The problem

In the contest between regressives and progressives, regressives have a significant advantage: They're willing to provide answers to complex problems that are simple, easy to understand, and utterly wrong because they have absolutely no connection to any reality that actually exists and thus no hope of actually working if implemented. Regressives have a consistent ideology, and virtually always provide answers that are consistent with that ideology, regardless of whether those answers are actually correct.

Communism had that advantage too, during its brief 70-year time in the sun before it finally collapsed of its inherent ideological contradictions. Communism provided answers to complex problems that were simple, easy to understand, and... well. Utter failures in practice.

Progressives, on the other hand... we are inherently pragmatists. We believe in using time-tested solutions where those are possible, we believe in looking at the actual reality and adopting solutions which will solve the problems that exist in that actual reality regardless of whether said solutions are consistent with any particular ideology or -ism, and we just don't have an ideological hook to hang our hat upon. People look at what we advocate and are, like, "why are you giving us all these complex solutions that have nothing in common, instead of simple solutions like the other guys give us?" The stereotypical left-wing rally where the "Save the Whales!" crowd and the "Gay Marriage Now!" crowd are feuding with the "End the patriarchy now!" crowd is almost a parody by now, but it is a parody that has a grain of truth in it -- the world has a lot of problems, and it's going to require a lot of different approaches, a lot of different tactics and viewpoints, to solve them, and the end result is that the progressive movement appears to be fragmented and inconsistent and a mess. You simply can't hang one single ideological hook on that whole mess and present a nice neat simple frame for Joe Sixpack to understand if he accidentally turns on MSNBC rather than Fox News one night.

The problem... ah yes, the problem. I've often noted that, as the American empire winds down, times are going to get hard. Way hard. Famine, starvation, food riots, and revolution hard, maybe. People are going to be open to new solutions when they have nothing left to lose, new solutions that maybe can salvage something out of the ruins of empire and come up with something at least somewhat sustainable. The problem is that the forces of regression are going to have their nice neat simple easily-understood solutions to all our problems and are going to be waiting and ready to sell these to people, and if the forces of regression win that intellectual battle, the end result will make the fall of the Roman Empire look like a day care center squabble. The eventual body count would end up making WW2 look like a border squabble between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The problem is that the regressives have such pretty answers to the problems of the world -- simple, ideologically consistent, and easy to understand -- when the world is actually complex and the problems of the world similarly complex, requiring solutions that are neither simple nor always easy to understand. And 50% of Americans are below average (see below "dumbass" posts)...

WASF. Just sayin'.

- Badtux the Waddling Penguin

The cult

Regarding the black bloc and throwing bricks through plate glass windows: I’ve read the anarchist tracts. I’ve listened to the black bloc types try to explain why their tactics are useful. None of it makes any sense at all in the real world, where the majority have no problem with the violence inherent in the system as long as it's directed against people who do things like, well, throw bricks through plate glass windows. It’s like a cobbled up philosophy thrown together to attract alienated kids who want to feel powerful, sort of a cult now that I think about it, a cult that’s amazingly similar to Ayn Rand’s cult of perfect freedom without responsibility. And as with the Rand cult, it has absolutely nothing to do with leftists or left-wing causes, and black bloc in the midst of a protest should be treated the same as teabaggers in the midst of a protest — i.e., as a hostile force with a philosophy and goals completely incompatible with our own.

-- Badtux the Left-wing Penguin

"Expose the violence inherent in the system"

That's one of the purported motives of the Black Bloc. The problem is, most people already are aware of the violence inherent in the system. As long as that violence is expressed towards people they don't like, such as criminals and minorities, they have not a single problem with it.

This is one reason why I insist that the purported motives of the Black Bloc are total bullshit, and that the actual motive is to discredit left-wing causes. And who benefits if that happens? Hint: the Koch Brothers dance a jig every time the Black Bloc shows up at a left-wing protest. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the "Just the Facts" Penguin

The limits

In a previous post, I pooh-poohed the notion of "limited government" in the Libertarian sense of the word (basically a return to 1776 when the U.S. government consisted of the War Department and the Post Office, and the Libertarians aren't so sure about the Post Office thing). I pointed out that there has not been a single democracy on the face of this planet within the past fifty years that has voted for "limited government", and thus the only way you could have "limited government" in the Libertarian sense of the word is the old fashioned Pinochet way -- by imposing it at gunpoint.

