Open Thread (5/12/2008)

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2008/05/12/rantoul_towing_could_rise_tenfold_with_plan

If the City of Champaign needs the money, perhaps they should look to their neighbors to the north to get added revenue.

Considering the number of violations they found I think they need the additional inspectors.  The property owners are the logical people to pay the salaries since they are the ones not maintaining their units.

This article suggests that all candidates should disclose their medical records, and is concerned that John McCain not only has early stage dementia as is frequently noted, but he also is likely to succumb to other medical conditions within 4 years or less. 
http://www.nolanchart.com/article3760.html

bizarre conspiracy theory about John McCain

Even more bizarre, I think it is not just a theory...

Heresy!  He will be the nominee once the mother ship lands.

r4cl: There are hundreds of thousands of Huckabee supporters, evangelicals who will never ever vote for liberal fascist-socialist McCain.

Isn't there an oxymoron somewhere in "liberal fascist-socialist?"

James Dobson on McCain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW4opGaLZ90

At least Huckabee and McCain share a philosophical goal that the government exists to provide everything for everyone, protect everyone from everything and regulate America to death.

IP has apparently converted to the "First Church of RON PAUL!" by assuming that any of the main candidate believe this.

"Nothing mutually exclusive in that combination, my friends."

Well, sure, if you can just make up definitions willy nilly.  Here are some from dictionary.com you might find helpful:

Fascism: A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

Liberalism: a political or social philosophy advocating the freedom of the individual, parliamentary systems of government, nonviolent modification of political, social, or economic institutions to assure unrestricted development in all spheres of human endeavor, and governmental guarantees of individual rights and civil liberties.

Socialism: a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

For starters, liberalism simply can not survive under fascism.  Also, fascism often retains private ownership of industry, while socialism does not.  And those are just the superficial differences...

They certainly won't let you exercise your freedom to pump oil out of the ground or even have a toilet that can legally take care of things in one flush. Hmm, that sounds more like the dictionary definition of Fascism.

Well that certainly explains why Mussolini was elected as a member of the Italian Plumber's Party.  In fact, wasn't Stalin's first order to mandate low-flow toilets? I guess that's why he shipped all the sanitation workers to the Poolaug.

Seriously, though, come on. Hysterically overreact much?

"It's not like either philosophy is coherent, at least not how they're most commonly described in American politics."

Sadly, all too true.  Hopefully, the one thing that remains consistent today for the majority of both American liberals and conservatives is an abiding interest in perfecting representative democracy, an attitude which places both of them at odds with the totalitarian and authoritarian extremes of fascism.

"Kevin has, of course, pulled out the definition of "classical liberalism"  which is an ideology closely related to Libertarianism.  I think that in the general definitions of left/right this one I quoted is more functionally accurate."

Um, no, not "of course" at all.  Actually we're both pointing to exactly the same web page.  I used the very first definition of straight up liberalism from the top of the exact same page that you and I both cited.  It's based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary.  You cherry picked a single phrase out of a larger American Heritage Dictionary of Cultural Literacy reference that makes up the very last definition on that page.  I should point out that the regular American Heritage Dictionary citiation from the middle of that same page is more in line with what I cited:

"A political theory founded on the natural goodness of humans and the autonomy of the individual and favoring civil and political liberties, government by law with the consent of the governed, and protection from arbitrary authority."

In any case, nearly all of the sources make the point that liberalism prefers democracy; fascism does not.  I'd call that a fundamental difference.  And in regards to "the general definitions of left/right," let's just say that you probably really don't want to go there, since fascism usually gets put on the extreme right end of that spectrum.

Personally, I think that particular conventional wisdom is a bit of a misnomer; fascism isn't really left or right so much as wrong.  This is part of the confusion here, since we are really comparing apples and oranges and gorillas.  Liberalism is a political philosophy.  Socialism is an economic ideology.  Fascism is a management model.

The three things have points of intersection in the real world, so that sometimes there might appear to be commonalities or similarities in isolated particulars, but at their core they are really three very different things.  Eventually, there were no liberals left (at least publicly) in Nazi Germany, but there were still many individuals who held private ownership of factories and farms.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'