Arnold Schwarzenegger for president?-OR- If I had a nickel for every time I read the phrase.... by chrisisall

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Arnold Schwarzenegger for president?-OR- If I had a nickel for every time I read the phrase....

POSTED BY: CHRISISALL
UPDATED: Tuesday, June 14, 2022 21:00
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Wednesday, January 11, 2006 3:52 PM

You know, you are right....... huh, just popped in "out of Gas" and checked it. I am getting old, that's my explanation and I'm sticking with it.

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Wednesday, January 11, 2006 3:58 PM

DREAMTROVE

I don't think we're talking about full on democracy here. Inara is a first class citizen, our other characters are not. I doubt anyone gave a rat's ass what Jayne thought.

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Wednesday, January 11, 2006 4:02 PM

CHRISISALL

Quote:
Originally posted by Fletch2:
We know what Mal does, we can assign reasons to why he does it but he doesn't do it because he's fighting a gorilla war, this is his way of surviving, if in the process he embaresses the Alliance like in "Train Job" that's just gravy.

Fletch, my simple point (maybe overly simple point) is that Mal isn't a bad guy, and the only true criminal element on Serenity is Jayne, who serves a purpose for Mal, properly reigned (and even has a spark of good in him, it's the only reason he made it off Ariel alive).
The show has desperation all over it, but not criminality. If you, an injured and temporally penniless Fletch, needed insulin to live, and stole some from a hospital's backroom in the nick of time, should you go to jail? Technically, yes. Realistically?
There's the rub for me; Laws do not equal justice, more often they serve to control. Laws are tools, and sometimes the wrong tool is employed for the sake of expediency, or profit.

I agree that labels are wrong many times, and I guess this is my roundabout way of asking you not to label Mal as a criminal...or comparing his actions to that of a crack dealer.

(I only ask 'cause I respect you, and find many of your posts interesting, otherwise, I wouldn't even bring it up at all)

(...and 'cause I take the FF 'Verse far too seriously, it seems

)

Chrisisall, thinking too much...

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Wednesday, January 11, 2006 5:01 PM

FLETCH2

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
Hmm, well.

Fletch:
I think you were a little, erm, overly enthusiastic in your description of DreamTrove earlier. Having said that I can't fault the points you raise. I don't think I've seen anything that really says to me that Bush/PNAC/team evil whatever are Socialist or have a socialist agenda.

By way of explanation my job often involves some night work. Usually it isn't so bad because I'm done by around 4AM, and I can sleep 'til noon. This week I've been getting home around 7AM, the time most of my neighbors start into their day, with reving engines, screaming kids and banging doors. By the time this ends some primordial hind brain thing has decided that if I'm not asleep by now it's probably survival related. So it elects that I stay awake -- homicidal but awake.

Now it could be that given enough sleep I'll revisit this thread and owe Dreamtrove an apology. I suspect though that lack of inhibition has just given a voice to a growing irritation. Probably should still apologize to be civil, but in that case it would be hollow.

My problem with him is that he isn't unintelligent, and the problems that he sees are undoubtedly real problems, my issue is that he can’t bring himself to see the root causes, because if he does so it means facing up to the idea that his “new religion” can be as corrupt as his old one. So he sets up a scapegoat, a foreign influence on modern American political thought that can be purged by removing a few bad apples. In fact the situation that exists does so because the underlying political and economic system allows it. If all the members of “Team Evil” died tomorrow in an unlikely toaster oven accident there would be others just as willing to take the money and continue the agenda. DT would probably argue that the neo-con socialist whatevers of “Team Evil” were just more numerous than he thought.

At it’s heart is a self delusion, that you can make things right without having to admit that anything fundamental is wrong and without having to change it. It fits well with the his new conservative religion in the same way that ID does with fundamentalists --- if you ignore the evidence you can continue to keep the same flawed world view.

Anyway, I don’t know. Ask me after 12 hours of good sleep.

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Thursday, January 12, 2006 12:33 AM

FLETCH2

Quote:
Originally posted by chrisisall:
]Fletch, my simple point (maybe overly simple point) is that Mal isn't a bad guy, and the only true criminal element on Serenity is Jayne, who serves a purpose for Mal, properly reigned (and even has a spark of good in him, it's the only reason he made it off Ariel alive).
The show has desperation all over it, but not criminality. If you, an injured and temporally penniless Fletch, needed insulin to live, and stole some from a hospital's backroom in the nick of time, should you go to jail? Technically, yes. Realistically?
There's the rub for me; Laws do not equal justice, more often they serve to control. Laws are tools, and sometimes the wrong tool is employed for the sake of expediency, or profit.

