Neolibs
I was reading this at the NYT
So I though it would be fun to start my own "neolib" conspiracy.
At the center I'll have billionaire Soros and maybe Ted Turner funding the effort. Tie in the trial lawyers and have it pushed by underground anti-american groups like world workers party and maybe some anti-globalization anarchist groups. Where does the anti-christ fit in?
Anyone want to help?
Quote:
There's something else going on, too. The proliferation of media outlets and the segmentation of society have meant that it's much easier for people to hive themselves off into like-minded cliques. Some people live in towns where nobody likes President Bush. Others listen to radio networks where nobody likes Bill Clinton.
In these communities, half-truths get circulated and exaggerated. Dark accusations are believed because it is delicious to believe them. Vince Foster was murdered. The Saudis warned the Bush administration before Sept. 11.
There's something else going on, too. The proliferation of media outlets and the segmentation of society have meant that it's much easier for people to hive themselves off into like-minded cliques. Some people live in towns where nobody likes President Bush. Others listen to radio networks where nobody likes Bill Clinton.
In these communities, half-truths get circulated and exaggerated. Dark accusations are believed because it is delicious to believe them. Vince Foster was murdered. The Saudis warned the Bush administration before Sept. 11.
So I though it would be fun to start my own "neolib" conspiracy.
At the center I'll have billionaire Soros and maybe Ted Turner funding the effort. Tie in the trial lawyers and have it pushed by underground anti-american groups like world workers party and maybe some anti-globalization anarchist groups. Where does the anti-christ fit in?
Anyone want to help?
Comments
By democrats ane conservatives , i do not mean the politicians themselves, but the classical supporters ( the people who vote)
Originally posted by BR
What you are doing here and what Shawn and Bunge do with their "call someone a neocon and dismiss them" tactics do nothing but hurt the situation. It's seriously time we stop rooting for these fvcking parties like sports teams. I mean, the way I see you guys going off on eachother in threads I'd think you were Dodgers and Giants fans going at it. Enough already. Grow the hell up.
Oh come on. It's fun!
Originally posted by BR
What you are doing here and what Shawn and Bunge do with their "call someone a neocon and dismiss them" tactics do nothing but hurt the situation. It's seriously time we stop rooting for these fvcking parties like sports teams. I mean, the way I see you guys going off on eachother in threads I'd think you were Dodgers and Giants fans going at it. Enough already. Grow the hell up.
I've never used the term or even implied the meaning 'neocon' on these boards or anywhere else so please don't drag me down into your ignorant rants.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Conten...3/000tzmlw.asp
I see Brooks didn't learn too much during his time there. Maybe he was there to go on donut runs.
And then some specific things he had some problems with:
Brooks:
con is short for "conservative" and neo is short for "Jewish"
Novak:
It was the Socialist Michael Harrington, indeed, who coined the term "neoconservative" for this small band and their friends, intending it as an insult.
In those days (the mid-1970s), it was thought that there was really no genuinely conservative movement in the United States as there always had been in Europe. In America, it was said, there is only one variant or another of liberalism ? the old fuddy-duddy liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries, or some blend of European socialism/social democracy.
Thus, to call a foe who had long been identified with the Left a "conservative" was thought to be a lonely literary ostracism. To prefix that with "neo" was to suggest something like "pseudo" or "not even genuine." No historical tradition or cultural movement called by that name could be decried anywhere in sight. Just a tiny band, cast out into the darkness of intellectual isolation.
http://www.nationalreview.com/novak/novak052003.asp
Of course, this isn't really the true story, as stated in the AEI eulogy:
Podhoretz
"Neo" of course means new, suggesting that neoconservatism was a new kind of conservatism; and so it was. But before counting the ways in which it was new, I want to correct a common error concerning the name. I have no idea who first coined it, but I do know that it was not, as almost everyone keeps saying, invented by Michael Harrington in the late 1960s. In 1963, when I myself was still on the Left, I beat Harrington to it by applying the term to Walter Lippman, Clinton Rossiter, and a number of others who, I wrote, were "over-impressed with the evil propensities of man and under-impressed with the possibility of political and social arrangements that would encourage the development of the human potentiality for good instead of concentrating on restraint of the bad." But early though I was, I cannot claim to be the original author of the term. The Oxford English Dictionary traces it back to a review in Encounter in 1960 by G.L. Arnold (the pseudonym adopted for a time by the late George Lichtheim), while a recent letter in the Times Literary Supplement finds an even earlier appearance in a piece by Dwight Macdonald published in the Reporter in 1952.
t is true, however, that the term neoconservative only entered into widespread usage in the late 1960s after Harrington and some of his socialist comrades applied it to a group of intellectuals who had just begun voicing serious doubts about the leftist ideas and policies they themselves had helped to develop and propagate in the years just past.
