans or highly regulates the political messaging of private media since ages, particularly foreign ones. The difference is, that with internet it's hard and PR unfriendly to do, and pretty much impossible to do as effectively as with conventional media. The only reason why the examples you have mentioned are notable is that in these cases, this happened to the "usual suspects" who aren't used to this happening to them, it wasn't even a particularly effective or large scale application of this phenomenon, it's just one side of the public debate that is used to media dominance being very sour about it being contested.
So long story short, a big hoopla over something that was around in some form since before at least most of us were born, yet the world didn't crash and burn over it.
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How many times does this have to be explained?
Left wing and right wing are not defined as dichotomous positions. What is not one does not become axiomatically become the other. That form of thinking is endemic within the global left wing and is purposefully done to associate completely unrelated ideologies with one another so that an attack on one becomes an attack on both. Which is both logically erroneous and
As I have posted multiple times, I fundamentally reject that structure for the left/right structure. There are ideologies and positions that fall outside of the left/right spectrum for any given country. Thus, just because they are rejected by one side or the other, does not inherently make them become part of the other.
Monarchism, of any stripe, in the context of American politics is such a position. The American left wing, defined by western progressive ideals and technocratic libertine passions, rejects Monarchism. The American right wing, defined by classical liberalism, dual federalism, and Constitutionalism, also reject it.
gral
Well-known member
Bolsonaro? Someone knifed him during the 2018 Presidential Campaign(video of the attack: ), and he was in danger of dying during the emergency surgery he had after the attack. As for a massive slandering campaign, it started from the moment he became a serious contender for the 2018 election and will go on after his term(s) of office end(s)...(Bolsonaro is hated by the Left and he reciprocates their hatred - the language between them has always been offensive, to say the least, with the rhetoric on both sides being quite low-brow).
Regarding the Brazilian Monarchy... I don't believe it'll return, barring exceptional circumstances. The First Republic was extremely efficient in extirpating monarchism as a political force in Brazil, to the point that by the Independence Centennial(33 years after the ousting of the Emperor), they allowed the Imperial Family back, because they posed no threat to the Republic. Even if there is an upswing in support for the Monarchism, I doubt they reach 20% of the Electorate. Also, the political class is not at all in favour of them; their 19th-Century peers did away with the Monarchy because they saw it as blocking them from running the show on their own, and the present-day politicians would see a return of the Emperor the same way.
Let me make myself perfectly clear. I know the Democrat party is taking a totalitarian turn. I won't disagree that the base is going rabid in the coastal areas. I am disagreeing that the Democratic party is fascist. You'll have to prove that they are fascist in particular, and not related to any of the other brands of totalitarian government to have come out of the Old and New World.
Otherwise, your analysis is as shallow and nakedly partisan as the people who use the "14 points of fascism" list to prove that Republicans are Nazis.
Not exclusive to fascism. It's closer than other things on your list, but it's also a characteristic of modern Chinese Communism.
And Maduro's motorcycle gangs. And the Bolshevik and Communist fighters that the Blackshirts and the Sturmabteilung were fighting. Hell, even Anarchists had their street gangs. Organized political violence goes back to the French Revolution, if not earlier.
That's called mob rule, and it goes all the way back to Gaius Marius's sixth consulship.
See above. Any totalitarian government worth its salt is going to have a paramilitary or an irregular military organization to terrorize the rest of the population into compliance. It's not universal, but it is common to despots who appeal to the will of the people.
Right. Because you could speak your mind to your heart's content on a university campus in the USSR.
See above.
Again, not exclusive to fascism. Try being a known royalist in Revolutionary France, or a Royalist in communist territory in the Spanish Civil War. Try being a Jew in Palestine. Try being a capitalist in Venezuela.
First of all, why did you parenthesize the 'r' in 'friend'?
Second of all, cool story bro, but Obama didn't do anything nearly as bad as Hitler. He did some illegal and some exceptionally shady shit, and the adulation he got from the media and the thoughtleader class was disgusting. But comparing him to Adolf Hitler undermines a bunch of legitimate complaints you can make about him weaponizing the IRS and the DOJ against his political opponents.
One last time: Not every kind of totalitarianism or despotism is fascism. Democrats are totalitarian. The Democrat party leadership is playing cute with mob rule and moral hysteria. But Democrats aren't fascists.
The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
You misunderstand. I never said monarchism wasn't a fringe position. My complaint is that people like Dinesh D'Souza and Jonah Goldberg try to make monarchism into a left-wing ideology because they define the right wing in terms of classical liberalism.
Yes, I agree with you that mainstream conservatism in America is largely dominated by people who identify strongly with the classical liberal tradition. That's not controversial. What's controversial is that those people assume that monarchism is not only fringe, but a leftist ideology. Yes, I know that nobody here is saying that substantially, but that is what you are saying implicitly when you define libertarian anarchism as "the far right." And there are conservatives that will label all ideologies that reject the idea of limited government as "leftist."
