If you doubt that democracy can become totalitarian, read J. L. Talmon's The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy,
and wake up. Even a close study of J.-J. Rousseau's Social Contract could have shown you that.[Hat tip to Z.M.]
Friday, March 09, 2012
Soon to be totalitarian regime?
More of the "hope" and "change" we can believe in: the approved assassination of U.S. citizens without charging them with any crime. Welcome home Cesare Borgia.
If you doubt that democracy can become totalitarian, read J. L. Talmon's The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy,and wake up. Even a close study of J.-J. Rousseau's Social Contract could have shown you that.
[Hat tip to Z.M.]
If you doubt that democracy can become totalitarian, read J. L. Talmon's The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy,
and wake up. Even a close study of J.-J. Rousseau's Social Contract could have shown you that.[Hat tip to Z.M.]
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I found the transcript of that radio interview
FALSANI: "Do you believe in sin?"
OBAMA: "Yes."
FALSANI: "What is sin?"
OBAMA: "Being out of alignment with my values."
Obama is perfectly within his right to force his morality on everyone when it comes to contraception and he is perfectly with his right to decide to bump-off somebody if they get under his thin skin.
Back when he was running for office - back when men like Greenwald were swooning over him like a 13 y.o. girl greeting the Beatles at the airport in New York -he submitted to an interview in which he averred that, for him a sin was when he did something that was against his own nature.
I took that to mean that he was identifying his own self as the avatar of our times, a Baba Meher with close-cropped hair if you will.
"Being out of alignment with my values."
The interesting thing about such a statement is that if one did not believe in objectively binding moral obligations (or "values"), then this statement would be perfectly compatible with unalloyed vice. In other words, with doing whatever you WANT to do, without any sense of obligations alien to one's desires or any potential sense of struggle.
The only difference between the absolutely vicious man and the absolutely virtuous man, in Aristotle's analysis, is that -- although both do whatever they LIKE doing without any struggle -- the vicious man no longer has a clue as to the identity or even existence of the objective GOOD. Scary.
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