Whenever an acquaintance identifies him or herself as a Progressive I ask, “Progress toward what?”
That usually earns a blank stare. Sometimes they answer with negative responses, along the lines of “It’s not (Bush, or some substitute).” I say, “No, it’s not E-gressive, but Pro-gressive – moving toward something.”
That has prompted some further thought on two occasions.
I then recommended Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg. One liked it, the other hasn’t checked in since.
So if I am not a “Progressive” (which was really Robert Lafollete’s Party in the 1920’s) what am I, a “retroactive” or perhaps a “stagnationist”?
The communists call themselves ‘socialists’.
Actually, I believe — if I recall it correctly — this first started to come into play during the Hillary campaign in 2007 when it dawned on them that “liberal” and “liberalism” was fully contaminated.
The appellations Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Castroite have all been successfully smeared by the reactionaries.
A progressive is the guy that continues to shoot holes in the bottom of his boat after the snake is dead.
I’m with vanderleun. First, any word that gains an unfortunate connotation gets nominated for a makeover. Reform School gets changed to Youth Development Center, though “reform” is a perfectly good descriptor – because everyone knows it’s Kids Jail. Second, liberals – they never deserved that title either – are in the business of nice-sounding things that disguise their Totalitarian Lite agenda.
They want their tribe to rule. They have presents for coalition partners. That is all.
“Progressive” has been used for generations by Soviets and Marxist fellow-travelers to describe themselves.
The appellations Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Castroite have all been successfully smeared by the reactionaries.
Make that “accurately characterized by sensible people” and I agree with you.
Gotta love the historical …uh…progression: Communist –> Marxist –> socialist –> liberal –> progressive.
Similar to their other word games, e.g, “social justice,” and “industrial democracy,” to name two.
A similar metamorphosis has been evinced by the terms for government handouts: relief –> welfare –> AFDC –> tax credits.
In each case, once decent people catch on to the nefarious import of a term, it is retired and another euphemism adopted.
Bob from Virginia:
I think the “progressive” crowd considers you a “regressive” if you believe in, and use, common sense.
Somehow the terminology they use to describe their theories has always seemed bassackwards in practice.
Progressives
feminists
communists
socialists
marxists
free thinkers
free love
GSLEN
BNS (black national socialists)
Nazi’s
Maoists
communitarian
and dozens more, all stand for the same things!!!
in each, the same things are wrapped with other things (which was the whole thing behind the original spam skit).
ALL the same… many believeing they are different beacuse a slightly different set of ingredients.
but that would be true of unleavened bread, challah bread, soda bread, rye bread, pumpernickel bread, etc.
all a different mix of similar ingredients, but all are bread.
we are too stupid to see the bread part.. as we all argue it cant be bread as the more we argue differences the less we see the same.
most of the explanations of names make sense if you lay them out in time.
before mao, there were no maoists.
before Marx, what where they called?
so first they were the progressives
then they became anarchists, and then marxists
then they became forms of marxism.
the original thread is from the progressives of teh communes in the US.. who took the idea of constitutional republic and freedom too far, denied limited freedom, and went from their.
ALL their social arrangements end up failing. but they do very well until they do, and sometimes after.
progressive (adj.) Look up progressive at Dictionary.com
c.1600, “characterized by advancement” (in action, character, etc.), from progress (q.v.). Of taxation, from 1889; of jazz, from 1947. Meaning “characterized by striving for change and innovation, avant-garde, liberal” is from 1908; the noun in this sense is first attested 1865.
they take over terms and they LOVE word games. they love to name things in code, so that you know to support something even if you haven’t met them..
back in the 20s and 30s you would have named your organization with “league” in it. other times “peoples” other times “collective”, and many other terms.
its how to organize without organizing (so that you can deny its organized – as the sedition and treason had to be avoided).
they, like Russia, are responsible for most of the ills in America (and Russia for a huge amount of them in the world). You cant claim to be making history, and not achieve that place…
Beginning in the 1900s, the political history of the United States has been the story of the two mainstream political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, and the third party movements that have grown and receded in their wake. Between 1912 and 1948, progressivism, a broadly based reform movement, had three national incarnations as the Progressive Party.
actually.. rather than become a valid party, what they did was realize taht the laws did not require a meaningful party affiliation. *(you can read this stuff by them if you hunt and read)…
and once people realized that their program was pretty much the full blown socialist program with the conflagration (holocaust, shoa) being acomplished (with engels calling for world wars, and both time progressives creating them), they had to go underground and so became a meta label.
so a feminist didnt know that all feminists are progressives… no such thing as one that isnt…
and the black racialists, they didnt know either that they too were progressives. as the same with the gays. the indigent… the illegal immigrant.
they dont look up the hierarchy..
it was the progressives that hurried through womens suffrage… why? because by looking to see what will happen anyway, and pretending to rush is to it, they can take claim for creating that which they never did.
a lot of the things we think are great, are really their games with our minds… we just dont know the history, and so we think they are great beacuse part of the history was their sellkng it wa great when other said what would happen. years later you can check, those others were right, not wrong.
the reason is that they were merit based. and so said what the outcome would be if you did certain things, they were empirical. and the progressive offer man the chance to get away from empirical reality. its responsibility and pressures. (in fantasy).
since they got their start in the free love and with the wealthy (who had the time to get wrapped up in immorality and perversion out of boredom and insufficient life (which is why it was the children of the wealthy not the self made themselves))
like many circles, each circle has a different reason for wanting thing, whether real or not.
and as you go up the steps or circles, there are fewer fewer people and the reasons are more real and abstract…
so what you have at top is completely pragmatic manipulation, and as it goes lower and lower down, this then changes from what it is, to different arguments of acceptance or reason.
so to the guys on the very top, feminism and such games limit success, threats from creative destruction (handled by social justice), and so on and so on.
all the nasty stuff is the reasons.
moving down you have women who made well their whole lives for the cause, and are close to the nasties on top to be afraid of them and see what can be done..
their followers get a bit differnt story…
so at the top, its a way to establish aristocracy and control, liek before which they lost durig the enlightenment.
at the bottom, its all emotional gibberish that’s conflicted and only serves to move enough people to facilitate cooperation through the system they follow.
so the femnist leader knows she is below the progressive leaders, who are below the councils (soviets). those close to her know some, but not all.. and as you get farther away, you have more people being used, and less in the know.
Artfldgr, “free love” and “Nazi’s” stand for the same thing?
I am now a “stagnationist”, it’s about time lazy people had their political movement.
The most perverse word game played by the left is when they refer to the killing an unborn baby as “reproductive rights”.
I believe that Progressives are hoping to progress toward a stateless society. Of course, you need total state control in order to achieve that.
This makes sense for those who believe that history exists in the future rather than in the past.
These are the same people who use terms like “paying for a tax cut” as though they were logical.
A “progressive” label “transforms” hate and murder into social justice. For instance:
Comment on July 9th on @ 10:52 p.m. by signalfire on commondreams.org’s blog titled, “A damning new report on George W. Bush.”
So can we hang him now? I personally don’t want to wait for the god he doesn’t really believe in to judge him.
All of Artfldgr’s groups have one thing in common: they all go through life pushing on doors marked “pull,” as my father used to say.
The common denominator between all of the groups: they’re all bitterly unhappy with the status quo, and want drastic change so that they’ll be happy, never realizing that their unhappiness comes from within. Nothing to do with externalities.
Vanderleun is correct that the terms “liberal” and “liberalism” have been fully contaminated — that’s why they shifted to “progressive.” [Aside: If there is one area where the left stands out, it is in name-changes] But we should keep in mind the Rasmussen poll (March 2009) that showed that only 53 percent of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism. Under-30 adults were essentially evenly divided: 37 percent preferred capitalism, 33 percent socialism.
