talkpolitics | The Right Wing's Idea of "Freedom"

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The Right Wing's Idea of "Freedom"

From Statepress:

Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.

‘I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,’ Lesko said. ‘So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.’

Jezebel points out that Arizona is an “at will” state. This means that bosses in Arizona will be able to fire women for being depraved enough to take birth control pills to prevent pregnancy.

As we all know, what made the Soviet Union infamous were not the gulags, its treatment of dissidents, and the rigid control over the press, but the fact that women could take pills for the purpose of contraception without fear of losing their jobs over it.

Yes, here it is -- the right wing's idea of "freedom" is a society where a woman has to ask her boss' permission to use oral contraceptives.

Does anyone else find this more than a little weird?

Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

he thinks that panel with all the men was about religious freedom.

Not think, but know.

in that blessedly singular BDJ way.

Reality and a significant segment of the voting public differ, but tilt away.

Reality agrees with me. The "significant segment of the voting public" might not, but it wouldn't be the first time.

If reality means a world where anarchism, fascism, Communism, and liberalism are all the same thing, where Bush's Administration never went to war with Iraq over WMDs, where totalitarian mass-murdering dictatorships and liberal democracies are moral equals, and where the Confederacy had nothing to do with slavery while the North allowing the South to butcher entire poor black towns was going to lead to freedom before the 40th Millennium, then yes, reality does agree with you.

I'd like you to cite the times I've claimed any of these things, please.

The one on Colin Powell:

http://talk-politics.livejournal.com/950003.html?thread=73692147#t73692147

The one on fascism, communism, and anarchism all being the same thing:

http://talk-politics.livejournal.com/1061509.html?thread=84849541#t84849541

But I'm sure this was someone using your account both these times and not you, as you seem to have a Goldfish issue.

The Colin Powell thing does not support your claim, or anyhting you've claimed.

The second part "all in the same ideological area" does not equal "all the same thing."

So you're 0/2. Try again or admit you're wrong and find something else to do.

As I said, I've no interest in debating someone too cowardly to stand up by his own posts. You know damned well what I said and what you said, but you don't have the capability to be honest enough to stand by your own words, or for that matter in all the time I've seen you "debate" anything approximating intellectual depth or honesty in the first place. I said that I did not want to get into this, and now this ends this rendition of funhouse logic. Sorry, I'm not going to play again the game of "But it's right here" "No it's not" "shows post" "talks about something completely different" "shows post again" rinse wash repeat.

This is me standing up exactly to what I've said. What I'm doing, specifically, is standing up against your continued distortions of what I've said.

As you're so far proving incapable of understanding what you read, perhaps you may want to refrain from attempting to tell anyone else what they're saying and instead worry about making yourself clear, hm?

No, this is you being the pretentious coward who doesn't have the spine to admit what you said. This is the exact thread where you made the "FDR is Stalin" claim”. To refresh your memory and see what lies come out about these posts, this is you and me, me in bold, you in italics.

I'm saying that Left wing politics as defined economically do not and never have existed in the United States.

FDR would like a word.

You mean the son of a patrician family who did everything he did to save capitalism and stave off Commie or Fascie revolution?

I mean the guy who's ideas were so far left that even Mussolini is said to have noted: “You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!”

Erm....I don't know what timeline you're posting that from, but fascism rose from the Freikorps, not the KPD, and spent much of its time destroying Communists and conservatives with a merry abandon. It's outside the Left-Right dichotomy altogether, which is not surprising, as Left-Right dates to the late 18th Century.

Sigh. That doesn't even come close to meaning anything.

It is this that led me to ask you this:

And just to be clear-is this stating that FDR and the New Deal was Stalinist, meaning the forcible collectivization of US farms, a massive military build-up, a secret police empowered to murder its way through everything it wanted to, a gigantic set of slave-labor camps that were the biggest employer in the system, and a system of centralized economic planning with mandated state quotas, and NKVD-led enforcement of said quotas. You are saying that this was the FDR Administration, am I correct?

To which you responded in the following fashion:

Pretty much. The only parts that aren't 100% accurate are the secret police and the slave-labor camps. I'm not sure the internment camps actually involved slave labor.

One more time-you are saying that FDR and Josef Stalin's leadership of the USA and USSR, respectively, were exactly the same?

To which you said this:

Not exactly, but more similar than you're willing to admit.

