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i had forgotten about this thread until just now, and am amazed----this last exhange is entirely is nuts----you are making arguments for limiting the franchise arbitrarily--worse than that, you are indulging rhetoric to justify it on the order of "parasites", "freeloaders", even going so far as to say that people without whatever arbitrary standard you are invoking to define your fantasy of self-reliance have "no committment to the nation"etc.--all of which that sounds really uncomfortably like a elements in some dressed-up fascist tirade--this way of defining a petit bourgeois "us" as over against rootless "them" is dangerous--it echoes the kind of thinking that lead to the murder of 6 million "rootless cosmpolitans" during world war 2.
as if this is not already enough, you get even more ridiculous when you talk about the left---remember that the first group the fascists went after were people on the political left, those who could name what they were doing, those who could mobilize opposition---this kind of thinking has absolutely nothing to do with democracy, even in its shallow american shadow-version.
however many its drawbacks, the existing order does tolerate dissent--people like you would eliminate that it seems, and then compound it by disempowering politically everyone who does not meet your arbitrary understanding of "self-reliance"---even if--against their own interests--they were to agree with you politically.
i certainly hope that you have not derived this kind of stuff from conventional conservative ideology--i hope that somewhere they lay other kinds of sources for it--because this is really not ok.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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