Oh, nonsense. The attempted secession of the South in order to preserve slavery demonstrates that secessionism and protecting liberty have nothing to do with each other. That’s what all the various state’s rights arguments have in common; at base they are pushed by people who hate it when the Federal government says they can’t oppress people.
Yeah, but I have formed my opinions through years of research and study and I am constantly reevaluating my positions and evolving. I don’t consider myself close minded at all. And I’m sure some of you may think of yourselves as open minded as well. However, the absolute dismissal of anything you may consider “outside the box” stikes me as close minded in the extreme.
Many of you won’t even read Austrian economics because you think “not many” mainstream economist believe it and because “we don’t do that anymore”.
Many of you won’t read anything pertaining to the Federal Reserve, FDR or Fort Knox because “it sounds like a conspiracy theory”. I basically shove the evidence in your faces yet you ignore that because you are too busy throwing around insults about aliens, Roswell, JFK and other derogatory references.
So yes much of this leads me to consider many of you close minded. If you would actually start to read my links and absorb the information I am giving you I would certainly change my mind.
Yes, you are. You’ve demonstrated that again and again in this thread.
Not really, no. There’s more important things to worry about than a bunch of not very useful heavy metal.
:rolleyes: Oh, please. None of that is true; I simply don’t share your gold fixation. Face reality; gold just isn’t that important anymore, and it likely won’t ever be again. It never was the thing of all consuming importance you think it is.
I’m tired of telling you to stop insulting people. This is a formal warning and the staff may discuss your posting privileges.
Go read the recent post I wrote, read the books and visit the links. Nothing I have posted is what “convinced me”. There are MANY books and articles and serious historians who have come to the same conclusion. I couldn’t possibly show you everything I have seen. I have no agenda in believing this story, it is just where the facts lead me.
If you read a bit more, although you may not be convinced, you would learn about the high number of serious historians and researchers who believe this. You would understand that this is a serious viewpoint and there is significant evidence to support it. You would gain perspective on the subject.
Go read the links and the books I suggested and get back to me.
Oh, please don’t take him away! He’s ever so much fun! We promise to feed and water him, and clean up whenever he takes a dump. Why, we’ve been doing that this whole thread! And he isn’t really any more dangerous than one of my rattlers. See, he just doesn’t know when he might hurt someone.
Can we keep him, please, please?!?! For a while longer, anyway?
ETA-- I know this probably belongs in ATMB, but I didn’t want to open a whole thread and all…
With **jrodfield **it should be clear by now that he does not have the ability to detect what are the good or the bad sources, regarding his Pearl Harbor Gish Gallop I made a bet that one only needed to check his first quoted source to find that in reality he does not “Try to actually pay attention to the facts for once.”
Just looking at Robert B. Stinnett and his Day of deceit:
One can see the quality of the sources from jrod, I think he has a blind spot for sources that like to misquote and misinterpret information.
This is the wrong forum for a discussion about that, and being patronizing about jrodefeld is also not helpful. I don’t want any more unnecessary hostility in this thread.
Yes sir.
No doubt there are many people who have read more history than I have. There are many people who I have read that believe what I believe who are expert historians who have read MUCH more than you or I ever had.
The evidense I have read is very convincing. I didn’t start reading this stuff yesterday. I have spent YEARS looking into this stuff. It makes sense to me.
But, leaving that aside, if it IS true that there was knowledge ahead of time about the attacks and they did nothing, wouldn’t there be a massive effort to cover it up and the school textbooks wouldn’t show the dissenting information?
What I am talking about is not a conspiracy theory, rather it is the natural course of events where the winning party writes the history. There is a LOT of distortions of history. There are constant revisions of history as well, usually to further an agenda.
The notion that because it is not a majority believe at this time it doesn’t merit discussion is bullshit.
Read up a bit more on the history before writting this off.
Yes it is. And more to the point you’re employing conspiracy theorist style thinking. The evidence for your point of view is weak and unconvincing, so you’re not resorting to the argument that there is a lack of evidence because there was a coverup. So the absence of evidence becomes evidence for a coverup. It’s circular thinking. And it’s also flawed, which Robert Anton Wilson pointed out a long time ago: he pointed out that with this type of thinking it becomes impossible to know which evidence to trust.
This is a typical smear that is unfounded. Anyone who supports states rights must be a racist. If you read about the history of the civil war you would see that is was about FAR more than slavery. There were many factors that went in to the decision to secede. Nobody defends slavery, but even IF a few states tried to secede for the wrong reasons, there are many examples in our early history of states rights and nullification used to fight slavery. And this is 2010, if we ressurected the idea of secession and nullification, NOBODY would support reinstituting slavery or any such ludicrous idea.
