tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19364700.post7411766774297811849..comments2023-07-26T04:54:13.903-07:00Comments on Robin's Readings and Reflections: Why I Did Not Vote For ObamaTerrell Clemmonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17367926808246409525noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19364700.post-48446051298496848592008-11-15T08:12:00.000-08:002008-11-15T08:12:00.000-08:00My only comment is that the Kingdom of God is not ...My only comment is that the Kingdom of God is not affected by who sits in the White House. This is why I do not vote as I do not promote any political agenda. Instead, we are to promote a Kingdom agenda that supercedes whatever is happening on an earthly level.I leave the politics to the politicians and seek that heavenly kingdom that cannot be moved. Presidents will come and go, but "of the increase of HIS government and peace there will be no end."<BR/>david letrodavidhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14919190595470279460noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19364700.post-17230116498193925822008-11-11T08:23:00.000-08:002008-11-11T08:23:00.000-08:00In defense of Obama, and to reply to your friend R...In defense of Obama, and to reply to your friend Russ's comments, Obama may be less egalitarian than you guys are making out, especially considering who are his financial advisers. What we have seen over the last 38 years is indeed wealth redistribution, but redistribution from the poor to the rich. That is how Ron Paul has described the recent bailout. Indeed, income inequality is greater in the United States than any country in the world, even surpassing historical Great Britian. Corporate executives live lavash lives out of the public radar and resort to all sorts of illegal activity to finance their royal extravagance. They do not have a right to their wealth since it has been illegally acquired. The very existence of corporations in the first place are illegal and violation of US laws. Starting on Sep 10th 2001 and continuing every year, literlaly trillians of dollars have been disappearing out of the Pentagon budget (is it a coincidence then that it was the office of bookeeping and account management that was bombed on Sep 11th). This is tax payer dollars that is disappearing, but where is the outrage at our taxes being used for fighting wars and belicose adventurism. Probably what Obama was getting at is that spreading the wealth around would help there be the kind of strong middle class there was in the 1950's, where only one parent had to work and children could afford to go to college just working summers. Obama is no more a Robinhood than the President of Bolivia was recently when he ordered his army to go in and "seize the oil fields from the multinational plunderers," since what we are up against are extremes. Getting rid of these extremes, even if it meant spreading the wealth around, would mean that small businesses could compete for a change. There is a psychology at work, though, to keep people from voting in their best interests. University of Berkeley linguist George Lekoff has written about it from the other side of the political spectrum in his books Moral Politics and Don't Think of An Elephant, along with a damning critique of James Dobson. While accepting the maternal/paternal state paradime metaphor, his conclusion is that the Republicans have grasped how this works and now use it in an irrational way to make people vote against their interests, in amongst other things, causing the republican party to be thought of as the party for "the little guy" when in reality it is waiting to slit their throats and bank accounts.<BR/><BR/>Patrick PhillipsUnknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15908883572491161410noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19364700.post-70755689068661316422008-11-10T10:14:00.000-08:002008-11-10T10:14:00.000-08:00I teach English in the third world (Peru) and my s...I teach English in the third world (Peru) and my students overwhelmingly rejoiced at Obama´s victory. <BR/> <BR/>Not, as was suggested by Peter Hitchens on his blog, because Obama wants to transform the United States into a developing country, but because to elect anyone else would have meant a continuation of the belicose adventurism which has made America so feared over the last sixty years and especially so hated over the last eight. There is also the perception among many of my students, and the Latin Americans I have spoken with, that a person of color may be more empathetic to the problems of the global south, such as poverty, the environment and immigration. Martin Luther King said before he died that, from Guatamala to Cambodia, the United States seemed on the wrong side of a world revolution. He blamed American policy for maintaining global apartheid, imposing poverty, and preventing development. So Obama may not be perfect, but what is the alternative? <BR/> <BR/>There is much that I respect, agree with and admire in your libertarian anaylsis. I have found it changing my mind on more than one occasion. I wish there were more palioconservative voices out there instead of the fake kind of conservatives that one sometimes associates with the designation. But it seems to me that even many true conservatives, even the ones who have opposed the outgoing administration, don´t think through the implications of where their critques might lead by default. Okay so John McCain was right on abortion, but here is a man who supported George Bush the first´s invasion of Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador and East Timor, and the horrible massacres which followed, as well as supporting Clinton´s depleted uranium carpet bombing of Belgrade, which