Pacifism only works because someone else is doing the dirty work of violence for the pacifists, one way or another. Otherwise, there’s nothing you can accomplish with the beliefs of pacifism. You can’t redistribute wealth because you can’t make the people that have wealth give it up to you. And you can’t convince them either, or at least helen has not provided any convincing arguments for why people with money should subsidize the groups she prefers. Certainly individuals like Warren Harding and George Soros, with an operative guilt complex, have an internal motivation to spend their wealth and make it trickle down, but those people are not typical of the majority of well to do in this country.

Human beings want things. And there’s nothing that a single human being wants, that can be achieved through pacifism. Even the indirect and passive use of government power is predicated upon violence, the threat of violence, and the fear of it.

This is a reality that is not recognized of course. Which is where doublethink comes in. You don’t recognize it when you don’t need to and you will recognize it when you do need to. A light explanation for how social revolutionaries are against the violence in Iraq but favor violence used to further revolutionary causes.

And I guess one point that I didn’t state very clearly is that you may not agree with the redistribution of wealth, but you chose the word “steal” for its connotative rather than ts denotative meanings. Is that the teacher or the lawyer speaking? Dare I say, we all know that poor people who get “money somebody else earned in our present (capitalistic) society” are not holding someone at gunpoint.

let me get this straight with some logic.

The poor people here refuse to look at life from the underside, but rich boy Kennedy and intellectually empowered professors are the ones looking at life from the underside… who do you think you are kidding here.

Personally, those for achieving the maximum potential of humanity are the progressives; those seeking to mire humanity in the pit of misery by shackling individuals to the age old aristocratic bonds held by corrupt and foolish people like Ted Kennedy, are the ones maintaining the status quo of human suffering.

What makes you think they believe these institutions allowed America to become the most powerful and prosperous nation on earth, Don? They don’t think that. They think the opposite. Which is how they justify destroying those institutions.

Until you understand that they don’t see America as a good thing at all, Don, you won’t really be able to predict what their views about american institutions are.

and yet I say, just as every chain is only as strong as the weakest link, a nation is only as powerful as its weakest citizen, as prosperous as its poorest, and as decent and moral as its empty jails.

See? Helen wrote that after I completed my first respose to you, Don, and I read it afterwards as well. But that’s just simply another example of how things are.

The rich cannot stand the idea of equality.

Robert KKK Byrd, Ted Splash Kennedy, John Fracking Kerry, T Heinz, Al Gore, Soros, and all the other folks making the big bucks cannot stand the idea of equality. So what is your point, helen? Are you going to get rid of those folks? I don’t think so.

When we judge people and categorize them by numbers, won’t some always be at the bottom?

Did someone apoint you to the level of omnipotent deity, helen. Because humans have always operated under a hierarchy, and only a god could change that reality. Somebody will always be at the bottom. That is what a hierarchy means.

And a good bit of its logic, too.

Coming from someone that believes in passion and never prefers the use of formal logic in debates, that’s a little bit farfetched don’t you think.

Passion is superior to logic, so why would the loss of logic be any detriment against America?

Sadly, HelenL, I detect a very strong undercurrent of resentment and envy in your post that weaves into your obsession with perceived “racism” (why, HelenL…what sad notes in your past have nurtured these obsessions?). Your caricatures of “the rich”, the source of their wealth, their motivations and how they think are very peculiar, to put it kindly. To paraphrase another savant - why do you think that your own personal life would be improved if you could simply by a whisk of your wand make all “rich” people disappear? If you wallow in envy and resentment, you will never be happy.