It is surely no exaggeration to say that a man’s admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.— Alexis de Tocqueville
At a certain point in the near future, if the current oligarchy cannot be removed via the ballot, direct political action may become an urgent and compelling mission. It may then be necessary for many people in many walks of life to put their bodies on the line. For the moment, however, although pressing and profound questions have arisen about whether the current government is even legitimate, i.e., properly elected, there still remains a chance to remove this government peacefully in the 2008 election. (Or am I living in a dream world?)
I do think this regime's removal is the most urgent matter before the country today. . . . This is all terrible and rather fantastic to contemplate. But what assurances have we that it is not all quite plausible? Having discarded the principles that Jefferson & Co. espoused, the current regime seems capable of anything. I know that my imagination is a feverish instrument. But are we not living in feverish times, in times of the unthinkable?
83 comments:
I think the man is a fruitcake.
There were elections, his side lost, now he wants to ignore the system and have himself a revolution because he did not get what he wanted.
Demcoracy is not for sissies.
Thee is no indication [other than the ravings of the mentally ill] that Bush is not going to be gone come Jan. 2009. So it is a little soon to call for armed revolt or whatever the hell it is this guy is calling for.
I wonder if Salon knows how completely strange this is: For all lurking Democrats, this is how and why you keep losing elections...you sound weird.
The fellow is supposedly some sort of 'radical' philosophy professor. Gee, what do think would happen if he picked up a gun, other than to shoot himself in the foot.
Sort of like that piece in Salon.
My reaction was not to want to watch a brief ad to read the rest of that drivel.
The student's question did remind me of something my friends and I used to ponder when I was in college -- is there any major more useless than a philosophy major?
The headlines:
CIVIL WAR?
--Uprising in Nation's Philosophy Dep'ts--
"Several policemen--scratched, bitten, hit with purses--claim professors "Not Civil!"
read more....
It may then be necessary for many people in many walks of life to put their bodies on the line.
I like the way these self-exalted assholes imply they are part of the "masses." If the shit ever hits the fan, I think they will discover that the masses have a different view.
Tocqueville was fascinated by the American electoral process. He was taken aback at the viciousness that preceded an election (name calling, vitriol, etc.) but was more amazed how everything calmed down after the election. Life went on, and people, who were at each other's throats one day, were back doing business with each other the next.
Mr. (or Prof.) Tennis should actually try reading Tocqueville instead of, you know,....writing. If he did more of the former, he might learn the folly of his trying to do the latter. Yes, dear Tennis, we do live "in times of the unthinkable." It is almost beyond belief that someone such as you actually got paid to write that piffle. The fact that you are able to make a nice wage despite your meager talents is proof of two things: 1) we live in a time of lax editorial standards with many outlets for views of all kinds to be aired, even silly ones, 2) what a country!
The student's question did remind me of something my friends and I used to ponder when I was in college -- is there any major more useless than a philosophy major?
Now, now --- I was a philosophy major.
However, the antidotes are brewing at the poison factory--new takes on PoMo PC soul-suicide will come from down the hall at the humanities dep't--ideas generated precisely in response to the appalling performance of post-WWII "philosophy".
Appalling in the sense that PoMo PC has had ample time to find its humanism, and to deliver value to us ordinary joes.
But instead of clarifying, it clouds, and in its confusion and guilt has become plainly anti-human.
So "philosophy" needs an intervention--and is getting one, from linguists and anthropologists--notably Eric Gans @ UCLA, a guy whose writings on our need for optimism and regeneration so animates this site's Truepeers (and even me, as what little I can savvy of it makes me feel good, rather than bad).
Mark, the problem with proceeding from false assumptions is that no matter how well-designed the following analysis--no matter how clean and well-lit, or mystifyingly byzantine, or barouque, rococo, waltdisney or roman-liturgical--it can be nothing but farce.
Mark, the problem is that I've been hearing the same theories for damn near 50 years. Secretaries of State in general don't much matter because elections are run by counties. The possibilities for electronic voting machine fraud are nothing on the old mechanical ones, and for every nasty letter to a Republican party group, I can see you, and raise you a tire slashing or (as in Washington State, or New Mexico) mysteriously appearing absentee ballots or absentee ballot challenges.
