Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "" video.
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Not a big fan of "class conflict" leftism. I'm a free-market capitalist, who's a classical liberal, which means liberty, tolerance, and limited government. Where you old-school lefties get it wrong is putting too much faith in the national government to "care for us."
You guys get so caught up in dividing up the wealth created by others, you make everyone poorer, and make government more and more powerful. Your nanny government ideas are the slow road to authoritarian rule, which breaks down, eventually, giving you totalitarianism.
You always pooh-pooh the slippery-slope arguments, and in the same breath decry the fascist systems you see arising inevitably from your putting so much power in the state apparatus. You create engines of oppression that bring about the opposite of your utopian dreams.
But on matters of war and peace, there's broad agreement between libertarians and progressives, generally.
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@contemplatively You know any good sources? I think Islam expanded into Spain basically on invitation, and worked wonders. But then iconoclastic purists came up from Africa and blew everything up. Islam in the peninsula became more regressive and more militarily aggressive. Inroads farther north into Gaul (Frankia/France) was what galvanized Christian countries to drive them out.
But what they did for Spain (architecture, agriculture, literacy and learning) is undeniable.
This is sort of how Christianity goes wrong, too. The most regressive and militant have a burning desire to rise to the top of the hierarchy and bend it to their will. The next thing you know, the God who fathered Christ is insisting they go killing people in His name.
Christianity is a bit different, because the human and social progress it encourages plants the seeds of its own decline. Educated people see through the dogma and choose something else.
In the West, we're seeing how it plays out. Without the Christian culture maintaining stability over generations, the people who reject the dogma/doctrine are untethered, and they will find new things/ideas in which to place their faith. Without SOME kind of faith, people fall into decadence.
Anyway, I could make a case that Islam was leading the world in enlightenment and Mongol conquerors crushed them and made Islam more militant, and less enlightened.
I could make a case that warlike neighbors and invaders also made Christianity more regressive.
In the end, it's all about survival of institutions over time in THIS world, more than it's about securing a place in paradise in the next.
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@absshire7984 I would add that I'm ashamed of what is done in my name around the world. Iraq, Libya, Syria, ... The USA is not supposed to be imperialist. We're supposed to mind our own damn business. But it seems like we just picked up where the British Empire left off, and we're just as arrogant, with just as little regard for human life and prosperity (except our own) as the British were.
Oh, we try to put a good face on it, mostly by telling everybody how bad the other guys are, but it's exactly the kind of foreign meddling and disrespect for individual and national sovereignty that ALL empires of old exhibited.
But no, I don't want to hear the call to prayer blaring from loudspeakers multiple times every day, either. I don't want to live under theocratic rule of any kind, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise.
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