On Jul 3, 2007, at 4:22 PM, wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
>> Last time I checked you called yourself a socialist.
>> Lots of 20th century socialists believed in one-party
>> dictatorship, cults of personality, mass murder,
>> secret political police and torture of "enemies of the
>> people," huge concentration camp systems, forced
>> labor, guilt by association, preposterous paranoid
>> charges and show trials, widespread censorship, and
>> other unsavories. Do you think we should give up that
>> term -- socialism -- and find an expression that no
>> one has sullied -- until _it_ gets dirty?
>>
>> I think attack on liberalism ought to have gone out of
>> style around the time of forced collectivization, the
>> Moscow Purge trials at the latest.
>
> Seems that a lot of the folks that you were offering so much praise
> for in
> the free speech and civil rights movements had some rather
> trenchent words
> about liberalism.
Yeah, I'm really wondering who these liberals are who advocate liberalism? These days you've got to be pretty far to the left - like NLG/CCR - to resist the imperatives of the terror war, for example. Maybe a third of the Democratic House delegation? None of the major presidential candidates. Civil rights? Where? Unions, forget about 'em.
Doug