Sure, why not… this will destroy America and everyone in it with the blazing heat of a million H-bombs, leaving the merest vapourized-shadows of what was once a great nation.
Thanks to reasoned response to my comments. I dissagree that this recent incident is typical of the same old same old friction between anti-vs-pro-government ideology.
There’s new forces at work perhaps because of advances in communications technology etc.
I think that is fodder for further discussion, however I would like to get your opinion on my original What If, since your response brings up the point I was originally trying to make.
Would it make a difference in your current opinion if evidence fully emerged that this Republican IRS manager and his Cincinnati underling were in fact working with Mark Levin’s Landmark Legal Services to intentionally stir up a controversy and more contempt against the IRS and the Obama.
Should this be a wake up call that apparently the current explanation is that it was a Republican but it was only a mistake?
What is the difference in your reaction to this event if the speculative conditions became reality vs what we actually know right now?
That’s because of your wildly partisan, good guys/bad guys view of seemingly everything.
That’s not how it works. “Scandal” isn’t some formal label affixed by dispassionate officials after lengthy investigation. No one in politics or the media uses the word the way you seem to, and that’s why you’re ranting about everyone else’s use of the word.
Did I, now? Care to show me where I attributed that statement to you?
This is on the thread where I Asked a question - I did not make s statement of fact. Although you did not attribute anything directly to me, I’ll accept your attempt to ridicule CTs as not directed to me when you state agreement that my What If question is not necessarily a CT.
If not, I believe your backhand slap was directed at me.
And your definition of scandal whether popular or not is in fact making the phrase guilty until proven innocent a virtual justified reality
So you are for it and I’m not.
Believe whatever you need to. Just don’t say I bent any question of yours, when I didn’t make any connection to you. I stated that it was too early to make conclusions, then gave three examples of premature conclusions.
Except for the part where no one has been convicted of the crime of “scandal”. It’s an informal term, not a legal judgement. Thus, there are no legal safeguards surrounding its use.
I’m just explaining reality to you. It doesn’t matter if I am “for it” or not, that’s how our media, our politicians, and the American people operate. Anything scandalous gets labeled a scandal.
I am aware of the reality.
Wrong realities have been eliminated over the course of history.
Does that make it right - and how do we go changing entrenched misperceptions? Should we?
Just asking?
Had this been an insider attack on the IRS what should the penalty be for the culprits.
First, we should wait for the investigation(s) to be completed, before we settle on what’s a misperception and what isn’t.
Firing.
Please explain further since this IRS ‘scandal’ originated as a mistake as I continue to refer to it to this day. Nothing we the public have learned since the ‘mistake’ took place has elevated that mistake to what you insist should be referred to as s scandal or scandalous activity.
The rule of your thumb just presented by you is that a mistake becomes a scandal when our “media, our politicians, and the American people - labeled a scandal”.
So a Republican manager at the IRS made a mistake and it remained a mistake until such time that (a) one American labels it a scandal / or if one American labels it a scandal and a certain quota/percentage of Americans must follow.
At this tipping point where sufficient numbers of the herd label the mistake a scandal, I am supposed to get in line and drop the mistake label that my free and independent mind has stuck with.
It sounds like you wish that I were a sheep or lemming or such.
Did you forget the IRS apologizing for their conduct? And I haven’t insisted anything, I am just reporting reality: this matter is being referred to as a scandal. As per usual, when reality conflicts with your beliefs, you attack reality.
Even if your theory as to what happened is correct (which we don’t know, the investigation is ongoing, and your efforts to declare “case closed!” are premature), a mistake can be a scandal. For example, the Castle Bravo nuclear test, which resulted in the irradiating of a Japanese fishing boat, was quite scandalous, and also a simple mistake: the scientists were wrong about how lithium-7 reacts to being bombarded with neutrons, and the affected area was larger than anticipated.
Your dichotomy between a scandal and mistake is a false one.
What other criteria could there be?
No one said “must follow”, that’s your martyr complex acting up again. You can call it whatever you want, but you’ve gone past that to attacking others for calling it a scandal.
Yes, you’re a martyr to freedom and independence, not a partisan wonk. :rolleyes:
It sounds like you wish you were persecuted.
By the way, have you checked out lemmingparty.com?
Koalas are cuter. Try that.
Regards,
Shodan
You didn’t answer if one American needs to label something a scandal or if it takes a certain number from the population. And if it takes more than one, who decides when there’s enough to change the label from mistake to scandal?
You need to tell me at which point it was that you began following the crowd and started calling the mistake a scandal, so I can learn to understand reality in the way that you do.
Who are you, the scandal police? Or the dictionary police?
