There’s more than a little magic in their album Dreamboat Annie, but lyrically Dog & Butterfly is more mature, grounded, a bit mystical and very wise. It’s my favourite album by Heart.

And if I really want to crank it up, I cue up Mistral Wind, which begins and ends with butterfly, but gets into a bit of junkyard dog in the middle. [grin]

Maybe, it’s time to watch it again?

No.

I’m neither a conservative nor a liberal — there are other options outside that duality.

What I’m saying in the article is that joining the argument is an exercise in futility. Neither of the politically delineated sides of the debate ever ‘wins’.

[smile] Please, no need to resist at all. I welcome commentary, and thank you for yours.

RE: Gandhi… Well, there are even worse ways to die. War offers a terrifying array. Don’t you think, though, that if Gandhi had been given the option of a peaceful death after leading a murderous revolt (or playing no role whatsoever in history) he’d have still chosen the path he walked to that fateful day? Personally, I hope I would choose that too.

Indian Revolution: No argument by me on the auspicious conditions for peaceful revolution in colonial India. Still, it could easily have gone either way, and the achievement set a precedent by which other peaceful resolutions under less auspicious conditions have been and will be undertaken.

European Communism: Yep. almost bloodless. Being born in 1961, I grew up with the spectre of the Communist Soviet Union. The iron curtain had always been defined to be a permanent structure that would only fall in an armageddon of one sort or another. Given the scale of the revolution, the violence barely registers a blip.

Yesterday I wrote up a post that will be published tomorrow morning. It responds somewhat tangentially to the final points you make. I do make allowances for ‘the direst necessity’. I count very few of the conflicts the West has entered in the last several years in that category. And, in fact, we’ve avoided several regions of the world where that phrase probably warranted armed intervention (the multiple genocides in Africa, for example).

I don’t think we need to concern ourselves with Utopias so much as just being better to one another, and trying to make our own lives more loving and spiritual. I’ll leave Utopia to politicians and philosophers.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts…cheers!

Isn’t this the liberal way of indicating how much superior you are to conservatives, especially when you can’t refute their arguments?