An amazing snippet of history

Posted by JW Holliday on October 10, 2005, 03:25 PM | #

To me, “left” and “right” are merely directions in 2-D space.  With regards to real life, I find it not only irrelevant, but dangerously misleading.  What happens is people begin to identify with the label of their chosen “politics” with the same fervor as obsessed sports fans and their favorite teams.

Thus, there are people in the USA - people whose actual views differ from that of Bush on the vast majority of issues - who nonetheless are strong supporters of Dubya because he is labeled a “conservative Republican”,  just like them.  So, he is “one of us”, on “our team”, against those nasty “liberal Democrats”, and the actual issues involved and the real-life consequences of Bush’s policies become irrelevant.

Likewise, there are people who have a lot of emotional investment in labelling themselves as “right” and “left”; indeed, the labels become more important than the ideas themselves.

Thus, for me, I don’t care whether an idea or set of ideas or person or group is labeled as “leftist” or “rightist” or whatever.  My concern is in what the ideas are and how these ideas effect ultimate and proximate interests.

Let’s not be fooled by labels, like so many red state Republicans are.  Let us examine he ideas, instead.

Posted by John S Bolton on October 10, 2005, 05:25 PM | #

The left and right are important categories, if one wants to know where one is going, or being pushed. Didn’t Hitler also make a lot of ‘cosmopolitan’ propaganda about a peaceful, unified Europa? Someone should slap the tranzis with that, but hard. JJR, an off-topic request that is hopefully not too impertinent: the Terman study was said in Shurkin’s Terman’s Kids to have found that ~1/6 of the enrollees were parents who are also in the top 1% of IQ. Is there information as to other data points of this kind, from which could be estimated the general shape of the curve describing the contribution of each,say ,decile of parental IQ’s to the top 1%? Would it be like: top 1%-1/6th, top 10%- 25, 2nd decile -15%, third decile 10%?

Posted by jonjayray on October 10, 2005, 07:08 PM | #

JSB:
Sorry I can’t help there
Chris Brand might know.

But only 1/6th of parents being high IQ seems a bit low

JWH
What you say is logical and many have said it but the data is un-co-operative. See:

http://jonjayray.netfirms.com/twodim.html

Posted by AD on October 11, 2005, 04:58 AM | #

JJR, do you know the historical roots of ‘right’ and ‘left’. It is tradition vs anti-tradition. Being ‘for peace’ has nothing to do with the right/left spectrum, it entirely depends what you are defending or warring against.

Left/right has been reinvented so many times that the terms are almost meaningless.

I can be against international free-trade/free-movement because it threatens my tradition and favours rootless cosmopolitanism. I can be anti-war because i don’t want my people dying needlessly for a cause that has nothing to do with preserving my tradition.On the other hand i can be pro-free trade within Australian borders and pro-war if anyone steps on my patch of dirt.

It is all about context. Libertarians of today are fighting for the same cause that the Bolsheviks were in the early twentieth century….to kill tradition under the guise of economics.

Posted by AD on October 11, 2005, 05:12 AM | #

Didn’t Hitler also make a lot of ‘cosmopolitan’ propaganda about a peaceful, unified Europa?

He wanted to reclaim all the territory Germanic tribes occupied(most of North/East Europe) before the invention of the nation state. Southern Europe/North Africa, up to middle France, was to be reclaimed by Mussolini with the aim of imitating the Roman Empire.

Ofcourse,my nation would be Japanese, except for Tasmania, which would’ve been an outpost of the Reich. Thats where all the antipodean Germans(including members of the Mosley worshipping Anglo-fascist organisation ‘new guard’) were to be resettled.

Posted by Svigor on October 11, 2005, 06:10 PM | #

JW, I say all of politics is tribal.  The trick is how to get them (back) to sensible definitions of tribe instead of the muddy-headed meaningless definitions of tribe we operate under now (like JJR’s).

Posted by JB on October 12, 2005, 08:31 AM | #

flogging that dead horse again.

Lew Crockwell and his libertarians are anti-war and anti-empire, so they must be leftists ultra-capitalists, right ?

American commies and progressives were pro-war when the enemy was the big bad fascists, so they were rightists collectivists, right ?

Stalin didn’t like homos, so he was a rightward leaning communist tyrant ?