(26 hours with only a 1 hour nap, my brain hates me. I'm comming to the conclusion that maybe the Reavers are right... Hold on this can get bumpy....)

Back way back on another board I said that I thought that if you had to label Mal then he was a Libertarian. I said it then and I still believe it but not for the reasons people would think. I don’t think he’s interlectualy Libertarian, I don’t think he’s gone through political science books and cherry picked an ideology. I don’t think he’s a “Libertarian of convenience” using it as a front to legitimize his views on taxation or dope. In fact if some strange accident involving a miss wired toaster oven and a black hole were to deliver Mal to us “in the flesh” I think he’d come to the conclusion that most modern Libertarians are whiners. (Not that they would be happy to be associated with someone so intent on appropriating other peoples good you understand.)

I think the way Mal behaves is completely appropriate to the situation he finds himself in. He’s been forced to that edge most of us never get near, he’s looked into the abyss and had to decide what morals are dear to him and what are expendable. He’s made that decision, sometimes it still doesn’t sit with him well, but he soldiers on.

He’s still flying.

And that is an admirable quality in a man, we like that, we see it as a strength that we hope we have ourselves, though we hope we never have to go through what he did to find out.

I would go further, I would say that Mal is everyman. I think if any of us were in that situation we would hope that we had the same grace under pressure that he has. I think that is the same no matter what your political and moral point of view is. Mal’s been shaken down to the core and left so naked and human, with all the glorious majesty and low flaws that that entails. That’s why left wingers and right wingers can look at him and find something that they like, because Mal is the best and worse of all of us.

Which brings us back to that label. Mal isn’t a Libertarian by book learning, or by nature or by anything real. He’s a Libertarian because the label we stuck on him says he is. How did he get the label in the first place? Because we applied the same political “purity test” to him as we do to the real people we know. When we ticked off the “distrusting of central government” box that stuck him in a pile that included “conservative” and “libertarian” later on when we came to his somewhat loose interpretation of some laws he moved over to the libertarian pile and received his nice neat little label. The problem is that the “purity test” is rigged, or rather it takes no account of the fact that real people are in fact…. Well real people.

Many years ago I was surprised to learn that the original Battlestar Galactica was seen over here as being “conservative scifi.” I once got into a long discussion with a “conservative” fan as to why that was. Well, the show was pro military, he said. So was the original Star Trek I countered. He then went on at great length about what a great conservative icon Lorne Green’s Adama really was, about his strength as a leader, his wisdom, the way he instilled duty, honour, independence and a sense of family in his kids..

And the thing that struck me about it is that he was right, those were the impressions that character portrayed, that explained why I liked him so much. There was a catch, I liked him because he reminded me of my own grandfather who had all those properties in spades, the family man, the strong leader, the dependable friend, the hard worker, the patriot and hero, --the man who would never have accepted the label “conservative.”

People cherry pick characteristics, group them together in bogus purity tests and then assign them a label. Every admirable “conservative” trait that character had existed in other people even people who don’t consider themselves conservative. Likewise some of those traits are missing from folks that DO choose to call themselves conservative.

So yes, you do the purity test and Mal is Libertarian, of course you have to assume that only a libertarian would be distrustful of arbitrary centralist power but apparently if you are to the left in the US you are not allowed to do that, that trait has been appropriated and made exclusive to some elements of the right.

Mal and real people everywhere are too complex to label.

Final thought. Robin Hood, Libertarian or socialist?

Well looking at our “purity list” we see that Robin is anti Taxation, dismissive of central (Norman) authority, is fully in tune with the Jeffersonian rural ideal and he has a religious advisor on staff so he’s obviously a spiritual man…. On the other hand he does take other people’s property, and he has this tendency to redistribute wealth to the needy, and there’s that girl that he never got around to marrying…

Probably just as well that Robin was around when folk were folk and not labels.

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Thursday, January 12, 2006 4:19 AM

DREAMTROVE

Quote:
Now it could be that given enough sleep I'll revisit this thread and owe Dreamtrove an apology. I suspect though that lack of inhibition has just given a voice to a growing irritation. Probably should still apologize to be civil, but in that case it would be hollow.

