No. 1, because it would mean really the end -- and the complete victory of the battle begun in the '60s. No. 2, because it will mean the end of a new American evil, which is the dividing, the Balkanization of American society. This is another counter-effect of a great idea, which was tolerance. You so much tolerate that you tolerate the American society to be in separate bubbles having their own peculiarities, and so on. Obama as president will mean all these bubbles submitted to a real ideal of citizenship. This is his message. McCain will not be able to do this. If McCain is elected, I can tell you the Iranians will close themselves in the Iranian identity. The Arabs will coldly, freezingly imprison themselves in the Muslim identity. The African-Americans will believe that the American society is more and more built against them. You will have an increase of the Balkanization.Huh? This guy would make a great McCain surrogate. Here's why:
And No. 3, you have another ideal in the America of today, which I call the competition of victims. Competition of memories. If you are in favor of the Jews, you cannot be in favor of the blacks. If you remember the suffering of slavery, you cannot remember too much the suffering of the Holocaust, and so on and so on. The human heart has not space enough for all the sufferings. This is what some people say. Obama says the contrary. It will mean the end of this stupid topic, which is competition of victimhood.
Lévy defines the goal of his first notion as:
[T]o have freedom and equality, the two dreams of freedom and equality walking at the same pace. To refuse to choose between the two. This is written in the motto of the French Republic, as you know, "Liberté, égalité, fraternité." And it is also written in the DNA of the best of America. The real dream of equality, which fed the battle, for example, for the civil rights, Martin Luther King and so on, and the battle for individual freedom. Those who ask to choose between the two -- if you have freedom you do not have equality, if you have equality, you do not have freedom -- for me, they are not leftist. This is a good definition of the left.But enforced equality of outcomes obviously comes at the expense of freedom, so that:
Trading liberty for equality turns nations into nursery schools--and citizens into children. It's insulting and unworkable.Thus, as Ed Whelan argues, Lévy's number one is a reason to oppose Obama.
I don't see any difference between Lévy's second and third rationales--but community organizer, race-obsessed Obama is literally the politician least likely to quell proliferating special interests. As an illustration, does anyone think Obama would disagree with Sony's decision?
Applying the principles to foreign policy, as Lévy does, is illogical: at best, it's erroneous "mirror-imaging," which led America astray during the Cold War's middle phase (1960-1980). More likely, it's naive "huggy-bear" internationalism, which trades the Sudetenland for conditional draft picks every time. Failures of defense readiness and military will produce surrender, not strength.
Conclusion: Lévy's a public provocateur, sometimes careless with truth, often wrong, yet admirable in certain respects. Never more so as he assembles the case for McCain--unintentionally.
4 comments:
What about male-female equality in pay and power positions?
Two words:
"French Intellectual".
That would be someone from a nation so vastly experienced in geopolitics that they've had to have the USA rescue their worthless, incompetent asses no less than three times (WWI,WWII,Indochina) in the last 90 years.
Also "French Intellectual" means a "Common Sense Quotient" (analogous to "IQ") which can only be expressed in imaginary numbers.
In short, "Who cares what this punkass idiot thinks?"
Anony:
I have already fully rebutted this repeated false claim of yours. So which is it: you can't read or your can't learn?
> I have already fully rebutted this repeated false claim of yours. So which is it: you can't read or your can't learn?
Both.
The U.S. Census Bureau found that as early as 1960, never-married women over 45 earned more in the workplace than never-married men over 45.
- Warren Farrell -
Anyone who has a legitimate concern about this would already have read Warren Farrell's book written expressly about the topic:
Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap -- and What Women Can Do About It
Dr. Farrell is a past-president of the NY chapter of NOW, so he's hardly a shill for male power, the GOP, or for conservatives, and has been interested in equality and equal pay for probably longer than annoynimous (yes, that's the spelling I meant) has been alive, and almost certainly longer than they've been potty trained, assuming they have at all, of course.
And as far as power goes, let's again look to Farrell:
The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex
Let's face it, annoynimous is a troll, and doesn't give a rat's patootie about anything but wasting peoples' time with drive-by crapping on threads.
I spend time occasionally answering said idiots more for my own benefit, and for the benefit of anyone who actually DOES care about those issues, than because I think such clueless idiots are going to Actually Get It.
[The question men need to ask, is:] 'Is earning money that someone else spends really power?'
- Warren Farrell -
Essentially, women's liberation and men's mid-life crises were the same search for personal fulfillment, common values, mutual respect, and love. But while women's liberation was thought of as promoting identity, men's mid-life crises were thought of as identity crises.
Women's liberation was called insight, self-discovery, and self-improvement, akin to maturity. Men's mid-life crises were discounted as irresponsibility, self-gratification, and selfishness, akin to immaturity. Women's crises got sympathy, men's crises got a bad rap.
- Warren Farrell -
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