Re: CHAT: "La Bandera Estrellada"

bjm10@CORNELL.EDU wrote:

> On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, John Cowan wrote:
>
> > bjm10@CORNELL.EDU wrote:
> >
> > > Yeah, that's as absurd as "Intelligent Liberal".
> >
> > Ahem.  *Smile* when you say that, stranger.
>
> I'll grimace any way I want.  I still maintain that "compassionate
> conservative" is as absurd as "intelligent liberal".  Ideologues are the
> worst thing that has ever happened to humanity.
True.  When they're like, Hitler or Mao or something.  Both thought
of themselves (in their own deluded ways) as helping the common
man out.  But that does not imply that the opposite is true:  even though
an excess of idealism often does much more harm than it does good,
having a total lack of idealism leads to the same kinds of institutional
power-grabbing, as in Russia today, for example.  There, the evil that
is done by government is done out in the open, and no excuse is made
for it.  The only difference between the two is in the honesty of the
latter.

In other words, a frightfully narrow middle-course must be kept by
deciding on what values we want to espouse, and then acting on those
values only after deciding practical options are open to us.  Anything
else is either naivite -- assuming the world will fit to your preconceived
abstractions -- or nihilism, which as philosophies go is just an excuse to
do what you feel like doing, and so is not a philosophy as such, to the
extent that they do not follow that narrow course.

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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