[Ramona_A_Stone]

Scoobie, your tone, and span's, is consistently one of mocking derision, but you're both so convinced you're right that you seemingly excuse yourselves from doing the exact things of which you accuse me.

Personally, I think anyone so commitedly polarized is absurd, myself included, but the fact is I'm openly aware of the cartoonish futility of such caricatures and I've acknowledged and insinuated a thousand times and a thousand different ways (re: "obligatory complementary exercise in polarized futility") that anyone who believes that individuals can be so black or white is in denial of human nature and reality, but this is simply derided as more liberal propaganda and you never seem to get the punchline.

You, span and sinner et al, are so enamored of your own instantaneous contradictions in the form of mocking derision of any and all ideas at odds with your great "conservative omniscience" (spoken in reverent quavering tones) that my whole approach to you has simply become to reverse whatever you say and reflect it back on you as much as possible; to say "look, here's what it feels like when you're arbitrarily placed in an ideological group and continuously fired upon with offhand negations."

Anyone engaged in such a categorical and inherently mythic battle, on either side, cannnot be taken seriously by their opponents, and, I can scarcely believe, by themselves.

I certainly have no need or desire to 'prove' anything to someone so seemingly utterly entrenched in the inability to take other people seriously, nor even a belief that such a feat would even be possible, but I can amuse myself with the exercise of playing your little game as well as I can. I assume that's the only possiblity there could be of interacting with you, and since you seem to prefer the dialogue to hover there I'm happy to play along as long as you seem as frustrated by it as you seem to intend for me to be.

Maybe I've misunderstood your game, I admit it is a little fuzzy but it seems about as simple and basic as chess to me, and has about as much to do with actual people, real issues and vital dialogue as that game.

Since you and span seem to not mind being the poster children for your agendas, and have worked so damned diligently to create this environment wherein seemingly anything outside the lines of your party's doctrines will be summarily, automatically and swiftly dismissed as 'typical hysterical liberal blather'--always looking for that 'checkmate in one move,' (in your dreams)--I haven't minded a bit being the 'poster child for the liberal intelligentsia,' if that's what you see my responses to you as. The possible difference here is that I see it for the humorous (and sad) exercise in misguided futility that it is. To make a caricature of it seems more than enough, since you seem unwilling, unable or do not care to do more.

You're constantly crying that no one is 'equipped' to debate you, yet you refuse to take responsibility for reaping what you have sown. Perhaps you feel that calling people moonbats and nutcases is a valid form of debate, but if this is the case it seems remarkable that you're happy to dish it out but not so happy to take it.

You simply refuse to treat people as real when you assume, as you seem to, that we sit down and figure out what's on the official liberal agenda before we decide what we think and what opinions we're going to have about an issue. Yet even as you complain constantly about this in others, it seems eerily as though you are doing the exact same thing you complain of.

Listen to yourself:

"your comments are judgmental to the extreme -- your example of dealing with someone who disagrees with you is to use words such as lobotomized carp, or anencephalic -- you do not debate issues, you choose to insult and mock instead -- you readily dismiss any opposing view as motivated by ignorance..."

Then in the same post you call me "a closed-minded pseudo-intellectual metaphysical nutcase -- you claim that I am intellectually and humanly deficient -- that I am a waste of your time and you resent me" and that basically everything I say is beneath contempt and consideration and should simply be ignored.

Pot, kettle, black, I mean really, wouldn't you honestly admit?

In other posts you're seen to call jack a "moonbat," to tell him he's the victim of leftist-commie propaganda and wears a tinfoil turban, ad nauseum.

In truth though scoobie, since I'd say about 85% of what you post aren't your own opinions, but articles by your favorite liberal-haters (I don't qualify liberal-hating as conservative as naturally and easily as you do, I have more respect for true conservatives so I wouldn't lump them into the same ball of wax), in my opinion you're not quite as guilty personally of derogatory coinage and dismissive derision as your comrade span, though most of the articles you do post are people doing exactly that, albeit usually with slightly more finesse. I won't even bother to list examples since anyone who frequents these forums can pretty much predict span's comments on any given issue, being as they are, the equivalent of snarling answering machine messages, the brief wording changing every day but the message always basically the same: "no one home, fuck off."

The constant attempts to discredit everything you disagree with are so relentless that I fail to believe it could have any intent at all beyond sarcasm and parody, so sue me for playing by your rules.

Since the onset of the war with Iraq the 'supposed conservatives' at this forum have consistently labeled anyone who was anti-war as tree-hugging, "Saddam loving" imbeciles, and the tradition carries on to the point that anyone who has the slightest quibble with the godlike party line regarding any and every issue receives the same epithets. You seem to love this easy exercise of taking fuzzy distorted snapshots of others, but you hate it when others take them of you.

Liberals label conservatives as greedy, bigoted, warmongering corporate megalomaniacs preciously doling out the reward of granting basic human dignity only to those already like themselves, and conservatives label liberals as tree hugging commie moonbats hellbent on dissolving every sacred moral value, from being overt traitors to our country to destroying the very nuclear family.

Yes, I am guilty of repeatedly jamming this ridiculously small shoe on your foot, repeatedly because you consistently seem to fail to grasp the principle of how ineffective your own tactics are when they are applied back to you while going on and on using them on others as if they were the height of efficacy.

One thing seems certain to me, everyone and everything cannot possibly fit in those two little Polaroids. Yet these are the only materials you provide.


