“We are socialists…we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions"

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BonoVoxSupastar said:
What's even funnier about Macs comparisons is that Peter Singer was Jewish.
He's "Jewish" in name only. He claimes to be a holocaust survivor, yet he advocates some of the most radical atrocities committed by the Nazis.

He's clearly against the idea that mankind is above animals. By no means is he a religious Jew.
 
Axver said:
Wow, you clearly have no clue about the writings of Karl Marx, do you?
As mentioned before, Hitler put his own spin on socialism, and was opposed to some Marxist ideas, which led him to ban Marxist literature.
 
INDY500 said:
It's a bit more complicated than that. She was a proponent of Eugenics which has as it's goal "to prevent the multiplication of bad stocks." She referred to immigrants and the poor as "human weeds" with "inferior genetic material" and favored sterilization to prevent "the propagation of those physically, mentally and socially inadequate."

It was the height of the modernist era, so it is not all that surprising that Sanger held views that we would find today to be outdated and offensive. Try and find a Westerner back then who *didn't* think that his/her civilization was "superior," while all foreigners were "savages." These kind of arrogant attitudes were an outgrowth of colonialism, and we have to remember that it was another 25 years or so until the end of WWII, where we collectively learned the folly of eugenics, and another 40 years until colonialism completely crashed and minority civil rights became an acceptable cause. Indeed, Sanger, herself, openly condemned the anti-Semitic Nazism as "sad and horrible."

This is not to defend her controversial opinions (which also included an outdated, pre-Freudian view on sexuality, which she viewed as a weakness to be overcome). This is just meant to put them into a larger context, and the most important thing to realize is that her opinions on eugenics and foreigners were just that: opinions. She did not create a targeted program to sterilize undesirable people, and while she held opinions that are tremendously racist by any standard, Sanger also did work with minorities that earned the respect of black civil rights leaders of the time.

There's a paragraph in Wikipedia that I think sums her up well:

Sanger remains a controversial figure. While she is widely credited as a leader of the modern birth control movement, and remains an iconic figure for the American reproductive rights movements, she also is reviled by some who condemn her as "an abortion advocate" (perhaps unfairly so: abortion was illegal during Sanger's lifetime and Planned Parenthood did not then support the procedure or lobby for its legalisation). Groups opposed to Planned Parenthood and/or legalized abortion have frequently targeted Sanger for her views, attributing her efforts to promote birth control to a desire to "purify" the human race through eugenics, and even to eliminate minority races by placing birth control clinics in minority neighborhoods. For this reason, Sanger is often quoted selectively or out of context by detractors (a practice known as quote mining), and her history and involvement with socialism and eugenics have often been rationalized or even ignored by her defenders and biographers (a practice known as spin doctoring). Despite the allegations of racism, Sanger's work with minorities earned the respect of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. In their biographical article about Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood notes:

"In 1930, Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Harlem that sought to enlist support for contraceptive use and to bring the benefits of family planning to women who were denied access to their city's health and social services. Staffed by a black physician and black social worker, the clinic was endorsed by The Amsterdam News (the powerful local newspaper), the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Urban League, and the black community's elder statesman, W.E.B. DuBois."

Although Sanger's views on abortion (like many of her opinions) changed throughout the course of her life, in her early years she was acutely aware of the problem of abortion, typically self-induced or with the aid of a midwife. Her opposition to abortion stemmed primarily from a concern for the dangers to the mother, and less so from legal concerns or the welfare of the unborn child. She wrote in a 1916 edition of Family Limitation, "no one can doubt that there are times when an abortion is justifiable," though she framed this in the context of her birth control advocacy, adding that "abortions will become unnecessary when care is taken to prevent conception. (Care is) the only cure for abortions." Sanger consistently regarded birth control and abortion as the responsibility and burden first and foremost of women, and as matters of law, medicine and public policy second.

Her larger legacy, by any stretch of the imagination, was pushing for the acceptance of contraception (not to be confused with abortion) and family planning, which most reasonable people today would view as a good thing. The old days of women having as many children as her husband wanted are over. Likewise, every couple that wants to have sex for pleasure, without the fear of conceiving an unwanted child, have Sanger's work to thank.

Melon
 
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This thread has several posts that are crossing the personal attack line or close to it. If the discussion can't continue without further sneering and ridicule it will be closed.
 
I don't see the folly of eugenics, I see the evil of mandatory programs of removing people from the gene pool but to strive towards a more powerful form of humanity and electing that path is a legitimate pursuit to this day, transhumanism is the future and it should be embraced.

As to the issues of Nazism and the right it depends on the definitions that are used for your left-right dichotomy; I would put Nazism and Communism as the end members of a statist side diametrically opposed to an anarcho-capitalist on the other. In the middle ground the social democracies fall on soft statist and the more laizzes faire on the soft anarchist.

As far as excercising control over the population then freedoms must be divided into categories, for instance

social
economic
political

And then ranking within those, I do not consider so-called right-wing groups who are in support of government funding for faith based inititatives, censorship of programming and making social liberties illegal to be on an anarchy side, in fact they are quite statist.

