Precious Cargo

Refreshingly Bitter And Twisted Observations On Life's Passing Parade.

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Location: Valley Village, California, United States

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Why Political Philosophies Don't Matter

I've been to author Roger Simon's blog a couple of times and found it to be the usual standard conservative marching in lockstep stuff. I was just there and let out a sigh when I looked at the ad on the right side of the page for a new book about Hillary Clinton that supposedly contains scathing revelations that will destroy her presidential campaign. This is so depressingly familiar, I thought.

But-

I kept scrolling down and directly under the ad for the Hillary bash book is an ad for a book titled Anerican Voices of Dissent, an anthology whose contributors include conservatives' favorite punching bags Noam Chomsky, the ACLU, Gore Vidal, Angela Davis, Howard Zinn, etc. I smirked when I saw this.

What's my point?

Roger Simon wants to turn his blog into a profit making venture. In so doing, he's willing to take anybody's money, even if it means that his blog becomes a conduit for disseminating the political philosophy that is the polar opposite of his own.

The two books advertised cancel each other out. In addition to the instinctual drives for food, water and sex, there is actually a fourth instinct: the desire for money. And in our new world where capitalism has flattened all other systems, every human activity ultimately devolves into acquisitive greed.

This is why I no longer care who gets elected and why any attachment to left or right politics makes no difference. The instinct to acquire money distorts all human activity. It drives people to abandon what they proclaim are their most closely held principles. Capitalism ultimately produces a state of mind where everyone has his price and selling out is just a matter of getting the right offer.

3 Comments:

Blogger Mark said...

Actually rather than accept me in his group Simon banned me fromhis site for asking about readersip requirements. He's a real totalitarian like all conservatives. I'm a liberal, but ads are the fuel of blogs.

7:28 PM  
Blogger Peter L. Winkler said...

Mark:

I enjoy jousting with you, but I really don't see why we're bringing this over to my blog. Simon is over at POD-DY's blog. You can engage him on the matter of being banned there.

I don't know what being liberal or conservative have in relation to taking ads. I have nothing inherently against ads. I know that Google has bots that pick the ads, but once you see that the ads being placed are for vanity preses, you can always cancel all the ads at once.

2:19 AM  
Blogger Mark said...

I thought you were speaking about Roger Simon. That's who I was referring to. Concerning the ads I did better than that: I put in a filter against vanity press ads.

6:35 PM  

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