Beyond all this there is something I feel I've learned, or come to believe from playing this game, and it's a shame you'll have been unable to read my liberal metaphsyical nutcase blather up to now, scrolling past it as you are, because this is the only really good part. Beyond and between these parodies, these abstract polarities that you and I seem so willing to mask our identities with across cyberspace, there does seem to be a basic qualitative difference and that is, stated as simply as possible:

The ideal of pure conservatism is less inclusive than the ideal of pure liberalism.

Even though the very names liberal and conservative have become equivalent to dirty words because they are so often bestowed us and so completely defined by the "opposition," and the very concept of their relative purity is entirely mythic, if this simple statement above is true, and can be conceded by both camps, and I think it obviously can be, then another interesting truism seems to obviously follow:

Liberalism is therefor more suited to the pursuit of the ideal of pure Democracy than conservatism.

Democracy is by definition an inclusive state of the people by which it is formed, and in fact the more inclusive it can be, the more ideal it becomes. Of course again the purity of this ideal is mythic.

True liberals seem to be the force in a Democracy that decentralizes, works outward toward recognizing, integrating and including diversity, even encouraging it, while true conservatives seem to work toward a more Mosaic fixedness and intensely centralized models of uniform behavior.

Clearly both are necessary goals, and in some sense a Democracy is equally dependent on the presence of both kinds of focus, but beyond the critical mass of either is certain and clear disaster. The true negatives of liberalism are entropy and social dissolution. The true negatives of conservatism are oligarchical and in the extreme much much worse.

The most important observation is perhaps that they are not the negatives of each other but have a common goal of change. It's just a silly irony of human nature that both will swear that their way will be better for everyone.

Of course all this is merely philosphical, there are no "true, pure, abstract" liberal or conservative intentions. People with NUKE IRAQ T-shirts or building little shrine-threads to war toys don't qualify as true conservatives and those with MEAT IS MURDER T-shirts or throwing red paint on fur-bearing models don't qualify as true liberals--in fact for these extremes you could just as well switch labels and make just as much sense of an argument. On the less extreme side most people are disqualified simply because of a personal balance that is an indeterminate mixture of approaches to each issue. There are lesbian Christians who carry guns and have confederate flag bumper stickers and atheist republican closet transvestites who attend Save The Whale rallies in this world.

[exercise in irony]

their thinking is "we know better than you how you should live, and we'll force you to live as we believe you should. through a benevolent dictatorial government, the liberals would decide how we should live, and the government would take care of each of us from cradle to grave, whether we like it or not.

their thinking is "we know better than you how you should live, and we'll force you to live as we believe you should. through a benevolent dictatorial government, the conservatives would decide who we should sleep with, marry, go to war with, and the government would regulate every aspect of our lives from cradle to grave, whether we like it or not.

[/exercise in irony]

Though the use of the words "we" and "you"--of the concepts of "us and them"--in both equations are the too often unexamined factors, and both are so fraught with contradictions it's difficult to find a qualitative difference, I still submit, again, that there is one.

While "conservatives" are arguing that liberals want to control everything they seem to simultaneously be saying: "we don't mind at all that the administration can easily overstep the will of the people to go to war or to amend the constitution to outlaw, regulate or predetermine the parameters of certain kinds of relationship based on religious language. As long as it benefits or at least isn't a detriment to us (and in the case of gay marriage for example we have an issue which is neither but is only detrimental to other people--them), and as long as we are secure that we are 'the majority,' (often falsely--polls consitently show that this nation is virtually split down the middle on the issues such as the war with Iraq and gay marriages and even George Bush's very election was characterized by a popular vote with a variance of about one half of one percent) we are proud to champion our government as righteous, if indeed not as infallible, even though you may disagree."

If liberals are moved to question the veracity of such claims it is again only because we are more inclusive in our thinking and mindful of the diversity which is constantly averaged out of your "big pictures."

It seems clear to me that any cultures which have successfully repressed this function of liberality have evolved into something that can no longer be referred to as Democratic, and while I certainly don't see The United States going the way of the Third Reich (or becoming a Utopia, for that matter) in any of our lifetimes, I will remain "polarized" to those who would seem to have it so.


OK one last sally and then I have to stop wasting our collective time.

At other schools we found these representations of registered faculty Democrats to Republicans:

Brown 30-1
Bowdoin, Wellesley 23-1
Swarthmore 21-1
Amherst, Bates 18-1
Columbia, Yale 14-1
Pennsylvania, Tufts, UCLA and Berkeley 12-1
Smith 11-1

At no less than four elite schools we could not identify a single Republican on the faculty:

Williams 51 Democrats, 0 Republicans
Oberlin 19 Democrats, 0 Republicans
MIT 17 Democrats, 0 Republicans
Haverford 15 Democrats, 0 Republicans

If we're continuing to play the game that all Democrats are Liberals and all Conservatives are Republicans, then I can't imagine what in the world those statistics would prove other than an incredibly obvious and marked tendency for more liberals than conservatives to become teachers, which certainly makes a great deal of sense since two prerequisites for becoming a teacher would clearly seem to be that you A: "be smart" or at least "intellectual" or very interested in education, and B: "be compassionate" or at least care about other people or society as a whole enough to facilitate educating them for a living.

The implied syllogism that "most teachers are smart, caring Democrats" doesn't surprise or threaten me at all...

...but you seem kind of "hysterical" about it...

A lot of times "smart" and "caring" seem to be more or less the same basic tendency to me, so your point seems very much in line with my experience that the most valuable people happen to have this "liberal tendency." But that's probably just because I'm a gay commie tree hugging nutcase.