Some kind of police, is what I’m going for here.
Educate and lead us, Oh last original thinker on Earth!
You might be interested in catastrophe theory. It deals with tipping points such as this. The old model of “the straw that broke the camel’s back” doesn’t model reality as well as it should. There is a sort of momentum involved.
You can actually watch this sort of thing in action at smaller scales, for instance, in a meeting room, where a new idea is introduced. You can watch initial skepticism change into grudging acceptance, and even into enthusiasm. It’s actually fun to observe.
So, no, there isn’t any given magic number. You can’t say that 9,281,344 people hold an opinion, but 9,281,345 people constitute a social truth. It just doesn’t work that way.
Thanks, but the issue here is not related to having the mob determine what is social truth or any kind of truth.
I am insisting upon having evidence fulfilled and yes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, prior to elevating a relatively low level Government employee’s mistake to the level of scandal and not to label it as such until such evidence can be presented to the public in a fair and truthful way.
The issue I have with Human Action and John Mace is that I have been told that the definition of a mistake becoming a scandal is reliant upon the reality that it get’s labeled a scandal by The news media, the politicians, and the public at large regardless of the evidence available at the time.
To me it is absurd to define a mistake as a scandal just because one person or a bazillion decide to start using that term instead of calling it what we only can know that it is.
It is John Mace and Human Action that define a scandal as something that get’s labeled a scandal.
I believe it would be fair for them to explain just exactly how this ‘labeling theory’ works.
Seriously… as this theory has been presented it is possible that only one CNN anchor could utter the phrase IRS Teaparty targeting scandal and wah-lah… a mistake is thus transformed by the power of ONE up to a hysterical scandal mongering situation which has become harmful in my view to our government institutions overall and not based upon one iota of fact.
It is mob rule, hysteria, and lack of respect for the truth all rolled into one.
No response to this question has come about, but perhaps the orginaters of the ‘mob label theory’ are preparing to provide a good answer.
Does it take one person to decided something without evidence is not a mistake but a scandal or does it take many? If many, how many? And then when do we know something has reached that point of no return… when a mistake becomes a scandal… and let loose all the hysteria you want.
After all “Wolf Blitzer” says it is a scandal.
Who are we to question him?
The problem is, that’s kind of true. There have been worse scandals in U.S. history which blew over and were forgotten. There have been other trivial scandals that have had greater consequences. (Congressman Anthony Weiner’s resignation because of naughty phone messages. Come awn!)
The public consciousness is quirky. We’re easily distracted by side-issues. We’ll spend millions of dollars to rescue a little girl from a well – and resent paying five dollars to give a little girl a healthy school lunch. We are not a rational species.
So, yeah: what is or is not a scandal depends a lot on public perception, and that is subject to manipulation, but is also hugely random. Look at how hard the Republicans tried to make Benghazi into an impeachment-level scandal. It simply isn’t a hard science.
The term “scandal” is not a term of art. It is not like “guilty” or “presumed innocent” or “mass” or “price”. So yeah, if enough people think something is a scandal, then it is.
Is there some precise definition out there that the rest of us are unaware of? You don’t need to call it a scandal if you don’t want to, but you don’t get to determine whether other people do. Perhaps it’s different on your Home World, but that’s how we earthlings operate.
So, after 8 pages, has it been determined yet if the IRS scandal was a “false-flag operation”.
Similarly have we yet decided if the Holocaust was a hoax or if Bush was responsible for 911?
I don’t want to determine whether you define this one as a scandal or a mistake. I question why you agree with the sheeple that it is a scandal just because one or more people started labeling it a scandal before anyone knew if the TeaParty was targeted for political purposes or if it was a mistake because of the ambiguity of the law.
Do you call it a scandal just because so many do call it a scandal?
Or do you have some evidence that we don’t know about yet?
What we did find out is that it appears that a Republican manager and his underling in Cincinnati got the whole thing rolling - and that it was not politically motivated.
So many here were wrong to discount any notion that it could be a false flag operation by just a couple employees at some sub-level within the IRS.
I also said I thought it was a mistake from the start… and now it appears that is what it was.
Now we are learning that it was a scandal and not a mistake because one person decided to label it a scandal and when a whole bunch (no number has been provided) of people hear it has been labeled a scandal they call it a scandal too.
So if that first person whoever it was that first called the IRS mistake a scandal, he had to be pushing some kind of CT to make it more exciting than just a typical mistake inside some government agency.
Did that CT include an enemies list by the Obama Admin just like Nixon’s.
I wonder which CT John Mace and Human Action bought into when they started repeating that the IRS mistake was a scandal just because a whole bunch of people called it a scandal.