destroyed some of the oldest sites in Christedom and opened the way for Muslims to follow with more of the same. So a vote against Obama would have been to help McCain continue the violence of American exceptionalism. So what is the implication of taking so strong a stand against Obama. <BR/> <BR/>Libertarians often eulogise an unrestricted free market. This has come up in some of your recent posts. It looks good on paper, but where have these theories actually been tried? As Naomi Klein so lucidly shows in her book The Shock Doctrine, free market capitlaism---so far from being natural, was midwifed onto the entire world after World War II by some of the worse attrocities ever committed in history, the main improvement of torture since the time of the inquisition. The CIA torture centers (in the United States and abroad) dwarfed even the pain of crucifixion, which at the time was thought to be the culmination of the Roman´s ability to inflict pain. The CIA would have people crucify themselves by keeping them awake and in stress positions, their senses blocked out by blindfolds and earmuffs. Everytime their arms would relax the opponants of free-trade would be automatically electrocuted. Then they would find their earmuffs and blindfolds ripped off as deafening heavy-metal music and strobe lights filled the cells. This would continue for days until the patients or prisoners broke their own arms and their minds snapped. Their personalities shrinked and they would accept, the words of the CIA torture manuals, "The father figure ready to make suggestions." This was the Jose Pedia treatment, along with gut-renching route cannals and solitary confinement which happened only a few years ago to an American citizen who's connection to terror was nebulous at best. Obama wants to free the prisoners at Guantanamo who get the Pedia treatment, but now have become so insane they role around on the ground naked, sucking their thumbs and loudly shouting baby songs. Naomi Klein's point is that anywhere free trade has been forced it has been midwifed through blood baths. She shows that the lazzre-faire which was imposed on Bhagdad after Iraqi Freedom was part and parcle of the torture. A phrase she used was ¨Bhagdad Year Zero¨ because the neo-cons wanted to start over and make everything according to business, to really to their free market fantasies for the first time. Iraqi´s who opposed this privitization of their recourses had their ears muffed and their eyes blocked out so that their brains would reach a ¨year zero¨ and return repentent believers in capitalism. In the CIA underground torture hospitals, Naomi Klein documents how the doctors would try to make their patients brains literally fresh, literally blank, forgetting everything and starting over, just like in Bhagdad or Chile or El Salvador. Their way of doing this was to put them in self-imposed stress positions until they literally cracked. The doctors saw this, as many thirld-world dictators did, as necessary for achieving a free market and the theories that went along with it. Much of the time the link was made directly by the tortorers themselves, that is the necessary connection between torture and the market. <BR/><BR/>When the free market is eulogised in libertarian leaning essays, consideration needs to be made of its abuses. I am trying to ask where the implication of some the libertarian ideas you have raised lead by default. Where is a really free-market being tried in a place that isn´t a basket case? While I identify with much of the cultural wisdom in libertarian critiques, often much more than the traditional left or peace-movement, too often I wonder if there is the potential for their reductionism to be harnassed by power and the Republican party (which is very far from the best traditions of American conservatism). <BR/> <BR/>In short, I propose a less reductionist view of Obama´s election than was put forth by Peter Hitchens (¨One of the most absured waves of self-deception ever to sweep an advanced civilization¨) and yourself, and one that takes into consideration American political reality, over 600 concentration camps up and running in the continental US, false-flag terror, extraordinary rendition, and a lame-duck President who declared his view of the constitution when he told a group of Senators that, ¨It´s just a --- damn piece of paper¨ (reported in Capital Hill Blue), sent delegates to Bilderberg meetings and arranged to have Canada and Mexico merge with the United States and start using one currency. Yes, the administration actually proposed that. (Lest people think I'm making this up, it's all documented it Jerome Corsi's book The Late Great USA). <BR/> <BR/>I had a student tell me he thought the dictator General Pinochet was good for Chile´s economy during the 70´s and 80´s but the problem was the human rights violations. He thought the two could be seperated. Can they be seperated, or should they, anymore than the crimes of communism are seperated from its ideology? Pinochets death camps were built on free market principles and applied to people. In such cases, often true believers reply, ¨But those disasters show that the market was not truly free.¨ How is this different from communists saying, ¨Well the Soviet Union wasn´t realy communism.¨ Although, having said that, a truly free market and unmaternal state still might be the best option. If we could ever get there. <BR/> <BR/>By the way, abortion is illegal in Peru. <BR/> <BR/>I leave comments via different gmail accounts because your blogspot doesn't accept yahoo postings. I'd be interested in seeing a response, although I recognize your time is limited.<BR/> <BR/>Patrick PhillipsUnknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08049833021369394985noreply@blogger.com