Sure. If one of the parties adopted as an official platform plank something I considered extremist or nuts, I’d really start to reassess. Simply allowing conspiracy-theory nuts under the “big tent” is SOP for both parties (Michael Moore/Glenn Beck, etc.). When multiple major party figures start openly embracing truther/birther type idiocy, I’ll be worried.
There’ve been several elected Republican officials who have expressed doubts about Obama’s birth certificate.
To repeat: simply allowing conspiracy-theory nuts under the “big tent” is SOP for both parties (Michael Moore/Glenn Beck, etc.). When multiple major party figures start openly embracing truther/birther type idiocy, I’ll be worried.
If you have cites, I’ll read. I have no doubt that Shodan could rustle up umpteen quotes from minor Dems (house members and state-level pols) saying that “questions need to be answered” about whether Bush knew about 9/11 or similar loony bullshit. You’d have to do significantly better than that.
But also to repeat: I think talking about myself much more in this thread is a hijack.
Boy, you got us on that one! Gotta admit it, Michael Moore and Glen Beck are just exactly alike, save for their orientation. Moore fudges facts sometimes, and Beck shrieks bald-face lies at the top of his lungs. Why, the parallel is uncanny in its exactitude!
My feeling is that Glenn Beck is far, far more phony than Michael Moore.
So…how many does it take? http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1209/Palin_Obama_birth_certificate_a_fair_question.html
Although, I suspect she won’t count as “high-profile” enough.
-Joe
“Reason” magazine and the “Reason” Foundation have done far more to discredit and mock the very idea of reason than anything else of which I am aware. And I write this as a subscriber to Free Inquiry and as a subscriber to The Skeptical Inquirer since 1979: Two publications dedicated more than anything else to advancing the cause of reason and clear thinking in the world.
The difference between them and “Reason” magazine could not possibly be more striking and alarming.
I doubt that sufficient common ground could possibly exist between myself and those who consider “Reason” magazine to be “dispassionate” and not “radical or fringe” for a debate to be worthwhile, but I’ll try…
“Reason” magazine and the “Reason” Foundation are funded almost exclusively by steadfastly unreasonable corporations and private individuals and interests who wish to mock or destroy any and all genuinely credible, peer-reviewed science and reason that would tend to reduce their profits if widely accepted by the public. “Reason” magazine is one of their favorite disinformation and propaganda outlets, and that magazine’s writers are, to an individual, slavish devotees of the “fuck the facts” propagandist arts.
What else would one expect from an organization funded by the Koch Family Foundations and the Scaife Foundations (among a very small number of other like “minds”?) Hell, David Koch himself sits on the “Reason” board!
Koch Industries is the “nation’s largest privately held energy company, with annual revenues of more than $25 billion. … Koch Industries is now the second largest family-owned business in the U.S., with annual sales of over $20 billion.”
David Koch is also the founder and chief strategist of the anti-health, anti-reason, anti-American astroturf group who was videotaped joyously cheering and dancing as Chicago lost the Olympics bid and who ordered his vacuous employees and other mindless gorilla dupes to stampede to the town hall meetings and to scream as loud as possible to drown out all dissent at all costs.
Koch and his brother brag often about how they’re their father’s “chips off the old block”, and boast that he was a founding member of the ultraconservative John Birch Society. And what organization was less dispassionate and farther into the fringe than the John Birch Society of the 50’s?
And does the name “Scaife”, as in “Richard Mellon Scaife”, whose wealth was inherited from the Mellon industrial, oil, uranium and banking fortunes, really need an introduction here? Richard Mellon Scaife, who funded and led the utterly vicious and dogged “(admittedly not very) Vast, Right Wing Conspiracy” against Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were in many ways not far from one of their own anyway? Richard Mellon Scaife, who referred to an interviewer from the Wall Street Journal – the Wall Street Journal, no less – as a “fucking Communist cunt”?
So, what positions has “Reason” magazine long been infamous for unreasonably attacking and unreasonably espousing?
– They have always been the poison mouthpiece of choice for the tobacco industry, crazily asserting in a most crazed manner over and over and over again that nicotine is not addictive, that cigarette makers don’t and never have “spiked” their products, that cigarette advertising in any media has always been completely benign and praiseworthy, and, more recently, that there are absolutely no credible risks whatsoever from second-hand smoke.
