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right wing or left wing? i liked this post from my brother, particularly the poster. the comments caused me to take a look into the definitions and ideas of “winged” politics as told by wikipedia. as a conservative, i didn’t really like what i read.

in general the article does a good job comparing and contrasting the two sides and then summarizing the history and present condition of the two view-points. however there is one particular issue that i would like to address and critique.

of all the terminology of the article (written and edited by many, many people), the most unsettling and uneven comparison of the two ideologies is this: right-wingers are “conservativism” while left-wingers are “innovation“. i cringe just typing it.

my first reaction simply is that the words are not equal. an exaggerated example might be that when comparing apples to oranges one says, “the skin of an orange is orange” and then, “the skin of an apple is tasty“. even in clicking through to the provided links, the two articles themselves are not even comparable. the article for innovation is a thorough definition of the word with an array of examples. please note there are no references in this article to the left-wing. on the other hand the article for conservatism is appropriately an article on the definition, spectrum, and ideology of the political theory of conservatism.

why in the world would the left-wing get the dubious title of innovative? i have no idea. if someone could name more than 5 things that the left-wing has innovated in the government in the past 5 years, they would be hard-pressed to do so.

liberalism to me would be a more equivalent term to apply in this case. however when reading the article, it is apparent that it is only talking about global liberalism tendencies and certainly not american liberalism. i need only to quote this line from the second paragraph of the article: “Broadly speaking, liberalism emphasizes individual rights and equality of opportunity.” HAHAHAHAHAHA, maybe this is an accurate definition worldwide, but it certainly doesn’t describe the mommy-state, socialist agenda of the american-left. so by my own reasoning, i have yet to find a term that appropriately compares the american right to the american left in terms of polictical ideology. not to mention the fact the liberalism described in the article directly contradicts the left wing ideas presented in the right-left wing article. i must find a more accurate term for comparison.

i thusly would change “innovation” to “social liberalism” and not feel bad about it at all. if i were feeling saucy, i would just change it to socialism. but i discourage wiki-vandalism.

taking a cue from my brother’s site i’ve decided to ditch the rss feeds for the day and take you on a free-wheelin’ walk through wikipedia.

after a long conversation with my brother and a friend regarding whether there was a difference between racism and prejudism, i decided i wanted to write some thoughts down and do a little light research. prejudism wasn’t actually listed in wikipedia and isn’t in the spell-checker for firefox, so i’m tempted to think that adding the -ism to prejudice isn’t actually possible and doesn’t actually exist. however, a google search of prejudism returned a wealth of information that i just ignored.<!–more–>

i’m guessing that prejudice is a pretty serious topic on wikipedia as it contains a tag warning about original research or unverified claims (meaning that someone is posting their research on wikipedia before publishing it, or they just aren’t researching at all and putting in opinions-as-fact). at any rate upon reading the first paragraph i was thoroughly disappointed in a mediocre fashion as it immediately dispelled my original assertions that prejudice was not racism, rather it was an unreasonable belief of a person before actually knowing them.

prejudice is then part of a much larger section of articles under the heading of discrimination. therefore prejudice and racism are both related to each other and to the idea of discrimination. but my essential assertion remains: prejudice is not necessarily racism, though it can be and racism is always prejudice. for example, a person may have an experience where a person of blue skin color approaches them and bites their finger. from that point the person has a prejudice in their mind against all people with blue skin, thinking that because one person with blue skin bite their finger, all blue-skinned people will bite their finger. this is not unreasonable to the bitten person, but would generally be known to be unreasonable if normal blue-skinned people were actually very timid and would not ever under any normal circumstances bite another person’s finger. the bitten person would be prejudiced against blue-skinned people up until the point where that prejudice was challenged by a non-finger-biting blue-skinned person. at that point when the bitten person realizes that not all blue-skinned people bite fingers the bitten person has a choice. they may choose to ignore the new development and continue on toward racist actions - actions based solely on a now invalidated exerience - or the person may re-evaluate their original prejudices of blue-skinned peoples and continue in a healthy mental and emotional relationship with blue-skinned people. but i digress.

in my hunger for understanding the world’s observations and understanding of prejudice i continued down to the “see also” section where the link for allophilia stood out to me.

allophilia is defined by wikipedia as the direct opposite of negative prejudices. i don’t really have any thoughtful comments about this except that the image sums up the article using only a fraction of the words as the article uses.

onward i went to see what phallocentrism was. i clicked the link with some trepidation as my gutter-mind-tendencies led me to believe that this word was based on the word phallic. i was right, but the idea is not un-appropriate for work. phallocentrism has to do with the importance of a man’s phallus when constructing meaning.

my next click took me to neologism. a neologism is a new word, like scrumtrilescent or fantabulous. although in the article they describe the more noble uses of a neologism, such as to describe new ideas or concepts that have gained new cultural importance.

port-manteaux is mentioned in this article, which is also the name of one of my girlfriend’s websites. it is not currently working, i don’t know why, but i guess i’ll have to figure it out and try and fix it.
with that i feel that this post has come full circle, so i will leave you faithful readers with this.

Now with 10%(est.) more wikipedia links!

Zogby polls has a poll up about which president hopeful people would NEVER vote for. Since I’m a Ron Paul fan I couldn’t help but notice that despite the fact that he’s largely ignored in the popular media/mainstream media, he’s managed to be marked as one of the top blackballed candidates. Now I know that his conservative (libertarian) views on abolishing the income tax are extreme, but really, the income tax has been found to be unconstitutional before. In my mind that makes him more viable than crazy. Though I’m not really sure how convinced I am about the reverse psychology of the whole “Who would you NEVER vote for” thing. And obviously the idea that the government really shouldn’t be involved in the private sector is extreme according to the mainstream media, even though one of the main purposes of the constitution was to protect the private citizen from the government itself. So yes, the government should protect us from outside invaders, inside attackers, and general evil-doers, but it should not “parent” us. But my question is this: Have we earned our freedom? Have we the American people essentially voted away our freedom and rights so that we could have State-run-and-paid-for health insurance? I say we have. And as such we have ignored our responsibilities and thus squandered our rights so that we actually deserve a government that will not leave us to be free from annoying bureaucratic annoyances. <–Rant…

Resistance or Insurgency? Civil War or Revolution? Revolution or Rebellion? This can only be an article of varying viewpoints. Throughout history largely the victors (or moral right in some cases) have been able to name the war as either being a revolution, rebellion, civil war.

Hello October! No posts for this serial, but I have started tumbling, or collecting all of my various data feeds into one blog. it’s etherealnation.tumblr.com. Check it out and subscribe to it. It’s information overload, trust me.