[lbo-talk] lbo, a den of right-wingers?

ravi lbo at kreise.org
Fri Aug 26 10:15:02 PDT 2005


andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> I may be the in the neighborhood of the closest thing
> to a real right winger who regularly contributes -- I
> have two cheers for western liberal democracy,
> consider myself an American patriot (no ("God Bless
> America" magnets on the car, but if they made one that
> said "This Land Belongs To You and Me," I'd use it.),
> I like markets, I unhappily campaigned for Kerry. I
> believe that unless you're pretty careful about your
> proteins a vegetarian diet does stunt your growth
> (hey, that's just a fact -- though what it has to do
> with politics I am not clear). I defend big
> corporations for a living. I am, however, a socialist
> who wanys to abolsih wage labor, can't abide
> discrimination on any of the usual laundry list bases,
> and am a staunch defender of gay and lesbian (etc.)
> rights. Nathan is probably several steps to ther right
> of me, he avidly likes the Democratic Party, but he is
> still (last time I checked) a socialist, I believe.

so, what's the big difference between you and me? i still don't understand the criticism of providing limited, conditional support to kerry. i haven't to date seen a complete critique of markets that i understood. there is one difference: i do believe that patriotism is the resort of scoundrels (apologies to you), and i do not believe land belongs to anyone (but i dont think you meant it in the sense of ownership/property-rights anyway). oh, also, i believe adding "western" to "liberal democracy" is, at heart, often gratuitous. not only do these structures arise out of an intermingling of cultures and ideas, but it would be very difficult (impossible) to prove that such structures did not exist in antiquity or in the present in other cultures.

the thing with vegetarian diet: a) careful construction is what evolution accomplishes and there are vegetarian populations that survive on a healthy diet without needing advanced degrees in nutrition. b) people rarely just state "a fact". there is almost always an opinion attached. in this instance, your addition of "carefully constructed" (which is a bit redundant, in the sense of (a)) is the thing missing from "the fact" that was presented about vegetarian diets.

there is a difference perhaps: my leftism is probably a bit more "religious" i.e., i believe less in reducing leftism to a science, than in the axiomatic importance of certain virtues, ways of looking at things and constructing ideas and carrying out dialogue, (kindness, tolerance, etc). insofar as it is faith-based, it is more open to analytical hole-poking (but it can be argued that my hard-nosed analytical critics have nothing significant, including their theoretical consistency, to offer in exchange).


> Let me
> tell you this is not the profile that you find on the
> Mises or Hayek lists, much less lower-brow right wing
> lists.

perhaps not. but mailing lists are only a slice of the populace.

--ravi



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