– They have also consistently been the poison mouthpiece of choice for their funders’ corporations’ crazed anti-environmentalist anti-science. Consider this from CSICOP’s Skeptical Inquirer (The Skeptical Environmentalist: A Case Study in the Manufacture of News):
Then there’s this from “Reason” printed in April:
So: Lomborg’s mainstream-science-free “uncontroversial data”? And mainstream environmentalists = “radical” environmentalists = “Islamic radicals” – cutting off hands and “honor” killings and terrorism and 9/11? And Obama is “irrefutably” “about as visionary as the guy who invented Dippin’ Dots” and the rest of that anti-reasonable rant?
What were you saying, adaher, about how “dispassionate” “Reason” magazine is and how “Reason” doesn’t “resort to emotional appeals”?
How droll.
How very thoughtful and reflective! Such eloquence and perspicacity!
I admire your honesty (though nothing whatsoever else about your thought-free “arguments” and “positions”) in more clearly revealing yourself to apparently rely entirely on the most infantile possible over-simplifications, stripped bare of any hint of subtlety and rational cognition.
You should run for office, you’d do even better than Palin among your crowd.
I was trying to put it in small words for you, given that complex thoughts like “I’m not a Republican” seem incapable of penetrating your helmet.
Perhaps next time I’ll try a rebus.
Speaking as someone who is overall probably to the left of Obama ( and who voted for him ), I have to agree with furt that that’s nonsense. Just because one party subjectively sucks twice as much as the other, doesn’t mean that objectively they both might not suck in general.
Or to Godwinize, Franco wasn’t as near bad as Hitler. But objectively they were both still assholes.
Franco just didn’t have the opportunity for more massive evil. I mean, c’mon, Spain?
So, you dug deep into your sublime, highly educated and highly tuned intellect and brought forth the “rebuttal” that you’ve identified yourself as being “not a Republican”, and somehow you imagine that’s of even the tiniest relevance or makes even the tiniest difference?
Would you mind pointing out to me where I wrote that only (or all) members of the Republican Party are incapable of clear, rational, well-justified arguments and critical thinking please?
Why do you imagine that not considering yourself a Republican is some kind of defense against my and others’ criticisms? Consider this from upthread:
So I don’t care what you do or do not call yourself. In the end, considering your facile comments and the fact that you think “Reason” magazine is a credible source and that Obama is much worse a president than G. W. Bush, it’s abundantly clear that you’re a conservative (and don’t imagine that calling yourself a libertarian is any better).
You see, conservatives face a greater and far deeper roadblock that prevents all but the very few wisest and most self-aware of them from achieving the goal of clear, critical thinking, and that roadblock is the pervasive dominance of authoritarianism and authoritarian ideology in their worldviews. Such deep-rooted authoritarianism makes subduing confirmation bias and the many other barricades against clear, critical thinking enormously difficult for conservatives to overcome.
The scientific facts assembled from many peer-reviewed studies of the domination of authoritarianism among conservative Americans, as documented in the 2009 work Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, presents a bleak outlook for the ability of conservatives to surmount the barriers to clear, critical thinking when it comes to the topics that are central to their political and socio-economic worldview and biases.
The research demonstrates that authoritarian leaders consciously or unconsciously manufacture factitious but “authoritative-sounding” assertions and social “memes” / “bumper stickers of thought” (as with Reagan’s “welfare queen” hate “meme”) for blatantly self-serving reasons, such as to artificially divide and polarize the electorate by deliberately framing issues in an excessively vitriolic and inflammatory fashion. Nothing brings out the voters to the polls like irrational hate!
Research also demonstrates that authoritarian followers simply have few and/or weak critical thinking skills or otherwise powerfully resist utilizing them when it comes to the political and economic biases and counterfactual belief systems that comprise their worldviews. The very large number of studies documented by Hetherington and Weiler in their book even includes otherwise hard-to-believe studies revealing that authoritarians, on average, reveal rather poor cognitive functioning.