And the "secret trials in secret courts" thing, while just about as obnoxious to me as to you, was established by Jimmy Carter.
If you were to set the Wayback machine to 1999, you'd find almost exactly the same arguments being made and the same dire predictions being ... predicted (hell, it's early) about Clinton, Reno, et al. You'd just have to hang around with a different crowd: the black-helicopter Republicans instead of the moonbat Democrats.
Somehow we muddle through.
A half-century of process-control by the Dems had very-nearly made this country unable to protect itself inside its own borders. Then folks started noticing, and they've responded by electing people expressly to roll back some of the experimental midnite social-engineering that had created that vulnerability.
Anyone who chooses to view this national turn to the right as some sort of conspiratorial process-grab, is half-right. They are framing the topic with their own vision, and conspiracy is part-and-parcel of that, has been since the human race bifurcated 10,000 years ago into producers and those who live off them.
When 53% of the voters conspire to elect someone, then, you bet, it's a vast conspiracy, alright.
Don't worry about an American police-state emerging on the right. The right has its share of nutjobs, but the genius of the nation's military schools--West point, Annapolis, Air Force Academy (and yes, mark,i know about the tea-pot tempest scandals that get blown sky-high by the you-know-whos)--being strict meritocracies that accept all walks of life--deliberately--on merit alone--guarantees a quality in American armed force that will not allow the country to be taken by coup.
The only coup available is--and will be--the one enshrined in the Constitution, the 'will-of-the-people', whereby we elect our leaders.
Yes, we can elect a monster--that's a major, major problem, but it's also warp-and-woof of the system. Whatcha gonna do? throw DC open to thugs and see who can assassinate their way into a Politiburo?
The closest thing we'll ever see to a coup is the one we've already beaten, the coup of marxist universities corrupting the nation's watchdog media into such a careerism-shaped monolithic outlook that we very nearly did a slow-roll into a nation that a majority of the electorate never saw coming--being busy with making a living--and did not want.
The century, and the blinders, turned in the year 2000 (you can thank Clinton for that), and Mark, you guys are just gonna have to deal with it.
Forget your civil war threats, you BDSers are few and can't fight anyway. Once it goes beyond keyboards and into the street, you'll take a few downtowns, and we'll just quit sending you beans and checks from the Treasury. It'll be a short-lived and very tiny revolution.
David, "idiots until proven otherwise" is a great prescription.
Soft science abstracts humankind to a point that the system Mother Nature built is somehow--according to what, I cannot imagine--"wrong".
The fleas need the dog, the dog don't need the fleas.
Buddy,
The rent seekers in the moats around the Blue Castles will rise up (at around 11AM) and drag the Blue Barons (in papier mache) through the streets for twenty minutes before retiring to Starbucks to exchange war stories. As grand and glorious a revolution as ever was - and all without the dreadful inconvenience of the mud and blood that go with an actual revolution.
It's what passes for the thought that counts.
I'm surprised that the professor hasn't changed his name to badminton - tennis can be such brutal sport.
At least he's not a faux idiot.
These mark-cysts have this wet-dream of taking their needlenose pliers, allen wrenches, a screwdriver or two, and doing a midnite break & enter at the Big Voting Booth Warehouse, where they'll hook up them doohickeys like they got in the ninja movies, and resetting all the machines to vote for THEIR guy.
So, naturally, they figger everybody else has the same dream, too.
The notion that a vast wing of the electorate would never, and furthermore will even fight--actually IS fighting--for even HIS right to vote, is quite simply beyond his imagination.
Most of my reactions to the post have already been expressed.
When I was in undergraduate school, Eisenhower was in his second term, the first Republican President in twenty years. But Congress was still run by the Democrats, and was to be for another twenty years.
I believe if one were to chart the power of the two parties, one would find that in the last seventy five years or so, the party achieving "one party rule" was more likely to be democrat than republican.
Tennis' comments are not only shrill, they are hysterical (in the Freudian sense of the word).
The way these BDSers are fixated on the paranoid style, it may be--re vnjagvet's reference to the unconscious--that they actually WANT to be victimized.