But once you admit that "limited government" in the Libertarian sense of the word is a lost cause because every junkie has a mother and a brother who want him protected from himself, every 18 year old has a father who wants certain things outlawed to maybe keep said 18 year old living long enough to have some sense, and so forth, then you have to wonder: What are the limits of power?

There's two answers to this question:

1. The majority in a democracy will not knowingly vote for laws that oppress the majority. And if they unknowingly vote for such laws, as long as it remains a democracy such laws will get repealed. Thus I don't think we need to fear that the majority in a democracy will vote that all citizens be terminated at age 65 in order to save on Medicare costs, because, after all, everybody eventually reaches age 65.
2. The majority in a democracy, like the majority everywhere, fear violence and conflict and will not knowingly pass laws that oppress a large enough minority that widespread civil disorder is the result.

The end result is that in a democracy, you have significant barriers to the sort of widespread tyranny that you see in most non-democracies. Lest you point out the sad history of racial discrimination and segregation in the South, I'll just point out that it was enforced via the same means that any other such regime of terror is enforced: it was imposed at (white) gunpoint, not by the vote of the majority of the citizens of those states.

Okay, so now let's talk about taxes. If there are no fundamental restrictions on taxes, what will keep the majority from, say, voting to impose a 100% tax on the 100 richest people in America?

Well, first of all, the 100 richest people in any nation don't produce a significant amount of economic output (output is produced by workers, not by executives, who merely reap the benefits of the work that the workers do), so it'd be a one-time redistribution of capital. Because the majority of workers produce the majority of the nation's income -- workers own only 51% of the nation, but earn 78% of the nation's income -- the majority in a democracy will never impose confiscatory taxes upon the majority, because the majority is *them*. In short, what limits taxation in a democracy is the simple fact that the majority of the income is earned by workers, and thus taxing a minority won't raise sufficient money to run the big government that the majority wants even if the majority taxed that minority at 100%. Sooner or later they'd have to raise their own taxes, because they're earning most of the income.

In short, what limits taxes in a democracy is low income inequality. If the worker majority are rewarded with a fair amount of the income that they produce for the ownership class, they will not impose confiscatory taxes on the ownership class because confiscatory taxes on the ownership class simply won't accomplish anything. It is only when the ownership class decides to get greedy and grab 49% of the assets of the nation despite being only 1% of the nation's population that suddenly they have to worry about confiscatory taxes being levied against them by the working majority -- at which point I have to say, they have nobody to blame but themselves, yo.

BTW, this is also why the worker majority won't award themselves unlimited welfare -- they'd have to tax themselves to provide it, so what's the point? -- but that's another right wing anti-democracy talking point to destroy at some point in the future.

-- Badtux the Democracy Penguin

Thought Experiment Part 2

Okay, so yesterday, we hired some scientists to do some studies examining claims by the makers of RM and PM, each of whom said that the other's product was bad for you. So our scientists did a bunch of hard work and found out that a) RM was causing hundreds of deaths per year, b) most of those deaths (roughly 80%) were of children, and c) RM had no advantages over PM, which didn't cause any deaths during the study period. So what's the next thing to do?

Well, our scientists then did an educational program where they convinced most of the vendors of RM to switch over to PM, pointing out that the product liability issues would be horrific if they continued selling RM. Most of the vendors of RM looked at the studies that our scientists had done, realized that they'd be toast if they got hauled into court, and switched to selling PM instead. This was made easier by the fact that it took only one piece of equipment to convert RM into PM so they didn't even have to change suppliers or anything, they just added that one piece of equipment to their processing plant and they were done.

But there were still children dying from sales of RM, mostly from fly-by-night vendors who had no assets and thus didn't care that they might get sued if their product made people sick. Rarity made RM more expensive (though it required less equipment to produce!), and thus more profitable, and there are always people willing to jump into a market selling harmful substances if they can make a buck doing so, especially if they still have all those old long-discredited studies showing that RM is good for you and manage to trick people into buying it as a "healthier" alternative to PM. If adults did this to themselves, that's one thing. Just call it evolution in action, yo. The problem was that 78% of the people dying from RM were children. So what now?

Well, I suppose we could say, "RM people, you can sell your stuff, but you have to put our warnings on it and include our studies with it." But the RM people would just slap a label on it saying "this was forced on us by those evil PM people, here's our *real* studies at our web site proving our product is good!" And some people would believe it. And since we have this devotion to something called "free speech", shutting up their false claims is problematic.

