Tag Archives | Right-Wing

Are Your Values Right or Left? The Answer Is More Literal Than You Think

By on April 16, 2011 in News 5
Drawing Hands

M.C. Escher, "Drawing Hands", 1948.

ScienceDaily reports:

Up equals good, happy, optimistic; down the opposite. Right is honest and trustworthy. Left, not so much. That’s what language and culture tell us. “We use mental metaphors to structure our thinking about abstract things,” says psychologist Daniel Casasanto, “One of those metaphors is space.”But we don’t all think right is right, Casasanto has found. Rather, “people associate goodness with the side they can act more fluently on.” Right-handed people prefer the product, job applicant, or extraterrestrial positioned to their right. Lefties march to a left-handed drummer. And those linguistic tropes? They probably “enshrine the preferences of the right-handed majority.”

Casasanto, of The New School for Social Research, and Evangelia G. Chrysikou, of the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to find the causes of these correlations. Does motor experience “give rise to these preferences, or are they hardwired in the brain?” If the former, “how flexible are these preferences?

… Read the rest

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Corporations Versus Individuals: The End of the Left/Right Paradigm

By on March 3, 2011 in News 181
Nolan chart. Source: Camilo Sanchez (CC)

Nolan chart. Source: Camilo Sanchez (CC)

Looks like the New World Order isn’t going to be a global Big Socialist Government (unless, perhaps, you count corporate socialism). Barry Ritholtz wrote in September of last year:

Every generation or so, a major secular shift takes place that shakes up the existing paradigm. It happens in industry, finance, literature, sports, manufacturing, technology, entertainment, travel, communication, etc.

I would like to discuss the paradigm shift that is occurring in politics.

For a long time, American politics has been defined by a Left/Right dynamic. It was Liberals versus Conservatives on a variety of issues. Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice, Tax Cuts vs. More Spending, Pro-War vs Peaceniks, Environmental Protections vs. Economic Growth, Pro-Union vs. Union-Free, Gay Marriage vs. Family Values, School Choice vs. Public Schools, Regulation vs. Free Markets.

The new dynamic, however, has moved past the old Left Right paradigm. We now live in an era defined by increasing Corporate influence and authority over the individual.

… Read the rest

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David Brock on Hardball: “Glenn Beck Himself Has Been Responsible For Three Thwarted Assassination Attempts This Year.”

By on January 13, 2011 in News 14

In a segment on Sarah Palin’s continuing profitable martyrdom, Media Matters’ David Brock told Chris Matthews that Glenn Beck has inspired assassination attempts.  Here’s the clip:

And here’s the transcript of the exchange:

MATTHEWS: I think we used to say, maybe back in the Churchillian age, your voice was your power, your ability to speak up. That’s certainly Norman Rockwell’s notion, the man, you know — the standing up at a meeting, at a public meeting and saying, “Here’s what I believe.” But, now, it’s standing up with your arms, standing up with your ammo, your gun sites, your bull’s eye…

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Sarah Palin Calls Criticism “Blood Libel”

By on January 12, 2011 in News 44

Sarah Palin has posted a video statement about the shootings in Arizona by Jared Loughner, entitled “America’s Enduring Strength,” on her new Vimeo Channel. She accuses journalists of a “Blood Libel” against her, calling it “reprehensible”:

[UPDATE from disinfo ed.: Presumably realizing how awful she sounds, Mrs. Palin has since made the Vimeo stream "private" so we have replaced it with a YouTube stream, but don't be surprised if she has it taken down.]

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Is Wisconsin the Epicenter of an American Death Cult?* Part I

By on November 26, 2010 in News 6

Did Jack Torrance stumble upon a truth much deeper and more primal than he knew when he wrote, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”? My girlfriend seemed to say as much a couple of weeks back and subsequent events in Winnebago County, Wisconsin lead me to believe that she just may have a point.

Pentagram pt IIIAviva kicked me out. Said I was “no fucking fun anymore” since I started crusading against the Brylcreem Brigade1 and their weird rhetorical war on the middle class and just plain common sense. “Goddamn it, Liam, it was funny at first, but it’s getting old. Now you’re starting to sound more like my econ professor than the writer I thought I was living with.”

I guess I could see where she was coming from. When we’d met at a mutual friend’s holiday party last December I was riding high on the crest of a fresh wave of creativity. I couldn’t stop blabbing about this novel I’d planned to write. It was a Kabbalistic parody of contemporary American religious culture centering on a cabal of ambitious up-and-coming angels who set up to hit God’s target numbers of human souls by dealing in volume rather than quality….

