Native American genocide and continued systematic oppression? Slavery and continued systematic oppression? Supporting Saddam Hussein, or attacking him once he got inconvenient (PR and world monetary policy etc.)? Creating, supporting and negotiating with the Taliban on an oil pipeline, or attacking them when the USSR was gone and the negotiations failed? A lifetime (yours, mine and more) of coups and invasions and mass murders and felony murders and theft on the grandest scale in history, both here and abroad? A moral stand on that is to be against it. Anything else is a moralistic stand.

Actually I’m writing from the US. Grew up in a middle class Republican household in Pennsylvania and have been deliberately moving left ever since. Not a big fan of war or any violence no matter who commits it, so you’re certainly right about me not being happy with Democrats. But I’m not sure what socially harmful legislation you mean. Unless you mean, well, all of it, because you believe people are essentially bad and need to be punished to grow up and stay in line, and believe that helping “weak” or “undeserving” people is evil. I can’t agree with you on that. My belief about good/bad people is a bit too complicated for this space but I do believe in people helping people, so some of that legislation was OK with me, imperfect though it was.

wf:
Who said I’m young? Who said I believed every word? Who said I haven’t read conservatives, starting long before Edmund Burke and continuing to the present? Thank you for your concern but my moral outrage is healthy, under control and entirely appropriate given the rapid drive toward fascism we are undergoing in the age of worldwide world-dominating neoconservative theocratic corporatism.

As a psychotherapist I shouldn’t be, but still, I am always amazed at people who deny that we are more, and deeper, than we appear. Hippie crap? Well here’s some more, spouted by such hippies as Christ (Matthew 25:40), Buddha, the writers of the Upanishads and the Koran and the Torah, Hesiod and a bunch of other Greek guys on whom our civilization is founded, Lao Tzu, Tolstoy, Gandhi, King, Thoreau, Emerson, T.S. Eliot and a few (billion) other people:

We are all connected.

We are all connected. No one gets out alive, and whatever you accomplish in your short life, if it is done with care and awareness, benefits both you and others; if not, is at the expense of both you and others. And nothing is a higher calling than to be aware of our oneness with others, human and other. No one gets out alive, and there is nothing more to hope for than that which comes to us and from us as a result of our real, physical, psychological, somatic, social, political, spiritual, ecological and otherical connection to all. Conservatism stands opposed to the wisdom of millennia, the wisdom of what is called the “Perennial Religion,” and if it also depends on denial of the existence of the unconscious in a Know-Nothing ahistorical nihilism, on a person’s refusal to face his or her personal history which mirrors his or her refusal to face communal history (and geological history, in this age of science deniers) then it is not only wrong and destructive, then it’s well, it’s really wrong and incredibly destructive. Get into therapy. Take two years and call me in the morning.

I have many swift arrows in my quiver which speak to the wise, but for the crowd they need interpretation. Pindar, Olympian Odes II, I.

PS
Just one example of what Gregory Bateson would have called this epistemological mistake: We’re spending more money than everyone else in the world combined on weapons that don’t work, either in the immediate or deeper sense, because on the rare occasions when they do in the immediate sense we end up killing people more efficiently and thus become less secure, not only because those people have friends and relatives. … Never have so few spent so much for so little, or wasted the lives and property of so many for so dumb a reason.

You must be really miserable when the Dims are in power, what with all the wars they have led us into, all the poor GI’s they got killed, and all the overpriced socially harmful legislation they have come up with over the years.

Wasn’t Wolf the silly bint who finally figured out years later she was being sexually harassed by one of her old commie professors or something?

Great role model, thanks.

Just a couple of random gleanings: To say that BW is “nothing but a courageous outfit that we should be proud to support.” is ludicrous on so many levels I don’t know where to start. But it’s the “nothing but” that really makes that statement art. Nothing is “nothing but”. And try reading Naomi Wolf The End of America. Yes, the number of people willing to believe lies is astounding. The fact that Bush was close enough to Kerry to cheat lie and steal his way into office again is proof of that. Clear Skies, Healthy Forests, Patriot Act, Tort ‘Reform’, No Child’s Behind Left and a 1000 other acts are proof of that. Global Warming/cancerous cigarettes/evolution deniers are proof of that. The US and the world may never recover from the depths of human depravity this administration has shown, and effective abuse of symbols has been its main weapon–well, abuse of symbols and torture have been its two main weapons. And mass murder. Amongst its weaponry have been such diverse elements as….

When you’re finished with Wolf go on with Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine. And mix in some Dahr Jamail, Winter Soldier testimony and Johnny Got His Gun. It’ll be good for what ails you.