Look at it--what's the problem that the BDS rank & file wants it leaders to solve?
Paying the rent, and paying for food and personal services, right?
Now, what do they want to do with their lives, that they couldn't do in a nice detention camp?
Hang a few tie-dye curtains, nail the peace-sign posters to the walls, slap a Tarantino movie on the wide-screen, fire the bong and the internet, and chill out for the next whatever. Uncle Sam will door-deliver three squares a day, antibiotics as needed, and plenty of furloughs for spring-break and such.
Talk about beat "The Man"!
Hell, no need for the real-estate and barbed wire--just send the money!
The great French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out that the United States is a polity founded on the concept of revolution. It's difficult to build stability on such a foundation. A riddle wrapped in an enigma as it were. Thus it is that the urge to revolution runs forever in our veins and is part of our sanctified "center". We cannot avoid it, and every turn of the political screw will lead another small group of delusional disaffecteds to find new reasons for armed revolt in the latest avatar of "oppression".
Braudel has a point--immigrants are radicals. Even our only non-immigrants, the amerindians, had to be just a little crazy to tip-toe across that shifting Bering ice-bridge.
LOL, Peter. Along those lines, and at the certain risk of making light of "genderism", let me paste an email going around in the south--among the guys (and ladies, please, it's all in fun):
**********
Sent: Monday, August 16, 2004 9:49 AM
Subject: Liberals explained
The division of the human family into its two distinct branches occurred after the Last Ice Age, when humans coexisted as members of small bands of nomadic hunter/gatherers. In the pivotal event of societal evolution, beer was invented.
This epochal innovation was both the foundation of modern civilization and the occasion of the great splitting of humanity into its two distinct subgroups: Liberals and Conservatives.
Once beer was discovered, it required grain, and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle or aluminum can had yet been invented, so it was necessary to stick pretty close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed.
Some men spent their days killing animals to barbecue at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of the conservative movement.
Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting, learned how to live off conservatives by showing up for the BBQs every night and doing women's work like sewing, fetching and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the liberal movement. Later, some of the liberals actually became women.
Liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, invention of group therapy and democratic voting to see how to divide the beer and meat that the conservatives provided. Women were not interested in democracy at that time because most of them were still women back then, and the conservatives fed them. Conservatives are symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass.
Modern Liberals like imported beer (they add lime), but most prefer white wine or foreign water in a bottle. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are on liberal menus. Their women have more testosterone than the men.
Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, and group therapists are Liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule in baseball because it wasn't "fair" to make the pitcher also bat.
Conservatives drink domestic beer. They eat red meat, and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumber jacks, construction workers, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, soldiers, athletes, and generally anyone who works productively outside government. Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.
Liberals do not produce anything. They like to "govern" the producers and decide what is to be done with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals just stayed in Europe when conservatives were coming to America.
The American cowboy, of course, is your basic, full-bore Conservative. A hundred years ago, a Frenchman visiting Texas was attempting to find the owner of a huge cattle ranch. He rode up to one of the ranch hands, and inquired:
"Pardonnez moi, but could you perhaps tell me where I might locate your master?"
To which the cowboy replied:
"Sorry, friend, but that son-of-a-bitch ain't been born yet".
Liberal achievements include the domestication of cats...
It's a damn lie. Anyone who claims to have domesticated cats is deluded. Dogs, on the other hand, have been bred to a touching and servile obedience. The liberal pet par excellance.
mark:
Did you know that the county official in Florida who was responsible for a great deal of the confusion in the 2000 election was a Democrat and that she had given jobs to relatives who never showed up and so a lot of things got screwed up?
People say politics are local, well so are elections and I am tired of Democrats either screwing up or using crack cocaine to buy votes and then blaming their inevitable loss on the other guy.
This paranoid fantasy about stolen elections etc. just leads Democrats to believe they can keep doing the same silly shit and sooner or later it will end differently.
It will only end differently when Democrats stop acting like bad children.
And btw mark, it was easier to kick down a door, tap a phone, lock up a man wihtout a lawyer and deprive him of a vote 40 years ago than it is today.
