A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Daniel
July 13th, 2012 - 17:55

Hi Chris, I met you in Kettle Creek State Park, in northern PA. I wish you safe tlvears and I will follow your journey through until the end. You be careful, know you are in my prayers and know that you have the courage the size of an elephant~~God Bless and Happy Trails Joyce (the lady who floated the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon) Oh, and by the way, the outfitter is Western River Expeditions Safe Travels

Carrie
July 15th, 2012 - 00:27

I think the politics of reesntment are very heavy in factions of both sides. And they by their nature tend to be very loud.It amuses me that the right with people like Limbaugh and O’Reilly who are forever the victims of victims of victims can discern no reesntment in this. But then again equally bitter factions of the left see only righteoud anger in their perpetual diatribes.I think most of us in balance think that we are fairly lucky, that despite many flaws our lives are wealthierm freer and with more opportunity than has existed throughout history.XML as for ideas on the left. Why are you here? The individuals that developed the net tended to be vague leftists with strong ideas of individual freedom and power. Their model for development was cooperative, a successful application of anarchy in which government, universities, corporations and others shared bandwidth, computer power, software and administrative functions.Indeed it rests on “open software” and rested on it before the term was formed.In conservative circles open software is bad, yet they use the net. They don’t use the propietary systems of companies like AOL or Compuserve.The founders of ebay were also vague leftists wishing to open markets to the people. These themes have certainly been a key part of a number of leftist ideologies ever since 1968 when Stewart Brand (the whole earth guy) assiste Engelbart in his demo of the first modern compuyer with mouse, fine grain linking etc. Also Wozniak and others of the Home Brew club considered themselves leftists when they started designing machines to bring computers to the people as opposed to being the monopoly of large institutions.I think you may be reading the concept of leftist rather narrowly. Certainly such people are not conservatives since they desire to unloose forces which wil threaten structurally mantained concentrations of private wealth and power.Much of the left does believe in the power of markets, it simply wishes to open them up. This is far more threatening to status quo wealth that government control since that can always be distorted through lobbyists etc.