I’m inclined to think that the ‘socialism ‘ label is not useful. Far better to stick to ‘liberal’ or ‘radical liberal” or ‘radical leftist’– terms that are mostly negative. Our educational establishment has done a fine job of confusing the issue, and communism and socialism are not fully understood. Who associates ‘Nazi’ with socialism, or knows anything about the evils of communism? Concentration camps were properly excoriated, but who knows anything about the gulag? And the “progressives” have done a fine job of demonizing “capitalism”– Marx’s name for the free market.
In following the American Revolution these people who constantly sought a free lunch were aptly called “levelers”. The “left” had not been seated yet in the government of France. A rose by any other name…..
Somehow the terminology they use to describe their theories has always seemed bassackwards in practice.
That’s why I prefer to call them Proglodytes. If they had their way we’d all be living in caves again.
I like to explain to my clueless Liberal friends that “Progressivism” was the American brand of the same fascism that was ascendent in Europe, beginning in the early-19th Century as an outgrowth of the French Revolution.
When I feel peevish, I mention that American progressives gave us 19th – early 20th century eugenic theories developed in places of learning such as the U. of Wisconsin and that provided the foundations for Hitler’s genocidal policies, according to Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”.
Same thugs, different gang colors.
There really is nothing new under the sun.
Artfldgr, “free love” and “Nazi’s” stand for the same thing?
actually yes…
because there is no such thing a thing like free love without the structure to go with it and all that.
you remember free love from the 60s, where they pretended to dissociate with the political system necessary to support it.
its the addiction model of ideology… they got you addicted first to the fun of the perverse while hiding its negative harmful things from being tallied as from that. so if you were a swinger and your marriage broke up, it wasnt that you guys really werent made to be what they think you should be, it was that you werent sufficiently evolved for bonoboism (my new core name for all of this, for if a bonobo could make up an ideology, they would make up progressivism).
Also, we tend to look from bottom up at these things not top down. and what appears one way from bottom up is very different from top down.
in fact, i think thats where we get mixed up as to things. when we describe feminism, we do it bottom up, when the leaders decide implementation and what it is, they are looking top down.
we look up and see a few hundred, they look down and see a sea of uncountable numbers.
from the bottom up, suffrage was liberation for women to vote. from the top down, its what the more heinious progressives say or reason that the bottom up lookers deny… like the idea that it was all about economy, not liberation… or rights had nothing to do with it,
it was and is always about using people in groups against other people in groups because its not practical for you to stand on the corner and take on the world alone one at a time.
from the top down womens suffrage is what the leaders discussed as goals. a means of meeting their goals or facilitating them, while liberation was how you sold it to the groups so they did your work for you without you having to pay them.
so under this, feminism is a facilitator of removing morals, separating children from their family history leaving them to the state to edumacate properly, move womens labor into industry so that her labor can be taxed for socialist programs and the wealth not 100% go to her family. the end of family.
and now… towards free love… which was way back in harmon times which led up to this…
you now have no fault divorce, a way to get rid of children from coupling for sport or pleasure, you have financial support so your not penalized for what is fornicating, loosening up of the social mores to grant more access.
so when you go back to the originators of all this.. the people i keep mentioning but arent read..
you find that all this other stuff just facilitates a society that fit their idea of morals and allowed them to act.
to a free love person who believes that everyone they have sex with is love, till it isnt. needs no fault divorce, so they dont lose for being themselves. who cares what it does to other women who aren’t part of the way they see it should be (aha moment… the rest who dont want it, or what not dont matter, just as they treated the free sex free thinkers as society destroying pariahs (cause they are)).
and how to link this to the nazis?
well it was their stuff that took the same ideas, for the leadership, and worked them.
lebensborn meant that SS soldiers and certain others could have sex with german women and any illigitimate child would have to be accepted.
and illegitimacy has to go when you have such a society. no?
and what would marriage be? force you to have sex with only one person in exchange for sex at all, how oppressive to a person who wonders if sex with a horse (like a certain famous royal) might be interesting, but are oppressed from trying.
you go back to he earliest speakers and things and connect the threads and you will see that they are exactly the same things..
and the social decadence that weimar became facilitated a dictator… just as the SAME EXACT social decadence (which you can follow back to weimar and the progressives back again to here), is leading to the same kind of statist control
dont think so?
well they just created in the health care the same thing as action 4, the order that ended the lives of the infirm. just a softer version which restricts healthcare to over 65, and the infirm, and such. not outright murder, but the same thing as leaving the baby outside of the wall at night for the wolves.
and they nationalized most the same industries.
the whole sex thing has a line in it too, which is why i said to read lukacs..
but it seems that no one really wants an answer to how we got here…
at least not one that shows how they helped.
i wish i had occams talent for being able to say the same thing shorter… but then again… maybe i wouldnt have the same thing to say. 🙂
that provided the foundations for Hitler’s genocidal policies, according to Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”.
even jonah gave you a cleaned scrubbed history so that his book would reach more people.
there were LOTs of people who were trying to say many of the same things and more and even more detail. but no one wold really listen. marginalized, they basically just got quiet.
when people came from states that had thsi stuff, and they knew better, they would first try to say something. but they would be admonished!!! they would be told, like i was told, that what they were seeing was something else, that experience didnt count, and so on…
and then they fell silent again, afraid of when the eye of the state would find them again. which is why so many will talk among themselves, but not talk among Americans who don’t know.
do not think that they are not watching things from here, and through their own countries, and so on.
many are also looking to take advantage. having experience, they will end up on better footing just for that.
Bob from Virginia Says:
July 12th, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Artfldgr, “free love” and “Nazi’s” stand for the same thing?
I understand that Himmler tried to set up a sort of “free love” camp for people of the proper genetic makeup, for the purposes of procreation, the babies to be raised either by the SS or according to their guidlines.
That aside, the National Socialist Worker’s Party had quite a few “progressive” ideas, at least to begin with. Rename their political planks (eliminate any reference to National Socialist) and they would fit in well with a verity of other kooky leftist groups on campus these days.
The title “progressive” dates at least back to the 1890s, probably quite a bit earlier. It is just that it was dropped, for the term “liberal”. The left labels itself, and when the label gets a bad taste due to the association, they change the label. They can even reuse old ones, like “progressive”.
They can even reuse old ones, like “progressive”.
It’s not just names – they even recycle their politicians. Witness Jerry Brown here in CA.
“We’re gonna keep electing him Governor until he gets it right!”
The layman knows just the term “the progressive era” and takes his cue accordingly. Due to media, education and entertainment establishing the definition of terms, “the progressive era” means that era when women got the vote and children got schooling–the same era which was bounded by the philosophy of positivism, the science of marxism and eugenics, and saw the rise of legal positivism in jurisprudence. Today, postmodernism (the opposite of positivism in at least an epistimological sense) bounds philosophy and marxism and eugenics have been discredited.
Liberals know that the average person equates “progressive” with “the progressive era” when muckrakers exposed the robber barrons and the franchise went out to all. They also know the average person does not know about eugenics as science and the loss of natural law and hence the loss of consitututional integrity or stability. In the “what I did for you” department, the label “progressive” confers an historical accolade. That’s why liberals love it.
Curtis, I think you’re giving the average person too much credit, and doubt that he knows anything at all about the progressive era.
I think the major appeal of the term “progressive” for the average schlub is its implication of being about “progress.”
Doesn’t this word manipulation game liberals play simply mean a rational conversation is impossible with them? I like Mark Steyn’s remark “Talking to a liberal is like playing tennis with someone who says “Yea, but your ace is just a social construct”. We’re talking language and its structure being made absolutely meaningless by these people.
You can add another RINO from New England to this list of ‘progressives’ = Senator Scott Brown.
We’re in the post-deconstructionist age and nothing means anything so why should labels?
