r.avens said:
I find this thread an endless circular echo chamber mostly populated by radical leftists who really don't even consider individual freedom a very important, dare I say sacred, right.
Maybe someone else would care to engage.
Your point raises an important issue regarding the nature of individual freedom as a sacred right, or, in the conservative way of thinking, the absolute right; which
takes into consideration only the individual and nothing but the individual in his total isolation from everybody else; when, in a civilized State, such individual freedom should take into consideration everybody else and, in being constrained by the demands of behaving in a civilized way, always to be given its proper measure by forever holding into account
everyone else's individual freedom at every moment of social interaction and under every political decision making process to thus legislate in such a way that neither unreasonably inhibits individual freedom nor allows the individual freedom of some to unreasonably trounce upon that of others. This is what is meant by the social-democratic State, r.avens, as an anecdote to that purly agonisitc capitalist State championed by the conservitives who when in power of late had sunken the country to a lowness
never before seen in its history.
The radical leftists, as you have called them, are often and in most cases simply people not taken in by such untrustworthy, power-hungry people that were in government then and in most cases nothing has changed even with the new elections because the politicians on both sides in America have grown us accustomed to wading in the muck. Such radicals, moreover, understand that your (anyone's) individual freedom ends precisely where mine (anyone else's) begins, which is the only philosophy that allows us all to be saved from the prepotency of others. It is the only way to prevent the law of the mighty from replacing
real justice and for individual tyranny to prevail over the well-being of collective society, which is what we get in the American capitalist system and in its form of democracy. The problem isn't therefore the right to individual freedom, but it's unconstrained concesion to everyone by the State and by the fact that the conservatives have allowed it to be used irresponsibly by those capable and willing to stop at nothing to pillage society exclusively for their own economic and political gains. And these dreadful people are always taken in by the word
socialism, I've thought, when everybody knows that the word
socialism has lost all meaning. Our socialists aren't socialists anymore, r.avens, today's socialists are the new capitalists, all a sham. Even if the truth is that modern democratic thought had been based upon the socialist philosophies of the post-industrial revolution period that saved the great political experiment from falling into the total control of the ruthless capitalist tyrannts and thus the
capitalist tyranny. And again so they did during the New Deal era, which saved the capitalist markets from their own auto-annihilation and consequently from their own greed to everyone's detriment. But the conservative way of thinking, which led to these disasters, has cunningly always found away to prevail and this by making sly use of individual freedom as sacred right as propaganda for stupid people who are unprepared to stand up to such propaganda even when it flies directly in the face of their own interests, the interests of most, and these pitiful people are therefore too weak to change the situation and allow themselves to be governed either by the most cynical and ignoble of opportunists or else the more vulgar and therefore more spineless of cretins.
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