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| 5/24 |
| 2003/12/16-17 [Politics/Domestic/RepublicanMedia, Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:11478 Activity:high |
12/16 Orson Scott Card demonstrating yet again why I can't stand his books:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004435
\_ What, because he doesn't agree with your politics?
\_ jesus this guy is free associating left and right and labeling his
drivel as fact. i thought ender's game was ok though.
but maybe he thinks enders game actually happened.
\_ His politics have never made sense. He calls himself a Democrat
for some bizarre reason, but his actual opinions are a synthesis
of Ayn Rand, the Old Testament, and the Wizard of Oz. I can't
stand his books for almost the same reason - even when he's
making a good point, he doesn't have the courage of his
convictions. For instance, check out his statements about
the meaning of Enders Game - he's the only one in the world who
seems to think its not anti-war. He's also made some really
bizarre statements vis-a-vis the "Peter" character and the
subject of child abuse.
\_ Maybe he doesn't like the way people define "anti-war."
It never suggests in the book that humans never should
have fought the buggers at all, just that they shouldn't
have eradicated them. It the humans hadn't defended
themselves in the first two wars, it's pretty clear
that the human race would have been destroyed instead,
for almost the same reason.
\_ No, it doesn't suggest that humans shouldn't have eradicated
them. It and the sequels show that under the circumstances,
the humans had to fight "us vs. them" because there was no
way to communicate and negotiate. Indeed, the lesson is to
use force last of all, but when you use force, use
overwhelming, overpowering force so that the enemy never
stands up again. That's the lesson Ender learns over and
over again.
\_ This is somewhat changing the subject but...
Someone told me the Wizard of Oz was a book/movie about
communism, but aside from the fact that the midgets live in a
Potemkin Village, I don't see it. Anyone have any insight?
\_ The Wizard of Oz is a godless Communist screed. And not
only that, but flouridation is an insidious Communist plot
to suck out and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
\_ Hoping for a serious response on motd... silly me.
\_ A serious response would be called for if it was a
serious idea.
\_ It's not about communism, it's about a political
movement in the late 1800's known as populism. Its
very pro-populism. Google on it.
\_ Specifically, the Wizard of Oz is a character re-mapping
of the political figures central to the Silver Standard
controversy. My understanding is that it only became a
popular children's story by accident - though this sort
of thing happens more often than you'd think.
http://paws.wcu.edu/mulligan/www/oz.html for one
summary.
\_ Oh jesus. You can do this with any book. This is like
the guy that had the pet theory that the Harry Potter
books were an allegory promoting Libertarian thought.
\_ Did you actually do any research before this
statement, or are you just talking out of your
butt again?
\_ I read your article. This sort of allegory is
bunk unless directly claimed by the author.
A little googling will show you that many
scholars have many wildly different allegorical
interpretations of Baum's book, which just shows
how ridiculous it all is. I'm sure you can
find a way to show that, say, Terminator 3 is
an allegory for the women's rights movement.
That doesn't mean you're any more correct than
the person that says its an allegory for WWI.
\_ The 'Harry Potter supports Libertarian throught'
idea seems dodgy, but the Harry Potter books do
contain many thinly veiled references to Britain's
pervasive class system that would be lost on most
folks living on this side of the Atlantic.
\_ Look we are war. We will be at war with terrorism for at least
a couple of generations. Anyone who questions President Bush
during a time of war is a traitor and terrorist sympathizer.
Any questions?
\_ I didn't know Ann Coulter wrote to the motd! Go Ann! *drool*
--Ann Coulter #1 fan
\_ "Oh my god! Your cock is so BIG and TAX FREE!"
\_ Hi ilya. You can't get over that one, can you? Sticks
with ya. --lye
\_ wasn't ilya
\_ Yeah, lye. How could you soil my good name like that?
My polite indignation knows no bounds! -- ilyas
\_ Consider it humbly withdrawn. Not that I have any
reason to believe anything that anyone says on the
motd. --lye
\_ Gee lye, do you have a hangup about people lying?
\_ No. I always lye. --lye
\_ He doesn't address Bush's WMD justification for attacking Iraq.
