Sunday, January 18, 2009

Transcending Politics with Dialectics

Someone needs to stimulate the economy; So, I decided to give StockXpert a try. I bought the 50 credit bundle to knock the per credit price down to $.75 an image.

To celebrate the peaceful transfer of power going on in DC, I decided to buy a designer's version of candidates racing to catch their political dreams.

©Election Day Runners


My one worry is that the left is trying to pull the trick of framing anyone whose worldview differs from theirs as divisive haters.

I read a vicious attack from Eric Fried of FortCollinsNow on some a guy named Kevin Lundberg out of Berthoud.

The Democrats won pretty much everything. So, why waste precious time on the historic cusp of change attacking an enemy who Fried notes is pretty much marginalized already? Fried is clearly not content with seeing his enemies marginalized. He wants anyone holding opinions outside his narrow little viewpoint destroyed utterly.

Mr. Fried's anger seems to be toward the fact that Republicans are returning to the core principles that they abandonned in the Bush years. I see nothing wrong with this. The whole point of a two party system is that the party that loses regroups.

When Democrats regroup, they return to the Material Dialectics. When Republicans regroup, they return to principles.

Apparently the great sin of Mr. Lundberg is that he is a global warming denier. To tell you the truth, if I lived in Berthoud, I would welcome be welcoming global warming. Could you do a couple more coal plants, it's cold up here.

I think the Colorado Springs Journal piece on partisanship was a bit more insightful. The article has a pithy quote about Bill Ritter quoting Obama quoting Lincoln. The article points out a strange tendency of Democrats to put forward their view as if it were nonpartisan.

A dialectician pretends to internalize the conflicts of the day. People holding dialectical materialism have the illusion that the trick allows them to frame their partisan actions as non-ideological, pragmatic and nonpartisan.

I think it is far better for people to acknowledge that they have ideas. Then openly discuss the ideas.

I am hopeful that the Libertarians and Republicans who lost this last round of elections really hit the table with the best of their ideas.

I actually think one of the reasons the Bush years were so icky was that the Democrats disengaged from an open discussion of ideas. Instead, they chose to entrench in an eight year long change campaign that really wreaked havoc on this nation.

Anyway, this Kevin Lundberg guy is probably a kook. His site has a long presentation by a Dr. William Gray who has some sort of antiquated notion about the scientific method. He sees science as being a system where a scientist puts forward a thesis, then members of the scientific community put forward arguments for or against the thesis.

Everyone knows that science is a system that evolves through thesis/antithesis conflicts. A member of the party puts forward a set of talking points. Scientists go through the motions of internalizing the conflict. As the winning side becomes clear, the most cunning of the lot jump on the winning side of the debate then set out to destroy those still examining the thesis utterly.

That's how the paradigm shifts.

Anyway, it is really exciting that the millions of people who caught the Bush Derangement Syndrome in the last few years are back and happy to be Americans again.

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