Actually, gay people are the proxy warriors of the sexual revolutionary left. Here's how this works: if you can justify the permissibility of greater deviancies, this means you can justify the permissibility of lesser deviancies. Thus, if you can justify homosexuality as a legitimate form of romance (as opposed to a disorder, as per the natural law tradition), then you can justify lesser sexual deviancies like fornication.
Not to mention that homosexuals have shown themselves to be positive malcontents in their own right. Homosexuals have numerous problems with pedophilia (most of the founders of the modern gay rights movements were pederasts or raped by a pederast at some point in their life), overwhelming promiscuous (Allan P. Bell and Martin S. Weinberg, 1978), prone to prone to use of illegal drugs (M. W. Ross, 1988), have high rates of mental health morbidity and suicide symptoms (according to the CDC), and constitute about 63% of primary and secondary syphilis cases (also according to the CDC).
If you question these negative aspects of the homosexual experience, then you are labeled a bigot. This is a strategy that homosexual activists like the authors of After the Ball admit is part of a long-term propaganda campaign to change attitudes about homosexuality. And it's been very, very successful; so successful, in fact, that mainstream conservatives in America are parading drag queen story hour as one of the "blessings of liberty" that the Founding Fathers of America would've approved of (even though Thomas Jefferson, the most liberal of the Founding Fathers, thought castration was an acceptable punishment for homosexuality).
Here's the deal: I am not a libertarian. That should be clear. So you talking about "what two consenting adults do doesn't concern me" strikes me as irrelevant. These people are in public promoting their homosexuality, and they have only ramped up their rhetoric since getting what they supposedly wanted from Obergefell. I believe this is proof that their actual problem isn't that they are persecuted by Christian society, but that there something wrong with them psychologically. Thomistic Natural Law and modern statistics about homosexuality seem to bear this out.
It's amazing because pretty much everything you said was wrong. Just addressing the strawman of natural law ethics that you've constructed would take entire essays (and in fact, entire essays have been written about it; see here).
Not to mention the philosophical implications of what you are arguing for... I mean, are you committed to David Hume's conception of causes as being "loose and separate," such that a rock crashing into a window would just as likely destroy the window as turn it into feathers? Are you committed to believing taking in nutrients and photosynthesizing is not good for a tree (since there's nothing inherently good about fulfilling natural ends, apparently)? I think, at a bare minimum, you should consider what you are actually arguing against and the ramifications of your position.
Where some faculty F is natural to a rational agent A and by nature exists for the sake of some end E (and exists in A precisely so that A might pursue E), then it is metaphysically impossible for it to be good for A to use F in a manner contrary to E. That's the formula by which teleological natural law ethics works.
Anal sex is always wrong by this. There is no context in which it isn't a misuse of the sexual faculty. This attempt to analogize anal sex with vaginal sex between a woman who is already pregnant or otherwise cannot become pregnant fails because in the latter case, those circumstances are accidents; there's nothing in the nature of the act itself that is contrary to natural law. The woman's sterility or pregnancy is an accidental feature of the act, not something intrinsic to it. Intrinsically, the act is open to procreation and brings unity between a married man and woman. In contrast, anal sex may bring unity, but it is by its very nature not open to procreation. To quote E. Michael Jones: "the anus is not a sex organ!"
On celibacy: There is nothing immoral about not using some faculty F because this argument applies to misuses. Not using some faculty F doesn't constitute a misuse. So priestly celibacy, forsaking the good of marriage to pursue a higher religious calling, is not immoral in the slightest. If you wish to pursue this line of reasoning, you'll have to prove (as some Protestants vainly try to) that all human beings are obligated to get married and have children.
I will not elaborate further on this in this thread. If you are curious and want to know more, please DM me. I do not wish to derail this thread any further.
Yeah, Roman Catholicism wagging its finger at people and telling them it's wrong not to procreate - while out of the other side of its mouth extolling complete celibacy as something spiritually superior?
The underlying reason for the doublethink is historical. Many of the late-classical "church fathers" whose views influenced medieval Latin thinking came from a cultural background in which any form of physical pleasure was considered evil, simply because it was physical not spiritual. So a couple having "fun" together simply because they enjoyed, well, "doing it"? Bad, bad, bad!
But since if nobody reproduced the human race would die out, and then the oh-so-spiritual people would have no one to mooch off, they realized they had to make a concession: okay, alright, have sex in order to make babies, otherwise it's bad!
Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas comes along and dresses it up in clever Aristotelian arguments. But that was all basically rationalization.
And none of it is even remotely Biblical.
