Liberal vs Conservative: The Useless Dichotomy

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Perhaps not in full but I didn't exactly visualize it in full either. I have my reasons for picking that decade and I gave them. Who doesn't fantasize about having conversations with their favorite authors. Given that is impossible for me to travel back in time I see your claim as moot and irrevelant as to what I was trying to get accross which is I made my 70 years ago comment out of feeling not out of any basis of objectivity.

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But those politicians don't come out of a vortex. There values are shaped by society just as much as anyone elses. Sure they may be more tempted to be corrupt but my point on the whole issue is that the public would be in such an uproar over Bush's actions that they would demand his impeachment; aggressively I may add. It is said that Andrew Johnson got impeached because he was an unpopular prez well so is Bush with his 37% approval rating so why did the public ( or even the politians back then) care so much? Bush scratches a lot of backs but he incites a lot of contempt as well. I am curious to see how history will remember Bush II.


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I think your bypassing a lot of 19th century American history by saying that. I am not saying that parties should be radically different from each other given that government by necessity must be about compromise. However your twisting my words around by saying that I advocate two radical different parties when I was only making an observable fact that politics has become more about image than about anything else. What is it about Bush that makes him an Republican? Is it his economic policies? Is it his views on immigration? Carter is another easy target as a " i labeled myself "democrat" to get elected.
These type of presidents end up getting no respect in the end of their terms because in truth they have no real respect for the party they were supposely a part of. I don't see this trend as going away soon when you have most democrats to afraid to even support their own traditional issues and republicans should just change their party to the "I dont really give a s**t about the people" party. Well at least one good thing will come out of this more people running to alternative parties instead of just pretending that both the democrat and republican parties aren't broken. I mean I am not asking for perfection here in a candidate just a little honesty.




Well I tend to do that and make no apologies for it. I did it for my benefit more than yours as I never really thought about logic as a tool before more as an product of nature. I thought humans normally go back forth and between normative and positive statements in a casual discussion. To me politics would have little value without normative statements let alone how do you create an ideology without one? Ah too pedantic for me I guess I am a Kantian at heart.

Not really, they just sell stuff. If you don't like the food then pick a different one, we have a better food selection than most people on the face of the earth much less past generations.


Because there were cultural icons. Longfellow vs Spears: hmm I really wonder who would score higher on an IQ test. The quality of the culture was better probably due to the mass culture being more interested in the high culture such as the arts. Although I use your terms loosely because I think it was a lot more complicated than that. Probably in part due to career niches there is less emphasis on people today wanting to learn something outside of their expertise. If it's not marketable why possess it type of attitude. I disagree with you about information being less availible. Thanks to the telegraph and later the telephone, small town newspapers were able to inform their citizens of what was happening in the world around them and lets not forget about libraries and universities. It was not as fast as it is today but an argument can be made that fast isn't always better considering all the misinformation that is swimming around us. Persons of the past may not have had the access nor the rational of attending a university (an example being they were just going to follow in their father's footsteps anyway or receive on the job training such an a police officer) but that doesn't mean that they were not interested in reading books and enjoying high culture such as attending operas and plays. I am not saying every dick and jane of the past was interested in those types of things Iam just saying that a substantial amount of them were to the point where high culture as you define it greatly influenced mass culture and vice versa.

These are just my humble opinions about aggro-business. I think you answered my question by saying:



Competition need not be analogous with war. Customers are not the enemy to be despised and manipulated or screwed over in a biz deal. What ever happened to the part in the book where Sun Tzu stated that war as a tactic should be the last resort? I don't know about you but I hate pushy sales people and their pitches of intimidation don't work on me. Why can't someone just to talk to me like a human being? Back in my CSR days I didn't pull that crap and my customers respected me a lot more because of it.



