Stay the course, thousand points of light, resolve, freedom, democracy and whatnot

"The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement," Thoreau

In the matter of one day, I've been banned from leaving comments on four sites (http://exvigilare.com; http://mangledcat.com/;
DamascusRoad; and LaShawnBarber). The first two seemed to get quite uneasy about the comments I was making to their posts. Rather than engage in any sort of civil debate, they banned me from commenting and altered my comments to the point where they no longer resembled anything close to the original. For the mangled cat, Jonathan Sebin (jwjsabin@earthlink.net) wrote a post saying that everyone could or should own SUVs because they can. I applied the logic he uses for this reasoning to the war in Iraq, which seemed frightneningly similar. Here is the post: oh wait, he deleted the whole thing.

Later, I go to http://exvigilare.com and post a comment where I agreed with (for the most part) the blogger about his feelings on the statements made by Bill Cosby. LaShawn chimed in with her, "I'm black. I know. White oppression. Liberals fault.We're people too." I responded fairly, and Jonathan came back with a most witty retort and banned me from his site.

There are reasonable conservatives out there... Jared Keller, of http://strategicintelligence.blogspot.com/, has been encouraging a steady stream of intelligent debate without taking cheapshots and using, "damn I look good" tactics.

I've been thinking, over the last day or two, about the disappearance of the whole, y'know, Democrat and Republican thing. All of a sudden it's only Liberals versus Conservatives and the problem is that the Conservatives are self-anointed as such but the Liberals are not. Despite what some say, Liberals are not calling themselves Liberals because of a stigma or reputation, LaShawn, they are saying they are not Liberals because they are not Liberals.

I believe that Conservatives are defining themselves by their religious views. They are associated with the current leader of the free world and therefore believe that they can fervently pursue blatantly religious legislation when it is an obvious violation of personal liberty and Church interfering with State. Luckily, a lot of it is getting buried and blocked (partial birth ban block). However, some of it isn't due to the control of certain districts by Conservative Judges.

I won't call myself a Liberal, not because I am ashamed of the stigma or its associates, LaShawn. I won't call myself a Liberal because I am not one. I have many liberal views on many topics; I also have many Republican, Libertarian, Green, and Independent views. I won't call myself any one of these labels because I don't think many labels fit me, in more facets of life than just politics. There are many that prefer and bask in the fact that they can call themselves one or two things. There are many people who don't even give the effort of thought to it and just pick what they think they are.

I believe that the majority of the people who don't give politics, foreign affairs or economics much thought vote for Bush. They do so because of fallacious logic. Many have good reasons for voting for him, though I vehemently disagree with almost all of them. The same argument could be made for Kerry voters, but the logic is slightly better. Not many people like the direction this country is going. People want a change and some think that by voting for Kerry it would bring us back to the affluent 90's of Clinton and Gore. This is fallacious logic as well.

So, what does it all mean... you got me. There is one thing though that needs to be said. I was a Conservative. Born and raised. In fact, I still believe in many of the ideals, morals, values and customs of that particular denomination. However, I was raised as a Conservative Jew, and although my religion for me now is more of a backbone for morality and values, I still believe in many of the facets Judaism had to teach. I think Jesus followed those as well, but many of his followers don't even realize that.