Or we could stop the RM people from selling RM. That would require hiring men with guns to enforce it, because RM is profitable. But it'd result in fewer dead children.

After a number of people whined that an outright ban on selling RM would be unconstitutional, a compromise was reached: Only interstate sales of RM would be outlawed. If a state wished it to be banned within its own boundaries, that state would have to pass local legislation doing so. Thus raw milk continues to sicken and sometimes kill children every year despite having no (zero) health benefits over pasteurized milk and significant health risks. But people keep buying it because it's "natural". Just like cyanide. And arsenic. And death. And we have to protect people's right to kill their children with it because, well, because it's Freedom(tm), I guess. But at least now the death toll per year can be counted up on the fingers of your hands, rather than being like our family cemetery from the first half of the 20th century, where the tiny little graves and tiny little headstones outnumber the adult ones.

And therein ends this exercise in Libertopian thought vs. reality, which tends to be messy and have those inconvenient little things like bodies of dead children. And by being non-Libertarian tens of thousands of children are alive today who would otherwise be dead. That's something I think about every time I hear a Libertarian whining about "onerous government regulations" and "Big Brother government". You're still free to buy your own cow and drink all the raw milk you want even in states that outlaw the sale of raw milk... you're just not free to sell this dangerous substance across state boundaries. Just like you're not free to sell arsenic-spiced toothpaste and other such dangerous substances across state boundaries. Bummer, eh, how that eeeeevil government is takin' away your right to kill other people!

-- Badtux the Lessons Penguin

A thought experiment

Let's say there's two substances, I'll call them RM and PM. The vendors of PM say that their stuff provides all the benefits of RM, but without the possibility of death. The vendors of RM say that their stuff isn't very dangerous, and provides some benefits that PM doesn't provide. Both provide scientific studies (paid for by the respective vendors) that "prove" their point.

Now, I'm not a scientist. How do I evaluate these claims and come to a reasonable conclusion? Oh wait, I know, I can *hire* some scientists! These hired scientists could look at the published studies and conduct their *own* studies, could perhaps look and find out exactly how many of the people who use RM die, vs. whether they're healthier in other ways than people who use PM. Because the scientists that I hire are not in the pay of either PM or RM, they are more likely to tell me the truth, instead of telling me what their employer wants them to say. But wait... I'm not rich. How can I afford to hire my own scientists?!

Wait, I know, I'll get together with a bunch of *other* people and we'll pool our money together to hire scientists! But... what if we find out that RM is killing children? We'd have to just publish our results for free, or else be complicit in the deaths of children. But if we have a moral duty to publish our results for free, what is the motivation to join our group to pay these scientists? I go to Joe Sixpack and ask him to toss in some money to help pay scientists, and Joe says he's kinda short, so he's just going to wait until we publish the results for free. I go to Droopy Dwarf and ask him to toss in some money to help pay scientists, he says he prefers using his money to buy gold and is going to just wait until we publish the results for free. Nobody wants to pay scientists because they all want someone *else* to pay for it, then they want to freeload! So at that point, I'm baffled -- clearly this scheme won't work if it's possible to freeload because everybody's going to want to freeload, but we can't say "we'll do the study but keep it secret" because if we find out that RM is killing children, then we'd be complicit in the deaths of children. If only there was some way to make everybody who benefits from the study pay for the study so that there's no freeloaders. That's the only way to make it happen. Now... what could we call such an organization? Oh wait.

Now, here's my question to the Libertarians: Given the freeloader problem that I mention above, where morally it cannot be justified to keep secret information that some substance is killing children, yet if we publish to everybody, nobody wants to pay... how do we fund this organization of independent scientists (let's call them the "Center for Disease Control" just to pick a name out of hat) without forcing everybody who benefits from their work -- which is *everybody* -- to pay for it? If taxation is slavery, are the deaths of children whose lives would be saved if we knew RM killed children just "collateral damage" in Libertopia? Because as much as I try, I can't figure out any way other than government to deal with the freeloader problem and get this study of whether RM is dangerous funded. I.e., every "libertarian" solution I come up with ends up with dead children (presuming RM is dangerous to children, which we'll presume for the purposes of this exercise). The only solution I can come up with that works for finding out that RM is dangerous to children is the liberal solution, where everybody is forced to pay taxes to get the study financed.

Next up: We join together and create a government and direct this government to collect taxes to pay for this study, and this government study then finds that RM is dangerous to children. What happens next? That's a subject for tomorrow's post...

