But in the same vain we don't give a neo-Nazi a pass because he didn't take part in the Holocaust, doesn't hate all the Jews, etc. We don't give a communist a pass for the 25 million that died in Russian gulags. If you call yourself a progressive, knowing what progressives did to this country(progressive era alone), knowing the people they hurt, knowing the people they killed, I mean my god, they did radiation test on babies.....I'm not going to give a progressive a pass for associating with a group that did horrible things(and plans on doing them again).
Emphasis mine, explained below.
I think you're reaching. First, neo-Nazis tend to be pretty pro-Holocaust and fervently anti-Jewish, in addition to other things. There are far more communists than Soviet Communists. You can be in favor of Communism and against Stalin and the Soviets and Mao and Guevara and Castro and all the others. The Communist Manifesto doesn't advocate an opaque, murderous regime that allocates capital and political influence in a decidedly unequal way as the ideal form of government, or even an acceptable form.
That Stalin or Mao or pick your favorite Communist-flavored dictator shouted "Yay Communism" while they crushed dissent with prison, torture, and murder doesn't insert such things there either. So if some college kid says "Capitalism is raping the world, a Communist system would be much better. That's why I'm a Communist, in the Marxist tradition.", I'm not inclined to saddle him with the blood of tens of millions of victims. Though I might discuss with him why I think that Communism is just not an effective form of government or social organization, or perhaps that there's an argument to be made that such an ideology will likely spiral into autocracy and repression.
Nazis, of course, don't have any such leeway. But if I met someone who told me that they were a Nazi, but that they believed in equality of all races and repudiated violence, my reaction would be that that person isn't a Nazi at all, that they chose a description that is incorrect. Probably that that person is foolish (at best) as well. Not that the description must be correct beyond all other considerations, and that no matter what they ever do or say they must be working to raise a new Reich and promote a master race.
Your assertion that progressives want to replay the worst actions of those who wore the title is probably the core of my disagreement with you on this. I see a lot of people, that call themselves progressives, who want things like marriage equality, equal opportunity for genders and races in employment and pay, and so forth. They also want government to enforce those ideas, insofar as they use the law to prevent people who would deny those things from doing so. I also see a lot of progressives who want new and/or more powerful government agencies in pursuit of those types of goals. Those are all things that can be discussed on their merits, and should be.
I do not, however, see progressives trying to overtly or covertly reinstate eugenics as mandatory social policy in the country. That's not to say that no one advocates that; you can find psychotics pretty much anyplace you care to look. But to suggest that that is their
express agenda is an extraordinary claim. In the same way that I do not simply assume that wealthy, landed Southern conservatives are constantly agitating for the specific return of slavery because they happen to have the same political description as people who demanded slavery over a century ago, I do not level a similar accusation at a progressive. That's not to say that no such person does want that, just that I don't find the label to be specific enough necessitate that anyone who has it wants 100% of the same things with no exclusions.
But even if I did believe that...
No, I agreed they tried to change their label and become faux liberals...Because for some time the word progressive was akin to the word Nazi. Progressives still believe the same old crap about an all powerful government, purified of all dissenters, as being the key to advancing this country past all its ills(Constitution and natural rights be damned).
Example: didn't AL Gore just call for forced sterilizations of all women under 25 to save the planet? Didn't Obama's science czar call for the same thing? Etc. (The last time it was for the purity of the human race, this time it will be for the planet, mark my words, I've seen it before)
So you don't even care about the term "progressive" then? If the label is so descriptive, and someone chooses to use a different one, apparently that's no escape from your pronouncement that they are monsters. Progressives still believe in the betterment of society through government intervention, but in the sense that the government should protect individuals from having their rights (Constitutional and natural) from being violated by others. By law and statute, not by internments and forced sterilizations. I have
never seen a progressive suggest that society should be purified of all dissenters through violence or any other coercive measure. I've seen very, very few people of any affiliation advocate such a thing in the United States. Again, that isn't to say that there aren't people of any given stripe who hold that opinion-- but I haven't seen such people make up anywhere near a large enough portion of groups the size of national political movements that I would tar them all with that brush.
Your example is pure BS. This is exactly why I am so against these incredibly narrow views that force people into the worst groups possible, for dubious connections.
See here for a bit more information than a magazine that also carries headlines like
this and
this. But hey, maybe they just mis-attributed the quote. It does sound like something that WWN's
favorite personality would say. Al Gore said that he was in favor of women having access to fertility management (birth control and education). Not that he was in favor of fertility annihilation (forced sterilizations).
That you instantly accepted something so unlikely and out of character for the alleged speaker, which even a shallow investigation reveals came from a source that would have had to have been markedly better to be deemed sh*t suggests very real danger to such positions. If a progressive says "Dow Chemical shouldn't dump toxic waste into the river near town, and I will work to give the government power to ensure that" and is met with "You're a eugenicist! How dare you try and ruin America with your evil!", political discourse will have a difficult time moving on to more important concerns. Namely, real ones that can be supported by reason.
Ontopic: Now that one (and only one) of the Credit Ratings board downgraded the US does that mean that Wall Street will panic and put us in an artificial recession?
The markets did take a pretty heavy dive today.
He dropped it when he thought it was going to cost him his job in the Obama admin. And we don't know that he actually dropped it in this little late term conversion, more then likely he dropped the radical pose for the radical ends and would have still pushed for the same crap once his position was secured.
People like this, who are far from a minority and whose arguments are starting to resonate with the GW crowd are going to pop up more and more as our government goes from being small with limited powers to being something like a parent/godhead that tells you what you can eat, who you can marry, how many kids you can have, what drugs you can do, etc. (Again, Constitution and natural rights be damned)
And here we are again. Even the
specific rejection of a position only suggests to you that he is a worse person-- he's not only in favor of forced sterilization, but he's also super-cunning and ruthless to boot. Yeah, well maybe, I guess it's possible, but the evidence seems a bit thin to me to consign him to the ranks of Hitler, Mao, and Stalin:
Have a read of the section. The most important portion, in my view, is excerpted below.
A far better choice, in our view, is to expand the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences, while redoubling efforts to ensure that the means of birth control, including abortion and sterilization are accessible to every human being on Earth within the shortest possible time.
I'm not going to defend him, not just because he can and has defended himself, but also because I truly believe that you will not accept any possibility of a view contrary to the one you already hold. Offering people options or seeking to use the force of government to fight things like discrimination and corporate malfeasance is very different from using government marching people into the sterilization clinic at gunpoint, even if the government would be involved in both scenarios. I would encourage the former, and fight bitterly against the latter. But I will fight the ideas, not simply anyone that I can possibly include in a group that might maybe advocate those ideas, particularly if I define that group in such a way as to include the most people possible including by no reason other than my defining them into that group, despite the notable absence of any evidence that they hold such views. If it were the case that there was a high correlation between people I met in a certain group and the holding of an abhorrent view, I might associate the two. And I might be reasonable or unreasonable in doing so, and not necessarily relatedly I might or might not be accurate in doing so. But with progressives, your position simply hasn't been what I've observed, and I find your examples and exhortations to be unpersuasive.
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