In condemning priestly celibacy as unbiblical, you seem to be unaware of the Bible verses by Our Lord and Saint Paul praising celibacy (1 Cor. 7:32-38, Matthew 19:12). No doubt you will probably interpret those verses to mean something different. However, given the indeterminacy of language, we will not be able to agree on interpretation until we go beyond text and appeal to something extra-biblical, like the Church Fathers. That you put them in scare quotes suggests you believe yourself to be a wiser and more thoughtful Christian than they, or that you don't think they are the founders of the church. That's a bit arrogant, I suppose, but nothing out of the ordinary for a modernist. I am interested in hearing how you fixing the problems of Sola Scriptura, in particular:
- How one can use Scripture alone to tell you what counts as Scripture.
- How Scripture alone can tell you how best to interpret Scripture.
- How Scripture alone can give us a procedure for deriving consequences from scripture and applying it to new circumstances.
In my opinion, when you condemn Catholicism generally and St. Thomas Aquinas in particular as "unbiblical," when you attribute the position of Gnostics (the people who actually did think procreation was evil) to the late classical church fathers who roundly condemned them, when you dismiss Thomism as being an Aristotelianized, post-hoc justification for Catholic dogma, you are demonstrating a decided lack of charity. A sin against charity is a mortal sin, and I strongly suggest you pray to God to set you straight.
If you wish to argue with me, I suggest you DM me. I won't turn this thread into another religious debate.
The right-left dichotomy is reflective of some deeper reality though. We do know that there are a group of people that want to destroy what's left of Western Christendom and there are people who want to preserve some aspect of it. We know there are people who value order above all and people who value freedom and equality above all.
I have no problem with you calling monarchists "fringe," because they are. I have a problem with you defining right-wing in terms of classical liberalism, which you are doing when you claim libertarian anarchism is far right.
They will call fascism that but monarchism? I haven't heard that.
Have they ever done that explicitly?
It is far right, it's just not conservative far right.
The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
Read some of the things by Jonah Goldberg and Dinesh D'Souza then.
They both have, albeit in different ways. Dinesh defines right-wing as being anti-state, and is on record on saying that libertarian anarchism is the "far right," so fascists who want a totalizing state are "leftists." Jonah Goldberg has compared Joseph De Maistre with black feminists because they both appeal to "identity politics" or somesuch nonsense.
Well, again, how do you define conservatism? There's a large debate over that at the moment, both in the academy with figures like Yoram Hazony claiming American conservatism is Burkean Conservatism and Burke wasn't liberal and with the recent controversy surrounding Jeremy Boering claiming "what American conservatives want to conserve is American liberalism."
D
Deleted member
Guest
I would argue that American conservatism conforms to the local environment, which is that of incredible open spaces, dense forests, and low population densities; with a natural (and partially engineered by indigenous Americans) bounty which makes survival off the land easy and means that during political disputes it was easy for the losing side to simply pull up stakes and go move somewhere else--indigenous American peoples did this all the time.
The discovery of the New World and its opening to Europeans meant that Europeans suddenly found themselves with the exact same potential. They could simply pull stakes and leave, for the New World, where they would all be able to claim as much land as a Lord might hold back home in Europe. This meant that even though the cultures were very different, the New World attracted the Europeans most culturally similar to the local indigenous people. And so European culture was interpreted through the same circumstances, and indeed through the example of the local people. By the time of the American Revolution, our society was essentially indigenised.
What this means is that American conservatism is fundamentally about maintaining the moral and social order found at the time of the American Revolution, when we had reached something like a healthy symbiosis with our lived environment. This means that Jeffersonian Agrarianism was actually the "conservative" set of values, because it wanted to make a European adapted cultural framework in the United States which essentially consisted of a Republic of a Free Yeomanry, in which the government existed for the benefit of the landowning farming class of free yeomanry, and the cities were cesspools of corruption and internationalist financial classes. The Hamiltonians might ostensibly look "conservative" because of their "aristocratic" touches, but mostly this was Jeffersonian rhetoric, their willingness to support large-scale industrialisation and importation of a working city class meant they were fixed on setting the country on a course to destroy the power of the agrarian class, and we have subsequently seen that inexorably happen.
The laws, customs, and traditions of the United States are not of themselves liberal. However, the country was damned by the admission of an underclass (the slave population) from before it was created, and the tension this caused set us on a course to centralise the government and erode the power of a free yeomanry. As a consequence, we ended with urban masses who perverted the basic intent of the Republic in the same way Rome was undone by masses of rural poor. Conservatism in the United States is thus about preserving, defending, and restoring the interests of the agrarian class--which means that those republicans from the prairie states who vote for the Farm Bill, the Post Office (because it's the only way to get anything in a small town), and Amtrak (because the train runs through and the nearest airport is a twelve hour drive away) are far more authentic American conservatives than the doctrinaire ideologues who are obsessed with free markets and want to enable fundamentally progressive businesses like those in SV to have more power over American society.