Come on, guys. This abusive policing thing is important and all, but I want to hear more about how the Great Polish Empire defeated Alexander the Great only to be brought down by the evil machinations of Vatican clergy and the Holy Roman Empire. Just for a bit. Just to see how it feels.
Actually it's telling that he says the rot started with the Germans + Romans. I'm guessing he's saying the root cause of all western decadence is paganism and socialism, and capitalism and Christianity get a free pass. I avoided commenting until now, but you seem to have misunderstood him as blaming the Catholics. That's not what he did there. He's literally blaming the ancient Roman pagans for the problems today. Everything the catholic church did in between then and now gets an automatic free pass. After all 2000 years isn't enough time for the Church to fix the evil influence of the witches and Zeus followers. I guess the Christian Crusades and Inquisitions don't warrant a mention: Christianity is blameless there because there was that pagan sacrifice at the founding of Rome in 753 BC, and that excuses everything that happened later. So you got Church people murdering and torturing people for 1000 years, and they're trying to hold their hand back the whole time and going "look what you Pagans made me do!"
EDIT: as for this claim that "conservatives" are a venerable belief system. Which conservatives exactly? Free-market small-government rule-of-law capitalist freedom-of-religion conservatives ? Those didn't exist before extremely recently in history. Traditional conservatives believed in a divinely ordained hereditary dictator who owned everything and ruled with absolute and arbitrary authority and enforced the state religion through pain of death. A hereditary autocratic theocracy with a planned economy, basically. That's traditional conservatism. They espoused not only a big government but just about the biggest government possible: a god-king-dictator.
Conservatives actually fought tooth and nails against the rise of liberalism and the free market. It was only once secular liberal ideology along with free market reforms became entrenched, along with the massive growth of wealth this entailed, that conservatives jumped on the "free market" bandwagon. Conservatives, by definition, are the people who think
every new idea is terrible, and someone else who isn't them has to push those ideas through. Then, conservatives automatically jump on the bandwagon of whatever ideas stick and become popular, going so far as to claim that that's what they "stand for". They don't "stand for" jack shit. Modern conservatism can be summed as as "when I was a kid, this is how things were, and they can
never change". Which isn't a principled or objective ideology in any way shape or form. Conservatives, by definition, never made anything new of any value. They can generally iterate on a form someone else created but they generally don't create new forms. For example you have conservative rock and roll, but they're not the people who created rock and roll, they only jumped on that and made a "conservative" version once rock and roll became mainstream, now you have forms of rock and roll (such as most "country" music) which are "conservative" and "traditional". Actual conservatives of the day hated rock and roll.
EDIT: If we left it to conservatives the whole time, we'd still be in some cave somewhere wearing animal furs, and they'd be shaking their heads saying we shouldn't try any radical new inventions such as putting a stone tip on our sharpened stick. Oh, but that's a straw man, so we can't say that, right? Clearly an all-conservative history
would have invented plenty of stuff, and would have
extremely conveniently leveled off right at the level of the 1950s free-market capitalist American society without going a step further to the stuff that happened in the 1960s. (despite previous generations of conservatives being against virtually everything that could be said to have made up 1950s America). So, you can see, the argument that if only we'd been "always conservative" that development would have continued but "leveled off" at some specific point, without going any further to "unnecessary inventions" is ... total bullshit.
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Topic: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice (Read 444697 times)