neo-neocon Says:
July 18th, 2013 at 1:15 pm
Mrs Whatsit:
I understand your point about ignoring Mitsu, but I disagree with you.
Arguing with someone like Mitsu is very good exercise. It sharpens the mind … So many commenters have responded to him with excellent posts that make excellent general and specific points.

You write this like a true liberal … and a wise conservative Neo!

I offer a hat-tip and an appreciative smile.

Thank you for the reminder.

We all need honest, informed, articulate and intelligent interlocutors it we wish to test and explore our own ideas and to avoid serious error that comes so naturally with a point of view.

,

neo-neocon Says:
July 18th, 2013 at 1:15 pm
… in my opinion, although Mitsu is troll-like he is not a troll; I think he sincerely believes most of what he says, and is actually trying to puzzle things through.

And thank you for vouching for Mitsu’s sincerity. We would do well to appreciate his gift.

Eric Says:
July 18th, 2013 at 10:39 am

Mike O’Malley: “Zimmerman’s actions were not entirely prudent. What were they?”

The dying embers of traditional middle-class America being stamped out …

Yes.

George Zimmerman’s action were neighborly. They were the actions of a free and responsible citizen of an American community. George Zimmerman’s actions were quintessentially American.

The President and his political allies seem to maintain that Americans have no individual right to self defense. In their view it seems Americans have no ‘right’ to defense other than to be defended by the state, but only to the extent that the state sees fit to defend them. Thus Mr. Zimmerman’s rights to self defense and to the presumption of innocence are nullified. All civil and personal rights proceed from the state in their view (as maintained by Cass Sunstein). In my view, underlying this broad and relentless political effort to gut the individual right of self defense is an attack on the unalienable right to life, at one with the left’s refusal to defend the right to life of an unwanted child even after a failed late term abortion.

However… what would you have to do, what level of effort would it take, to change yourself?

Juan doesn’t want to know them. He knows what, from his perspective, he needs to know.

Here is a good place to start

http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/16/zimmerman-verdict-part-2-the-unarmed-teen/

Also listen to an alternate Juror

http://commoncts.blogspot.ca/2013/07/video-alternate-george-zimmerman-juror.html

I doubt the Left has the power to withstand Islam.

The prospect that they’re driving to dismantle and replace the current order without knowing their end-state, or they do know and it’s something approaching the ovens at Auschwitz, is even more frightening.

July 18th, 2013 at 1:06 pm

DNW: “What there is there, to their there?”

Well, what is there to us here?”

That’s not exactly parallel to what I had asked.

What there is there, to our “there” is a real world of objective or at least inter-subjectively verifiable facts and values, which results – having served as informing predicate – in the political free space we have for so long enjoyed. That clearing was made and kept open for the rightful exercise of individual initiative, and was designed by people who were “realists” (if moderate) in the philosophical sense of the word. Meaning of course that they believed that the world existed independently of their minds and that class objects had an existence that was not completely the product of the superimposition of an arbitrary cultural construct.

Our “there” is then a real world with real people having real rights.

Theirs is, apparently, not.

What is it then? What does it generate?

Well the weird thing about postmodern liberalism and I was far from the first to notice this, (though I once thought I might have been) is that their extreme relativism logically reduces, in effect, to a kind of subjective idealism – the only irreducible “reality” for them being in the final analysis, the unexamined and unjustifiable urges that well up as felt within them. Unjustifiable or self-justified, for them it amounts to the same thing.

They often blithely talk as if there is nothing really “there” to reality. You even see that attitude or presumption brought to bear in discussions on the nature of physical reality in popular magazines and online journals.

One asks then, what is their project in aid of? What do they take for “real” and on what basis?

I think that they can answer that question – sort of. But they don’t dare while they lack complete coercive power.

We have to assume there will be a civil suit, or there is already one in the works, no?

“That is the mentality we face now. The public is being whipped into a frenzy by our very own government, in concert with its cheerleaders in the media, to foment distrust in the outcome of our judicial jury trial system, because the outcome wasn’t what the mob wanted.”

Channeling Max Weber’s typology, we’ve always relied on legal-rational authority, which is another hallmark of American middle-class culture. But the Obama administration came into power with charismatic authority and is using it now.

If you’re unfamiliar with Weber’s charismatic authority and want an easily digestible explanation, I recommend this lecture from a Yale professor:
http://oyc.yale.edu/sociology/socy-151/lecture-19

If you’re too impatient to sit through a 50 minute video, a link to a transcript of the lecture is on the lower left.

The professor uses Obama as an example of charismatic authority. You probably won’t be surprised at some of his other examples.