Would Harry Truman recognize John Kerry as a Democrat? Would either Grant or Lee recognize in George “Tomb of the Unknown Diversity” Casey a commanding general.
Would either Jack Kennedy or Werner von Braun say NASA is a space program?
Labels change to keep up with the times, so that people who can’t change a fraction into a decimal can be graduates.
The constant attack on language by ideologues is really irritating. Perfectly innocent words get endowed with false virtues and meanings. Why is “progressive” always good and “regressive” always bad? Syphilis is progressive. Does that make it good?
“the words mean what I say they mean” The Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, in her own way a virtual Lenin. She understood the power of renaming to confuse.
For the breakdown on the Left’s assault on, and weaponizing of, language, see Jeff Goldstein.
The opposite of Progress is supposed to be Congress.
🙂
“Progressive” is also the name of a car insurance company.
I wonder how many of Neo’s bloggers have coverage through Progressive. I do not. Its longtime head, Peter Lewis, is now a billionaire, and funds many progressive causes along with his buddy, Soros.
As an ACTUAL (Marxist) socialist, and someone very involved in “the Left” in general, I must disagree with your characterization, and those of the people in these comments. For clarification, here is the commonly (albeit not universally) accepted use of terms describing political stance:
– A “liberal” is someone who believes in some strong government intervention on the behalf of “the people,” meaning the poor, the middle-class, or minorities.
– A “progressive” is someone who recognizes the inefficiencies of compromising with radical republicans, and usually advocate some immoderate advance in the areas of environmentalism, wealth equality, or minority rights.
– A “socialist” is someone – anyone – who believes in government control over some aspects of the economy. This is how we can see socialist tendencies even in some Republican presidents.
– A “Marxist” is someone who believes the working class, that is, the producers of wealth, should take democratic control over the economy and do away with the institutions that leave wealth and power concerntrated in a (relative) handful of the population.
It’s unfortunate that Americans don’t understand the differences, but that’s what you get when you cut education programs!
A “liberal” is someone who believes in some strong government intervention on the behalf of “the people,” meaning the poor, the middle-class, or minorities.
There is a difference between true liberals, i.e., classical liberals, and modern liberals (leftists). What you describe is not a true liberal. The left stole the term liberal. Further, “progressive” is really just another term for modern liberal (leftist). It is just name changing, an attempt to avoid the stench of a failed ideology.
A “Marxist” is someone who believes the working class, that is, the producers of wealth, should take democratic control over the economy and do away with the institutions that leave wealth and power concerntrated in a (relative) handful of the population.
A Marxist is someone who believes you don’t have a right to your labor. “From those with the ability to those with the need”. Any form of socialism (including Marxism) is simply an ideology of theft.
It’s unfortunate that Americans don’t understand the differences, but that’s what you get when you cut education programs!
When an education system produces people who think socialism in any form is a good idea, it is a failed education system.
Would Harry Truman recognize John Kerry as a Democrat?
Truman did push for socialized healthcare.
And Truman was brought in as VP to replace the radical leftist nutcase FDR previously had as VP. The Democrats of the 30s and 40s were quite radical. So yeah, Truman would likely recognize Kerry and even Obama as Democrats. Obama is much more the 30’s style of radical leftist than, say, Bill Clinton.
Assistant Village Idiot Says:
“I’m with vanderleun. First, any word that gains an unfortunate connotation gets nominated for a makeover.”
Me too but I think it should be added that they went to liberal because progressive / progressives were too disliked. Now they’ve done it again, liberal is disliked so they’re going back….
SteddieH Says:
“I think the “progressive” crowd considers you a “regressive” if you believe in, and use, common sense.”
Yes, but they more commonly call the ‘regressives’ by another name. Conservative. 🙂
But seriously, they picked that term for us. We did not…
Bob from Virginia Says:
“Artfldgr, “free love” and “Nazi’s” stand for the same thing?”
I think there was a phase. Just like lefty socialism (ie, Russian socialists did too), the phase usually ends once dear leader is entrenched (Lenin stopped it eventually).
Nazism also had a homosexually accepting phase. Same deal, once Hitler was well entrenched he did away with it / them.
– A “liberal” is someone who thinks he believes in some strong government intervention on the behalf of “the people,” meaning the poor, the middle-class, or minorities, but in fact is too effing stupid to realize that he’s a useful idiot for the communists.
– A “progressive” is someone who talks about the inefficiencies of compromising with radical republicans, and usually advocates some immoderate advance in the areas of environmentalism, wealth equality, or minority rights, but does so to appear chic and edgy about Communism Lite, and the cool kids will sign his yearbook.
– A “socialist” is someone – anyone – who believes in government control over some aspects of the economy, kind of like someone who believes in having only a small tumor.
– A “Marxist” is someone who hasn’t paid much attention to current events in the last century or so, and thus hasn’t noticed that Marx’s predictions have failed miserably, which necessitated Lenin’s patching them with duct tape. Marxists believe in Marx’s theory of surplus value, but don’t realize that it’s based upon the labor theory of value, which is risibly sophomoric. Nevertheless, Marxists adhere to their theology because it gives them an utterly specious basis on which to feel superior to others to whom they are in fact inferior, because they are life’s losers. Odd how you never hear the winners complaining about the rules, isn’t it?
Marxists project their inner maladjustment onto society, and think that if only they could change society, then they would be at peace with themselves. In this, of course, they are mistaken; their demons are inside them. (See Guevara, Che; Pot, Pol; Stalin, Joseph, for examples. Did they live under Marxism? Check. Happy, well-adjusted people enjoying their Marxist heaven on earth? Not so much.)
It’s unfortunate that Americans don’t understand the differences, but that’s what you get when you cut education programs!
And yet we’re ahead of you, wherever you are. By a lot. In everything (except soccer, which we don’t care about, and if we did, we’d be ahead of you in that too). And gaining. Funny, huh?
Occam’s Beard Says:
“Marxists believe in Marx’s theory of surplus value, but don’t realize that it’s based upon the labor theory of value, which is risibly sophomoric.”
Surplus value had a few other arguments in support; they were just proven wrong every time it was tried.
Market inefficiencies are minor compared to central planning’s inefficiencies. Although, this is still a fact that ‘liberals’ won’t admit… heck, they won’t even admit when they’re pushing bills that want to replace market mechanisms with planning.
True enough, Thomass. I didn’t want to waste my time on a theological debate with our Red friend, and hence satirized his comment.
In my experience with Reds – which at Berkeley was considerable – they live to debate doctrinal minutiae ad nauseam, much like the Eskimos with their variety of words for “snow.”
geoffb,
their history predates their name… [since their labels change a name can only take you so far back! so if you try to find them by their movement names prior to the label, you think they started at a different time than when they did. if you follow by names and associations and thoughts. yuo end up going farther and farther back to just after the American revolution (and the hatred that blacks and women were free too. so they stopped that – same thoughts, not refined enough dont get a name until they are refined… but there are decades of stuff before that point)
Moses Harmon, free sex love communes, were the origins… and there was a big back and forth between the US and Europe..
And yet we’re ahead of you, wherever you are.
i am in ny..
you know. home of BELLA DODD head of CPUSA, and the TEachers union. home of Columbia and the Frankfurt school. home of the new teachers college..
and the new school.
naw… i just know how they teach two different ways.
ALSO, your confusing moral momentum, where the boomers are just entering retirement.
i am talking about their replacements.
so when you say we are beating everyone else, may i ask in what?
language? we are not tops in literacy
science? we are no longer tops, china beats us (they just purchased 128 illumina sequencers. that gives them more sequencing capacity than all of the US)
Manufacturing? if you divide revenues from whats made here, and what profits are made, we no longer manufacture like we used to. china just topped us a month or two ago.