The thing is oppression can occur at any level of government. The goal should be to provide a healthy counterbalance between the various levels of governments so as to provide enough safeguards of the peoples liberties to limit the possible oppression.
In our current history the Federal government has far too much power and the states have far too little.
I prefer local government over massive national government.
Not necessarily racism, but typically other forms of oppression as well. Which is why so-called states rights supporters suddenly become big fans of federal power when it’s used to, say, keep California from loosening up anti-marijuana laws.
No. Slavery was the all consuming purpose of the Confederacy, as they admitted at the time and wrote into their constitution. The claims that it was about state’s rights and so on are due to historical revisionists trying to make them look better than they were.
According to you; me, I’d be happy to see the states reduced to impotence. I regard powerful state governments as destructive to the nation and an archaic holdover from the distant past.
State government isn’t even close to “local government”. And state governments are quite massive.
I agree that the old ideal of government is crashing and burning. But I don’t think there is a consensus to cling to it. Just because your ideas don’t look any better, doesn’t mean people are defending the failing ones.
Agreed. But Austrian economics? It sounds like jumping from the frying pan into the fire to me. It’s not all that complicated. Do you think we change for the sake of changing? Fine, why don’t you consider other alternatives instead of insisting only you know the answer?
Disagree. Simple logic demonstrates its not true. The checks still go out, get cashed, and there is minimal inflation. Without changes to the system it may eventually fail. Why don’t you think the simple changes to continue the system won’t be made at the last minute like we always do?
We ought to. Won’t reveal a lot about the gold. Might spur reform of the Fed though. How does that justify the rest of your claims?
Agreed. But you advocate a laissez-faire approach that will make that problem worse. I think, because your ideas look like a pile of spaghetti, and who can tell what you really mean.
I’ll cut spending, but why the ‘sacred cows’? How about the overfed cattle that don’t supply any meat?
You complained before about democratic opinion. What would be the point of repeating what others have said?
I just see you having a condescending view of other’s ideas, and offering no evidence that your ideas will work. I don’t support conventional wisdom, but why should I support your ideas? They are different, but the need is for a better way, not merely a different way.
So far, I see you demonstrating the closed mind. You’ve ignored the well documented evidence that contradict your claims, and persist in citing the same dubious sources that you based your claims on in the first place. Some of your detractors may be closed minded as well, but that doesn’t add credence to your argument.
I take unpopular sides in arguments all the time, on this board and in the rest of my life. I feel like calling people idiots all the time too. So I understand the nature of your frustration. There are a lot of quibblers and nit-pickers on this board, and it gets tiresome at times. But the purpose is for me to learn. The ignorance I spend the most time fighting is my own. You don’t sound to me like you are considering the possibility that you could be wrong, or have anything to learn. After a few fruitless posts you might want to ask questions, try to understand the answers, and demonstrate that you are a reasonable person. If I actually cared about changing people’s minds, thats what I would do.
Nice overwhelm attempt. But a big pile of shit is still just shit. For the record, I have read most of these.
And you lose.
Been there, done that.
This must be some definition of ‘serious historian’ that I am unfamiliar with.
You do have an agenda, it is part of your overall mindset. Otherwise we would not be discussing it.
I learned about the cranks and no-nothings who try to play historian and fall flat on their faces when they meet up with historians who actually know what they are talking about.
Did you hear about Stinnett’s message board? He set it up expecting nothing but adulation and he certainly got some from the folks who can’t let their family hatred of FDR go - but historians who studied WW2, the experts on Pearl Harbor, and people who made a life out of studying cryptography started asking him questions. Hard questions. Things like what GIGObuster post and hundreds infinitely more damning.
Stinnett shut down the board. His evidence had been shown to be a sham. It was paper thin and made to look impressive, but to those who knew what he was talking about it was a joke. For Stinnet’s claims to be even remotely possible a time machine would need to show up in 1946. Stinnet was shown to be a deceptive liar and he had to hide that fact from his fans and from the internet.
Why are you acting as if I know nothing on the subject? I probably forgot more about it than you will ever know.
Already done. Care to defend Stinnet now, you can start with GIGObuster’s bit for starters. If you can handle that we’ll move onto stuff that is even harder to deal with.
You really are not very good at this. It is painfully obvious despite all your talk about ‘studying for years’ that you never even glanced at any criticisms of Pearl Harbor nutters.
JRod, I take it you’ve finally read the Wiki links and realize your original assertions on nullification don’t hold water. That’s the closest to an important substantive concession on your part I can recall in the thread. Good on you. Given this good faith movement on your part, I will agree to proceed. For a while.
