I know I’m a bit late to the mix (it’s a fast moving topic), but about that liberatian/nativist/reactionary mish-mosh of a teaparty-centralist platform, did nobody else notice #88:
“88) Computer artificial intelligence has evolved to the point that it can predict the future with extreme accuracy.”
OK, it doesn’t seem to relate to the next item #89 (“It will be illegal for elected officials to become lobbyists or obtain any job that could be construed as being in conflict of interest.”), so I guess the teaparty-centralists are supportive of the concept of the Singularity then?
I also note that #98 and #99 just seem to be random statements:
98) One problem our Founding Fathers could not foresee is that a Constitutional amendment could now be passed without a majority vote.
99) Early in our history, people were encouraged to settle land, populate the country and even more recently, to own houses.
If I was limited to one word to describe the Tea Party, it would be “paranoid”. These are people who are afraid and feel threatened. They think that American life should be like a Norman Rockwell painting. They want things to be back like they were, when minorities were neither seen nor heard, when “good girls” didn’t do it, when we never heard of Muslims and we tolerated Jews but wanted Christians to be in charge, when movies had no swear words and you never saw a breast, when gay people stayed in hiding lest they be ruined or beaten to within an inch of their lives. That America that they remember is perhaps just a romantic illusion, but they believe that if we could just go back and turn back the clock to that innocent age, all would be well.
So you have this group of people who pine for a nation that no longer exists, if it ever did. Then you have a huge economic collapse resulting in the election of a black president. These people were beside themselves. Could things get any worse? But they knew it was no longer politically acceptable to whine about the president’s ethnicity. They had to find something else to set their teeth into. They tried their hand at identifying Obama as a Muslim, some still do that, or buying into the birther nonsense. Those weren’t providing any traction, but Obama gave them a gift- the Affordable Care Act. Despite the fact that it was essentially the same package that Republicans offered as an alternative to Hillarycare, it became the lightning rod. It was socialism, it was a government takeover of the economy, it was death panels. A black man in the White House who wants to kill grandma! And take your guns and raise your taxes.
The Republican elite saw this as fertile ground for sowing 2010 voters, so they bankrolled it. They were going to fight the socialist Obamacare. Little did the Teabaggers know that Republicans had already met on Inauguration Evening and vowed to never give Obama any cooperation. The Teabaggers saw the Republicans as their salvation from Obama and they elected a GOP House. So while the elite took the Teabaggers’ votes, they also paid lip service to the lies about Obamacare and the stimulus and their paranoia about their guns, all the while convincing these lower middle class whites that their salvation was in cutting taxes for the rich and gutting regulations. Government was the enemy and it could do no good, at least as long as Democrats had any say.
So what is the Tea Party? A group of paranoid racists who have been exploited by the GOP elite.
Indeed, the Revolution was started by a bunch of Rich White Guys who didn’t want to pay their taxes (even though they liked the government subsidies they received).
More to the point, they were rich white guys who wanted a say in how they were taxed. “No taxation without representation”, no? It was never “We don’t want to pay any taxes ever”.
Even more to the point, they were a bunch of rich white guys who knew they were facing the end of their wealth, and possibly their lives, for rebellion and did it anyway. So they must have been SUPER greedy already-rich white guys.
Again, the original Tea Party ™ idea that came together between February and April 2009 was hijacked after the fact. In its initial and earliest days, it was about taxes and federal spending. Then the nutjobs got hold of it (much like most other populist movements throughout history).
I will say this, "rational"wiki sounds like an utter charming and pleasant afternoon read, I can see why so many rely on it for their information.
No, not really - just by posting that stuff you killed several baby bunnies somewhere on Earth. Is that the style of the entire site? I think the points could be made in a less…vile manner. It’s clearly written by the convinced, for the convinced, nobody on “the other side” would possibly be swayed by any of that.
But what about its future? That’s what really matters, isn’t it? Is the TP going to fade away, or is it going to run more primary-challenges in 2014, and in service to whose interests, and how is that all going to play out? (Not much like in 2010, I should think; everybody’s had time to adjust to the TP’s presence, now.)
No, the record shows that (now Freedom Works) started to use it in 2002. Are you paying attention? Really guys, this blind spot on timelines or time itself that I see coming from many on the right is getting tiresome.
They are closer to what we do, as in the SD, they debunk pseudoscience and fight anti-science. And no, their entry on genetic engineering shows that they also do not mind on ripping a new one on many on the left that are against it.
Actually, what frightened our FFs was the English ruling class. They did not want to wind up like the Scots and the Irish, toiling for English absentee landlords. From The American Way of Strategy, by Michael Lind:
One more time - Tea Party is American social shorthand for tax protesting, and it actually started to be used in 1777. EVERYONE uses it to mean that. TEA (acronym) Party was not a Koch/FreedomWorks/Cheney/Bilderberger/etc. “front”. Or are you saying that Freedom Works originally set sleeper agents all around the country, 7 years prior, waiting for the precise moment to strike with “spontaneous” protests of actors or something? Wouldn’t a more “rational” assumption be that it WAS a nearly spontaneous outpouring that was then hijacked by the Puppet Masters? Try Occam’s Razor on it and see what works better.
I wasn’t talking so much about content as how it is delivered. I’m sure I’d probably find much of the information fascinating and even agree with huge swaths of it if it weren’t for the “look how cutting, ironic and hipster we are, and oh yeah, fuck you Stupid-McStupiderson who doesn’t think like us” presentation. As it is, I doubt I’ll ever even skim any of it if the entire content of the site is written in that manner.
No, it isn’t.
No, everyone doesn’t.
You can quit with your “TEA Party” acronym pushing-it’s not catching on among the Tea Partiers.
Nobody said anything like that-how silly.
Facts is facts, not matter what you think would be a more “rational” explanation.