Likewise the types of progressives who support gun control, smoking bans, junk-food advertising bans or disincentives and anti-free speech measures such as hate speech laws are not pro-individual freedom and fall about the same place as the socially conservative statist.

The nut philosophies on the anarchist side would include socialist libertarianism and anarcho-communism even though they are philisophically divided from anarcho-capitalism.

In conclusion Nazism is an extreme leftism if we define left and right as a function of state control over individual liberties. That linear designation of left and right is unpallatable to many and it cannot reconcile with the terminology that is used in everyday descriptions of politcs. If it is used then the "right" is not going to be the reactionary and domineering statists, but it is moot because the arguments and class of thought must be justified on the basis of evidence.
 
A_Wanderer said:
As to the issues of Nazism and the right it depends on the definitions that are used for your left-right dichotomy.
:yes:

A_Wanderer said:
And then ranking within those, I do not consider so-called right-wing groups who are in support of government funding for faith based inititatives, censorship of programming and making social liberties illegal to be on an anarchy side, in fact they are quite statist.
These are ways in which the right-wing has bargained for the use of government, and this is correct.

A_Wanderer said:
Likewise the types of progressives who support gun control, smoking bans, junk-food advertising bans or disincentives and anti-free speech measures such as hate speech laws are not pro-individual freedom and fall about the same place as the socially conservative statist.
This goes without mentioning population control, high taxes, economic redistribution, and the suppression of religion to private citizens, legislative opposition towards private, home, and charter schools, but yes these are some examples of how the left dictates an agenda through the use of government.

If for whatever reason one believes that there is much more freedom on the left, and freedom alone defines left and right, while ignoring socialist policies and religious suppression, we somehow arrive at the conclusion that the National Socialist German Worker's Party was somehow in alignment with the right.

Of course it would take more than a few historical revisionists to enforce that conclusion.
 
Religious supression is different from secularism, it is about the nature of government and where they derive their authority. The state should not sanction from religious authorities and the religious authorities should never become the state; the only way to guarantee and protect freeom of religion and concience is to keep the two seperated, America has never had to suffer the horrors of the state church.

Keeping religion an issue of individual choice does not entail burning down churches or executing believers, it merely protects other members of the club that is called your country from endorsing beliefs that they do not hold true.

The only way to fully resolve any argument about the state education system would be to abolish it completely.

The only real freedom is the freedom to make the stupid choice.
 
A_Wanderer said:
Religious supression is different from secularism, it is about the nature of government and where they derive their authority. The state should not sanction from religious authorities and the religious authorities should never become the state; the only way to guarantee and protect freeom of religion and concience is to keep the two seperated, America has never had to suffer the horrors of the state church.

Keeping religion an issue of individual choice does not entail burning down churches or executing believers, it merely protects other members of the club that is called your country from endorsing beliefs that they do not hold true.

The only way to fully resolve any argument about the state education system would be to abolish it completely.
On the basis of morality, many religious principles are accepted in our society. However, on the basis of the sciences, for example, atheism is the norm of which is taught in our public schools. I find it very difficult to separate atheism and secularism on this subject, because Darwinism is the only belief that is being taught, while a significant fraction of the population believes that the universe did not emerge by chance. Much of the blame could be made on the church itself, for it never offers a logical explanation of how religious texts can be used to explain anything but the knowledge of good and evil. There are those who see the Bible as not only a moral compass, but a contending idea of history, biology, geology, etc. I'm not one for removing Darwinism from our schools. However, a logical argument could also be presented in defense of intelligent design, and would be nice to see. Instead, our public schools serve as a state-sponsored form of atheism, in which alternative views are not tolerated in the classroom.

The only real freedom is the freedom to make the stupid choice.
I agree, and I support individualist concepts when they do much more to serve society rather than to harm it. I do however see great harm in absolute individualism that violates cultural standards and threatens our national security. Rather than let a child stick his hands on a burning oven, there are times when it is appropriate to childproof the home.
 
yolland said:
This thread has several posts that are crossing the personal attack line or close to it. If the discussion can't continue without further sneering and ridicule it will be closed.
 
Macfistowannabe said:
However, on the basis of the sciences, for example, atheism is the norm of which is taught in our public schools. I find it very difficult to separate atheism and secularism on this subject, because Darwinism is the only belief that is being taught, while a significant fraction of the population believes that the universe did not emerge by chance. Much of the blame could be made on the church itself, for it never offers a logical explanation of how religious texts can be used to explain anything but the knowledge of good and evil. There are those who see the Bible as not only a moral compass, but a contending idea of history, biology, geology, etc. I'm not one for removing Darwinism from our schools. However, a logical argument could also be presented in defense of intelligent design, and would be nice to see. Instead, our public schools serve as a state-sponsored form of atheism, in which alternative views are not tolerated in the classroom.


This really reeks of "playing the victim". Very much like the "Statue" thread, I'm sorry many can't differenciate between secularism and atheism, but you know what, that their fault and no one elses. Not once I have I heard of a public school teaching that God didn't exist. Not once.
 
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