In particular, I agree that whether nullification is a good idea is separate from its historical standing. But you’re mistaken to say I haven’t addressed that. Back in Post #906, I said, “As for my personal views, no nullification can’t be right. Article VI (the supremacy clause) means nothing if it is. For better or worse, we’re stuck with the the Supreme Court as arbiter. Nothing else fits the system of checks and balances. BTW, I support medical marijuana, yet recognize the California law is invalid. It’s one of the prices I pay for living in a democracy.”
Let’s consider an example. As you know, in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown that segregated schools were not acceptable under the Equal Protection Clause. Most southern states thought this decision was wrong and Arkansas in particular contested the decision in court. This too went to the Supreme Court. Its unanimous decision, in Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958), reaffirmed the rule under which we have all lived since Marbury v. Madison, to wit, that the Supreme Court is the arbiter and the states are bound by its decisions. You can read the Wiki summary here and the full opinion here. The point is, how else can it possibly be? Surely Arkansas doesn’t get to violate equal protection on its own say so. If that were the rule, the 14th Amendment means nothing. Someone or something has to be the arbiter. If not Arkansas or the Supreme Court, then who?
Now let’s take your question: “Lets say we were started a new nation from the ground up and we wanted to preserve liberty for our citizens, wouldn’t we want to make sure that all voluntary groups had the tools of secession and nullification?” You do realize, I hope, that that’s essentially a democratic question. What rule of law would we choose? Not what rule of law would you impose. It’s a thought experiment, of course, and therfore not easily answered. My sense, though, is that most people would agree that having fifty state legislatures and/or their governors deciding what the Constitution means is unworkable. YMMV.
Importantly, you seem to assume that de-federalizing would mean less regulation. Why so? Could it not just mean a cacophany of disparate regulations? I remind you of the law of unintended consequences. Nothing is simple.
I agree with Der Trihs in that American companies manufacturing overseas should be held somewhat responsible. Why should they be able to freely outsource jobs from the US to avoid workplace regulation?
Beisdes, you’ve completely ignored the point I was making. You genuinely claimed that poverty could be eliminated by the free-market and actually had been in the past, which is clearly bollocks. But I guess you’ve realised that since you are now ignoring it. Whether the poverty is inside or outside of America is irrelevant.
When did I say I objected to it? I accepted that poverty is a natural consequence of the free-market and you disagreed, saying that through some sort of magic your Libertarian Utopia would eliminate it. Now, having realised I am correct you seem to have adopted my position while continuing to argue as if I had held yours.
Because I accept that this a natural consequence of the economic system I support government intervention to reduce it’s human cost. Perhaps you cannot accept it because this would mean you would have to take the position that a) poor people don’t matter and we shouldn’t protect them or b) we should have a welfare system.
And you are correct that it’s the standard of living at the bottom that is most important, but I don’t see how your policies will help that. Until some amazing breakthrough in population control or food production the poorest will continue to be hungry. And remember that the true cost of free-market globalisation has been hidden from the average American because it has been exported to the developing world, where poor people still suffer hunger and mal-nutrition. If you believe this is a consequence of the free-market not being free enough then you’re a fool.
That’s a big ‘if’ right there, plus the requirement of ‘honest’ businessmen. Plus nobody is even arguing against the merits of entrepreneurship, we just disagree that your system would a) provide more of it (without government regulation big business could soon squash smaller firms) b) be a big enough benefit to justify the less agreeable side-effects of Libertarian government.
Who’s arguing for an authoritarian government? If you class the US’s democratically elected, ‘socialism is a dirty word’ government as authoritarian then it’s no suprise that you have trouble arguing your points, because you clearly lack perspective.
Now that’s something we agree on. Despite you labelling me as such I am not a socialist (by my definition anyway, by the American Right’s definition I’m probably a Communist). I believe in having a vibrant free-market and that corporate influence in government has gone to far, especially in the US. The difference is that I am not an absolutist, as you are. Where you see the free-market as the perfect solution to all problems I see a system with up-sides and down-sides that requires a balancing hand if we want to achieve a meaningful social policy.
Basically your aguments lack nuance because you are unable to see or acknowledge the positive aspects of our current system or see the glaring down-sides of a completely free-market one.
Who would you have audit the gold at Fort Knox, jrodefeld?
Given your propensity for believing all sort of Conspiracy Theories and woo, (and your apparent inability to distinguish between reliable sources and cranks in regards to vasrious topics), your demands that other posters remain silent until they have accepted your references are ludicrous. In that context, these sort of demands are nothing more than personal challenges that are little more than disguised insults. In particular, your insistence that anyone who opposes your diatribes are relying on fictions fed them in school is utter rubbish and an unwarranted insult. Most of your opponents are as well read as you are and many of them have demonstrated a better grasp of history and science than you have.
If you wish to continue posting here, your should probably develop a different approach to your posting style.
[ /Modding ]