Sh*t, Terrye, it was easier FIVE years ago. Look into "filegate" and the small western anti-Clinton newspapers that got IRS hounded during President Clanton's regime.
buddy:
It was easier when they could operate in the dark.
Or under the desk.
Not a pretty picture.
I love it!
LePore was a Rovian plant. Is there no end to the man's genius?
And Shrum has lost how many elections for the Democrats now? Ten to one he is another covert GOP operative.
What Mark does not realize is that we have already infiltrated his movement. Half of his comrades are actually undercover GOP agents. It's impossible for him to win, yet he keeps plugging away. Sad, really.
Flenser, you're right--all Democrats who get elected and then are booted for Republicans are actually Republicans. It's all right there on Mark's websites, nestled in between the porn ads and the personal-services classifieds.
We get them from cribs, and put little kryptonite-powered receivers in their heads. Haven't you read your Manson?
mark:
Let me explain this to you.
I used to be a Demcorat. I really did.
I left the party because it was taken over by people like you.
People who had to chose between being responsbile adults and being paranoiad and chose the latter.
Because of this they refuse to stop doing dumb things that get them beat and make other Democrats look strange in the process.
I don't know what thought process is involved that makes it possible for people like you to overlook the dead rising to vote Democrat, Democrats slashing tired, Democrats swapping drugs for votes, Democrats discovering mystery ballots in cafeterias, Democrats registering more people to vote in a district than live there, Democrats coming closer to losing Wisconsin than Bush did to losing Ohio and completely overlooking it and on and on.
The responsibility for elections is handled on the local level, for several reasons. One is that it is harder to cheat and the cheating tends to be minimized.
But to guys like you in the fever swamp, there are two kinds of elections:
The ones you win
and the ones that were stolen.
So why bother discussing this topic? You have already made up your mind. Republicans are the spawn of Satan and are part of a conspiracy involving tens of millions of people that exist for one reason and one reason only: to see to it that you do not get what you want.
I am sure there is a medication for this.
Kennedy and Nixon had a neck and neck election and Hawaii ended up deciding it. In truth Nixon could have contested it, reports said he had more votes in the popular election. But he said it would be bad for the country.
It is pretty sad when Richard M. Nixon is more of an adult than half the Democratic party.
pathetic in fact.
Mark, you'e now been reduced to arguing that a Democrat election supervisor in a Democrat machine town delivered votes to Buchanan by making a confusing ballot that the Palm Beach papers eventually analyzed, and discovered hadn't actually been any more error-prone than any other or previous ballots.
Oh, and the answer on "philosophy major" is in two parts: first, that's where they did mathematical logic when I was an undergrad (in many places, anyway); and second, I read a lot of Ayn Rand as a kid and thought philosophy was cool.
Still do, actually. Just don't think that its easy to reality-test.
I was running my own business at the time so the question of what I would do with a philosophy degree was less important.
From Nov 10, 2000.
Mark, why not a word about the Florida Panhandle, while you wax wroth over your excuse for your BDS?
Besides, if all Democrats who lose are actually Republicans, then do you mean, Mark, that the Republicans who beat them are in reality Republicans masquerading as Republicans?
You may have something there--you should call it in to the NYTimes.
Did anyone ever get the whole story on the 20,000 ballots tossed for having two holes punched, that were as statistically impossible *against* Bush as a third that many Buchanan votes were *for" him? Mark? You got a version of that, too?
I'm sorry, a *seventh* as many Buchanan votes.
3K vs 20K.
And the panhandle--good for a 10K swing Gore-wards.
Gore had 50 trained election-lawyers down there, way ahead of the game. They still couldn't steal the state.
WHY? Because Bush won. Fair & square. Too bad you can't get on with your life, Mark.
"Elderly Jews in Palm Beach, some of whom were holocaust survivers casting the last votes of their lives were about as likely to vote for Pat Buchanan, a candidate who once called Hitler a great man, as they were for Yassar Arafat."
I guess I'm slipping into madness if I think I can get a rational response from mark, but how does he know which people in Palm Beach cast votes for Buchanan? Or is he saying that everyone in PB is an elderly Jewish survivor of the Holocaust?
