A collection of Michael Savage quotes.
“Theirs is a fragile house of cards; a vacuous, toxic brew of political intolerance, insulated by the vernacular of progressiveness, diversity, and moral relativism. They are in essence defending a potemkin village, and are taken aback by Savage, and others, who are guiding America on a tour of their back yard.”
“We indeed have an Orwellian nightmare going on in America, where only certain thoughts and speech are considered acceptable. You have an obligation, now more than ever, to disavow the cultural commissars. But be aware that there is a price to pay for this level of moral and intellectual courage. You will be called names. You may be ostracized, abused verbally, and humiliated.”
“You are going to have to endure the verbal equivalence of the police dogs at Montgomery. You are going to have to endure the water cannon abuse in words, and in gestures, that the civil rights protesters received in Selma. The PC storm troopers are going to try to make you feel ashamed of yourself. They’re going to try to pretend that you don’t exist, and yet they’re only going to make you stronger.”
“The anti-Americans are those who won’t let you protest, if your protest is considered politically incorrect. Remember, this nation was founded by men and by women who refused to be tyrannized. Stand up to these dictators, because we are living in a tyranny of the mind, a political gulag.”
“The truth movement is unnerving the left. You didn’t hear about it in print and television media, because, unless you buy into their worldview, you don’t exist. But that’s fine. You can decide for yourself whether you want to be part of this renaissance in America. It offers you a window on what could be, not the abyss that is. It has the promise of converting the most hardcore cynic into an enthusiastic participant in a restoration of shared American values, respect for integrity, and perhaps the emergence of people who we aspire to resemble, rather than people who repulse.”
and finally, John Stuart Mill
“There is nothing which impresses a person of reflection with a strong sense of the shallowness of the political reasoning of the last two centuries than the general reception so long given to a doctrine [..] that the man who steals money out of a shop, provided that he expends it all again at the same shop, is a public benefactor to the tradesman whom he robs, and that the same operation, repeated sufficiently often, would make the tradesman a fortune.”
TrueblueNZ 
17 responses to “General Debate 10/04/11”
I’ve been listening to Savage since 1997. He, along with every other talkshow host, is feeding back to you and me our own common sense — kinda like the robber in Mill’s quote — and claiming it for his own.
The best thing is that it amplifies our voices.
The bad thing is that it associates the thoughts with him, and that has been and will still be a deficit. The Agency of Lies and their Statist masters love to tar you and me with guilt by association.
I learned long ago, back in the early days of Rush, how to answer the parrots with their charges of “Ditto-head.” “No, you have it wrong. I don’t sound like Rush — he sounds a bit like me, but often comes to the wrong conclusions.”
Now we have the internet, and are not reliant on any leaders except when they have put together a good series of words as Savage often does. And Levin too. And each claims the other steals from him. The reality is that the underlying observations and conclusions are ours, and both those talkers ride point clearing the way for you and me. We simply have to understand that they help make our thinking more mainstream, and that’s a good thing. But they often get it wrong, such as in their style and egomania and unwillingness to work well with others.
I did not mean to write in this vein when I started, but as this is general debate, I felt why not do this and then write my originally provoked comment later. Now, if I can only remember what started me off, I’d have the upper hand on my short-term memory for today at least. 🙂
LikeLike
I did a search on line for the accuracy of Mill’s quote. I have his works on my shelf, and I may be able to find in there if one word has been altered so as to make the quote a bit nonsensical.
What offends my senses is this: “if it proves anything, proves that the more you take form the pockets of the people to spend on your own pleasures, the richer they grow: that the man who steals money out of a shop,”
That second proves looks like it may actually be disproves in order to align with the sense of the paragraph.
This would not be the first time that I’d discovered corruption of the text in a major work. In this blog post I revealed where the editor at Columbia University (appears to have let the spell checker) replace a not common word (inly) with a common one (only) when he posted the entire text of The Abolition of Man to the web. In the process he obscured terribly what CS Lewis was saying so eloquently.
Out of context it may seem like a small thing, but this important work is hard enough to absorb without the text being destroyed by hacks.
There’s another, less known author, whose works I’d seen corrupted in its online version (of whose printed text I had to verify) long before I found this.
So what I’m passing along to you here is a word to the wise. Please be careful — and you RB are noticeably and laudably careful with what you post — before you accept what you find repeated and repeated again online as if it were Gospel.
As to the words of John Stuart Mill: he may very well have written these words and meant to use “proves” the second time. Can someone please explain to me how that could he could have meant that the robbing of a shop actually proves the robber is the shop’s benefactor?
LikeLike
Do Savage and Levin have some kind of feud going ?