-- Badtux the Basics Penguin

The march of progress

Above: President Obama comforts a woman in the aftermath of the Missouri tornados

Fifty years ago, they would have lynched any black man who dared hug a white woman.

Think about that. Yeah, the regressives have made a ton of political progress over the past fifty years, but on the social front? They're losing. They're losing big. Homosexuality is no longer a disease to be cured, women work outside the home and have careers and some even choose to not be wombs on legs (gasp!), and it's no longer acceptable to use the N-word in polite company. Why, one of those darkies can even be elected preznit of teh United States!

Is it any wonder why the right-tards are blowing fuses and trying their best to blow up the country? Their ideas have largely been relegated to the dust-bin of history. They're just trying to make sure the rest of us end up there too.

-- Badtux the On-the-positive-side Penguin

Joe Bageant and the death of dreams

One of the things that infuriated Joe Bageant was liberals. Specifically, urban liberals. He considered them a bunch of wusses who talked the talk, but when time came to walk the walk and actually get out there and make a difference, instead settled for shallow PR stunts like Jon Stewart's farcical march on Washington, which sent him into guffaws of absolute astonishment. Because see, the great-great grandpappies of folks like Jon Stewart were out there on picket lines busting knuckles with the strike breakers of the American Legion (which started out as a right-wing paramilitary made up of WW1 veterans financed by right-wing industrialists) and risking getting their head busted. While today's liberals... oh my. Can't do anything like that. That's for the vulgar common folk, not for white middle class professionals. Why, getting arrested would look so bad on the criminal background check for job applications to Megacorp Inc. and I might not get the job! Go on strike? Do without a paycheck for several months shutting down the country to protest the fact that 30% of income taxes paid by corporations in 1950. 7% today, and you and I now pay that other 23%? Why, think what that'd look like on my credit report! Horror!

Wusses. Useless as tits on a bull. As I mentioned in 2006, Democrats haven't done jack shit for poor white trash since at least 1960, instead focusing upon the urban (black) poor if they talk about poverty at all. And unions haven't been a damn bit better. Ever since Truman busted the unions' chops in the 1946-1952 timeframe, the unions have been by and large content to feed like pigs on slop at the corporate trough, instead of standing up for workers whose jobs are being exported or standing up against unfairness such as trillions in bailouts for Wall Street and nothing for Main Street. When Reagan busted the PATCO ATC union in 1981, that was the end of unions as a real force for labor in America -- the unions could have done just that, *united*, and shut down the entire federal government with a general strike where the Teamsters refused to deliver anything to any federal unit, all Federal workers walked off, mail didn't get delivered, yada yada until the federal government was *forced* to give in and re-certify PATCO, crap, the unions could have shut down the entire fucking *country* the way the French unions often do. Instead they went whimpering off into the sunset like whipped dogs, tail stuck between their legs, useless, irrelevant, and futile.

So you want to know why unions are irrelevant today and why things get worse for ordinary Americans every year as things get better and better for the rich... well, look in the mirror. Joe Bageant held it up for you. Joe and I disagreed on economics -- he was an outright socialist rabble-rouser, I'm a capitalist (albeit not one who worships it but, rather, someone who believes it is the best way to handle matching supply and demand for things with complex inputs and/or where choice matters, i.e., it's a tool, not a religion). But one thing we did agree on was that the whole problem with liberalism in America today is that today's liberals have lost their way and in their haste to condemn Red State America, have forgotten why the so-called Red States are that -- i.e., that liberals haven't done a goddamned thing for them since at least 1960, so why the fuck *should* they vote liberal?!

And so it goes...

-- Badtux the Southern Penguin

Word for today: Socialism

So what is Socialism?

Well, you listen to today's right-wing blogosphere, and it becomes clear that they haven't a clue. They appear to believe that "Socialism" is the same thing as redistribution of wealth. By that standard, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a socialist -- he had no problem with a 90% income tax rate on the top bracket in order to redistribute wealth downward.

The problem is, that's not what Socialist means. Socialist means that the government owns the means of production of wealth. Like when the UK nationalized Leyland Motors and called it British Leyland, or when France nationalized Citroen and Renault and made them state-owned, or when Britain nationalized the hospitals in 1948 and made them state-owned, or when Sweden nationalized its banks in 1992. That's Socialism -- the State owning major industries. Redistribution of wealth -- such as, say, taxing the rich in order to provide subsidies to the poor so that they can buy health insurance -- is plain old liberalism, which is not the same thing as socialism at all, let alone Communism, which outright outlaws private property beyond anything you can carry upon your own person.

