Hi Carol, I really like your blog even though I disagree with almostThe comment was written by Dave, who blogs at Re/Creating Tampa. I checked out the blog and found that my feelings towards Dave's blog mirrored his toward mine. I enjoyed the blog, found it well written and I disagree with most of what Dave has written. (See his post claiming that there was an "illegal coup in Honduras." Hmm.)
everything you write!
That's right. I'm a liberal.
Similarly, if you don't want a gay marriage, don't have one. If you
don't want an abortion, don't have one.
Liberals have committed themselves to equal employment opportunity, to
making sure everyone can have access to an education, and are now fighting to
make sure everyone can have access to health care. All of these things (and
more!) are about giving individuals the opportunity to lift themselves up.
Anyway, I was wondering if you might want to choose a topic we can debate on our
blogs. Any subject you choose. I'll write the liberal argument, and you write
the conservative. Perhaps we can learn something from each other.
Long story short, (too late?) I accepted Dave's challenge, pointed out that a liberal's idea of giving everyone access to education means that liberals will fight for everyone to receive a crappy education and fight any meaningful measure (vouchers) to improve opportunities for children in failing schools and referring back to his "Similarly, if you don't want a gay marriage, don't have one. If you don't want an abortion, don't have one.", I wrote something along the lines of "if you don't believe in clubbing baby seals to death, don't club one." Yeah, it was childish on my part, but in my defense, at fifty-one years old I am much closer to my second childhood than I am to my first.
Dave is a graduate assistant at USF in the USF School of Library and Information Science, which some would say gives him an advantage in the researching positions department but we know better because I have the finest conservative minds going to tap into.
Dave will be emailing me his position as a liberal on some aspect of education this weekend. In return, I will email him my 'conservative' response and we will both post the back and forth on our blogs.
If anyone has any suggestions for me, please let me know. I will do my utmost best to represent conservative principals well.
3 comments:
If you want to tweak your opponent, opt for the Federalist argument.
DC should make no laws directly affecting individuals (and the 16th Amendment should be stricken).
The liberals should have states where the hedonists can "mare-y" their horse, and there is a baby abbatoir on every corner, and they all work for the state government, and I know not to go there for more than a tourist visit.
Thank you, Smitty! This is why I love you. It has been my experience that Conservatives are very generous with their knowledge and the share not in a "I am telling you what you think" but rather a "hey, look at this and tell me what you think" way.
Again, thank you.
What Dave advocates is mediocrity for all. Though not an Objectivist, I think Ayn Rand was spot on when she wrote:
If there were such a thing as a passion for equality (not equality de jure, but de facto), it would be obvious to its exponents that there are only two ways to achieve it: either by raising all men to the mountaintop—or by razing the mountains. The first method is impossible because it is the faculty of volition that determines a man’s stature and actions; but the nearest approach to it was demonstrated by the United States and capitalism, which protected the freedom, the rewards and the incentives for every individual’s achievement, each to the extent of his ability and ambition, thus raising the intellectual, moral and economic state of the whole society. The second method is impossible because, if mankind were leveled down to the common denominator of its least competent members, it would not be able to survive (and its best would not choose to survive on such terms). Yet it is the second method that the altruist egalitarians are pursuing. The greater the evidence of their policy’s consequences, i.e., the greater the spread of misery, of injustice, of vicious inequality throughout the world, the more frantic their pursuit—which is one demonstration of the fact that there is no such thing as a benevolent passion for equality and that the claim to it is only a rationalization to cover a passionate hatred of the good for being the good.
'Equal opportunity' means that everyone has to be dragged down to the lowest level in order to achieve the equality desired.
Post a Comment