China doesnt have PC forbidden things and so they are making a lot of progress in genetics of different races, genders, and such..
they have monopolies in mercury, which is why we are mandated for CFL..
they have monopolies on rare earths critical for green tech… which is why we are mandating that.
they have several TRILLION in US debt the way that the US had England debt before it took away England eminence.
We just passed laws that will set quotas for women and minorities… (like the SBA program) these quotas are designed to disenfranchise the oppressor class (white men) who also included Jews.
I was a bronx science attendee who could not get any financing, as they wanted more women. now they have put in women and minority help to disenfranchise more.
i am now working with a geneticist because i am autodidactic, and lots of stuff… but if this last try doesnt work due to PC bs… i am thinking of going to family i have now in asia…
some asian companies will NOT hire an asian whose IQ is below 140. since i test higher, i will seek to work for a meritocritous company. that SAME company does not hold the standards so high for Americans that work for them (125), because if they did, they would not have enough women and minorities in that area to make their Americans and westerners happy.
The U.S. has arguably been the most desirable place in the world to get a college education with international students from China, India, Japan, and others all traveling to the U.S. with that express purpose. However, there’s serious signs of trouble; U.S. citizens’ college graduation rates are in danger of falling behind China. Japanese enrollment is down as U.S. universities are slowly falling out of favor. And at least one executive of an Indian firm complained that American graduates were “unemployable”.
go ahead. watch blood sweat and t-shirts or other similar documentaries…
i work with graduate students in medicine who cant spell or read, and don’t know words (the foreigners do).
the halls are full of women and minorities. very very few white males, and what is there are foreign.
Adding to the list of awkward statistics is a recent announcement by Bleum Inc., a Chinese outsourcing company. In China, with a deluge of available highly-intelligent graduates, Bleum Inc. requires that its workers score over 140 on an IQ test.
When it decided to recruit American computer science graduates, though, it decided that bar was way too high. It dropped the requirement for the Americans down to 120, a move it says reflects a lower pool of talented college grads in the U.S.
they have no reason to lie here.
they are staffing… they want the best
and we are NOT allowed in the US to perform to our best, only to the highest level of the lowest achiever.
when i was a kid, the show would have been are you as smart as an 8th grader… today, its are you as smart as a 5h grader.
1/5th believe that winston churchill was not real
that King Arthur, and sherlock holmes were real.
the students i work with often cant reason. they cant debate, they are very afraid of having an answer that they have to justify. and they want mostly to just be making papers and throw them on the pile for a salary, and not have to bring anything to market or such.
My sister is a teacher in a heavily illegal immigrant area in california. my cousin is a teacher in ny.
my son is in college and graduated honors on scholarship, but they are oing to take that away now, that the new laws let them kick out white males. he is part American Indian by his mom, so he got the scholarship i couldnt get!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the old are going out..
the young coming up will show that your confideence is not well places since the old are who made all that stuff and are still doing it.
Colleges want a degree stamp for all. the idea is we are all equal so we all can get a stamp, and that stamp in cargo cult fashion gets us a higher salary..
but in truth, that was when the standards were so high that only the best got in. and since men outpeform women on iq in these areas, they had to lower standards as a way to reward the good usful idiots for helping them gain power that they can force a negative outcome pretending its positive.
if you look at history, women DID go to college (especially the free love and early women. progressives are the ones wanting to make a society and THEY took away what they would later want reward for rationing back. i can prove it by showing history)
but like military, fire, police, everywhere they went, we had to lower standards to make higher numbers NOW, not wait till more were interested, and the numbers grew to meet standards. or accept that a high standard woman was a medium standard man in most cases. women dont like this, its not PC.
but if you read the papers of the progressives, their predecessors, and Marx, and so on. THEY have no problem thinking this way, only their useful idiots do!!! [and they do because they don’t want to be standing alone as n individual, but want to be part of something more]
I am FROM America..
but i am a child of immigrants..
[so i have no connection with any of the BS they spout as if everyone got here 200 years ago, and no one new showed up]
My eyes are wide open.. i try to get otehrs to work for a futuer. they dont need it. they have it plannedl obama will take care of them. the others dont want to do business, all they do all day is work on their not for profit graphics on your tax dime!!!!
go ahead.. go out and start talking to the common.
they are not stupid, but they ARE ignorant.
to hear my best friends friends son at our barbecues each year is to listen to the communist in the movie “one, two, three”.
he spouts stuff that the older people dont get. he talks about oppression and all this. he is VERY Smart, but he was not selected for the different education.
that is, he didnt get the educatino my son got, he got the dumb them down and stupify them education.
i only had to ask him to do long division on paper to know which he got.
my son does it the old way.
he does it the new way.
my son is on an academic path in which the computers think he is american indian
this guy is white with nothing (like me), and so they gave him the new math…
this new math is like the education the commoners got during the age of aristocracy where puzzles were good enough to lock things.
oh, he can do math… but only basic math. what they taught hmi will not let him intuit things. wont let him go beyond that level… the teaching version makes future levels intractable.
the idea is to make whites look dumb, and minorities seem to close the never closing gap of IQ..
we used to call it cooking the books.
Tom Says:
“- A “Marxist” is someone who believes the working class, that is, the producers of wealth, should take democratic control over the economy and do away with the institutions that leave wealth and power concerntrated in a (relative) handful of the population.”
So the democrats are Marxists for their healthcare bill. Got it.
the producers of wealth, should take democratic control over the economy
Why is it that “democratic control over the economy” invariably requires informers, secret police, and gulags to maintain “democratic control?”
The idea that the working class are the producers of wealth- especially with regards to industrial production- is laughable. Did workers invent the product? Did workers design the production process? [In the case of companies like Toyota, worker suggestions for production improvement ARE used to improve the production system.] Did workers provide the investment for the whole shebang?
Dresden Scott – part of my education included linguistics, which bears on any problems of definition.
When abstract terms enter common public discourse, they begin to lose value. Liberal is a word that has nearly reversed in meaning over the last 150-200 years, for example. Terms like marxist have a dozen related meanings. This fuzziness in denotative meaning allows them to acquire all manner of connotations instead. They have a feeling or an aura about them. Reverting to what they are “supposed” to mean or “really” mean is impossible. The word gentleman, for example, used to mean “one who owns property.” It eroded into nothing more than “well-meaning male.”
One can take a prescriptivist approach to the meanings of words within specific contexts – which is why introductory textbooks are mostly about defining words and concepts for use in later courses. One can also state with some definiteness what a word meant at a certain time, and what it means to most people today. Words that are not emotionally charged change more slowly; concrete words change more slowly.
The problem comes with abstract, emotionally charged words, because people want to bend them to their meaning. You can con people with that much flexibility, giving them the impression that you mean one thing while actually meaning something related, but importantly different. Or more often, that you mean something precise when you actually mean something vague.
Thus, the distinctions you draw between four different attitudes are useful. But the labels you apply have long since shed their precise meanings, and are used as generalities. I try to use “liberal” in its most commonly understood modern sense, even though it is vague and I am aware of more precise earlier meanings. When I need more precision or clarity, I add in qualifiers and explanations independently.
I will also now turn your own cleverness back on you. As you were just badly outgunned with your sneer about education cuts, you might consider my oft-repeated opinion that the various ideologies of the left are more social than intellectual. They enjoy the impression that they are the smart ones, and have an infinite variety of condescensions to reassure each other of this. These social cues are not founded in actual intellectual data, however, but in tribal cues, rather like totemic symbols or bird chirps. Socially alert people learn how to push the “we’re smart, you and I” buttons of others, and thus find tribal acceptance doable. That is why, as the saying goes, liberalism is more NPR than PHD.
Obama, as an example, performs the tribal cues of condescension, insult, reference-dropping (having read Urdu poetry, for example), and codespeak remarkably well. And many are indeed charmed or cowed by these, so he keeps them. These cues, and not his sentence construction, clarity, or content, are why (some) people thnk him a brilliant speaker. Demonstrations of actual superior intelligence are harder to find, though he might fairly lay claim to something above average.