Words have meaning. Using words in ways that aren't applicable makes you look like an idiot to anybody who is intelligent. Which, I realize, is the minority of Americans since 50% of Americans are below average and average ain't so smart anymore, but still. This ain't Freeperville, and we're a bit brighter 'round these parts :).

-- Badtux the Liberal Penguin

More left-wing stupidity

Janet Atkinson of the San Jose Down Syndrome Network rips the movie Tropic Thunder for using the word "retard". Nevermind that the movie uses the word "retard" in much the same way that Mark Twain uses the word "nigger" in Huckleberry Finn, i.e., to make fun of the people who use the word. It's "denigrating to the mentally disabled" and thus the movie should be boycotted, or banned, or something. Sorta like these same kinds of asswipes are always trying to get Huckleberry Finn banned because it's "racist" or some such bilge.

And here I was, thinking that the movie was making fun of Tom Hanks. Why does the extreme left-wing make it so difficult for someone to call themselves "liberal" nowdays? It's as if they want liberal ideas to be marginalized and made fun of. Sigh.

-- Badtux the Head-shakin' Penguin

Do you really think this is coincidence?

45 years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech in Washington, D.C. It had been a long and bloody year, many civil rights workers killed, injured, or arrested, many blacks and whites both ending up paying a horrible price fighting for freedom and equality for all Americans.

They failed. They failed, but not because they did anything wrong. They failed because while they could change the laws, they could change what was socially acceptable to say in public, they could not change the hatred in the hearts of bigot-Americans or heal the anger and suspicion of those raised to fear the outsider who found themselves suddenly asked to treat fairly those who did not look like them, talk like them, or worship like them. They failed because, in the end, America could change her laws, but America could not change her heart.

But that was 45 years ago. Two generations have died since then. Two generations have been born since then. And so tonight, 45 years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his I have a Dream speech, a man who is half African mounts the stage before a throng, and standing beside his African-American wife accepts the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. I cannot think that it is coincidence that the Democratic National Committee scheduled this convention's penultimate speech on the day they did. But it is very fitting anyhow, coincidence or not.

-- Badtux the Seeing-history-made Penguin

More on classic American liberalism

In my posts below, I mention classic American liberalism. Note that classic FDR-style American liberalism has nothing to do with radical socialist or Communist agendas or whatever. Indeed, FDR's liberal solutions were intended to prevent radical socialists and Communists from coming to power in America. Rather, classic American liberalism has its basis on the study of reality, and the formulation of solutions to problems found in reality.

For example, when FDR became President, there was a lot of people unemployed. FDR did not look at those people and say, "My ideology says that if they can't find jobs on their own, they should starve to death." FDR did not look at those people and say, "My ideology says that I should nationalize all industry and farmland and put those people onto collective farms and state-owned factories". Rather, he said "They need jobs, and if they don't get jobs they're likely to go Communist or Socialist because no man will voluntarily starve to death just because my ideology says he should. Thus I will create jobs for them." And he did, via the WPA and CCC. Problem solved. Communism averted.

Similarly, when I look at health care today, I do not advocate Medicare For All because my ideology says that government should provide health care. Indeed, if that were my ideology, I would be advocating something like the Swedish system where all doctors are employees of the government and all hospitals and clinics are owned by the government. Rather, I advocate Medicare For All because, looking at the numbers of the current Medicare program vs. the current private health insurance industry, it is the most cost-effective way to fund health care. Medicare For All gets rid of a host of administrative overhead that the current system has, from advertising to enrollment, and eliminates entire bureaucracies (such as the entire billing bureaucracy for billing employers and citizens for their health insurance) that otherwise suck up health care dollars but provide no useful service to America. Medicare's administrative expenses are approximately 1/5th those of private insurers on a per-claim basis. If we eliminated the roughly 25% of current health care spending in America that disappears as administrative expenses or profits for health insurers, if we make all health insurance as efficient as Medicare already is by extending Medicare to all Americans, we can fund health insurance for all Americans without any increase in the amount of money that Americans currently spend on health insurance. In short, I go by what the numbers tell me, not what ideology tells me. And what the numbers tell me is that, by and large, Medicare has been a spectacularly successful health insurance program and that there's no reason to not extend it to all Americans rather than only allowing old prunes to enroll.

