Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Is Buying Krispy Cremes a Sign You are Liberal?


The South is under attack!!!! It seems I go from posting Pieces from this LSU's beloved Grad that I am tearing down to those I love. Which is one reason I read him. I agree with his points here at Donut elitism I am free trader but also would be one to buy Fair trade coffee. As Rod points out:

Why? Why is it "conservative" to be against fair trade coffee [not "free trade"]? Do conservatives not believe that there is a moral dimension to commerce? Why is it conservative to boycott, say, Disney -- meaning choosing to spend, or not to spend, money with a certain retailer because of moral considerations -- but not conservative to make a spending choice on coffee based on how much compensation the small farmer in the Third World receives? If the Guatemalan coffee growers are Pentecostals, is it conservative to support them by buying fair trade coffee? If they're lesbian Zoroastrian Sandinistas, is it our conservative duty to refuse to buy their coffee?
Or is it simply that "fair trade coffee" seems like the sort of thing liberals are interested in, so hating it must be "conservative"?



I find his piece interesting because I think it relates to a intriguing article I read on the Pope's New Upcoming Encyclical called Beyond Left and Right: Awaiting the Pope’s Next Encyclical
He says in conclusion to his piece ( I had a few disagreements with it but it was good):
It will be interesting to see how Benedict weaves everything together. The outlines are already apparent in the section on Justice and Charity in Deus Caritas Est, and in the remarks he made recently to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, to the effect that solidarity and subsidiarity must “always be placed within the horizon of the mysterious life of the Triune God, in whom we perceive an ineffable love shared by equal, though nonetheless distinct, Persons.” Both have a vertical as well as a horizontal dimension, he emphasized. That may not play too well in a culture that, precisely because it has forgotten the vertical, has to divide everything into Left and Right.


Vertical Politics? Goodness that sounds familiar does it not? Were we not hearing a certain Presidential hopeful from the GOP talking about such stuff. It is not to say that label such as "left" and "right" have no value. Indeed I am pretty right , but again the vertical appears to be missing

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