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Dec 29th, 2019
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I like Bernie, but then again I liked him before the debate too. I will vote for him this primary. I don't like Bernie, but then again I didn't like him before the debate. I will not vote for him this primary. But of course I could never vote for any progressive liberal socialist democrat.....my conscience wouldn't allow it.
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I was rather impressed with the focus on issues (unlike the Republican debate) and also with Bernie Sanders You were impressed with the self avowed socialist, Bernie? Which issues impressed you? Is it the democratic party's dedication to gay "marriage" and all LGBTQ issues? Is it the democratic party's support of euthanasia? Is it the democratic party's full fledged affirmation of abortion on demand? Perhaps it is the democratic party's loyal dedication to Planned Parenthood and their butchering of babies for the sale of tissue and organs? My dear Reclusive Brother! No, I'm not impressed with any of those points of the Democratic party platform! I was impressed with his debating style and delivery of his thoughts. As you know, I've worked in politics for more than a quarter of a century (and will be going back). I've spent a lot of time studying speaking styles, writing speeches and advising politicians on delivery of their message and the like. I'm naturally interested, therefore, in how politicians behave during such debates. Bernie was quite amazing from that perspective. Your Republican folks couldn't hold a candle to him in that respect. Just because I admire Bernie in this way does NOT mean that I am in agreement with his party or with democratic socialism or socialism and communism of any sort. Alex
Last edited by Orthodox Catholic; 10/14/15 09:32 PM.
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I like Bernie, but then again I liked him before the debate too. I will vote for him this primary. I don't like Bernie, but then again I didn't like him before the debate. I will not vote for him this primary. But of course I could never vote for any progressive liberal socialist democrat.....my conscience wouldn't allow it. And my conscience will not allow me to vote for any candidate endorsing capitalism, the continual grinding of the poor, the withholding of healthcare from all who need it, the preservation of white supremacy, etc.
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And my conscience will not allow me to vote for any candidate endorsing capitalism, the continual grinding of the poor, the withholding of healthcare from all who need it, the preservation of white supremacy, etc. Having no idea what ground poor would be like, I turned to wine reviews [ phrasegenerator.com] the Wine Review Generator for some clues. "...brings us gritty onion overtones with a oaty nacho finish" "An indigestible shrimp flavor and orgiastic sushi elements are brought together..." "A sadistic horseradish aftertaste and old-school urine flavors are intertwined..." "A conventional pheremone essence and German turpentine flavors..." "... mixes near-demonic squid undertones with a crude spelt aroma." I think Jonathan Swift already covered this subject in A Modest Proposal. Now have some chocolate and relax. 
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Just because I admire Bernie in this way does NOT mean that I am in agreement with his party or with democratic socialism or socialism and communism of any sort. Thank God!
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And my conscience will not allow me to vote for any candidate endorsing capitalism, the continual grinding of the poor, the withholding of healthcare from all who need it, the preservation of white supremacy, etc. Um..........huh?
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As Margaret Thatcher said, "“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Ain't it the truth. Capitalism has allowed more people to escape poverty than any other system by providing opportunity to those who will take it and use it. Socialism, especially in its most extreme form of communism, has impoverished people everywhere it has held power. Only the gangsters at the top of the party benefitted.
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‘The Mind of Mr Putin’ by Pat Buchanan
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/the-mind-of-mr-putin/
By: Pat Buchanan | October 02, 2015
“Do you realize now what you have done?”
So Vladimir Putin in his U.N. address summarized his indictment of a U.S. foreign policy that has produced a series of disasters in the Middle East that we did not need the Russian leader to describe for us.
Fourteen years after we invaded Afghanistan, Afghan troops are once again fighting Taliban forces for control of Kunduz. Only 10,000 U.S. troops still in that ravaged country prevent the Taliban’s triumphal return to power.
A dozen years after George W. Bush invaded Iraq, ISIS occupies its second city, Mosul, controls its largest province, Anbar, and holds Anbar’s capital, Ramadi, as Baghdad turns away from us—to Tehran.
The cost to Iraqis of their “liberation”? A hundred thousand dead, half a million widows and fatherless children, millions gone from the country and, still, unending war.
How has Libya fared since we “liberated” that land? A failed state, it is torn apart by a civil war between an Islamist “Libya Dawn” in Tripoli and a Tobruk regime backed by Egypt’s dictator.
Then there is Yemen. Since March, when Houthi rebels chased a Saudi sock puppet from power, Riyadh, backed by U.S. ordinance and intel, has been bombing that poorest of nations in the Arab world.
Five thousand are dead and 25,000 wounded since March. And as the 25 million Yemeni depend on imports for food, which have been largely cut off, what is happening is described by one U.N. official as a “humanitarian catastrophe.”
“Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years,” said the international head of the Red Cross on his return.
On Monday, the wedding party of a Houthi fighter was struck by air-launched missiles with 130 guests dead. Did we help to produce that?
What does Putin see as the ideological root of these disasters?
“After the end of the Cold War, a single center of domination emerged in the world, and then those who found themselves at the top of the pyramid were tempted to think they were strong and exceptional, they knew better.”
Then, adopting policies “based on self-conceit and belief in one’s exceptionality and impunity,” this “single center of domination,” the United States, began to export “so-called democratic” revolutions.
How did it all turn out? Says Putin:
“An aggressive foreign interference has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions. . . . Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster. Nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life.”
Is Putin wrong in his depiction of what happened to the Middle East after we plunged in? Or does his summary of what American interventions have wrought echo the warnings made against them for years by American dissenters?
Putin concept of “state sovereignty” is this: “We are all different, and we should respect that. No one has to conform to a single development model that someone has once and for all recognized as the right one.”
The Soviet Union tried that way, said Putin, and failed. Now the Americans are trying the same thing, and they will reach the same end.
