newcity
France is being accused by the Turkish Prime Minister of blocking Turkey's admission to the EU. That comes as no surprise....apparently the prospect of a modern, secular but Muslim state is too much for the nativists at Elysee Palace to handle. That's also very unfortunate. Turkey has been a stalwart member of the western alliance, and has shown how much progress can be made when the principles of secular democracy are permitted to work their magic.
It's also ironic that Turkey is adhering to these principles when so many conservatives in America, notably John Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and others, argue that only by being religious can America retain its freedom. As the NYU historian (and Rabbi) Arthur Hertzberg wrote in the "Nation", no country in which a church was dominant ever emancipated the Jews. There's a lesson in that which conservatives seem all too eager to forget.
Gun control. Ah, there's a topic to get the conservative blood boiling. Here in Pennsylvania, guns are a religion, worshipped like any other idol, and politicians think of gun control like the rest of us think of colonoscopic exams.
But gun advocates have never explained to me
why
we need guns. What are they good for? Many tell me they keep the government from taking our liberties away. But our military is so powerful no force on earth, much less the NRA, can defeat it. If the army gets nasty, gun owners aren't going to stop anything. Those who believe this nonsense generally break Godwin's law by invoking the spectre of Nazi Germany. But as the citizens of Lidice, Czechoslovakia found out, armed citizens who kill soldiers of a well armed and trained army generally suffer, to put it mildly, much more than anticipated. The French resistance...armed citizens...was so ineffective it was considered a joke by the allies.
Gun advocates also say that guns stop or deter crime. If this is true, why does the US have the highest murder rate in the western world? While they appeal to 'cultural' differences, if the US is so violent, advocating gun possession is like asking whether one should use a match or lighter to see in the darkness when one is standing in gasoline.
Gun advocates do have one argument in their favor: gun CONTROL is a waste of time. It's completely ineffective, given the tens of millions of guns in society.
But with 10,000 people murdered each year by gunfire, why do we place our lives, and the lives of our children, in the hands of gun owners? Cars have a use; banning them would be suicide. Guns CAN be banned, since many societies have done so with little repercussion. Since gun control is ineffective, it's time to think about a complete gun ban. If necessary, this may included repealing the 2nd amendment.
While difficult, this is not as impossible as it seems. Several years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan came up with the idea of a gun ban to include shutting down gunsmiths, banning bullet and reloader equipment sales, and stopping the production of brass. With the destruction of the gun infrastructure, it may take a generation, but guns would wither away.
And that would be to the benefit of us all.
One of the things I've noted about politics is that liberals talk about ideas (which is why there are so few liberals), while conservatives talk about liberals.
Andrew Sullivan, one of my favorite conservative pundits (andrewsullivan.com), is one who brings out the wonderful contradictions in modern day conservativism. While he believes in privacy for consenting adults for sexual practices, he does not believe in privacy for women where their bodies are concerned.
In recent months, as the Catholic Church furor has intensified, gays have been subjected to baiting by the right, and Sullivan is starting to see that for many conservatives, being gay is a fundamentally disordered state of affairs. He's taking alot of heat from other conservatives (notably Stan Kurtz at the "National Review") who wish to see marriage enshrined in the constitution as being between man and woman.
I've never figured out how conservatives say they're for 'limited government', except, of course, for sex and religion. To conservatives, hell bent for prayer in public schools, creationism, outlawing homosexuality, etc., the best government is limited government, except when it isn't.
Hello, and welcome to another of the myriad blogs on the net. This will be a bit different from most political blogs since I'm a secular (atheist) liberal, neither of which is common in the US today. Actually I find myself more in-line with Christopher Hitchens than anyone else. The rabid religious fanatics in the world today (of whatever religion) seem to be on the warpath, so that's one area I have an interest in.
Those who've read Hitchens know of his excellent shredding of Noam Chomsky's fundamentalist anti-Americanism, as well as his support for individual rights, especially for those of us who are middle class, and actually work for a living. It seems the right has taken over social policy in the US, while the far left renders itself more obsolete day by day with its nihilist opposition to just about damn near everything.
This is very much a work in progress, so I welcome all points of view, including conservatives (regardless of what you guys say about the close-mindedness of liberals). If you'd like to read a rather focused autobiographical sketch, go to 'qrz.com', and type 'wf3h' into the field.