Yup yup--lotta dirty politics in the era.
But none of it holds a candle--not even close to holding a candle--on the Dems breaking a deal with an ally--and our own military--by yanking the plug on weapons re-supply, and leaving ARVN--without warning or preparation--naked and helpless to the NVA armored divisions moving down on them.
None of it was a fraction of a percent as destructive to the world of the 70s and half the 80s as the American "Vietnam Syndrome"--the Democrat's proudest achievement since they were a real party in the 40s--which among other things allowed--encouraged--the lustrum of madmen and despots slaughtering our friends in SE Asia.
Noble we've been, as a nation, under the Dems--whether it's backstabbing allies or seducing chidren in the Oval, our Dems know how to wear shit proudly.
And financially slaughtering the nation (and global-poverty-lifting trade) with double digit inflation and interest rates.
And letting AQ balloon with victory.
And abdicating totally any attempt at mitigating the results of their very own liberal courts--the murderously destructive, life-ruining social patholgies of every sort that we will now fight for seven generations.
The list is endless--the Democrats of today, boomers forward, are a hideous, despicable self-willed national disaster--and have earned us a world contempt that is only now beginning to lift.
No, mark--YOU started Florida 2000. You do it daily--it's as familiar as it is totally bogus.
The "messes" you keep trying to gin up are largely the fact of your royal mouth--"Hey, there's so much moaning and groaning about moaning and groaning that I have a legitimate reason to moan and groan!"
Here--want something real to M&G about?
Get out of the way of SS, MC, & IRS reform, and we'll all be incredibly better off. Well, not all--not those vested in the waste.
http://www.gao.gov/index.html
bad link above--go browse reports and testimony and such--look at the actuarial/demographic nightmare that the Dems--as their DC leaders showed in televised house and senate questionings of Alan Greenspan recently--are incapapble of comprehending.
as I am of speling.
"terrye I gotta tell ya I'm not impressed by the principled stand of someone who supports the party of Bush, Cheney, Rove, Abramoff, DeLay, Frist, Santorum and Cunningham. Sorry."
markg8,
There lies your problem, and the problems of the Democratic pParty ran by the likes of you, but you can't see it. If you do not respect voters who vote against you, and trumpet the fact to high heaven, you will never get their votes. Never.
There was a time when the Democratic Party respected voters, and listened to what their concerns actually were. Now they mock them and wonder why the Party's power dwindles in each election.
Until it dawns on you that democracy is about everybody, and that includes the Joe Sixpacks of the world, taking principled stands you'll be nothing but and elitist prick nobody takes seriously.
Seneca you're reduced to arguing that elderly Jews in PB County are stoopid.
Is that a road you want to go down?
No, Mark, I'm not arguing anything. I'm pointing out that LaPore was a registered Democrat in a Democrat county, and that the Palm Beach papers didn't find an unusual error rate. You're the one who is arguing that these "elderly Jews" were too dumb to cope with a ballot style that was used all over.
Hey you guys are the ones who want rehash Fl in 2000.
Mark, I refer you to your post of the 13th at 0758. It would appear you're confused.
DNC = "Damn! No Credibility!"
Dull Noodleheaded Collectivists.
Depressing Nut Cases
markg8,
Are a bunch of geezers getting confused and marking the ballet wrong really the best you can come up with?
I think I've found MarkG8.
Lemme see, your party contiunously cuts taxes for the rich during wartime no less and tries, though never succeeds in paying for it by cutting benefits for middle class and poor people and I'm some kind of elitest snob? I said never because the tax cuts always seem to outweigh the spending cuts and by 2010 the nat'l debt will be about 10 trillion dollars. Just as baby boomers start retiring and increasing the load on Medicare and Social Security, which Bush has tried to gut while simultaneously exploding the debt. These are massive financial and social obligations that yet unborn taxpayers will have to bear for decades to come and I don't respect voters? The American people don't want to bankrupt the country so some of us can live it up today. They don't want the social safety net ripped out from underneath all of us and live in some giant banana republic where 10% are filthy rich and the rest dirt poor. They don't want to send their kids off to war
to protect this country from a corrupt monstrous dictator only to have it morph into some thinktank domino dream of spreading democracy via torture
You know, Mark, each and every one of these things can be factually refuted: you can easily find out that after the Bush tax cut, the tax system was more progressive; the tax revenues coming in have increased, not descreased; social spending has increased dramatically, and the so-called "cuts" are descreases in the rate of growth; and on and on.