30 hours later, crickets chirping. Just sayin’…
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Whenever an acquaintance identifies him or herself as a Progressive I ask, “Progress toward what?”
That usually earns a blank stare. Sometimes they answer with negative responses, along the lines of “It’s not (Bush, or some substitute).” I say, “No, it’s not E-gressive, but Pro-gressive – moving toward something.”
That has prompted some further thought on two occasions.
I then recommended Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg. One liked it, the other hasn’t checked in since.
So if I am not a “Progressive” (which was really Robert Lafollete’s Party in the 1920’s) what am I, a “retroactive” or perhaps a “stagnationist”?
The communists call themselves ‘socialists’.
Actually, I believe — if I recall it correctly — this first started to come into play during the Hillary campaign in 2007 when it dawned on them that “liberal” and “liberalism” was fully contaminated.
The appellations Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Castroite have all been successfully smeared by the reactionaries.
A progressive is the guy that continues to shoot holes in the bottom of his boat after the snake is dead.
I’m with vanderleun. First, any word that gains an unfortunate connotation gets nominated for a makeover. Reform School gets changed to Youth Development Center, though “reform” is a perfectly good descriptor – because everyone knows it’s Kids Jail. Second, liberals – they never deserved that title either – are in the business of nice-sounding things that disguise their Totalitarian Lite agenda.
They want their tribe to rule. They have presents for coalition partners. That is all.
“Progressive” has been used for generations by Soviets and Marxist fellow-travelers to describe themselves.
The appellations Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Castroite have all been successfully smeared by the reactionaries.
Make that “accurately characterized by sensible people” and I agree with you.
Gotta love the historical …uh…progression: Communist –> Marxist –> socialist –> liberal –> progressive.
Similar to their other word games, e.g, “social justice,” and “industrial democracy,” to name two.
A similar metamorphosis has been evinced by the terms for government handouts: relief –> welfare –> AFDC –> tax credits.
In each case, once decent people catch on to the nefarious import of a term, it is retired and another euphemism adopted.
Bob from Virginia:
I think the “progressive” crowd considers you a “regressive” if you believe in, and use, common sense.
http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2005/03/regressives.html (dated 2005)
Somehow the terminology they use to describe their theories has always seemed bassackwards in practice.
Progressives
feminists
communists
socialists
marxists
free thinkers
free love
GSLEN
BNS (black national socialists)
Nazi’s
Maoists
communitarian
and dozens more, all stand for the same things!!!
in each, the same things are wrapped with other things (which was the whole thing behind the original spam skit).
ALL the same… many believeing they are different beacuse a slightly different set of ingredients.
but that would be true of unleavened bread, challah bread, soda bread, rye bread, pumpernickel bread, etc.
all a different mix of similar ingredients, but all are bread.
we are too stupid to see the bread part.. as we all argue it cant be bread as the more we argue differences the less we see the same.
most of the explanations of names make sense if you lay them out in time.
before mao, there were no maoists.
before Marx, what where they called?
so first they were the progressives
then they became anarchists, and then marxists
then they became forms of marxism.
the original thread is from the progressives of teh communes in the US.. who took the idea of constitutional republic and freedom too far, denied limited freedom, and went from their.
ALL their social arrangements end up failing. but they do very well until they do, and sometimes after.
progressive (adj.) Look up progressive at Dictionary.com
c.1600, “characterized by advancement” (in action, character, etc.), from progress (q.v.). Of taxation, from 1889; of jazz, from 1947. Meaning “characterized by striving for change and innovation, avant-garde, liberal” is from 1908; the noun in this sense is first attested 1865.
they take over terms and they LOVE word games. they love to name things in code, so that you know to support something even if you haven’t met them..
back in the 20s and 30s you would have named your organization with “league” in it. other times “peoples” other times “collective”, and many other terms.
its how to organize without organizing (so that you can deny its organized – as the sedition and treason had to be avoided).
they, like Russia, are responsible for most of the ills in America (and Russia for a huge amount of them in the world). You cant claim to be making history, and not achieve that place…
Beginning in the 1900s, the political history of the United States has been the story of the two mainstream political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, and the third party movements that have grown and receded in their wake. Between 1912 and 1948, progressivism, a broadly based reform movement, had three national incarnations as the Progressive Party.
actually.. rather than become a valid party, what they did was realize taht the laws did not require a meaningful party affiliation. *(you can read this stuff by them if you hunt and read)…
and once people realized that their program was pretty much the full blown socialist program with the conflagration (holocaust, shoa) being acomplished (with engels calling for world wars, and both time progressives creating them), they had to go underground and so became a meta label.
so a feminist didnt know that all feminists are progressives… no such thing as one that isnt…
and the black racialists, they didnt know either that they too were progressives. as the same with the gays. the indigent… the illegal immigrant.
they dont look up the hierarchy..
it was the progressives that hurried through womens suffrage… why? because by looking to see what will happen anyway, and pretending to rush is to it, they can take claim for creating that which they never did.
a lot of the things we think are great, are really their games with our minds… we just dont know the history, and so we think they are great beacuse part of the history was their sellkng it wa great when other said what would happen. years later you can check, those others were right, not wrong.
the reason is that they were merit based. and so said what the outcome would be if you did certain things, they were empirical. and the progressive offer man the chance to get away from empirical reality. its responsibility and pressures. (in fantasy).
since they got their start in the free love and with the wealthy (who had the time to get wrapped up in immorality and perversion out of boredom and insufficient life (which is why it was the children of the wealthy not the self made themselves))
like many circles, each circle has a different reason for wanting thing, whether real or not.
and as you go up the steps or circles, there are fewer fewer people and the reasons are more real and abstract…
so what you have at top is completely pragmatic manipulation, and as it goes lower and lower down, this then changes from what it is, to different arguments of acceptance or reason.
so to the guys on the very top, feminism and such games limit success, threats from creative destruction (handled by social justice), and so on and so on.
all the nasty stuff is the reasons.
moving down you have women who made well their whole lives for the cause, and are close to the nasties on top to be afraid of them and see what can be done..
their followers get a bit differnt story…
so at the top, its a way to establish aristocracy and control, liek before which they lost durig the enlightenment.
at the bottom, its all emotional gibberish that’s conflicted and only serves to move enough people to facilitate cooperation through the system they follow.
so the femnist leader knows she is below the progressive leaders, who are below the councils (soviets). those close to her know some, but not all.. and as you get farther away, you have more people being used, and less in the know.
Artfldgr, “free love” and “Nazi’s” stand for the same thing?
I am now a “stagnationist”, it’s about time lazy people had their political movement.
The most perverse word game played by the left is when they refer to the killing an unborn baby as “reproductive rights”.
I believe that Progressives are hoping to progress toward a stateless society. Of course, you need total state control in order to achieve that.
This makes sense for those who believe that history exists in the future rather than in the past.
These are the same people who use terms like “paying for a tax cut” as though they were logical.
A “progressive” label “transforms” hate and murder into social justice. For instance:
Comment on July 9th on @ 10:52 p.m. by signalfire on commondreams.org’s blog titled, “A damning new report on George W. Bush.”
So can we hang him now? I personally don’t want to wait for the god he doesn’t really believe in to judge him.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/06-0
All of Artfldgr’s groups have one thing in common: they all go through life pushing on doors marked “pull,” as my father used to say.
The common denominator between all of the groups: they’re all bitterly unhappy with the status quo, and want drastic change so that they’ll be happy, never realizing that their unhappiness comes from within. Nothing to do with externalities.
