Sunday Around Outer Blogness

Comments (5)

1. Well it wasn’t so much my coming out (as most of my friends and all my family already knows), but I was informing them all of National Coming Out Day yesterday, though a few of the people I e-mailed hadn’t known until I e-mailed them.

   Thanks for mentioning me!

2. Craig — I’m very happy to encourage gay people to come out to their friends and family. It’s hard, but this is the sort of thing that really gets people to look at “the gays” from a bit of a different angle.

   Also, I liked that article you linked to (along the same lines as Daniel’s post, linked above). You picked a good quote to highlight, but I liked this part too:

   Eager to salvage conservatism from the wreckage of conservative rule, right-wing pundits are furiously blaming right-wing politicians for failing to adhere to right-wing convictions. Libertarians such as Bruce Bartlett fret that under Republican control, government has not shrunk, as conservatives prescribe, but has grown. Insiders like Peggy Noonan complain that Republicans have become–well, insiders; they are too focused on retaining power and too disconnected from the base whose anger pushed them into power. Idealistic younger conservatives bewail the care and feeding of the K Street beast. Paleocons Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak blame neocons William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer for the debacle that is Iraq. Through all these laments there pulsates a sense of desperation: A conservative president and an even more conservative Congress must be repudiated to enable genuine conservatism to survive. Sure, the Bush administration has failed, all these voices proclaim. But that is because Bush and his Republican allies in Congress borrowed big government and foreign-policy idealism from the left. The ideas of Woodrow Wilson and John Maynard Keynes, from their point of view, have always been flawed. George W. Bush and Tom DeLay just prove it one more time.

   Conservative dissidents seem to have done an admirable job of persuading each other of the truth of their claims. Of course, many of these dissidents extolled the president’s conservative leadership when he was riding high in the polls. But the real flaw in their argument is akin to that of Trotskyites who, when confronted with the failures of communism in Cuba, China and the Soviet Union, would claim that real communism had never been tried. If leaders consistently depart in disastrous ways from their underlying political ideology, there comes a point where one has to stop just blaming the leaders and start questioning the ideology.

3. Indeed.

   It occurs to me that neither extreme right-wing ideology nor extreme left-wing ideologies are the answer.

   May haps somewhere in the centre?

   Of course, I vastly prefer centre-left, and think it is the most moral, as well as most apt to function 🙂 I mean, Europe and Canada seem to be doing relatively well…

4. Exactly.

   The focus should be on problem-solving, not on trying to fit every situation into a traditional left/right ideology that doesn’t always apply.

5. Mais oui. Perhaps we ought to start our own country.