But what fascinates me is that you don't seem to have any ability to muster an argument on a topic, any topic, and stay with it. Every discussion seems eventually to include yur notion of election issues, cutting prices, lies about Iraq, deficits, and so forth.
Why is this? You start out able to construct a decent sentence, and you seem, when threatened, to be able to muster a certain degree of thought and even decorum. Why does everything you get involved in turn into a repeated litany of the same topics, each of which we've refuted in the past?
markg8,
I'm a Democrat you twit.
As for your list of what americans want, maybe you should stop pretending elections are stolen and actually pay attention to what voters are voting for. Here's a hint -- it aint the out of touch, elitist crap your peddling.
The Democratic Party used to be about real people, and real concerns, before nitwits like you entered it and substituted word games for action.
Back to the topic of this thread -- some clown is sitting in an Ivory Tower wringing his hands over whether he should finish his term paper or join a non-existent revolution and you can't see the ludicrousness of it all?
You come in and try to blow smoke to cover his nonsense and think you're not making yourself look like a blithering idiot in the process?
Show some grativis ya boob. Better yet, join the Greens and render yourself even more irrelevent.
markg8,
It sure as hell wasn't some goof pretending he was a war hero.
soooo... what do youo think about the article this thread is about? Thew guy strike you as a buffoon, or do you feel his pain?
Seneca I'll make it short, who're ya kiddin?
Yeah, that was an informative answer.
It was short, I'll grant.
Well, I'm back--had to go scald some din-din. A black iron frying pan and a rice cooker. You start the brown rice, with garlic salt and butter in with it and start thawing a lb of hamburger in the microwave. while u wait, you dice an onion and a bell pepper and a chunk of cheddar and a chunk of Mozzarella. Then you add some olive oil and black pepper and whats-dis-here sauce and the burger to the pan and when half cooked throw in the onion and bell pepper. when done--onion carmelized and edge burnt--add a can each of pinto beans, black beans, Ro-Tel hot tomaters diced, and okra. simmer and stir a couple minutes, then kill the the gas, and sprinkle the two cheeses and a half cup of Piquante on top. serve over the rice with an beer you stuck in the freezer when you got the hamburger out. Mmmm, boy!!! takes a half hour, to enter the kitchen hongry, and leave fukll--and with dishes washed, since you clean as you go.
Then you come back to the orifice, drop your freshly-belarded self into the rolling chair, flip on the Dell, and see that in your absence the mark8 has been hawking a slightly rearranged platter, and has been satisfactorily chastised for the latest episode of betraying his own party trying to sell the 'turned' fish.
Ahhh...all's well, life is good.
First off, the 9:26 was great BL. Made me hungry, and I just ate! The Good Life!!
Well this may destroy what modicum of credibility I have, But...IMHO, there seems to be a certain MO among, let's call them, the 'm' trolls. markus, (I don't even like typing this) monkeyboy, markg8. (But there are others, swoopa, doublestandard, etc.) They start off with posts sure to aggravate, annoy and otherwise get a rise out of the 'regulars'. Once that's milked and things are beginning to become a little hostile or to the verge of banning they come out with the sad story of their current life, or how they are just being misunderstood, or how they are or used to be Repubs, but Bush is just evil, none of which has any bearing (on the discussion) other than attracting sympathy. Then comes the small amount of give on their part, for the ingratiating effect. This sets them up as someone who at least deserves a modicum of sincerity and rebuttal of their asinine arguments. Then once this level is reached, it is back to the all BS, all the time, maximum disruption. Call me demented, but it all seems to be a studied and practiced way to thread steal. Disrupt the enemy in seemingly small and insignificant ways, but in toto, make it difficult to carry on an intelligent conversation. I don't know, call me crazy, there are just too many similarity's on the arguments and talking points. I know that some of you have alluded to this type of thing being an organized activity, but mostly in jest I thought. Maybe not.