And back to the op-ed:
Brooks
The ones outside government have almost no contact with President Bush. There have been hundreds of references, for example, to Richard Perle's insidious power over administration policy...If he's shaping their decisions, he must be microwaving his ideas into their fillings.
Charter of the Defense Policy Advisory Committee
The Defense Policy Board will serve the public interest by providing the Secretary of Defense, Deputy Secretary and Under Secretary for Policy with independent, informed advice and opinion concerning major matters of defense policy. It will focus upon long-term, enduring issues central to strategic planning for the Department of Defense and will be responsible for research and analysis of topics, long or short range, addressed to it by the Secretary of Defense, Deputy Secretary and Under Secretary for Policy.
And note the sources openly identify with neoconservativism.
It's not some made up liberal boogieman.
Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld all endorse the neoconservative ideology.
They recognize themselves as neoconservative.
It's an attitude of unilateral, preemptive global policy.
Which many on this board seem to have no problem with.
So while many conservatives throw around liberal as if it's an insult... which to me it isn't, my definiton of a liberal is different than theirs... to people on the left neoconservatism is on the same level.
SCLM.
Originally posted by segovius
It is interesting to look at Scott's original quote because it is quite possibly one of the most uniquely inane pieces of vacuous and meaningless drivel from a publication that raises those qualities (?) to an art form.
For example: where are these towns where 'no-one likes Bush' ? Show me such a place.
San Francisco?
Originally posted by segovius
How can you have a radio station where 'no-one likes Clinton' ? What exactly does this mean ? Every last member of staff down to the janitor ? Everyone on the payroll ? How do they establish the anti-Clinton proclivities, vetting of some sort ?
Rush? The G-Man?
Originally posted by segovius
And what is a 'half-truth' in conspiracy terms ? Surely admitting less than the absolute whole truth (as the NYT does) in cases like Foster or Saudi foreknowledge is prima facie grounds for suspicion that we are not being told the whole truth ?
QED.
Originally posted by BR
What you are doing here and what Shawn and Bunge do with their "call someone a neocon and dismiss them" tactics do nothing but hurt the situation. It's seriously time we stop rooting for these fvcking parties like sports teams. I mean, the way I see you guys going off on eachother in threads I'd think you were Dodgers and Giants fans going at it. Enough already. Grow the hell up.
No, if anything I've tried to highlight the differences between neoconservatives and "old guard" conservatives for the sake of clarity. I think the animus you see between a few of us is on much more of a personal level. (This coming from one of our more...hostile...members?
For their effort lawyers are rewarded with large settlements.
Where?s the outrage?
Originally posted by Scott
I think I'm going to make the LA and NY Times part of my neolib conspiracy. They use their media bullhorn to guide the thoughts of Americans. No idea is ?legitimate? until it?s vetted by one of those two papers.
I think you're only inventing the term "neolib." The idea of a left wing lock on public media predates our births.
Just curious what "rules" are supposedly being created through trial lawyers. And how do they effect you?
Originally posted by chu_bakka
Just curious what "rules" are supposedly being created through trial lawyers. And how do they effect you?
Lots of rules have been created by the courts over the years. Legal abortion and the Miranda warnings are two prominent ones that pop right to mind. Of course, you might say that this is just the courts doing their Constitutional duty to see that the laws and rules enacted by the other branches of government are within the bounds of the Constitution. But that duty is also a result of this judicial activism: Marbury v. Madison. Damn trial lawyers were even around back then.
IMO, the courts are the guardians of the rule of law and the last bulwark against tyranny of the majority. Trial lawyers (of both the defense and civil sort), as despicable as they may be, make our society work.
Originally posted by Scott
Neolibs use the courts to do an end run around the legislative process to enact by judicial fiat the rules that are used to guide our lives. They use the trail lawyers to get done what they couldn't do via legitimate means. Say the wrong thing at work, lawsuit leads to neolib speech code.
For their effort lawyers are rewarded with large settlements.
Where?s the outrage?
Kinida like how Bush "won" the election.
Originally posted by chu_bakka
Which rules are that Scott?
Just curious what "rules" are supposedly being created through trial lawyers. And how do they effect you?
Gay marriage
Originally posted by Scott
Gay marriage
Are you afraid you might be forced into one?