That is reality-based policy making. That is liberalism. Liberalism has to do with looking at reality, and formulating solutions to the problems you see when you examine reality. People don't have health insurance and the life expectancy of Americans is thereby declining? Provide it to them, sharing the costs amongst all Americans via the existing Medicare payroll tax. That's liberalism -- solving problems via the most effective and least intrusive means it takes to solve them. It's not as exciting as talking about the revolution where capitalism will be overthrown or other such radical left-wing garbage, or ranting about individual responsibility and how those poor people should just voluntarily starve to death or other such radical right-wing garbage, but so it goes. Reality has never been as clean and simple as ideology, it's always been messy and requiring much study and much number-crunching to understand the problem and devise a solution that will actually solve the problem while upsetting the current applecart as little as possible (thus while nationalizing industry and farms would have certainly solved FDR's unemployment problem, interference into the status quo beyond the minimum needed is not part of liberalism, thus he didn't do it). If you want all that ideological stuff you'll just have to go talk to some radical left-wing anarchists or right-wing glibertarians or such. Meanwhile, those of us who deal with reality have problems to solve, and we will continue to propose solutions to those problems that are based on reality, not ideology. It's the liberal thing to do, after all.

-- Badtux the Liberal Penguin

Those oh-so-effective Republican policies

This just in: Life expectancy decreasing in the United States. But not in all of America. As Karlo at Swerveleft notes, quoting an AP report on this study: What the new analysis reveals is the reality of two Americas, one on par with most of Europe and parts of Asia, and another no different than a third world nation. For example, previous research has shown that the U.S. state of Georgia has a life expectancy and infant mortality rate similar to the impoverished Eastern European nation of Georgia. In Harlem, African American men are less likely to reach the age of 65 than men in Bangladesh, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Disparities in life expectancy are increasing rapidly, with the West Coast and Northeast continuing to have improvements in life expectancy, while the Republican-dominated South and interior states stagnate or have declines in life expectancy.

In short, life expectancies are declining primarily in Republican-dominated areas like the state of Georgia that implement Republican policies, and are increasing primarily in areas like, say, the San Francisco Bay area, which implement liberal policies. In other words, liberalism is good for your health as well as your wealth -- it's no mistake that the states that have the highest concentration of liberals are also the wealthiest states, while the states that have the highest concentration of Republicans are the poorest states. Republican ideology simply isn't based on reality, and if you govern according to ideology rather than reality, you get the stark results of people dying. That's how it's always been, whether we're talking about Lenin's ideology or George W. Bush's ideology. Govern according to ideology rather than reality, and you end up with the life expectancy of the average American being only about 78 years, which places us 41st on the 2008 CIA World Factbook list, behind Bosnia but still edging out Albania.

Yay! We're #41! U S A! U S A! U S A! We may not be #1, but we're still better than Albania. WOOT!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

A neat thing about right-wing blogs...

is that they never accept comments, or if they do, they're moderated and only comments which agree with the proprietor of the blog are allowed. Any other comments are "disappeared" and the IP or account which originated them banned.

That is the difference between Likkudnik/neo-con blogs and liberal blogs. Liberal blogs are willing to listen to any point of view. Likkudniks, on the other hand, only want to hear their own point of view, and if you express any different point of view, well, then you are untermenschen, other, evil, vile, anti-whatever.

It is, in short, the difference between neocons/likkudniks and liberals in general. Neocons are ideologues who believe what they're told to believe and refuse to accept any piece of data that does not comply with their ideology. Liberals are reality-based and look at what is, rather than at what their ideology says must be.

Note that there is a significant difference between classic American liberalism of the FDR variety, and left-wing radicalism. Note that I've had my own issues with left-wing radicals, who have accused me of being sexist or racist or otherwise politically incorrect for not accepting their ideology due to lack of data supporting their ideology at the same time that I have been accused of being anti-American or anti-semitic or whatever for not accepting neo-con or Likkudnik ideology due to lack of data supporting their ideology. The point is that classic American liberalism is reality-based, not ideology based. This has put it at somewhat of a disadvantage in the middle of the "culture wars" between the ideologues on both sides. But this is also its strength -- in the end, when ideology fails, those who embrace reality will always come out on top. Whether that will be America in 2008 or some other country will determine whether the United States becomes an also-ran country while reality-based leaders in other countries out-perform a failing flailing giant, or whether the U.S. gets a chance to return to greatness.

-- Badtux the Reality-based Penguin