Well I am generally true to my feelings. I do associate the word warrior with certain values that the modern biz man does not possess. As for biz men being heroes I am sorry but that mundane job will never be seen in the same light as someone who must physically/mentally fight just to bring their cause into existence. I am not into naming everyone a hero just because it boosts their ego. The passion to make money is the not same thing as the passion to bring your vision or someone else's into existence. If the business world wasn't so sociopathic maybe I would feel differently but alas it is a world full of sharks and so I don't. I realize that people have their own causes; I just wish so many people didn't conform to the expectation that making money is the most important consideration in the world. I admit I possess an intolerable view on this position.

That depends on the "corporate interests" and the period of time over which they are practiced. A large part of this also relates back to our cultural heritage which includes individualism and capitalism. I don't think that this is stockholm syndrome because the US has historically been very capitalistic. I think what this really ends up being is that you think your political beliefs are correct and that the system is corrupt because it does not perfectly reflect that. My own political instincts are often described as very capitalist and I have thought about them a lot as well and read a significant amount of economics in my free time.[/quote]

My fatuous tendencies will always get the best of me. I thought it was a pretty sweet analogy. I don't see much individualism in America. What is so individualistic about conformity? Just cuz the US is more aggressive then some other countries doesn't necessarily make it more individualiistic especially when the agression takes on a collective form. I never said I was against capitalism. Like every other ism it never has and never can be practice in it's purest form. Regulating capitalism is not the same thing as doing away with capitalism completely which is where I now currently stand on the issue. I demand my consumer rights damn it As for my political beliefs well I could probably write a 900+ page book about them which I probably will do. Are they correct? I more curious if they will actually work but since the liklihood of me becoming a monarch of my own country is next to nil I will just to have to armchair it.

Oh, well, I tend to value objective reality as something to examine.


No, they don't. I never said that they did. I merely said that they were individuals with individual desires. Why would the public be in an uproar? Heck, the Plame affair didn't really include Bush anyway and we have had many presidential scandals where nobody gets impeached. Andrew Johnson got impeached because he was politically unpopular, not because of the public opinion so much. Andrew Johnson got in the way of political plans, George Bush is now just learning how to use a veto and many of the things that Bush is unpopular for are things that the entire political body is guilty for on some level, such as the Iraq War.




I don't really think so. The government is about compromise. Bush believes in tax cuts, he has pro-business views on immigration, he believes in an aggressive foreign policy, he promotes socially conservative policies such as a constitutional amendment on gay marriage, he has appointed conservative justices to the SCOTUS, he is not a big promoter of government social programs, he tried to privatize social security, he is not an environmentalist, and at the very least he tends towards a very conservative use of diction. Bush is not a democrat. Carter fits more as a democrat due to his foreign policy stance as it is not as aggressive and nationalist as republican stances.


They do go between normative and positive statements in a casual discussion, and politics is often all about the normative statements. My statement was that life was subjectivity, which means that life is based upon normative statements which are subjective, and not positive statements. This ties into your position of politics as all about the normative statements.


Well, yes, you are right, you would have different spending habits if you had a different income because of the changes in consumption of inferior and luxury goods. I love spaghetti, but I don't mind cheap food. Yes, people did do that at one point, it is not efficient though for most.

Ceases to fund it properly? Are you speaking of the businesses because funding to businesses is often just corporate welfare. Agribusiness has become big business, and we don't need to protect it at all.

Yep, cheap.

And people are making bad choices. If you even look today most fast food places will have cheap salad and cans of vegetables can be bought cheaply at any grocery store. Americans are not without choice; we have plenty of choice.

Yes, their industries haven't learned that quality matters. Frankly, that is no surprise, I think that many industries do go a reckless phase.


But the issue is still popular culture. Now really, will popular culture in a pre-mass culture society really reflect the popularity of a poet? Not really. You ignore the lower classes who may not really know how to read and if they did they would not care. I mean, we can look at the changes in the distribution of culturally important markets and perhaps see a lot of the issue.

I would really argue that mass culture was not interested, it just wasn't developed enough to really stick out. Mass culture in the early US included getting drunk and having crazy displays on holidays, but we look at the successful people who run everything to truly get our ideas on past society.