Vanderleun is correct that the terms “liberal” and “liberalism” have been fully contaminated — that’s why they shifted to “progressive.” [Aside: If there is one area where the left stands out, it is in name-changes] But we should keep in mind the Rasmussen poll (March 2009) that showed that only 53 percent of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism. Under-30 adults were essentially evenly divided: 37 percent preferred capitalism, 33 percent socialism.
I’m inclined to think that the ‘socialism ‘ label is not useful. Far better to stick to ‘liberal’ or ‘radical liberal” or ‘radical leftist’– terms that are mostly negative. Our educational establishment has done a fine job of confusing the issue, and communism and socialism are not fully understood. Who associates ‘Nazi’ with socialism, or knows anything about the evils of communism? Concentration camps were properly excoriated, but who knows anything about the gulag? And the “progressives” have done a fine job of demonizing “capitalism”– Marx’s name for the free market.
In following the American Revolution these people who constantly sought a free lunch were aptly called “levelers”. The “left” had not been seated yet in the government of France. A rose by any other name…..
Somehow the terminology they use to describe their theories has always seemed bassackwards in practice.
That’s why I prefer to call them Proglodytes. If they had their way we’d all be living in caves again.
I like to explain to my clueless Liberal friends that “Progressivism” was the American brand of the same fascism that was ascendent in Europe, beginning in the early-19th Century as an outgrowth of the French Revolution.
When I feel peevish, I mention that American progressives gave us 19th – early 20th century eugenic theories developed in places of learning such as the U. of Wisconsin and that provided the foundations for Hitler’s genocidal policies, according to Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”.
Same thugs, different gang colors.
There really is nothing new under the sun.
Artfldgr, “free love” and “Nazi’s” stand for the same thing?
actually yes…
because there is no such thing a thing like free love without the structure to go with it and all that.
you remember free love from the 60s, where they pretended to dissociate with the political system necessary to support it.
its the addiction model of ideology… they got you addicted first to the fun of the perverse while hiding its negative harmful things from being tallied as from that. so if you were a swinger and your marriage broke up, it wasnt that you guys really werent made to be what they think you should be, it was that you werent sufficiently evolved for bonoboism (my new core name for all of this, for if a bonobo could make up an ideology, they would make up progressivism).
Also, we tend to look from bottom up at these things not top down. and what appears one way from bottom up is very different from top down.
in fact, i think thats where we get mixed up as to things. when we describe feminism, we do it bottom up, when the leaders decide implementation and what it is, they are looking top down.
we look up and see a few hundred, they look down and see a sea of uncountable numbers.
from the bottom up, suffrage was liberation for women to vote. from the top down, its what the more heinious progressives say or reason that the bottom up lookers deny… like the idea that it was all about economy, not liberation… or rights had nothing to do with it,
it was and is always about using people in groups against other people in groups because its not practical for you to stand on the corner and take on the world alone one at a time.
from the top down womens suffrage is what the leaders discussed as goals. a means of meeting their goals or facilitating them, while liberation was how you sold it to the groups so they did your work for you without you having to pay them.
so under this, feminism is a facilitator of removing morals, separating children from their family history leaving them to the state to edumacate properly, move womens labor into industry so that her labor can be taxed for socialist programs and the wealth not 100% go to her family. the end of family.
and now… towards free love… which was way back in harmon times which led up to this…
you now have no fault divorce, a way to get rid of children from coupling for sport or pleasure, you have financial support so your not penalized for what is fornicating, loosening up of the social mores to grant more access.
so when you go back to the originators of all this.. the people i keep mentioning but arent read..
you find that all this other stuff just facilitates a society that fit their idea of morals and allowed them to act.
to a free love person who believes that everyone they have sex with is love, till it isnt. needs no fault divorce, so they dont lose for being themselves. who cares what it does to other women who aren’t part of the way they see it should be (aha moment… the rest who dont want it, or what not dont matter, just as they treated the free sex free thinkers as society destroying pariahs (cause they are)).
and how to link this to the nazis?
well it was their stuff that took the same ideas, for the leadership, and worked them.
lebensborn meant that SS soldiers and certain others could have sex with german women and any illigitimate child would have to be accepted.
and illegitimacy has to go when you have such a society. no?
and what would marriage be? force you to have sex with only one person in exchange for sex at all, how oppressive to a person who wonders if sex with a horse (like a certain famous royal) might be interesting, but are oppressed from trying.
you go back to he earliest speakers and things and connect the threads and you will see that they are exactly the same things..
and the social decadence that weimar became facilitated a dictator… just as the SAME EXACT social decadence (which you can follow back to weimar and the progressives back again to here), is leading to the same kind of statist control
dont think so?
well they just created in the health care the same thing as action 4, the order that ended the lives of the infirm. just a softer version which restricts healthcare to over 65, and the infirm, and such. not outright murder, but the same thing as leaving the baby outside of the wall at night for the wolves.
and they nationalized most the same industries.
the whole sex thing has a line in it too, which is why i said to read lukacs..
but it seems that no one really wants an answer to how we got here…
at least not one that shows how they helped.
i wish i had occams talent for being able to say the same thing shorter… but then again… maybe i wouldnt have the same thing to say. 🙂
that provided the foundations for Hitler’s genocidal policies, according to Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”.
even jonah gave you a cleaned scrubbed history so that his book would reach more people.
there were LOTs of people who were trying to say many of the same things and more and even more detail. but no one wold really listen. marginalized, they basically just got quiet.
when people came from states that had thsi stuff, and they knew better, they would first try to say something. but they would be admonished!!! they would be told, like i was told, that what they were seeing was something else, that experience didnt count, and so on…
and then they fell silent again, afraid of when the eye of the state would find them again. which is why so many will talk among themselves, but not talk among Americans who don’t know.
do not think that they are not watching things from here, and through their own countries, and so on.
many are also looking to take advantage. having experience, they will end up on better footing just for that.
I understand that Himmler tried to set up a sort of “free love” camp for people of the proper genetic makeup, for the purposes of procreation, the babies to be raised either by the SS or according to their guidlines.
That aside, the National Socialist Worker’s Party had quite a few “progressive” ideas, at least to begin with. Rename their political planks (eliminate any reference to National Socialist) and they would fit in well with a verity of other kooky leftist groups on campus these days.
The title “progressive” dates at least back to the 1890s, probably quite a bit earlier. It is just that it was dropped, for the term “liberal”. The left labels itself, and when the label gets a bad taste due to the association, they change the label. They can even reuse old ones, like “progressive”.
It’s not just names – they even recycle their politicians. Witness Jerry Brown here in CA.
“We’re gonna keep electing him Governor until he gets it right!”
The layman knows just the term “the progressive era” and takes his cue accordingly. Due to media, education and entertainment establishing the definition of terms, “the progressive era” means that era when women got the vote and children got schooling–the same era which was bounded by the philosophy of positivism, the science of marxism and eugenics, and saw the rise of legal positivism in jurisprudence. Today, postmodernism (the opposite of positivism in at least an epistimological sense) bounds philosophy and marxism and eugenics have been discredited.
Liberals know that the average person equates “progressive” with “the progressive era” when muckrakers exposed the robber barrons and the franchise went out to all. They also know the average person does not know about eugenics as science and the loss of natural law and hence the loss of consitututional integrity or stability. In the “what I did for you” department, the label “progressive” confers an historical accolade. That’s why liberals love it.
Curtis, I think you’re giving the average person too much credit, and doubt that he knows anything at all about the progressive era.
I think the major appeal of the term “progressive” for the average schlub is its implication of being about “progress.”
Doesn’t this word manipulation game liberals play simply mean a rational conversation is impossible with them? I like Mark Steyn’s remark “Talking to a liberal is like playing tennis with someone who says “Yea, but your ace is just a social construct”. We’re talking language and its structure being made absolutely meaningless by these people.
You can add another RINO from New England to this list of ‘progressives’ = Senator Scott Brown.
