Thoughtforfood said:
I have to jump in here (yes I realize I have 2 more pages to read), but I have to side with Scott here. Left radicals are just as fringe and useless as are the radicals on the right. "Raging against the machine" has about as much effect as urinating on the ground and expecting to form the Grand Canyon. Like it or not, the forces of power actually HAVE power, and changing anything that involves moving them takes patience and time. However, radicals do have their usefulness in that they produce the philosophical base for more moderate and useful views.
I am just not a fan of violent rhetoric because I know that regardless from whence it comes, there are stupid, unstable people who will take the message to the extreme. I also do believe that people like Rush and Coulter incite in ways that suggests that contrary to their protestations, they would love to see some violence enacted by their followers. Then again, so did the Black Panthers, and many other groups on the left. In fact, the guy that just flew the plane into the IRS office sure sounded like a Liberal to me when you read his journal entries.
I do not for one second believe Scott to be radically situated in his beliefs. If you would read his posts on this thread, you will see someone who does see the middle as useful.
Well maybe you'd think differently if the country were taken over by a facist regime. And, by the way, America isn't completely immune form facism, though most Americans are completely in the dark about it.
There are times, consequently, when a violent response is
absolutely necessary. For instance when it is done in the name of combating an even greater violence.
And I find it so distasteful and incredibly hypocritcal (given the brutality surrounding us) this type of enemic centrist ideological position, that is without verve and never really takes up a postion on anything, where everything that is even moderately jaring, which is not to a say completely upsetting, to the easilly distressed centrist mindset, is invariably branded radical and denounced as anathema for having dared to present a position we can all actually understand or at least come to terms with, whether we like it or not.
Americans are so easilly distressed and over the most normal of circumstances. That's because too much reality goes against their comfortable daily routine, thus things which lacerate the minds of many throughout the rest of the world, are not even thought of in America because to face them would be too destabalizing to the fragile national psychology. Every violent opinion is terrifying and is denounced as
extreme, even though there isn't much extreme about such ideas at all. Like socialized healthcare.
To far too many Americans something that is completely normal for the rest of the civilized world, is to them nothing short of
Hitlerian. How grotesque. And the reason why the rest of the civilized world sees nothing radical in something which they know is absolutely necessary, that is socialized healthcare, no matter the costs, is because they know that there will always be the poor. Consequently it is simply uncivil and rather barbarous to make the only form of healthcare that people have access to be that which is offered by the private insurance companies, which, quite naturally, the multitude of poor cannot afford. It is simply unconscionable to the rest of the civilized world that private healthcare has been pretty much the exclusive option in America, and not something optional for those that can afford it; whereas that which
is of a moral necessity and should thus be available to all irrespective of wealth, namely a State healthcare program, was non-existant, to say nothing of the dreadful state of affairs caused by the tyrrany of the health insurance companies, who deal out life and death as they see fit based upon the economic advantages or disadvantages.
That centrist America, on both sides of the ideological fence, tollerated the intollarable for decades, is a demonstration of the prevailing ruthlessly individualistic culture that is much more radical and offensive from an ethical stand point, than any so called radical statements made by the fringe political movements which terrify you so.
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