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John McCain has made clear that he doesn’t like the blogosphere. Always an enemy of real freedom and the U.S. Constitution McCain has introduced legislation to disparge and nullify the U.S. Constitution's guarantees of the people's RIGHTS to freedom of speech and freedom of the press ---WITHOUT AMENDING THE CONSTITUTION as required!
Click on the title for the full story.
North County Times
Amory Lovins has a vision:<-------------- left ------------ center ------------- right -------------->
Or, when expanded a bit:
<-crazies-communist/socialist-far_left-liberal-centrist-
-conservative-far_right-fascist-crazies->
This model is misleading and fatally flawed. It doesn't have a place for many millions of people who don't fit neatly into some variant of liberal or conservative. In effect, it disenfranchises the millions of Americans who don't feel that "left," "right," "liberal," "conservative" etc. accurately describe their views. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wouldn't fit comfortably on that chart under any of those labels. Neither would Jesse Ventura or Huey Long or Pat Buchanan. America's real political spectrum is more complex than this simplistic Crossfire model allows.
Nor does the "left-right" line give any useful insight into the differences between the various political categories. It doesn't tell us what the important differences are between liberals, conservatives, fascists, and so on. It tells us nothing of the views of these and other groups.
Furthermore, the left-right model is inherently illogical. The model implies that if you "go too far" (i.e., are consistent) with any political idea, you end up, in some weird and unexplained way, at totalitarianism or anarchism (or maybe both!). Pursue conservative thought to its logical extreme, according to this model, and you somehow end up at fascism (which is national socialism), or white supremacy or some other authoritarian position. If you pursue liberal thought too far, you supposedly end up at socialism or communism. This is inconsistent, and ignores gigantic philosophical differences between, say, liberalism and communism, or conservatism and fascism.
To see another major reason why this model is irredeemably flawed, try to fit libertarians on that line. Libertarians believe that people should be free to live as they choose, in both the economic and personal realms, as long as they don't harm others. So libertarians believe in a free market -- which should put them on the "right," right? Nope. They also oppose censorship, the drug war and other attempts by government to control the personal lives of peaceful individuals. Does that put them on the left? Well, no. Does it put them in the "middle"? No. There's just no place for libertarians on that map.
Consider that millions of Americans are libertarian or libertarian-leaning. Libertarians and libertarian thought are a large and important part of American politics, and have been since the country's founding! Indeed, libertarian ideas have played a central role in world history for centuries. But the left-right line simply pretends that libertarians don't exist. It does the same for others as well.
No wonder, then, that many Americans -- used to thinking about politics with this familiar left-right map -- couldn't figure out what libertarians were. Libertarians weren't left-wing, they weren't right-wing, they weren't centrists -- so they, in effect, didn't exist. Libertarians literally weren't on the map!
The left-right model thus gives a skewed, distorted, inaccurate picture of American politics. It's a "flat earth" political map -- inaccurate and misleading.
World's Smallest Political Quiz
"The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they may be. It is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God."It's shameful the damage that reading the bible does to people's minds. Because of the horrors and perverted logic that readers are exposed to, I believe that if we must have bibles they should all come with warning labels to warn readers of the dangers that exposure to its contents may cause, particularly in young people during their formative years. To this end I have created a PDF file which contains eight warning labels that you can cut out and paste to the inside cover, (and anywhere else you can find space inside,) of all bibles, korans, and other superstition books of revealed religions. You can get it for free by clicking here. and send copies to all your friends and relatives!
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"In raising the minimum wage, the government doesn't guarantee jobs. It guarantees only that those who get jobs will be paid at least that minimum. But precisely by requiring this, the government destroys jobs. Someone to whom an employer was willing to pay only the current minimum wage of $5.15 might not produce enough to be worth paying, say, $7.25."Raising the minimum wage, Henderson says, "will help only a subset of the people it is thought to help, and will help them only a little -- while hurting some of them a lot."