...that's "full"--typo--haven't left a kitchen "fukll" since that party when i was 17 and the folks were out of town and the only place open was the kitchen table. Then later in life i have three daughters, and the gods get 5000 sleepless nights to teach me the lesson that even teens need to have some respect. So far all that late-night waiting for the girls to get home nail-gnawing remembrance of my own youth has satisfied Olympus sufficiently to keep 'em safe, but it's been a long hard 'earn-off'.
Luther, i think you're right. This mark hints to be from new jersey, but another elsewhere-banned site pest by same name seems to be from the west coast. Wonder if the one in Jersey has had his name hijacked? anyhoo--we may be an "assignment". But, ya gotta admit, it IS fun!
How else would I, for example, being slow of uptake, realize that the party of the Smart People doesn't really have a single shittin' issue that holds water?
Well, someone reading this site sent me an email saying they had banned the same name of a guy in Frisco.
We're all meeting at Buddy's place tomorroww for dinner. BYOB.
Since we are on a food theme- conservatives are waffles, liberals are spaghetti.
That is, their thought processes involve having all sorts of disconnected ideas, or ideas which ought to be disconnected, smushed together into one big ball. Thats why, whatever the nominal subject at hand, they always trot out the same laundery list of talking points.
Of course, they could just be paid disrupters, but I don't have a food anaolgy for that.
Oh hell Buddy, I suspect you've known for a long time that that bucket is full of holes. The difference now is that folks can gather and talk amongst themselves without the intermediary of the MSM, academia and others who would have us lose this great country.
But you're right, it is fun. Watching you and Peter work on'em is delightful. What gets me is the sheer obtuseness these folks display. I guess I shouldn't talk, had my head up yonder for a while myself, but in the big scheme of things when someone says they want to kill you, it behooves to listen, and act. These yahoos just don't seem to get that.
Reference your 10:05, I wouldn't be surprised. After awhile the fun does go away. Then you're left with...no words...nothing I guess.
To bed.
But if it's all the same guy, he sure, sure SURE doesn't like Pope John Paul II--the soon-to-be Saint of the 2000 year old Catholic Church.
Sleep well, Luther--don't let Superman getcha!
\;-)
Me, too-nite all (glad you liked the recipe, flenser)
Can I suggest an alternative explanation? Instead of it being a pattern of paid trolls, it's instead a pattern of thought. Used to see it in USENET too -- the same thing: make an outrageous statement, eventually explain how hard life is and why you shouldn't be nasty, then go back to being nasty. Usually with a collection of offenses against good order and dignity that are drawn back into every argument.
It's not an unknown thing on the other side of the fence, either.
It's the lying that stuns me. Corrosive as hell, and pointless, insofar as the politics of persuasion are concerned. No, not pointless--counterproductive (and highly so).
It occurs, that were I a Democrat, and say, so invested that I could not allow myself to say anything that would help GOP, I'd be on the Dem sites with my net-commentary, trying to help shape-up the party to compete honestly on the issues.
As far as the mark-complex, I could do ten times better work against Bushism--with a fraction of the typing--and no lies.
I'd have to drop the mask, of course, and come right out with Das Kapital--but it could be spun better than this child-like playground in the garden of the idiots, "the administration-is-a-gang-of-thieves-and-murderers."
markg8,
Hey now, I was polite enough to answer your direct question. How about returning the courtesy?
Soooo... what do you think about the article this thread is about? Does the guy strike you as a buffoon, or do you feel his pain?
Goodness, Clark Kentski, thanks for opening the phone booth! Faster than a speeding loco, able to watch tall buildings fall without a wince, it's the All-American Hero, Stuporman!
"The difference is I don't support torture, lies, corruption, record deficits and sneering, disastrous foreign policy"
Actually, you DO, prima-facie.
The only question is, do you know it?
If you do--and I'm sure you do--then you're no better than Krugman, whose continual lies are well documented and inarguable.
If you don't, then you're guilty of moral idiocy, a well known condition of ultra, hyper partisanship AKA "BDS".