We’re in the post-deconstructionist age and nothing means anything so why should labels?
Would Harry Truman recognize John Kerry as a Democrat? Would either Grant or Lee recognize in George “Tomb of the Unknown Diversity” Casey a commanding general.
Would either Jack Kennedy or Werner von Braun say NASA is a space program?
Labels change to keep up with the times, so that people who can’t change a fraction into a decimal can be graduates.
The constant attack on language by ideologues is really irritating. Perfectly innocent words get endowed with false virtues and meanings. Why is “progressive” always good and “regressive” always bad? Syphilis is progressive. Does that make it good?
“the words mean what I say they mean” The Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, in her own way a virtual Lenin. She understood the power of renaming to confuse.
For the breakdown on the Left’s assault on, and weaponizing of, language, see Jeff Goldstein.
The opposite of Progress is supposed to be Congress.
🙂
“Progressive” is also the name of a car insurance company.
I wonder how many of Neo’s bloggers have coverage through Progressive. I do not. Its longtime head, Peter Lewis, is now a billionaire, and funds many progressive causes along with his buddy, Soros.
For your consideration, “The Progressives’ Legacy of Bankruptcy” gives a brief overview of the roots of the Progressive movement.
As an ACTUAL (Marxist) socialist, and someone very involved in “the Left” in general, I must disagree with your characterization, and those of the people in these comments. For clarification, here is the commonly (albeit not universally) accepted use of terms describing political stance:
– A “liberal” is someone who believes in some strong government intervention on the behalf of “the people,” meaning the poor, the middle-class, or minorities.
– A “progressive” is someone who recognizes the inefficiencies of compromising with radical republicans, and usually advocate some immoderate advance in the areas of environmentalism, wealth equality, or minority rights.
– A “socialist” is someone – anyone – who believes in government control over some aspects of the economy. This is how we can see socialist tendencies even in some Republican presidents.
– A “Marxist” is someone who believes the working class, that is, the producers of wealth, should take democratic control over the economy and do away with the institutions that leave wealth and power concerntrated in a (relative) handful of the population.
It’s unfortunate that Americans don’t understand the differences, but that’s what you get when you cut education programs!
There is a difference between true liberals, i.e., classical liberals, and modern liberals (leftists). What you describe is not a true liberal. The left stole the term liberal. Further, “progressive” is really just another term for modern liberal (leftist). It is just name changing, an attempt to avoid the stench of a failed ideology.
A Marxist is someone who believes you don’t have a right to your labor. “From those with the ability to those with the need”. Any form of socialism (including Marxism) is simply an ideology of theft.
When an education system produces people who think socialism in any form is a good idea, it is a failed education system.
Truman did push for socialized healthcare.
And Truman was brought in as VP to replace the radical leftist nutcase FDR previously had as VP. The Democrats of the 30s and 40s were quite radical. So yeah, Truman would likely recognize Kerry and even Obama as Democrats. Obama is much more the 30’s style of radical leftist than, say, Bill Clinton.
Assistant Village Idiot Says:
“I’m with vanderleun. First, any word that gains an unfortunate connotation gets nominated for a makeover.”
Me too but I think it should be added that they went to liberal because progressive / progressives were too disliked. Now they’ve done it again, liberal is disliked so they’re going back….
SteddieH Says:
“I think the “progressive” crowd considers you a “regressive” if you believe in, and use, common sense.”
Yes, but they more commonly call the ‘regressives’ by another name. Conservative. 🙂
But seriously, they picked that term for us. We did not…
Bob from Virginia Says:
“Artfldgr, “free love” and “Nazi’s” stand for the same thing?”
I think there was a phase. Just like lefty socialism (ie, Russian socialists did too), the phase usually ends once dear leader is entrenched (Lenin stopped it eventually).
Nazism also had a homosexually accepting phase. Same deal, once Hitler was well entrenched he did away with it / them.
– A “liberal” is someone who thinks he believes in some strong government intervention on the behalf of “the people,” meaning the poor, the middle-class, or minorities, but in fact is too effing stupid to realize that he’s a useful idiot for the communists.
– A “progressive” is someone who talks about the inefficiencies of compromising with radical republicans, and usually advocates some immoderate advance in the areas of environmentalism, wealth equality, or minority rights, but does so to appear chic and edgy about Communism Lite, and the cool kids will sign his yearbook.
– A “socialist” is someone – anyone – who believes in government control over some aspects of the economy, kind of like someone who believes in having only a small tumor.
– A “Marxist” is someone who hasn’t paid much attention to current events in the last century or so, and thus hasn’t noticed that Marx’s predictions have failed miserably, which necessitated Lenin’s patching them with duct tape. Marxists believe in Marx’s theory of surplus value, but don’t realize that it’s based upon the labor theory of value, which is risibly sophomoric. Nevertheless, Marxists adhere to their theology because it gives them an utterly specious basis on which to feel superior to others to whom they are in fact inferior, because they are life’s losers. Odd how you never hear the winners complaining about the rules, isn’t it?
Marxists project their inner maladjustment onto society, and think that if only they could change society, then they would be at peace with themselves. In this, of course, they are mistaken; their demons are inside them. (See Guevara, Che; Pot, Pol; Stalin, Joseph, for examples. Did they live under Marxism? Check. Happy, well-adjusted people enjoying their Marxist heaven on earth? Not so much.)
And yet we’re ahead of you, wherever you are. By a lot. In everything (except soccer, which we don’t care about, and if we did, we’d be ahead of you in that too). And gaining. Funny, huh?
Occam’s Beard Says:
“Marxists believe in Marx’s theory of surplus value, but don’t realize that it’s based upon the labor theory of value, which is risibly sophomoric.”
Surplus value had a few other arguments in support; they were just proven wrong every time it was tried.
Market inefficiencies are minor compared to central planning’s inefficiencies. Although, this is still a fact that ‘liberals’ won’t admit… heck, they won’t even admit when they’re pushing bills that want to replace market mechanisms with planning.
True enough, Thomass. I didn’t want to waste my time on a theological debate with our Red friend, and hence satirized his comment.
In my experience with Reds – which at Berkeley was considerable – they live to debate doctrinal minutiae ad nauseam, much like the Eskimos with their variety of words for “snow.”
geoffb,
their history predates their name… [since their labels change a name can only take you so far back! so if you try to find them by their movement names prior to the label, you think they started at a different time than when they did. if you follow by names and associations and thoughts. yuo end up going farther and farther back to just after the American revolution (and the hatred that blacks and women were free too. so they stopped that – same thoughts, not refined enough dont get a name until they are refined… but there are decades of stuff before that point)
Moses Harmon, free sex love communes, were the origins… and there was a big back and forth between the US and Europe..
And yet we’re ahead of you, wherever you are.
i am in ny..
you know. home of BELLA DODD head of CPUSA, and the TEachers union. home of Columbia and the Frankfurt school. home of the new teachers college..
and the new school.
naw… i just know how they teach two different ways.
ALSO, your confusing moral momentum, where the boomers are just entering retirement.
i am talking about their replacements.
so when you say we are beating everyone else, may i ask in what?
language? we are not tops in literacy
science? we are no longer tops, china beats us (they just purchased 128 illumina sequencers. that gives them more sequencing capacity than all of the US)
Manufacturing? if you divide revenues from whats made here, and what profits are made, we no longer manufacture like we used to. china just topped us a month or two ago.
China doesnt have PC forbidden things and so they are making a lot of progress in genetics of different races, genders, and such..
they have monopolies in mercury, which is why we are mandated for CFL..
they have monopolies on rare earths critical for green tech… which is why we are mandating that.
they have several TRILLION in US debt the way that the US had England debt before it took away England eminence.
We just passed laws that will set quotas for women and minorities… (like the SBA program) these quotas are designed to disenfranchise the oppressor class (white men) who also included Jews.
