Eclectic Views

    
The queries continue . . .
  

    
New question: What's your favorite Elvis Presley song?
  

    
Heartbreak Hotel
  

    

I Can't Help Falling In Love With You
(or whatever it's really called.  you know the one.)
  

    
Don't Be Cruel
  

    

Mystery Train
  

    
Love Me Tender
  

    
<3>, It's Fools Rush In, and I think that might be my favorite too.
  

    
Teddy Bear.
  

    
Are we talking about ones he and the Colonel snaggled writing credits
on or the ones he had hits with?  

Either way, my fave is "Hounddog".
  

    
Jailhouse Rock (and choice no. 2 would be everything he recorded for
Sun).
  

    
It would have to be "Don't Be Cruel." It came out the year I was born.
My father brought home the single one night and my mother and he
stayed up late dancing to it. They went to bed around two, and she woke
him up a little later saying that it was time to go to the hospital.
It was a  quick easy labor, probably because she was dancing during the
early stages.
  

    
i'm with Bubbles' <6>:  Love Me Tender
  

    
New question: What authority figure(s), if any, do you trust? 
  

    
The Dalai Lama, though he would vehemently deny the "authority" part.
  

    
an old Carmelite priest, Fr. James Geoghegan
  

    
Being one of those "neither church nor state" people, I'd say that
trust, for me, does not flow from authority.

There are figures of intellectual authority that I admire, but I don't
think of that as trust.  There are people whom I know personally that I
trust, but they're not authority figures.
  

    
<mcb> said what I would have, but much better than I could have said it.
  

    
i guess i just was taking off on the "authority" as an inner,
self-validating quality.  in the instance of my Carmelite pal, it is
Fr. James's own insight, deep appreciation of flawed human nature and
how best to live with that, and his creativity, that creates the
authority for me.  Not the collar.
  

    
"Authority" is a very scary word to the left. It's been said that the
fundamental difference between the left and the right, from which all actual
positions on issues flow, is that the right likes authority and the left
fears it.
  

    
Trust with regard to what?  Trust to act and/or advise me strictly
according to _my_ best interest?  No one, not even myself.  Trust to
uphold some ethical/moral standard above their own selfish intersts? A
few.  (Al Gore, for one.)  Trust to act fairly predictably, generally in
accord with their own interests and/or those of some group to which they
are strongly bound?  Practically everyone.
  

    
> "Authority" is a very scary word to the left. It's been said that the
> fundamental difference between the left and the right, from which all
> actual positions on issues flow, is that the right likes authority and
> the left fears it.

It's not a left-right split at all, but is a completely different axis
of authoritarianism vs. anti-authoritarianism (statism vs.
libertarianism) that is pretty much 90 degrees offset to the
traditional left-right axis.  A very good illustration of this is the
"World's Smallest Political Quiz" <http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html> 
(also known as the "Nolan Quiz").

Both the Left and the Right embrace authority enthusiastically, but in
different spheres. The Right advocates economic freedom of choice, but
wants to strictly regulate personal behavior and enforce authoritarian,
traditionalist standards of conduct. The Left advocates socially-liberal 
freedoms in matters of personal conduct, but wants to strictly regulate 
economic behavior in an authoritarian manner, with a powerful regulatory 
State (or even a socialist economy).
  

    
Obviously I disagree. I think there are two, closely related, lines of
fissure: authoritarian/non-authoritarian and tolerant-of-
ambiguity/intolerant-of-ambiguity. They're closely related because, if you
can't stand ambiguity or nuance, you're likely to be attracted to
authoritarianism because it offers simple cookbook answers.

Of course, there are any number of case-in-point exceptions, but I stand by
the general observation.
  

    
The ambiguity/intolerance-of-ambiguity axis is intriguing, but I'm not
sure what it is you're disagreeing with.  The left's employment of
authoritarianism in economic and associational areas is beyond
question. I don't think leftists disagree. They might assert that they
are employing authoritarian tactics in the service of "equality" or
"social justice" or whatever, but they're undeniably authoritarian.

Taxation, which is highly popular with the left, in which income and
wealth are taken under threat of expropriation or imprisonment by the 
State and redistributed, is about as authoritarian as one can imagine.
  

    
I accept the authority of competent doctors, scientists, engineers,
accountants, and lawyers, within the limits of their fields of
expertise. One reason that I will take them as authorities is precisely
that their fields have well-defined limits.

I listen attentively to intelligent economists, sociologists,
psychologists, philosophers, critics, and priests, but do not accept
them as authorities. They know their way around those kinds of thought,
but in the manner that people who have been lost a long time know
their way around the area in which they are lost. They can guide one
around the problems, but they can't guide one to a solution.

There is a kind of conventional authority that I accept provisionally,
the kind that traffic cops and traffic lights have. There are
circumstances under which it is best if everyone does as they are told,
even if what they are told is not the best thing to do, because
collectively figuring out the best thing to do would take much longer
than doing some worse thing immediately. By and large these are cases
where the differences between the options available are not very
important.
  

    
Taxation is only authoritarian if one accepts that the money taxed
belongs to the person from whom it is taxed. Arguably, all wealth that
one holds over and above what one could make entirely by one's own
unaided efforts is the property of the whole social group. It is
important that there be consistent conventions for distributing such
wealth, but no reason such conventions cannot include taxation.