Either way, your "Regular-Joe" self-proclamation is just another useful hidey-hole, Mark(s).
And precisely the hidey-hole that one such as you would use on this particular site.
Fox ran the cameras in a few of the polling places in the USA upper-midwest where qualified Iraqis could absentee-vote. Ya shoulda seen it. The crowds coming in through the falling snow, old and young, the smiles, the tears, the ladies doing the ululation of joy, the workingmen carrying their babes-in-arms, the heavily accented old woman waving the purple finger and saying "George BOOSH! Anyone who will not see what he has done, can GO TO HELL!"
As the entire globe barely skirts disaster and starts the moral recovery of a form of civilized sanity lost back in the 70s, Mark(s), using a bottomless bucket of pixels, flings indictments of the entire world-historical turning--indictments that were they true, 95% of the Right would've already long-since ridden BOOSH outta town tarred & feathered on a fence-rail.
Donald Segretti is about the only legit beef I've seen yet. So, because Nixon had this dark side, we now just suicide the planet?
I could brew a fresh pot of coffee, and talk about the importance of morale and belief in mankind, and what every Dem prez since Nov 22 1963 has done to the world's.
There's more than the left vs right difference between Mark Steyn and Paul Krugman. Steyn has never published a single--not one--lie, and Krugman has been caught out so many times hardly anyone even bothers to count anymore (note that this is not a porn site, this is William F. Buckley's National Review).
And to anticipate charges that the NR writer (Donald Luskin) is a "Bush-Zombie", he savages what needs savaging, left AND right--as does NR, which battered Bush on Miers.
(more on Luskin/Krugman--Krugman [a former Enron advisor, BTW] IS the NYTimes position-columnist on economics, if ya can believe THAT!)
You must've read the links. Thanks!
No time, Mark--but i know he's a PhD and a Princeton prof.
You should take the time and read for 15 minutes inside the NR link, mark.
If you stand on the man's CV, you're making the same cognitive error that keeps you guys losing your elections.
Peter-LOL, you vicious bastid, you! \:-)
Mark, the frustrating thing about economics, for me, is that it's like the old joke about irish politics: get 5 economists together to talk about an issue and you'll get 6 opinions. At least.
That said, Krugman has made a lot of glaring mistakes in matters of fact, and seems to exhibit some annoying tendency to decide his economic opinion depending on the party affiliation of the person whose position he's talking about. This is a fault Brad DeLong doesn't share.
Luskin has wide interests--the 'obsession' bit is Krugman's harried defense over having a guy truth-check his NYTimes colyums.
Luskin is a guest on CNBC quite often, on their econoomics shows, being interviewed on his stock mkt and economics views--with Krugman never even mentioned. Checl the Kudlow show--Kudlow is also a princeton economist.
Luskin has made me personally a few large, following his investments, and he's a funny, good-humored player in the world of economic commentary, who happens to detest fakery and fraud, and so spends an hour or so per week on a critique of the NYTimes' Krugman column.
The "obsession" is Krugman's, and yours, mark, in your monomaniacal quest to turn what you both know is a demonstrably excellent administration economic policy into some some evil robbery scheme propaganda.
Just more effort to crawl your way back into DC via a "demoralize and weaken the most vulnerable" strategy.
Somehow, he escaped from his association with Ken Lay and Enron--probably took a 'deal' to propagandize embarrassingly in the NYTimes.
The bills that we have to be scared stiff of are the SS and MC bills when the boomers start dropping out and needing care.
Only hope to avoid taxing the kids to penury is for you Dems to ask your pols on the senate and house finance committees to at least learn enough economics not to flagrantly, flamboyantly, embarrass the entire nation on TV when trying to frame a coherent questions for Alan Greenspan when hearing the topics.
THEN maybe we can segue that inkling into some reform of the two systems --that all economists acknowledge are the 'breakers' of this economy.
IRS reform would also drop a fortune on the government--and the people.
None of these three monsters chewing through our actuarial tables are the fault of GWB, y'know.
He's the guy you won't let FIX the damn things--in everybody's favor but the plantation overseers (and their markG8-model stooges).
Wasn't Krugman an advisor to the Enron BD?
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