Lamer. |
| 5/24 |
|
| www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004435 AT WAR The Campaign of Hate and Fear Some of my fellow Democrats are unpatriotic. BY ORSON SCOTT CARD Tuesday, December 16, 2003 12:01 am EST In one of Patrick OBrians novels about the British navy during the Napoleonic wars, he dismisses a particularly foolish politician by saying that his political platform was death to the Whigs. Watching the primary campaigns among this years pathetic crop of Democratic candidates, I cant help but think that their campaigns would be vastly improved if they would only rise to the level of Death to the Republicans. Instead, their platforms range from Howard Deans Bush is the devil to everybody elses Ill make you rich, and Bush is quite similar to the devil. Since President Bush is quite plainly not the devil, one wonders why anyone in the Democratic Party thinks this ploy will play with the general public. There are Democrats, like me, who think it will not play, and should not play, and who are waiting in the wings until after the coming electoral debacle in order to try to remake the party into something more resembling America. But then I watch the steady campaign of the national news media to try to win this for the Democrats, and I wonder. Could this insane, self-destructive, extremist-dominated party actually win the presidency? It might-because the media are trying as hard as they can to pound home the message that the Bush presidency is a failure-even though by every rational measure it is not. Bush is that the terrorist war is being used as a tool to try to defeat him-which means that if Mr. Indeed, the anti-Bush campaign threatens to undermine our war effort, give encouragement to our enemies, and cost American lives during the long year of campaigning that lies ahead of us. Osama bin Ladens military strategy is: If you make a war cost enough, Americans will give up and go home. But hes still telling his followers: Keep killing Americans and eventually, antigovernment factions within the United States will choose to give up the struggle. Reuters recently ran a feature that trumpeted the fact that United States casualties in Iraq have now surpassed United States casualties in the first three years of the Vietnam War. Never mind that this is a specious distortion of the facts, which depends on the ignorance of American readers. Compare our casualties in Iraq with our casualties in Vietnam when we had a comparable number of troops, and by every rational measure-casualties per thousand troops, casualties per year, or absolute number of casualties-youll find that the Iraq campaign is far, far less costly than Vietnam. But the media want Americans to think that Iraq is like Vietnam-or rather, that Iraq is like the story that the Left likes to tell about Vietnam. If we had closed North Vietnams ports and carried the war to the enemy, victory could have been relatively quick. Memories of Korea were fresh in everyones minds, and so Vietnam was fought in such a way as to avoid another Korea. Our war is against terrorist-sponsoring states, and just because we toppled the governments of two of them doesnt mean that the others arent still sponsoring terrorism. Also, there is a substantial region in Iraq where Saddams forces are still finding support for a diehard guerrilla campaign. In other words, the Iraq campaign isnt over-and President Bush has explicitly said so all along. So the continuation of combat and casualties isnt a failure or a quagmire, its a war. And during a war, patriotic Americans dont blame the deaths on our government. We blame them on the enemy that persists in trying to kill our soldiers. What Im saying is that those who try to paint the bleakest, most anti-American, and most anti-Bush picture of the war, whose purpose is not criticism but deception in order to gain temporary political advantage, those people are indeed not patriotic. They have placed their own or their partys political gain ahead of the national struggle to destroy the power base of the terrorists who attacked Americans abroad and on American soil. Patriots place their loyalty to their country in time of war ahead of their personal and party ambitions. And they can wrap themselves in the flag and say they support our troops all they like-but it doesnt change the fact that their program is to promote our defeat at the hands of our enemies for their temporary political advantage. Think what it will mean if we elect a Democratic candidate who has committed himself to an antiwar posture in order to get his partys nomination. Our enemies will be certain that they are winning the war on the battleground that matters-American public opinion. So they will continue to kill Americans wherever and whenever they can, because it works. Our soldiers will lose heart, because they will know that their commander in chief is a man who is not committed to winning the war they have risked death in order to fight. When the commander in chief is willing to call victory defeat in order to win an election, his soldiers can only assume that their lives will be thrown away for nothing. Thats when an army, filled with despair, becomes beatable even by inferior forces. None of the three candidates Humphrey, Nixon, Wallace were committed to unilateral withdrawal. Not during Nixons Vietnamization program, in which more and more of the war effort was turned over to Vietnamese troops. We lost the war when the Democrat-controlled Congress specifically banned all military aid to South Vietnam, and a beleaguered Republican president signed it into law. With Russia and China massively supplying North Vietnam, and Saigon forced to buy pathetic quantities of ammunition and spare parts on the open market because America had cut off all aid, the imbalance doomed them, and they knew it. That wasnt about peace, that was about political posturing and an indecent lack of honor. The enemy-a conspiracy of terrorists sponsored by a dozen or so nations and unable to function without their aid-was hard to attack directly; And in all the campaign rhetoric, I keep looking, as a Democrat, for a single candidate who is actually offering a significant improvement over the Republican policies that in fact dont work, while supporting or improving upon the American policies that will help make us and our children secure against terrorists. We have enemies that have earned our hatred, and whom we should fear. They are fanatical terrorists who seek opportunities to kill American civilians here and Israeli civilians in Israel. But right now, our national media and the Democratic Party are trying to get us to believe that the people we should hate and fear are George W. I can think of many, many reasons why the Republicans should not control both houses of Congress and the White House. But right now, if the alternative is the Democratic Party as led in Congress and as exemplified by the current candidates for the Democratic nomination, then I cant be the only Democrat who will, with great reluctance, vote not just for George W. Bush, but also for every other candidate of the only party that seems committed to fighting abroad to destroy the enemies that seek to kill us and our friends at home. This article first appeared in the Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, NC. RESPOND TO THIS ARTICLE READ RESPONSES E-MAIL THIS TO A FRIEND PRINT FRIENDLY FORMAT HOME TOP OF PAGE ARCHIVE SUBSCRIBE TO THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE OR TAKE A TOUR . |
| paws.wcu.edu/mulligan/www/oz.html Dorothys silver slippers originally the property of the Wicked Witch of the East, until Dorothy drops the house on the witch. Walking on the yellowbrick road with the silver slippers represented the bimetallic standard. MGM changed the silver slippers to the vivid garish, even ruby slippers to exploit the fabulous technology of Technicolor. The Wicked Witch of the East Eastern banking and industrial interests. She is killed by Dorothys falling house because the Populists expected that the eastern industrial workers would vote Populist, but this never really happened. The Wicked Witch of the West the West was where the Populists were strongest. The only reason why the West gets a wicked witch is a you need two bad guys to balance the two good guys, and especially, b William McKinley was from Ohio, then thought of as a western state. The wicked witch is sometimes identified directly with President McKinley. Populist mythology always looked to this group for support, but never found it in reality. Baum realized this most Populists didnt and shows the Tinman as a victim of mechanization. |