I don't think it's me, but I also don't think it's you. I think there's been a growing abrasiveness in the stating of opinions particularly as people verge off into looneyland, which is not to say that it's pirate news either, just the nature of the debate has led people to an 'argh!'

The fact is that you know my position on socialism, which is I feel that the socialist political movement of the 20s culminated in the socialist experimental govts. of the 30s, and it is a proven failure, and it really hasn't gotten any better since that, and the socialist disasters of the 90s are proof of that, and so my attitude is 'why are we still talking about this? let's put this bad idea to bed.'

Which is not to say I have anything against people who are concerned about different things than I am. For me, equality is not the top priority, probably conservation, followed by individual liberties and overall economic and scientific progress rank higher than equality. But if people are bent on equality as their driving political view I'd like to hear new ideas of how to this could be accomplished, not the same old ones that ended really badly. I didn't mean to blame modern socialist movements for those disasters, but i wouldn't blame the neonazis for killing jews, yet I suspect they're on the wrong track.

I don't think that I have a 'new religion.' I've been a conservative for quite a while, it was a long time ago I was in college. It's not a religion, I think there are a lot of flaws in the conservative movement, just over time I had to concede that they were more generally right than the political left. This is a personal choice, but it's based on the historical data. There has been more war, strife, suffering, etc. at the hands of the democrats by a solid 10:1 margin. The flaws are what prevent that from being 10:0.

Here's my most general problem with the political left. It loves its ideas.

The right is more casual in its aquaintence with its ideas, and thus drives less to makes them come through. The left just has problems letting go. The right I see as more pragmatic.

By contrast to the traditional right, neocon is really a different political perspective. In the was that socialist is different from democrat. Neocon philosophy is based on a need for control, which is motivated by a vicious cycle of paranoia. Paul O'Neill really pegs this guiding princple down well in the beginning of his book.

I think on the Team Evil idea, I have a good idea what I'm talking about, and I know who I'm talking about, and I know what they are up to.

Taking your hypothetical example, I think if they were gone, and things didn't improve (I hope they would) that I wouldn't necessarily jump to that conclusion, I might have to re-evaluate where those problems were coming from. My suspicion is that the right would drastically improve if team evil were removed, but it still would not be perfect.

But objectively, the right with team evil is still slightly less destructive than the left, which also has team evil, and Bush doesn't kill as many people as Clinton did. This does not however make Bush 'good.' Just possibly less evil. Or maybe just as evil just a more incompetent evil.

But when team evil is gone, the left will still have the army of equality, which will be using all of its power to force its will on others, like it has done for at least a century in this country.

I don't think you're giving me proper credit for understanding the situation. After 1968, people on the left worked to silence the hawkish elements in the democratic party (the robert macnamara's) in hopes of getting a better (less hawkish) candidate than truman/johnson, and as a result they eventually got Carter, who was definitely less hawkish. The only flaw was that that hawk had its root support in the democratic votership, and those people did not vote for most of the doves that the peace left put forward, like mcgovern, when it came time for the general election.

I see this as a problem with the neocons, it may cost the republican party votes to lose this neocon block, but at some point there are two things which must be counter-balanced:

winning and staying true.

If you win, but don't stay true, your agenda isn't fulfilled, and you lose.

if you don't win, but stay true, you've still lost.

right now the GOP, and the agenda set by 200 years of self labeled republicans, is not staying true at all in the form of gwb. Ergo, we've clearly erred on that side. The Bush cheat at everything model could probably keep him in power forever, but the traditional conservative influence over him would be zero. The right needs to pull back and stay true much more.

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Thursday, January 12, 2006 6:14 AM

CHRISISALL

Quote:
Originally posted by Fletch2:
26 hours with only a 1 hour nap, my brain hates me.

Thanks Fletch, an awsome reply, and an even more awsome achievement considering that sleep deprivation tends to negativly affect cognitive function...

Sleep well, my friend.

Sandman Chrisisall

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Sunday, May 2, 2021 3:35 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

Arnold Schwarzenegger diplomatic about Caitlyn Jenner's run for California governor

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-9517503/Arnold-Schwarzen
egger-weighs-good-friend-Caitlyn-Jenners-run-California-governor.html

Arnie thinks he / she / it has a chance in California governor election

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Tuesday, June 14, 2022 9:00 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

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