LikeLike
Savage feuds with just about everyone. I identify his ferocity as the avuncular sort I grew up with (also in the boroughs of NYC). Savage calls Levin “Groucho Marx’ Grandmother” and Levin calls Savage a useless hack. Any caller to either program that tries to mend the break in the name of seeking the same goal is given an abrupt heave-ho. It is as if the shtick is written into their contracts that they be irascibly irreconcilable as about each other as possible.
I long ago found it tiresom, lame and — worst of all- divisive of conservatism. Hence my constant recommendation that we don’t pin our hopes on ANY talkshow host. Someone like RB is immensely more readable. If he only had a 10th of the reach of either of those two.
LikeLike
Thanks for that. Actually I have never really listened to Savage, how would you rate him? I subscribe to Rush Limbaugh and listen to his show without fail when I’m home.
When I was in the USA recently I drove the rental car out of Buffalo airport, turned on the radio and bang, the Rush Limbaugh show was already dialed in !
LikeLike
Angus, I searched for you for mp3s on the web that work for recent Savage shows. But the server appears to be down.
At this blog post of mine is an excellent example of Dr Savage’s work. Savage: Home Invasion of America
from last September. The download still works.
The first 38 minutes of the download starts with Savage demonstrating Karl Rove’s duplicity. The whole tape is ok, but skip to the 21 minute mark as I suggest in the blog post and listen to that. “It’s as if America were dying from an auto-immune disease.”
LikeLike
I’d never heard of J.S.Mill until one of my favourite youtubers made a video on his essay on Liberty.
MrCropper is worth a visit on youtube.
LikeLike
Tried to fix that Mill quote Pascal.
LikeLike
I tried too RB. My volume of Mill does not include Essays on Economics and Society. The same quote comes up on the web everywhere. Freaky unless Mill was saying the opposite of what we think he is saying. Given what Utilitarianism means today, maybe that is the case.
LikeLike
Out of 33 finds in Google for the phrase “a public benefactor to the tradesman whom he robs,” more than 25 were from an article by Gerard Jackson. About 3 links were to this post of yours. That’s not solving this problem tonight. LOL
My volume on Mill contains 3 books: On Liberty, Representative Government, and Utilitarianism. It would take me some time to skim to see if this passage is from any of those. Mr. Jackson only referenced his volume of the combined works of Mill.
LikeLike
I see Pete George has voted on my poll.
LikeLike
Four times, at latest count.
LikeLike
RB. I forgot to say I like the way you fixed Mill’s words. However, it doesn’t solve the problem of whether or not he was actually lauding the social justice thinking in a way that the Left does toda y — by double-talking their way passed contradictions to their racketeering.
You may well ask what I mean. Here’s the 3 paragraphs with which Mill concludes his book praising Utilitarianism. Given what we know today, his Leftoid thinking almost fisks itself. I’ve added some emphasis.
I guess I must ask your forgiveness. I implied about that Utilitarianism had become much worse since Mill’s time. It now appears it’s always been his intent to seek the cover of the appearance of practicality and pragmatism in order to subdue (Cultural Marxist) Western moral order.
LikeLike
For a handful of American Talker free podcasts, I found this today: http://conservativereview.us/
Angus, all of last weeks Savage broadcasts are at the top of this page.
This Friday’s Savage is on fire. He was on a tear against one politician’s sound-bite after another.
LikeLike
Remember that in a utilitarian world, raping a prostitute is engaging in an act of less moral condemnation than finding another victim. Some utilitarians would even argue that if the rapist was a soldier returning from a long war, or an important person with a high desire doing the same, there would not actually be a crime at all, as what the victim gave up had less value than what the perpetrator obtained, from a collective viewpoint, of course.
LikeLike
Bez, undoubtedly that’s part of it. But need you malign these men? Can’t you see that they really are looking to mitigate misery with an eye to seeking equality — achieving that long elusive social justice at long last.
They aim to alienate the burden of responsibilities for actions from every individual. Because once they have a clear mandate to achieve social justice, the authorities cannot rely upon the individual to weigh the justice of his own actions (as we traditionally have been urged we should). They very idea of inculcating the notion of personal morality and applying it — the notion of personal responsibility — is to be obliterated. For the individual may — almost cannot help but — get it wrong.
See, only those in authority have the wherewithal to understand the common good and what will fulfill it. The only way to assure that collective social justice can be achieved is if a series of goals have been set by those in authority. Then after 5 years they can assess how successful their plan has worked out so that they can address the inequities, and then fix them with their next 5-year plan. It’s all very practical. What was Mill’s turn of phrase again? “and we are saved from the necessity of maintaining that there can be laudable injustice.”
I know some of you may think this is sarcastic. But let me assure you, those social justices are in deadly earnest.
LikeLike
@Pascal: and so it is. To me it is always a miracle that this truth remains hidden in plain view of the great majority, who even go as far as accepting that politicians are “leaders” in possession of the required views and skills to pursue this utopia, simply by the fact of being elected.
LikeLike