No, I doubt that. People in earlier societies simply got a trade and lived life. They were not autodidacts seeking great knowledge at all. The best they might have done is learned the Bible and many probably didn't do that. In today's society, there are lots of different opportunities to learn many different things. Popular books today include well-written books by public intellectuals that can be found in wal-mart, and there are channels on the television devoted to improving the knowledge and skills of people. Heck, compared to past people we have more time to do many of these things anyway which alone speaks volumes of what we can and do learn.

That is only partially true, there is still exposure to ideas now that did not exist before, and even on the most basic level there are people who argue that our entertainment has gotten more complex making us more intelligent in order to better entertain us, which is why more shows now have more complex plots.

So? Depending upon the year there were many farmers and even though there is a capability that is no proof of its use. Do you think that libraries were that big of a deal for people who barely got an education in the schools they went to? I doubt it. Universities are even more common today than ever anyway.

Misinformation has always swam around us. To claim that ideology is not a part of how reality is expressed is like saying we have a chicken sandwich without the slices of bread. Besides, the information we receive in schooling is a lot more than most people ever got their hands on. We have mass education now with much of the population having good literacy. In fact, I would argue that both of us are probably misinformed in some way or have failed to keep our opinions in line with the correct academic answer in many fields of study.

Why would they be interested in those things though? They likely were mostly interested in baudy jokes and liquor. I mean, you are claiming that the average person, who was at that time less educated than today, wanted education for its own sake more than the average person today? I think that the real issue is that the elite culture dominated in the past more so than that the average person of the day really cared about learning and that men of letters walked our streets commonly. Just think of factory workers, they did not even have a lot of free time to pursue these intellectual interests and the people before them would have even less access.

Well, high culture already does influence mass culture. Seinfeld is noted for being a postmodern show(postmodernism is an idea of the intelligensia, not the common man) and the Simpsons(one of the most popular shows in history) is noted for having high culture references, even an episode that included Edgar Allen Poe's poem "The Raven".

So, they are not despised? Businessmen are taught to bend over backwards to win over the customer and businesses will often help customers who screw themselves over. Do businesses actually go to war? No. Salesmen aren't that common though, and they are pushy because they need to be in order to get some success. The issue is that many people will give in eventually and not all salesmen are skilled in the same way.


Well, on some level it already has been seen in that manner. The entrepreneur is seen someone who physically/mentally fights to bring their cause into existence and most businessmen try to see themselves as the entrepreneur, who takes risks, who works hard, and everything in order to do well.

Well, and that ignores the nature of businessmen. The ones that seek to be considered heroes seek to be considered entrepreneurs and great men who influence the world. The mercenaries who go in to make a buck will consider themselves that.

The business world is there for a reason and having the type of order you like isn't it. Making money is at least a way to get other people stuff.

That is because you take a cultural view of individualism as pursuing a crazy path, rather than the idea of individualism as freedom. Americans see individualism as rugged individualism, the idea that we make it our way and we are free. Not in the manner that we take art classes to express ourselves. Americans have also always been pragmatists which will impact your cultural view of them as they will inevitably aim towards pragmatic ends with little regards for the higher things you enjoy.

But the fact that we don't sign a lot of treaties does. Nationalism is more individualist than internationalism.

Most people associate corporations and capitalism together so quickly that I have to jump on it. Whether capitalism can be practiced in its purest form is a matter of questioning, I actually have a friend who believes in anarcho-capitalism so I often get dragged into those arguments on the nature of capitalist calculation vs government, the nature of privatized law, and all sorts of other things of that nature.

They are different. The issue is the efficacy of regulation of course, and to be honest, one of my favorite economists is Milton Friedman so I probably will be very different than you on that matter.

Well, I don't think I would write a book that large on my political beliefs. I don't care that much, but if I went through and explained every argument and fully fleshed everything out I might get my ideas to be pretty long, especially if I explored all of the tensions I am dealing with currently.