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Miscellaneous See other Miscellaneous Articles Title: Welcome to TOS4 Source: me URL Source: http://none Published: Jan 29, 2005 Author: christine Post Date: 2005-01-28 10:54:16 by christine Keywords: Welcome, TOS4 Views: 16546 Comments: 272 Let's get this thing going ;) Post Comment   Private Reply   Ignore Thread   Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 177. #171. To: christine (#0) hey, good to see y'all! :) kiki  posted on  2005-01-31   0:11:59 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #175. To: kiki (#171) WB, Kiki. (Which was my daughter's nickname when she was a kid...I still call her keeks, but not around her friends. There she is Kathleen, if you please.) Happy to see the people of good intention returning. Bush sure is a uniter, ain't he? But this might be a good thing. If we can start talking past the talking points and get down to what is important, we have a chance to forge a real democracy. I mean, how weird is it that liberals like me are the deficit hawks? I always have been one, but it was not a hallmark of the Dem party or the liberal mindset. Now it is. As usual, I will ramble and free associate. This weekend, NPR here in Chicago had a series of specials about the death of Cabrini Green, the largest public housing project in the country. It has been shut down in stages, torn down and replaced with mixed low-rise townhouse villages, where the wealthy pay $350K for a unit, and the poor pay a prorated rent or can buy for a lot less on very favorable terms. So far it is working, and they shut down the last big buildings this weekend. In 1955, huge public housing sounded like a good idea to liberals. It turned out to be a very bad one. It was better than what was going on then, and the city sold the world on it with an ad campaign that contrasted the ghetto that was there at the time to nice clean public housing. Well, it was better, but not much. Europe was doing the same thing, calling them council estates, at the time. Clockwork Orange was a prediction of what would happen, and it was accurate, but if anything, too optimistic. When the Sex Pistols sneered "just another council tenancy" in No Future, they were referring to the warehousing of the marginalized disguised as compassion. That's my longwinded way of saying that some liberal ideas look GREAT on paper, and suck in real life. The job of conservatives is, IMO, to say, yeah, that sounds nice, but society can afford JUST SO MUCH. They act as brakes on the bad ideas for change and force a debate. And liberals force bad conditions to change. It's a healthy thing. The Neocons are a new phenomenon. They're the most deluded, stars in their eyes, hippy-dippy, peacenlove idiots ever. Starshine and Uncle Truckin's dream of having, like, man, a COMMUNITY in the Maine woods where everyone would do, like, what they wanted, sounds more mature and sensible than delivering democracy like Domino's, only with a bunkerbuster bomb. I was in grad school with some of these nuts. A couple are in the administration now, in lowly positions, but they make good money. They were fairly normal until they got into grad school, at which point they developed delusions of grandeur, suddenly realizing they were great thinkers. They were not, and their professors told them so, but they started taking over classes. It was like an infection. Pretty soon a friend of mine would start calling me naive. These people were marginal liberals, not activist or anything, but traditionally liberal. And suddenly it was like The Night of the Living Dead. Neoconism is a very seductive philosophy; boiled down, it says you can do good by doing bad. These are people who think saving a village by destroying it makes sense. The thing I noticed most, though, was how they started saying "grow up." They wanted to be taken seriously, they lost all sense of humor, they suddenly had a mission. The same thing happened to a close friend who is now high up in the Moonies. There has to be a cause greater than all of us for them and if we don't sign on, we're frivolous. Remember the buttholes in the Bushie wing saying, "the adults are in charge"? These are very dangerous people. They cannot think for a second they might be wrong. They never debate. They scream, they deliver ludicrous talking points without a blink, they change language to mean what they want it to mean, they will do anything to win. Underlying it is a sense of narcissism. They are all very mediocre people. There is not one truly bright person among them. Ever notice how Condi demands to be called Dr. Rice? How Smirk demands to be called Mr. President? Condi is a mediocrity and Smirk is less than that. Anyone who hangs out at a university long enough and sucks up to the neocon PoliSci profs (yes, that was my major) can get a doctorate. The one guy they had who was truly intelligent was Paul O'Neill. He was spacy, but bright. And look what happened to him. Christie Whitman, despite my dislike of her, was pretty bright too, but she is long gone and her new book is going to kick their ass. What's surprising is that even the mediocrities, like Ridge and Lindsey and Veneman, have all been thrown overboard too. This gang needs TOTAL loyalty and they were losing it among their functionaries, so they got a whole new crew who had not been around to see them make sausage. My prediction is, it will not work, they will implode and people like Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch are going to get together and say, OK, we don't agree, but we, unlike them, have the best interests of the country in mind. Let's work it out, get someone in office and start working together more. I have no idea how to get out of Iraq, but we have to. I have no idea how to cure the health system, but we have to. I have no idea how to repair our image worldwide, but we have to. I have no idea how we can repair this economy, but we have to. So I am happy to have this site, and we have to make sure that scum like Badeye are banned instantly when they turn discussion into partisan flame war. Mekons4  posted on  2005-01-31   1:29:37 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #176. To: Mekons4 (#175) I mean, how weird is it that liberals like me are the deficit hawks? lol - i'm a longtime liberal too - i think most of the people here know that. how funny, maybe w really is a uniter, except i don't think the intention was to unite people against him. i've never been a supporter of big government. i do believe in helping people, but helping them get on their feet, not carrying them forever. you know, teaching a man to fish, that sort of thing. i like it here cause i feel like if i hang out somewhere like du, i'm not gonna get any fresh perspective. i like finding things in common with people who haven't shared my ideology for years and years. i agree with you about all the things we absolutely have to do, but have no idea how to do. the first step is identifying the problem, right? second step is shedding the labels and realizing we're all in this together. if liberals and true conservatives can find common goals, we may just make the people currently in power irrelevant. and that would be cool. kiki  posted on  2005-01-31   2:15:52 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   #177. To: kiki (#176) Yeah, I didn't mean to imply you were a conservative. I was just riffing on how nice it is to see good people come back. We CAN solve this mess, but we have to totally discredit these creeps. There is no way we can say, well, they had a point. They did not. The reason we got attacked was not that they envied what we have, as the Bushies like to say, but because they hate us for supporting Israel, subverting the Saudis and supporting their fascist regime, and basically telling them they are savages. I have friends who are Palestinian and Lebanese. They were so gung ho at the beginning of the war, because they really thought we would bring democracy to Iraq. Yeah, right. That is not our intent and no one sane believes it. Our intent it is to stabilize the oil market, which is not evil in and of itself. But to kill 100,000 people, most of the civilians? That is not what real Americans do. Oh, and DU drives me nuts too. I use their LBN page because it has some good stuff, but I avoid most of the other content. If you admit you like a steak once in a while, you will get called a mass murderer. Both sides have bad actors, but no one at DU is as bad as the average person at FRetard City. Happy to see you here, Kiki. Mekons4  posted on  2005-01-31   2:38:58 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply   Replies to Comment # 177.         There are no replies to Comment # 177. End Trace Mode for Comment # 177. Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest

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