I was a bronx science attendee who could not get any financing, as they wanted more women. now they have put in women and minority help to disenfranchise more.
i am now working with a geneticist because i am autodidactic, and lots of stuff… but if this last try doesnt work due to PC bs… i am thinking of going to family i have now in asia…
some asian companies will NOT hire an asian whose IQ is below 140. since i test higher, i will seek to work for a meritocritous company. that SAME company does not hold the standards so high for Americans that work for them (125), because if they did, they would not have enough women and minorities in that area to make their Americans and westerners happy.
Chinese Firm Drops Local IQ Standards for U.S. Hires
http://www.dailytech.com/Chinese+Firm+Drops+Local+IQ+Standards+for+US+Hires/article18974.htm
The U.S. has arguably been the most desirable place in the world to get a college education with international students from China, India, Japan, and others all traveling to the U.S. with that express purpose. However, there’s serious signs of trouble; U.S. citizens’ college graduation rates are in danger of falling behind China. Japanese enrollment is down as U.S. universities are slowly falling out of favor. And at least one executive of an Indian firm complained that American graduates were “unemployable”.
go ahead. watch blood sweat and t-shirts or other similar documentaries…
i work with graduate students in medicine who cant spell or read, and don’t know words (the foreigners do).
the halls are full of women and minorities. very very few white males, and what is there are foreign.
Adding to the list of awkward statistics is a recent announcement by Bleum Inc., a Chinese outsourcing company. In China, with a deluge of available highly-intelligent graduates, Bleum Inc. requires that its workers score over 140 on an IQ test.
When it decided to recruit American computer science graduates, though, it decided that bar was way too high. It dropped the requirement for the Americans down to 120, a move it says reflects a lower pool of talented college grads in the U.S.
they have no reason to lie here.
they are staffing… they want the best
and we are NOT allowed in the US to perform to our best, only to the highest level of the lowest achiever.
when i was a kid, the show would have been are you as smart as an 8th grader… today, its are you as smart as a 5h grader.
1/5th believe that winston churchill was not real
that King Arthur, and sherlock holmes were real.
the students i work with often cant reason. they cant debate, they are very afraid of having an answer that they have to justify. and they want mostly to just be making papers and throw them on the pile for a salary, and not have to bring anything to market or such.
My sister is a teacher in a heavily illegal immigrant area in california. my cousin is a teacher in ny.
my son is in college and graduated honors on scholarship, but they are oing to take that away now, that the new laws let them kick out white males. he is part American Indian by his mom, so he got the scholarship i couldnt get!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the old are going out..
the young coming up will show that your confideence is not well places since the old are who made all that stuff and are still doing it.
Colleges want a degree stamp for all. the idea is we are all equal so we all can get a stamp, and that stamp in cargo cult fashion gets us a higher salary..
but in truth, that was when the standards were so high that only the best got in. and since men outpeform women on iq in these areas, they had to lower standards as a way to reward the good usful idiots for helping them gain power that they can force a negative outcome pretending its positive.
if you look at history, women DID go to college (especially the free love and early women. progressives are the ones wanting to make a society and THEY took away what they would later want reward for rationing back. i can prove it by showing history)
but like military, fire, police, everywhere they went, we had to lower standards to make higher numbers NOW, not wait till more were interested, and the numbers grew to meet standards. or accept that a high standard woman was a medium standard man in most cases. women dont like this, its not PC.
but if you read the papers of the progressives, their predecessors, and Marx, and so on. THEY have no problem thinking this way, only their useful idiots do!!! [and they do because they don’t want to be standing alone as n individual, but want to be part of something more]
I am FROM America..
but i am a child of immigrants..
[so i have no connection with any of the BS they spout as if everyone got here 200 years ago, and no one new showed up]
My eyes are wide open.. i try to get otehrs to work for a futuer. they dont need it. they have it plannedl obama will take care of them. the others dont want to do business, all they do all day is work on their not for profit graphics on your tax dime!!!!
go ahead.. go out and start talking to the common.
they are not stupid, but they ARE ignorant.
to hear my best friends friends son at our barbecues each year is to listen to the communist in the movie “one, two, three”.
he spouts stuff that the older people dont get. he talks about oppression and all this. he is VERY Smart, but he was not selected for the different education.
that is, he didnt get the educatino my son got, he got the dumb them down and stupify them education.
i only had to ask him to do long division on paper to know which he got.
my son does it the old way.
he does it the new way.
my son is on an academic path in which the computers think he is american indian
this guy is white with nothing (like me), and so they gave him the new math…
this new math is like the education the commoners got during the age of aristocracy where puzzles were good enough to lock things.
oh, he can do math… but only basic math. what they taught hmi will not let him intuit things. wont let him go beyond that level… the teaching version makes future levels intractable.
the idea is to make whites look dumb, and minorities seem to close the never closing gap of IQ..
we used to call it cooking the books.
Tom Says:
“- A “Marxist” is someone who believes the working class, that is, the producers of wealth, should take democratic control over the economy and do away with the institutions that leave wealth and power concerntrated in a (relative) handful of the population.”
So the democrats are Marxists for their healthcare bill. Got it.
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Why is it that “democratic control over the economy” invariably requires informers, secret police, and gulags to maintain “democratic control?”
The idea that the working class are the producers of wealth- especially with regards to industrial production- is laughable. Did workers invent the product? Did workers design the production process? [In the case of companies like Toyota, worker suggestions for production improvement ARE used to improve the production system.] Did workers provide the investment for the whole shebang?
Dresden Scott – part of my education included linguistics, which bears on any problems of definition.
When abstract terms enter common public discourse, they begin to lose value. Liberal is a word that has nearly reversed in meaning over the last 150-200 years, for example. Terms like marxist have a dozen related meanings. This fuzziness in denotative meaning allows them to acquire all manner of connotations instead. They have a feeling or an aura about them. Reverting to what they are “supposed” to mean or “really” mean is impossible. The word gentleman, for example, used to mean “one who owns property.” It eroded into nothing more than “well-meaning male.”
One can take a prescriptivist approach to the meanings of words within specific contexts – which is why introductory textbooks are mostly about defining words and concepts for use in later courses. One can also state with some definiteness what a word meant at a certain time, and what it means to most people today. Words that are not emotionally charged change more slowly; concrete words change more slowly.
The problem comes with abstract, emotionally charged words, because people want to bend them to their meaning. You can con people with that much flexibility, giving them the impression that you mean one thing while actually meaning something related, but importantly different. Or more often, that you mean something precise when you actually mean something vague.
Thus, the distinctions you draw between four different attitudes are useful. But the labels you apply have long since shed their precise meanings, and are used as generalities. I try to use “liberal” in its most commonly understood modern sense, even though it is vague and I am aware of more precise earlier meanings. When I need more precision or clarity, I add in qualifiers and explanations independently.
I will also now turn your own cleverness back on you. As you were just badly outgunned with your sneer about education cuts, you might consider my oft-repeated opinion that the various ideologies of the left are more social than intellectual. They enjoy the impression that they are the smart ones, and have an infinite variety of condescensions to reassure each other of this. These social cues are not founded in actual intellectual data, however, but in tribal cues, rather like totemic symbols or bird chirps. Socially alert people learn how to push the “we’re smart, you and I” buttons of others, and thus find tribal acceptance doable. That is why, as the saying goes, liberalism is more NPR than PHD.
Obama, as an example, performs the tribal cues of condescension, insult, reference-dropping (having read Urdu poetry, for example), and codespeak remarkably well. And many are indeed charmed or cowed by these, so he keeps them. These cues, and not his sentence construction, clarity, or content, are why (some) people thnk him a brilliant speaker. Demonstrations of actual superior intelligence are harder to find, though he might fairly lay claim to something above average.
30 hours later, crickets chirping. Just sayin’…