Now, a repeat. I said this:

And just to be clear-is this stating that FDR and the New Deal was Stalinist, meaning the forcible collectivization of US farms, a massive military build-up, a secret police empowered to murder its way through everything it wanted to, a gigantic set of slave-labor camps that were the biggest employer in the system, and a system of centralized economic planning with mandated state quotas, and NKVD-led enforcement of said quotas. You are saying that this was the FDR Administration, am I correct?

And the only response you gave was this:

Pretty much. The only parts that aren't 100% accurate are the secret police and the slave-labor camps. I'm not sure the internment camps actually involved slave labor.

Now, when you said the only parts that weren't 100% accurate were the secret police and slave labor camps, let me repeat everything in bold you said was 100% accurate:

meaning the forcible collectivization of US farms, a massive military build-up and a system of centralized economic planning with mandated state quotas, and NKVD-led enforcement of said quotas.

When you tell the truth, physician, then you can tell me to be honest. Otherwise, people will keep returning to their lies like a dog returns to its sick.

Since you're just cutting and pasting, here's the exchange (http://talk-politics.livejournal.com/1061509.html?thread=84774021#t84774021).

Now, the part that you say:

meaning the forcible collectivization of US farms, a massive military build-up and a system of centralized economic planning with mandated state quotas, and NKVD-led enforcement of said quotas.

Now, what I said was that they're "more similar than you're willing to admit." Where does this leave the rest?

Forced collectivization of US farms? The Agricultural Adjustment Acts fill that void fine for me.

Massive military build up? Quite obvious, we couldn't have fought WW2 without it.

Centralized economic planning with mandated state quotas, enforced by the government? That's the New Deal in a nutshell.

This is akin to your constant inability to see the Jim Crow era as one in place due to legislation - that somehow the state is incapable of action.

I applaud you for actually backing up your claims about me, but it's unfortunate that you cannot actually understand what you're reading.

Forced collectivization in the USSR produced a country-wide deliberate famine, which in places like Ukraine and Kazakhstan verged into genocidal territory. The AAA did nothing of the sort, unless you're claiming FDR killed 10 million Americans and the Commie history writers wrote this out of the history books.

The massive military build-up only started before the war in the FDR Administration, we did not have anything of the sort into the fall of 1942. The USSR, by contrast, had the largest army in the world before WWII (and spent the first years of WWII showing why quantity minus quality is a handicap. Namely in that this huge army was saddled with obsolete weaponry, and that its leadership thanks to the Purges had no idea what it was doing.

Centralized planning is not the same as the New Deal, the Gosplan worked on a very different pattern. Namely that it literally specified to factories in Bumfuck, Siberia, to produce Quantity X or it'd be a bullet in the brain. The New Deal, by contrast, focused on public works and the establishment of a skeleton welfare state. Nowhere did FDR tell General Motors to make 200,000,000 automobiles or he'd ship them to die in interior Nevada. Stalin, by contrast, did this quite a bit and paid the price for it in 1939-42.

My inability to see that reflects reading on the Reconstruction era, and repeatedly raising points about the White League and Red Shirts and things like the Hamburg and Colfax Massacres you have never answered at any point, which leads me to the conclusion that you are either approving of said massacres by omission or you're selectively illiterate. Because I have brought them up to you in virtually all of these threads (saying virtually because it may not have been in alll of them and there has been deafening silence from you.

An addendum to that first point-from some statistics I've seen IIRC in Montefiore and other post-1991 sources the death toll in Kazakhstan was as much as 25% of the total population. Unless the AA killed a quarter of the population of an entire US state in peacetime then you indeed made mass murder the moral equal of FDR's Administration. And this is without factoring in the Holodomor. Unless the AA deliberately starved American farmers, you are indeed proclaiming mass murder is the equal of something it is not remotely akin to.

And now I predict you will in fact claim FDR *did* murder 10 million Americans through the New Deal in lieu of admitting you were wrong. Or alternately this will be another conversation to come up in the future because you'll claim your direct words meant nothing of what I'm responding to without ever saying what they do mean.

Dude don't bother, I'm still waiting for him to get back to me on how "large parts of The New Deal were dismantled before the war" (WWII).

Apparently he believes The New Deal never happened because legislation that was struck down in 1933 and then put back up in subsequent years in nearly the exact same form with some wording changes and upheld by the exact same SCOTUS "doesn't count".

Yeah, it happened in 1938/1939 after the second dip. I'm pretty sure I did get back to you on that.

actually, they happened before the second dip. In fact, they caused it.

A common myth, yes.

that they happened after the dip? Yes.

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