Origins of Right Wing Consciousness and the Closed Mind

In my previous post I basically made a strongly negative appraisal of the Postmodern Left and Right, and praised the candidacy of Barak Obama is a sign of hope in rising above the Left and Right. I praised both political centrism and a minority representing its rise.

I posted the same blog entry to Craigslist Philosophy Forum. I got several nonsensical replies (which is the CL way of replying with a negative vote), and also got one reply that is on display here for some analysis (please post comments). Here it is:

Subject: PC Username:Bill_F_Buckley Time: 02/28 23:25:41

Centrism, like it's a good thing. my a**.

Tie goes to the government? sh**

our nation was founded on individual rights, not the rights of the government.

the postmodern age has confused rights of the criminal with rights of the individual. it is this cockeyed structure that creates a system biased in favor of the lawbreaking citizen at the expense of the law abiding citizen.

all other rights are abdicated to the government.

bullshit. Obama is not centrist, the hope that postmodern centrism is going to provide some sort of political balance is naive.

until the founding father's radical empowerment of the individual is recognized as the philosophy behind the founding of this country, conservatives will be at odds with the center and left.

thats what you commie f**** don't get.

After my decade of deeply embedded activity on the Left I thought my pro-centrism on this blog was sort of....right-wing. Then this CL poster gives a good expression of the true right-wing. "The postmodern age has confused rights of the criminal with rights of the individual. it is this cockeyed structure that creates a system biased in favor of the lawbreaking citizen at the expense of the law abiding citizen". I charge this is a half-truth that enables another wrong. I think the statement is true of the Postmodern Left, that they more often fight for the criminal because he/she is an individual, rather than than fighting for the individual's right to the pursuit of happiness ( which is bounded within both not being a criminal and not being a victim of crime). But notice the CL poster's hatred of government? Why? Because the Postmodern Right has their own class of criminals they are trying to defend and keep from behind bars.

The USA now has the dystopic distinction of having 1 in 100 citizens behind bars. The Postmodern Left encouraged the pursuit of life as a criminal, and the Postmodern Right encouraged the ruination of the same people's lives through poverty and incarceration. This is a formula for exponential unhappiness in middle to lower class society.

Their are signs of hope. Barak Obama represents them. Also, I noticed this news story, and within its semiotics is an instance of the right thing. In the story minorities physically stopped a fugitive, tying him up for the police to pick up. Chinese community catches America's Most Wanted fugitive.

Evaluations and Corrections

This is a critique of the US criminal management system. Specifically, how we manage people after our jurisprudence process has deemed them guilty within a crime case.

The subsystem of psychological/character evaluation and rehabilitation needs deletion. It is essentially religious, even if the professional apparatus have masked their ideological origins with faux secularism.

A secular governmental apparatus should not be asking questions about criminal's character development. Character evaluations are for choices of personal/business affiliation. A large impersonal system making a predictive statement about one person's internal mental landscape is a case of two moving targets aiming at each other. The "corrections system" and the person's psyche are both too complex to completely map, and both manipulate the other in real time. An objective statement about "what is really going on" is empirically impossible ( except, ironically, this statement itself ) .

Locally, a person who had been convicted of numerous crimes and deemed criminally insane was under close supervision but not incarcerated, he stabbed a 31 year old woman to death in a random improvised act on December 31, 2007 ^{story here}. In another developing local story, a person found guilty of murder was also deemed clinically insane. He is being psychologically rehabilitated in order to stand trial and face punishment.

If humans were to meet and exchange cultural information with aliens from outer space, would we tell them these dark stories?