livE People
Cobb links to one Doc Rampage's beliefs about the nature of folks on the left and right side of the political spectrum. He tries to sound reasonable, and if his assumptions were true, he would be.
The difference in a nut shell: the left believes that the measure of a society is how well it produces good people. The right thinks that the measure of a society is how well it controls bad people. To the left, if a society has bad people that need to be controlled, then it is a failure already. To the right, society has little impact on how good a person is, it can only control their more harmful actions.
I almost have no problem with this, but the good doctor leaves out a major difference: the right has some pretty bizarre (to me, anyway) ideas about what constitutes help and harm. Not to mention that he has the entire dynamic backward (hence "livE" rather than "Evil").
Anti-discrimination laws, for instance, punish behavior rather than intent. Try to find a rightwinger in favor of actually enforcing anti-discrimination laws (which I judge by their actions in budgeting rather than their rhetoric…by Doc Rampage's lights, that makes me a right winger).
The right has been trying to coopt the left's issues because the "Compassionate Conservative Crap" is the horse they rode into a 50% share of the popular vote on. Without the CCC (yes, I remember the organization with those initials quite well, thank you) they'd have never even have gotten close.
Doc Rampage believes, and that's unfortunate.
Again, the left is correct. What they fail to understand is how utterly obvious that fact is to conservatives. Of course there are brutal and cruel people in America. Of course some of these brutal and cruel people are in the military. Of course even otherwise good people sometimes do evil things. None of this shocks the right, or even seems worth remarking on. That is why conservatives misunderstand what the left is saying. When a person says something utterly obvious, you assume that they mean something else by the remark. If you ask a friend how he likes your new car and he says, "Well, it's red." You assume he doesn't just mean to tell you the color of the car. And when the left constantly points out evil things done by Americans or the American government, the right is inclined to react similarly, looking for the meaning in these obvious and trivial statements.
Multiple problems here. The response of the right has been to deny the evil of (for example) butt-nekkid men on my TV.
DON'T make me get the quotes.
To the left, the human mind is a computer that takes inputs and produces outputs. If the inputs are frustration, want, and suffering, they will deliver outputs of violence, cruelty and brutality. Correspondingly, if you want to prevent violent outputs then you simply change the inputs. That's why leftists fear movies about the suffering of Christ or pastors who say that homosexuality is a sin. They fear these inputs will trip a switch in some hapless mind that sets someone to violence.
What Doc does here is deny the ability to learn from one's environment. I don't know anyone on the left that feels one can simply program the human mind.
The right sees these arguments and finds them patently offensive for treating human beings like robots. It seems morally arrogant to always presuppose that you can manipulate others to see things your way.
…which means the Bushistas are leftists.
You want objectivity? Ignore the good doctor. Check the promises Bush made in 2000. Kinder. Gentler. Compassion. Help putting food on your family. Compare what they promised to what they've done.
I'm assuming from all this that Doc Rampage and Cobb are both voting against Bush.