Evolution brought about a human brain and human nature that, by dint of natural selection, primed us to hold and propagate all kinds of blatantly false beliefs. Those who were excessively fearful of unusual factors in the environment, and thus often crafted bogus pseudo-explanations like witchcraft and gods or other mysterious agencies like the “evil eye” of the poor, the unusual, and the dispossessed, were more likely to avoid those situations and, though based in utter falsehoods, their undue fear increased their genetic fitness and multiplied the genes, alleles, or gene combinations in the gene pool.
The collection of scientific results that Hetherington and Weiler report in their book establishes that conservatives/authoritarians are innately more fearful than others, especially of views, actions, or behaviors that appear to them to upset the ostensible “natural” or “God-willed” order of things, just as their fearful genetic forbears did.
While liberals and other non-conservatives are hardly immune to these irrational fears, their worldviews are much less authoritarian in nature and so those fears do not play anything remotely like the fundamental role they play in conservatives.
So you emphasize that you’re not a Republican. Big deal. Palin’s effectively no longer a Republican, either, as indicated by her campaigning against a registered Republican in favor of a nutjob Conservative, and she recently remarked that Glenn Beck would be a fine choice for her Vice-Presidential running mate.
That’s why I identified her as the leader of the deeply irrational and mindless authoritarian crowd when I wrote: “You should run for office, you’d do even better than Palin among your crowd.”
With respect, I don’t think you quite grasp the issues here. Unless you can name a human institution that consists entirely of faultless, perfectly wise and noble people who never err or misjudge, then every single individual and collection of individuals will be flawed in some way. Yes?
So furt and others who breathlessly report the shocking – shocking! – fact that both the Democratic and the Republican Parties are flawed are perhaps not telling us anything very earth-shattering after all. Yes?
So we flawed humans will always be confronted with a choice between flawed human organizations (including the choice of our own flawed human selves over other flawed humans). So the best we can ever hope to accomplish is to choose the least flawed human institution available among the options. Agreed?
So where does it get us to agree to the “shocking” fact that all political parties are flawed human institutions? In the U.S., we’re still left with the only two non-pointless options of either the Republican or the Democratic candidate!
And only if furt can factually and rationally justify his continuing and utterly laughable assertion that both parties are equivalent (and so we can flip a coin and get the very same result) does anything he’s said here have any validity whatsoever. It is a shockingly flawed crock of excrement.
TLDR.
If you wanna yap about me, take it to the pit. As I said before, I don’t think it’ll go well for you there, but I’m stupid, so what do I know? I’ll be gone all weekend and will check in Monday night.
Otherwise, piss off.
Little green footballs = amphetamines.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19710530&id=BOcNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=33UDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4866,3160934
It’s easy to find references to the amphetamine epidemic in postwar Japan.
“Postwar Japan was the site of the first epidemic of amphetamine psychosis; thanks to its feverish production of amphetamines for the German Luftwaffe, Japanese munitions factory workers popped uppers at an alarming rate as the war neared its end. Drug companies advertised amphetamines for the “elimination of drowsiness and repletion of the spirit,” enabling them to clean out their stockpiles, thereby creating 500,000 new Japanese addicts.”
From http://www.drugtext.org/library/books/recreationaldrugs/amphetamines.htm
They’ve already been calling him a heretic for months.
Hey, anybody want a good laugh? Check out the mad rightwing blog below and then tell me what you think about the state of American public discourse:
I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that you totally didn’t mean to quote me in there…
-Joe
TWEEEEET!
This thread ostensibly started as a discussion of one political faction either eating its young or waking up after coyote sex. It has now morphed into a discussion of the tack that individuals ought to embrace regarding political parties with far too many comments regarding what specific posters should do with their lives and beliefs. Despite the organic nature of the hijack/derailament, it is still a train wreck.
Either return to the original point of the OP or I am going to close the thread. Those feeling a need to continue the personal attacks may resume them in the BBQ Pit.
[ /Moderating ]
Very interesting article. This passage was especially telling:
I have not read Churchill’s book, but found a thumbnail review on Amazon:
Had to look all of those up.
If those are the best examples Churchill could find of “the long American tradition of armed resistance to intrusive government,” then, to put it as mildly and charitably as possible, he is describing nothing that should be suffered to survive in the 21st Century. And if the “militia movement” is part of that tradition, it might not be new but it certainly is utterly irrational.
Kids, can you say “false equivalency”?