ThomasHobbes wrote: ↑May 18th, 2018, 6:47 pm
Yes Lucky, we have now moved into Reefer Madness territory. Lock up your young, the stoners are coming!
Oh very droll, Greta - highly amusing I must say; but that's you to a "T" isn't it, the ever- so -clever,sophisticated, progressive, liberal intellectual. You love nothing better than to proudly flaunt your "rapier wit" in the same way a female peacock makes a public spectacle of her plumage. You're convinced that- "Yah" - it's definitely hip to be a member the pretentious leftist intelligencia - to be one of the "Guardian-reading" political cognoscenti", a free-thinker who passionately condemns the moribund
status quo, and despises the primitive Conservative "square bears" who defend it. After all, they're just a bunch of dumb, unenlightened dinosaurs and nasty reactionaries, right (?); they don't have a high IQ like you do, they lack the kind of superior rational faculties that you possess. If there were more smart, intellectually liberated people like you running the State, we would then have the kind of high-powered creative nous - the kind of radical "
Sapere Aude !" attitude - that's needed in the corridors of power if we are ever to have a chance of implementing the kind of bold, new, innovative policies of change that will be required to tackle the major social, political and moral problems of that beset the West today!
There's only one little problem with the doctrine of progressive liberalism, Greta, and that is that it failed and it did so quite a long time ago. Modern-era liberals like yourself (i.e. progressive intellectuals sympathetic to the core tenets of modern philosophical liberalism) look out at the big problems that confront the West today (or were created by the West): the rapacious destruction of the natural environment for profit, pollution, the potentially apocalytic threat of global climate change, the rising prevalence of clinically diagnosed psychiatric conditions especially severe depressive mood disorders and anxiety disorders in the general population), four decades of dominance by the grossly iniquitous, socially - divisive ideology of neo-liberalism across the Western world, racial conflict and the rise of extremist neo-nazi and neo-fascist political groups on the far political right and so on. They look at these crises and reflexly point the finger of blame at the machinations of a wicked "Conservative political establishment" . What they don't realise is that the big problems the West is struggling with today are not the result of the march of traditional Conservatism (as I have defined it) in Western politics in the modern era. Rather, if we do a little detective work, we find that the root cause of our current ills hasits origin in the era of Enlightenment rationality. More particularly, It was the European Enlightenment project that triggered the French Revolution of 1789, and the subsequent unleashing of the forces of liberalism ( i.e. what we term today progressive philosophical liberalism, with its emphasis on the absolute liberty and sovereign autonomy of the rational individual) and market culture.
People like yourself Greta are curious specimens; on the one hand they are- physically/biologically speaking - alive and kicking in the year 2018; on the other hand their brains/minds are still pure 18th century Enlightenment. You and your like-minded, pretentious "intellectual" compeers are, in a sense, forever "off with the pixies of yore " as it were, sipping hot chocolate and taking snuff with fashionable, polite society in Madam Geoffrin's salon in Paris in the year 1755; you are, in your own mind, still, in any uncanny (though very real and must say, rather spooky) sense, happily chattering away with Voltaire about politics, exchanging big ideas with the ghost of Rousseau to your left, waving to little Tom Paine across the room, congratulating the Marquis de Condorcet on his latest essay: - " Magnifique, Nicolas- tres magnifique !"...Do you understand what I mean ?
So I have to thank you for the comment you posted below, the monumental irony of your delusional ignorance actually made me laugh out loud, only briefly though, for the comedy, unfortunately, is pitch - black. You said that I (Dachshund) ...
LuckyR wrote: ↑May 19th, 2018, 2:00 am
recommends a society that is essentially a repressive, completely controlled conservative nightmare.
What you don't understand, Greta, is that the whole Enlightenment project failed and in consequence you now
already live in a society that is a repressive, completely controlled, f**king nightmare (!); and the reason for this has nothing at all to do with the politics of traditional Conservatism that I endorse. What happened is that progressive liberalism failed. It failed because it was grounded on the principles of Enlightenment thinking, and Enlightenment reason - which promised to liberate man from tyranny and allow him to build a paradise of happiness and moral perfection on Earth -turned perversely on itself as the modern era advanced. First, it naturally (d)evolved into an objective scientific rationality and this gave birth to the "dark Satanic mills" of the English Industrial Revolution in the 19th century; then, in the 20th century it morphed into technological rationality, and this later godless force progressively took on a life of its own. As we speak, it holds sway in the West as the most powerful and tyrannical instrument of oppression, domination and enslavement that has ever blighted humanity.
To fully appreciate what I am saying you would need to properly understand the essential , fundamental spirit of the Enlightenment; you would need to comprehend its critical false premise - (the fatal
proton pseudos) that both gave it birth in the 17th century ( basically through the work of four men, namely: Hobbes, Descartes, Bacon and Spinoza ) and at the same time signed its ultimate death warrant. If you like, I am happy to explain it all for you; and equally, how throughout modernity, the opposing voices of traditional Conservatism always warned in the most, strident, and urgent of terms that it was folly, that it must stop lest it all end in tears. But history shows how those pleas fell on deaf ears. Hitler and the Holocaust, Stalin, Mao, the Cold War, global climate change, the despitritualization and alienation of the modern human heart - the disenchantment and desecration of the consciousness of late Western man at the hands of unfettered corporate capitalism its greedy doctrine of materialist consumerism. Don't say you were not warned, Greta !
Today: the spectre of global climate change, the triumph of moral relativism, the wide-spread skepticism and the deathly stench of nihilism -( that paralysing, dreadful sense that human life is absurd; that it has no value, no ultimate worth, no purpose or meaning ) - which pervades the very air we breathe in the West today ; it is all a consequence of technological rationalism.
Don't blame me, I'm a traditional Conservative, and we always warned that the **** of Enlightenment rationality/ progressive liberalism would hit the fan one day, and when it did it would do make an unimaginable mess !
Regards
Dachshund
If you want to imagine that I'm exciting and exotic member of some elitist intellectual club so you can pretend to your Breitbart buddies that you have crossed swords with a Serious Contender, be my guest.