Unlike most U.N. speeches, Putin’s merits study. For he not only identifies the U.S. mindset that helped to produce the new world disorder, he identifies a primary cause of the emerging second Cold War.
To Putin, the West’s exploitation of its Cold War victory to move NATO onto Russia’s doorstep caused the visceral Russian recoil. The U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine that overthrew the elected pro-Russian government led straight to the violent reaction in the pro-Russian Donbas.
What Putin seems to be saying to us is this:
If America’s elites continue to assert their right to intervene in the internal affairs of nations, to make them conform to a U.S. ideal of what is a good society and legitimate government, then we are headed for endless conflict. And, one day, this will inevitably result in war, as more and more nations resist America’s moral imperialism.
Nations have a right to be themselves, Putin is saying.
They have the right to reflect in their institutions their own histories, beliefs, values and traditions, even if that results in what Americans regard as illiberal democracies or authoritarian capitalism or even Muslim theocracies.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Americans had no problem with this, when Americans accepted a diversity of regimes abroad. Indeed, a belief in nonintervention abroad was once the very cornerstone of American foreign policy.
Wednesday and Thursday, Putin's forces in Syria bombed the camps of U.S.-backed rebels seeking to overthrow Assad. Putin is sending a signal: Russia is willing to ride the escalator up to a collision with the United States to prevent us and our Sunni Arab and Turkish allies from dumping over Assad, which could bring ISIS to power in Damascus.
Perhaps it is time to climb down off our ideological high horse and start respecting the vital interests of other sovereign nations, even as we protect and defend our own.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority.
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/the-mind-of-mr-putin/
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Unfortunately, Pat Buchanan's understanding of the situation of Ukraine and the other former satellites of the Soviet Union is one that is based on Western ignorance.
Did the U.S. force NATO into those countries? Did those countries want to remain enslaved in the Soviet Union? Not at all. They wanted out and as the Soviet Union collapsed from within, they grabbed at the chance for independence.
Mr. Putin, Buchanan omits to say, wanted the Soviet Union to persist. He decried its dismemberment as the worst tragedy of the 20th century.
The elected pro-Russian president of Ukraine was brought into power precisely because he promised up and down that he would bring Ukraine into the EU. That is a fact.
Yanukovych was a murderer serving a life sentence when he was freed by order of the communist party which he served all his life.
As president, he lived as a despot, robbing the people and living better than any Tsar had ever lived. The uprising that led to his downfall came from the villages and towns in the first instance, including all the members of my extended family, many of whom lost their jobs as "national undesirables" because they travelled to Kyiv to protest against Yanukovych in the teeth of inclement weather.
Pat Buchanan appears to represent a type of "self-hating American." He is angered by the lack of leadership in Washington for the past twenty years or so. He is somewhat jealous of Russia that it has such a strong leader in the person of Vladimir Putin.
But his understanding of the plight of the enslaved peoples of the former USSR is that of a typical frustrated Western conservative.
Alex
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Just because I admire Bernie in this way does NOT mean that I am in agreement with his party or with democratic socialism or socialism and communism of any sort. Thank God! Yes indeed! But, Recluse, how is it that you are so anti-communist/anti-socialist (thank God!), and, at the same time, you are in favour of Putin? I'm asking not telling. The same Putin who said that the dismemberment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century and who also likened the body of Lenin to the relics of the Kyivan Caves Lavra? How does that work? Alex
Last edited by Orthodox Catholic; 10/15/15 10:23 PM.
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Capitalism worked for a while in America because of Protestant and English self-restraint. Both of those are gone.
I like Chesterton's sentiment that if capitalism is so great, why are there so few of them.
Though I considered myself Evelyn Waugh on the outside and George Orwell on the inside, I concede that capitalism has done more for the common good than any economic system that has feasibly been attempted. Distributism sounds nice, but it has never been a real system. Aspects of it, however, have thrived before capitalism got too global. One time a lot of people were small business owners and small farmers.
Sanders is the opposite end of the dissatisfaction spectrum from Trump. Socialism and anti-immigration are bad for America. They are products of static, European societies and their emergence demonstrate that America has become very static and income-segregated. European countries needed some kind of socialism to shake up their once rigid class systems. The US did not.
A question for our Canadian readers, of which I know there is at least one: Is gerrymandering the basis for allotting constituencies in Canada, or is there some other way? I think that is the main cause for bringing nutcases to the fore in our federal elections...or is this irrelevant in Canada because of proportional representation.
I know...totally unrelated to Eastern Christianity.
Last edited by Mark R; 10/15/15 09:57 PM. Reason: grammar, thoughts
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Dear Charles,
You hit the nail on the head (as per your usual).
The communism of the USSR was a form of gangster capitalism, its worst form.
There is a view that gangster capitalism persists in today's successor state to the USSR . . .
Alex
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Yes, this is relevant in Canada and it brings, shall we say, insufficient candidates to the fore during election campaigns(like the present one we are in).
And the leader of the Liberal party whose only real claim to fame is that he survived childbirth . . .
This IS relevant to Eastern Christianity as it involves spiritual and moral values.
And the Liberal party has decreed that anyone who is against abortion etc. cannot run as a candidate for it - while the leader is an avowed Catholic.
This is all highly relevant as a result.
Alex
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‘Putin concept of “state sovereignty” is this: “We are all different, and we should respect that. No one has to conform to a single development model that someone has once and for all recognized as the right one.” Contrary to what others on this forum may say.....I believe Buchanan is spot on!!! Thank you Alice.
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He is somewhat jealous of Russia that it has such a strong leader in the person of Vladimir Putin. I am somewhat jealous also. The weak leadership in America is very frustrating.
Last edited by Recluse; 10/16/15 10:59 AM.
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