Conservative Political Forum

Seeing as how my article on Thomas Jefferson was ripped to shreds (by a couple of posters), I'm hoping I'll have more luck with this one, which features some fun facts on Teddy Roosevelt  :

--link removed by taxed -- we're not your research monkeys.

Let me know what you guys think. My aim was to do something that wouldn't be seen as partisan/controversial. Teddy is one of my favorite presidents, and I can't seem to learn enough about the guy.

There is also a line of argument pursued by Thomas Woods that Teddy ushered in the modern "imperial Presidency." Though a good argument can be made that Lincoln already laid that groundwork.

Corporations do want the state to protect their profits. That is certainly true. And anti-trust lawsuits are no exception to that rule

It's incredibly difficult - and usually unfair - to judge historical figures for what happens hundreds of years after they did something. 

No sane person could deny that abolishing slavery - in and of itself - was a noble and glorious achievement.  Unfortunately that eventually became transmogrified into the utterly insane and idiotic theological tenet that can only be coherently expressed as follows:  "The only way to ensure individual freedom is to cede ever more power to a monolithic central authority."

The pathologically stupid and monstrously evil people who proselytize that psychotic religion may yet succeed in their zealous quest to plunge the entire world into a dark age of universal subjugation.   But that is most definitely NOT Abraham Lincoln's fault... any more than it's James Madison's fault that "Progressive" liberals have spent the past century systematically transforming the most succinct marvel of concision ever penned into a Bizarro World inverse of itself.


I hate to seem overly-technical, but what corporations want is to protect is profits -- period.

The term for people who want the GOVERNMENT to protect the profits of select corporations is "Fascist."  And that applies equally whether those liberals are in boardrooms, in government office, or squatting in front of fire hydrants on Wall Street.

Excellent points all, except that none of that means anything whatsoever unless you can explain how YOU would have abolished slavery in Lincoln's stead.

Slavery was absolutely vital to the existence of every civilization in human hisotry.  But in America - the indisputable beacon of world freedom - it had finally outlived its necessity decades earlier.  Unfortunately, the southern states dug in their heels and were absolutely adamant about the issue.

I don't mean this at all facetiously.  I would dearly love to know how that transition might have been accomplished in a way that would have avoided violence and - there is no way to over-emphasize this - the contemporaneously HYPOTHETICAL loss of future liberties.

I had to look that up.  Thanks for wasting my time, btw.   I PERSONALLY had been using that phrase to describe the same effect for at least a couple of decades before this dufus "coined" it. 

You can take comfort in the fact that I'm only a very tiny bit annoyed by that.  But it's safe to say that Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, were they alive to post here, would have a right to be infinitely more so.

What's "foundational" to the American anti-trust movement at the turn of the twentieth century is also foundational to a then-potentially viable economic theory that only LATER became a patently psychotic cult.

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it is at least theoretically possible that a not-completely-braindead individual might have imagined Communism to be a potentially viable economic theory.

 As (literal) cottage industries were usurped by larger and larger assembly lines, it was fantasized that they would eventually reach an infinite economy of scale.  Ergo (assuming the economist also lacked the capacity to imagine that the public's desire for an increased standard of living would also fail to expand with increased supply) this would in turn lead to a Worker's Paradise of infinite pleasure and leisure.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty.  If I had been a doctor in 1840, I would very much like to believe that my genetically superior brain would have seen phrenology (the study of bumps on the scalp) for what it was:  a  crazy, stupid fad.  But I can't re-write all my memories sufficiently to be POSITIVE that I'd have recognized that fact, at that precise moment in history.

And, by the same token, there is no way anyone alive today can know for certain he'd have seen Communism for all that it was at the turn at the twentieth century; back when conservative American politicians were warning the electorate:  "Don't be swayed by the material benefits of Communism!"

Don't get me wrong; I am by no means trying to imply that Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt were Gods.  Or that they were smarter than the average person of their day.  Or even that they were smarter than the average politician of their day....

All I'm saying is:  stop equating those those well-meaning but understandably-ignorant noble primitives with the braindead neohippies who STILL worship the crazy-ass death cult that Communism eventually unequivocally demonstrated itself to be.

If today's liberals had fixated upon and transformed Franz Joseph Gall's theory (congratulations; now you get to look that one up  ) into a totalitarian nightmare, it would not be HIS fault.

So let dead Communists lie.  Try to limit your wrath to precisely where it is most unquestionably deserved:  The younger a liberal is, the more obviously stupid he is... and the oldest ones still alive today are pretty Goddamned moronic.  I don't claim to be absolutely positive about anything that happened more than a hundred years ago, but I very strongly suspect that James Madison, Abraham Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt - and maybe even fucking FRANKLIN Roosevelt - would wholeheartedly agree with all of us about that.