Margaret Thatcher on the Morality of Science

Here's a fun clip from what looks to be the 1990s of Margaret Thatcher smacking down CNN anchor Bernard Shaw's suggestion suggestion that advanced nations are "making technology a god at the expense of the human spirit." 

Comments

[Warty]

And here she is on socialism. She was good at PWNing.

[Joe M]

Yeah except she said pr0n was bad and should be prohibited.

[Charlotte Falcon]

Porn isn't a good thing. It's a vice. Like booze, smoking, eating for more than just sustenance, etc.. Free adults should be able to engage in vice alone or with other free adults. However, the same free adults need to live with the consequences of engaging in those vices. Make sense?

[sticks]

How is porn a vice?

[Ted S.]

Perversion for Profit

[Apatheist ?_??]

Also what exactly are the consequences of engaging in porn?

[phandaal]

Blindness, hairy palms, a grip like a vise.

[Charlotte Falcon]

In my opinion whacking it to some girl/woman who was most likely abused at some point in her youth isn't what I would consider a noble endeavor. I would say that normal, healthy, and happy women do not make pornography.

Porn is disrespectful to women. Porn can be addictive. People can use porn as a coping mechanism to deal with other trauma in their lives (i.e. they use it to control unhappy feelings). Porn can impact how one views sex, relationships, etc.

I'm not telling you not to look at porn, I'm just saying that it isn't harmless to everyone. All this is my opinion.

[darius404]

Merkin. Calling it now for posterity.

[mnarayan]

What? There's nothing even vaguely racist there.

[sticks]

I would say that normal, healthy, and happy women do not make pornography

I would say that statement is disrespectful of women.

[Kaptious Kristen]

And surely those non-normal, non-happy, non-healthy women need their betters, like you, to show them the correct life path.

[Lord Humungus]

8x a night!

[alan_s]

"And surely those non-normal, non-happy, non-healthy women need their betters, like you, to show them the correct life path."

I don't believe that point was ever made. In fact, just the opposite: "Free adults should be able to engage in vice alone or with other free adults. "

[MJGreen]

What are the consequences of pornography?

A large bill on lotion? Or my soul or something?

[Jeff]

I was with her until the part about passing laws against pornography.

[wareagle]

no politician offers you 100% agreement. Find someone who's 60-70% with you and decide if the remainder is a deal-breaker. Anyway, she was old school conservative; that type is almost always anti-porn.

[lap83]

If Margaret Thatcher ran for president this last election, I'm pretty sure a lot of libertarians wouldn't vote for her based on a couple of social issues.

[Juice]

To get me to vote for a politician there has to be a deal maker. They don't have my vote by default until some deal breaker comes along.

[AB]

Also fascinating:

There was a time when CNN was relevant enough to get Thatcher, Bush and Gorbachev on stage together.

[Kaptious Kristen]

Bernard Shaw's suggestion suggestion that advanced nations are "making technology a god at the expense of the human spirit."

I believe this is pretty much a direct quote from Contact. A movie in which Shaw made a cameo, I might add.

[Kaptious Kristen]

(it was at the party for David Drumlin - Palmer Joss says "I'm not against technology, just the men who deify it at the expense of human truth").

[Zuul mothafucka Zuul]

She was an authoritarian busybody but yet the reasonoids worship her because she said the right things about socialism. Why don't you apply the same standards on her that you would on Newclear Titties?

[wareagle]

because she was sharp enough to put first things first, to recognize govt as a problem, to recognize authoritarian govt as an even bigger problem, to enact policies that addressed both those beliefs, and to be far more likely to call bullshit on socialism than to be a moral scold.

Believing there should be laws against something is not the same as actively campaigning for them. Besides, piling on the dead is something typically found on leftist blogs.

[Zuul mothafucka Zuul]

Which is why no one at reason has ever criticized any socialist/progressive politician who is now dead.

[wareagle]

criticizing policy is one thing, cheerleading death is another and no one at Reason did the latter. Maybe the mag thinks Thatcher's positives outweighed so-con statist tendencies. Good luck finding that perfect pol who agrees with you on everything all the time.

[Zuul mothafucka Zuul]

I have never celebrated her death, I just think that there is substantive criticisms of Thatcher from a libertarian perspective, such as her centralization of power and her repressive crackdown on the Irish,and these criticisms never surface on reason. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily mt friend.

[Zuul mothafucka Zuul]

*my friend

[Jeff]

Because the British are so thoroughly fucked that Mags seemed amazing compared to the rest of them.

[Zeb]

Sure, there was loads wrong with Thatcher. But she did turn them slightly away from the socialist hell they were becoming in the 70s. If it is bad there now, imagine what it would be like if they still had all the nationalize industries they had back then.

[Lyle]

Authoritarian? Nope, she wasn't that.

[OldMexican]

Re: Zuul,

She was an authoritarian busybody

Most British MPs were.

but yet the reasonoids worship her because she said the right things about socialism.

I don't worship her, and I don't believe Reasonoids do. It is just that we don't engage in Ad Hominems like you are right now. If what she said about Socialism and what she DID about it (which was plenty) enhanced the cause of freedom for her countrymen and women, then that is something to be celebrated.

[MJGreen]

On Sunday Reason is too forgiving of idiots on the left.

On Monday Reason is too forgiving of idiots on the right.

It's hard to keep this all straight.

[Proprietist]

You get used to it. The Left think we're a bunch of nihilistic Republican sympathizers who like weed and porn. The Right thinks we're cosmotarian libertines who like flirting liberals at Beltway cocktail parties. It's both fun and frustrating to be an enigma.

[darius404]

A comment from a Facebook post commemorating Thatcher:

Peter Lalor This is the problem with most stripes of contemporary libertarianism: It's still essentially conservatism when it comes to any sort of social justice.
about an hour ago ? Like ? 3

The problem, apparently, is not enough support for taking people's money and giving it to other people.

[Lyle]

The mullahs of Iran have got the science. North Korea has the science. Mankind is our only hope.

[Joe M]

I love how we have people in this thread accusing us libertarians of both loving and hating Thatcher, all for the wrong reasons, of course.

[Ornithorhynchus]

There are a lot of horrible things about Maggie Thatcher. But still, she deserves a lot of praise for helping to invent soft-serve ice cream.

[Juice]

Not sure where this is coming from but it's BS. Carvel and/or Dairy Queen invented it in the late 30s.