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The Return of Doctor Weird and the “Laugher Curve”

By on November 7, 2010 in News 14
Laffer Curve

Laffer Curve drawn by Vanessaezekowitz (CC).

With millionaire dilettante Ron Johnson confirmed as Wisconsin’s senator elect to the government his own Tea Party professes to disdain, it’s a sure bet we’re gonna be bombarded with a lot of blather about how tax cuts for corporations and the uber-rich are supposed to magically improve employment and erase deficits.  Which is utter batshit lunacy.  But don’t take my word for it — run the numbers yourself.  All within the linked workbook “Laffer Curve Analysis v1″.

Midterms are over; here begineth the real shitstorm: the struggle against Right Wing corporatists and faux populists trying to complete their destruction of the United States.

No, that’s not just the Wild Turkey talking. Haven’t touched the stuff for the better part of a week now.  And though the night terror visions of President Palin’s Interior Secretary Don Blankenship leasing the floor of the House to BP for fracking natural gas and Treasury Secretary Richard Rahn outsourcing the federal minting operations to China have subsided, the daytime terror visions have only grown in intensity.… Read the rest

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Notes Toward a New Political Taxonomy

By on September 6, 2010 in News 2

Noah Millman writes for the American Scene:

It has become clear to me over the years that one of the causes of persistent confusion in our political arguments is the interchangeable use of taxonomic terms that, while they may have a natural affinity, are not actually synonyms.

Three terms that tend to get used interchangeably are:

Left / Liberal / Progressive

Their counterparts on the other side of the political spectrum are treated similarly:

Right / Conservative / Reactionary

The shades of difference among the meanings of the words within the triads, however, are not minor. One can very well be extremely right-wing without being a reactionary in any meaningful sense — think of Ayn Rand. One can be extremely left-wing without being a liberal in any meaningful sense — think of Lenin.

I propose, therefore, to accentuate the differences between the words commonly lumped together, to clear up all ambiguities by assigning technical meanings to commonly-used terms, and thereby define a three-dimensional space within which political writers and thinkers could more clearly be pegged.

… Read the rest

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Is There Anyone The Right Doesn’t Hate?

By on August 18, 2010 in News 24

Rex Nutting poses the question for Marketwatch:

Whenever America faces her toughest challenges, you can always count on the right to be there.

Sowing hate, stoking fear.

So it’s no surprise that in the midst of a great economic catastrophe, the right would search for scapegoats instead of answers.

And so we have the fabricated crisis of the “Mosque at Ground Zero.”

Leave aside the fact that it’s not a mosque and it’s not at Ground Zero. This is really about hate and fear, the right’s old friends.

For the last 45 years, at least, no matter who the Republican candidate has been, hate and fear were really at the top of the ticket.

Recall that in 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency by stoking fear of Negroes and hippies. The vaunted Southern Strategy of the Republican Party was at its core a campaign of fear. What a ride it’s had.

… Read the rest

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America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution

By on August 6, 2010 in News 3

This 12,000-word essay by Angelo Codevilla, “The Ruling Class–And the Perils of Revolution,” published in the conservative magazine American Spectator, has been so popular that Al Regnery is getting back into publishing to turn it into a full-length book (Regnery founded but no longer runs his eponymous and very successful right wing political imprint).

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America.

… Read the rest

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Right-Wing Blog Watch: Alternative Right

By on May 28, 2010 in News 26

From Nick Pell at Red Star Times

Welcome to a new feature on Red Star Times, right-wing blog watch. I am introducing this feature for the sake of keeping a close eye on right-wing blogs, ranging from hardline conservative to outright fascist. My first subject of study is Alternative Right, a particularly noxious website that brands itself as “radical traditionalist.” For those who aren’t familiar with the term, radical traditionalist is a term used by hipsters, goths and faux-erudite who espouse fascist ideology but want a term with more intellectual cache.

Radical traditionalist favorites include Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist. Associated (allegedly) political movements include Eurasianism, metapolitics, third positionism and national anarchism. Alternative right is an exemplar of radical traditionalism and fascism in as much as it begins with hatred of minorities, women and the working class and proceeds to construct a bizarre mish-mash of gobbledygook as “ideology” after the fact.… Read the rest

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