You know, when you presume to argue with someone, accuracy counts.

My name is Salemi, not Salerno. That carelessness on your part is already a bad sign.

From your post: “…you said that his imbecilic behavior was likely the result of having ‘gone through’ a 12 step program. I knew what you said and and I responded to what you said.”

No, that isn’t what I said. Here are my exact words from post # 10:

“These twelve-step programs have a tendency to produce some of the most robotic, android-like people in existence.”

I brought this up as a possible explanation for Bush’s intransigence and rigidity when following what he thinks is the right course. I said nothing about his being “imbecilic.” I hate what Bush has done to the country, but I don’t think that he is a mental defective.

When you say that I “obviously do not understand the nature of addiction,” you betray your adherence to the therapeutic assumptions of all these twelve-step, self-help programs. It’s not the glass of sherry, the line of cocaine, or the puff of tobacco that makes one an addict, although that is the myth that AA and similar recovery programs promote. This is a pernicious myth that fuels all our puritanical frenzies, from Prohibition to the current anti-tobacco mania and the truly tyrannical Drug Wars.

You claim that “An addict can remain free of the compulsion to use drugs just so long as he or she abstains from the use of drugs.” Well, to me that’s not being free from drugs at all. That’s just as great an enslavement as when you were shooting the stuff up your arm.

To be fair, AA has done some wonderful things. But it does have an extremely rigid and unbending view of human nature, and it frequently exacts a price for its successes. There is no one more sclerotic than someone who has been “reformed.”

When someone turns down my offer of a glass of sherry, I don’t press him any further. I just drink the sherry myself.

Mr. Salerno, you obviously do not understand the nature of addiction. An addict can remain free of the compulsion to use drugs just so long as he or she abstains from the use of drugs. Declining your offer of a glass of sherry may amount to robotic behavior in your book. I can’t see it that way.

I see it as an example of being concerned for one’s own health and well being. Maybe you could give them the benefit of the doubt instead of concluding that they were brainwashed by an anonymous 12 step fellowship. That’s entirely up to you, of course.

“I never said that all that is wrong with GWB comes from his fight with alcoholism. ”

No, you said that his imbecilic behavior was likely the result of having “gone through” a 12 step program. I knew what you said and responded to what you said.

In my own opinion, Bush is an arrogant fool. He has probably always been an arrogant fool and I doubt he’s that way as a result of any of his associations with people in any anonymous fellowship. It’s far more likely that he’s an arrogant fool as a result of being born to two arrogant fools. With parents like his, he had little chance of turning out otherwise.

Pardon my diverging here, but I just want to say that while I agree with Mr. Salemi (#36), I think Fatima should be excluded, insofar as its message (the possible annihilation of various nations) is quite a matter of concern for all men, even non-Christians.

Thanks for the response. I took “ideology” from both the Minogue defintion cited above and I also agree with how you defined it. (I also meant “diatribe” in a more archaic sense).

I would say ideologies are intended to do as you say: Comprehensively explain the world and human nature and suggest rules for social organization consonant with those explanations BUT ALSO that all ideologies (and their consequent rules) are doomed to failure because human nature is too complex and contradictory to be explained by model. I know I have a progressive ideology but unlike most progressives, I know it will fail.

I would dispute your claim that early 19th century Tories were not ideologically driven. They were, I would say, mostly beholden to a worldview that clung to explanations derived from hierarchical feudalism that had been cumulatively compromised by the rise of Mercantilism–which that compromised Toryism could survive–but then by Capitalism–which it couldn’t.

We all have to have an ideology although each person’s ideology is unique in one sense, that of being informed by our unique learning and experience. Yet ideology is useless unless and until it gathers with it others of like-but-not-exactly-like mind, whether it’s the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church or the contemporary Green Party in Germany … or the Rockford Institute.

You may not like to be described as a Thomist or Aristotlean–but that’s what you are. That does not mean that Thomas or Aristotle are infallible, they most certainly are not. That is merely to say that you believe their principles bear up longest before crumbling.

It is not simply bad ideas that afflict the United States, but the bad character of the people: We are a smug, lying, cowardly, hedonistic, and bullying nation. We lie to ourselves about nearly everything, and if we ever do hear the truth we insist upon demonizing the teller and silencing him. It does not matter what such people believe or say or even, I fear, how they vote. God in his mercy can save them, but the rest of us can do nothing but watch them live, as Calvin said of the Anabaptists, like rats in straw. The real meaning of this election is the sorry condition of the American character. What Clyde Wilson used to refer to as the “degraded Yankee character” is now the degraded American character.