The author of the Hardcore History and Common Sense podcasts. I’ve been listening to Common Sense since about episode 70. I have heard all of the Hardcore History episodes. I have had some pretty pointed critique for Dan over the years.
It would be silly, of course, to be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ modernity tout court, not only because it is pointless to try to stop the development of technology, science, and economic rationality, but because both modernity and antimodernity may be expressed in barbarous and antihuman terms.
I do not know what postmodern is and how it differs from the premodern, nor do I feel that I ought to know.
Typical of my attempts to title things, this brief blurb’s title largely misses the mark. Another one of the things I wrote on those dead DanCarlin.com boards, perhaps even one of the last things I wrote. I’m sure I had some deeper point I was planning on making, but like most of my plans this one also went nowhere. How to distinguish what I wrote then from what I’m writing now? Hmm, that is a puzzler. How about the quote I selected from The Federalist article that thrashes Star Trek and liberalism? Yes, that shall be the demarcation point. What juicey bit of bullshit should I select from that piece, though? That is the next question.
This was a critique of a critique that attempts to show the correlation between the decline of liberalism and the decline of Star Trek as a franchise. The postmodernism allusion was probably in reference to the now well-known belief that we live in a post-truth world. As if truth, reality, causality, really cares about human problems, a hallmark of my issue with everything postmodern. Reality continues being exactly what it was before, while the people living in it tell themselves different lies that explain it and believe that their lies change the existence of reality. but I digress.
Over nearly 50 years, “Star Trek” tracked the devolution of liberalism from the philosophy of the New Frontier into a preference for non-judgmental diversity and reactionary hostility to innovation, and finally into an almost nihilistic collection of divergent urges. At its best, “Star Trek” talked about big ideas, in a big way. Its decline reflects a culture-wide change in how Americans have thought about the biggest idea of all: mankind’s place in the universe.
In the author of the above quotes defense, he actually understands the degradation of Star Trek as a philosophical looking glass into mindless action-entertainment. This is why I haven’t considered myself a Trek fan since the Abramanation aired. I deemed Trek dead on the day that film released. However, like nearly all things conservative, the author oversimplifies to prove his point. As an example, Star Trek 6 aired after Roddenberry died (and is one of the worst Trek films ever made. Weirdly Star Trek 2 by the same director is one of the best) but the multi-year rehabilitation of the Klingons that preceded his denouncement of their portrayal in Star Trek 6, starting with Worf on The Next Generation Enterprise is completely left out, because it complicates the point he’s trying to make.
As usual, the intent to decry the ideology of another while uplifting one’s own leads to hypocrisy on the part of the writer. This is a serious problem with most conservatives these days. The real culprit here is not liberalism, but postmodernism. This is an illness that afflicts all modern ideology, philosophy and politics alike. Not just Star Trek and not just liberalism.
…and that is where I left it. For two and a half years. Why? Because I always aspire to knowing more than I know, and then the realization that I don’t know that much brings the entire edifice crashing down and then I abandon the work entirely. Postmodernism is an active ill in society, of that much I am certain. We can know things about the world around us, and not everything in existence is dismissible as the delusions of a weak mind. How we can know these things is a task for epistemology to figure out. That we do know them (existence exists) is not really in question here.
Postmodernism, the school of thought that proclaimed ‘There are no truths, only interpretations’ has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for ‘conversations’ in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.
I haven’t written on the subject of shootings (justified or otherwise) in quite some time. Well, that’s not quite true. I’ve written plenty on the subject in other places over the last few years, a smidgen of which is reproduced here. But I haven’t posted much of what I’ve written on the subject on this blog since I last wrote about the Joe Horn case in Houston several years back.
While the Zimmerman case was being argued in the court of public opinion and later in actual court (to little effect) I wrote extensively on Dan Carlin’s bulletin board system about the problems with Stalking and Shooting (one of the less clusterfucky of the threads on the DCBBS) the categorical description of the behavior that Zimmerman engaged in.
Zimmerman made a affirmative SYG case, so SYG has everything to do with it. The problem with Trayvon Martin, the problem with Marissa Alexander, is that both of them have black skin. Consequently they are looked down on, even by people who have the same color skin. This fact is borne out by statistics. So Trayvon is threatening simply because of the color of his skin; it certainly wasn’t the presence of a sidewalk, 20 feet from where he was fatally shot. Marissa was assigned a duty to retreat because she had the double curse of being female and being black. Women are routinely jailed for daring to defend themselves.
The problem with SYG is specifically this; we SHOULD have the duty to retreat in public places. Zimmerman had no business profiling and stalking that teenager. No one should expect to get a “get out of jail free” card simply because they claim self-defense. EVERYONE (including cops) should be subject to trial when someone dies at their hands. Had Zimmerman not been emboldened by what they lyingly said he was unfamiliar with, he would have stayed in his car, and Trayvon would have been alive today.
How we get to the point where we legally have to allow women to defend themselves, is a separate discussion. Clearly special laws are required, since general laws yield outcomes like Marissa’s. Special laws giving women permission to shoot abusive men. Yeah, that’ll happen.
Being the briefest of brief rehashes of content posted to a 42 page thread, and that typed up and added as a comment to an article on Reason Magazine’s site concerning the attacks on Stand Your Ground Laws that occurred after those laws were so horribly and hypocritically applied in Florida and elsewhere.
But this latest slew of problems isn’t about SYG as a perversion of an offensive action into a defensive one. It isn’t even necessarily about guns, since one of the deaths in question involved a choke hold, not gunfire. It is about police using their unique relationship with their local prosecutor’s office to make unjustified homicides look like justified ones, allowing the offending police officers to claim vindication in the courts, when no court trials have occurred.
Much like the torture post, this post remained unwritten because the solution to me was so obvious, and has even been related by talking heads on various news outlets. The prosecutor’s office in nearly every county and city in the US works closely with the police, or as Jon Stewart observed at about 8:29 in this nine minute clip;
Yes, it’s Law & Order, and a serious (but humorous) oversimplification, but still it has to be observed that police departments have internal investigations departments (and all of them should have) there really need to be special prosecutors appointed specifically to prosecute cases against police officers. There should be citizen oversight everywhere there is a significant police department, too.
Prosecutors work too closely with the police to be able to effectively prosecute cases against them, all of their protestations to the contrary. It is a breach of trust to even allow them to bring cases against police that they work with. The real surprise to me is that it has taken this long for this conflict of interest to be brought to the public’s attention.
This has been true for awhile now, as many people more versed in the subject than I am have pointed out, over and over again. I’ll just point to Radley Balko as one shining example. Time and again he has documented how police excesses go unchecked, and how most people turn a blind eye to the real costs, because it is too painful to witness.
Well, if torture hadn’t come along to interrupt the outrage, we’d still be talking about this mess. We will probably be talking about it again after the New Year’s passes, because it isn’t going away anytime soon unless we do something to fix this broken system of ours.
You might well say, what do these police cases have to do with Joe Horn, or Zimmerman or that other case? If you really have to ask that question, the answer of skin color probably isn’t going to sit well with you. But it is true all the same. In all these cases, the public dialog has gone out of it’s way to give latitude to the aggressor. The dialog in Joe Horn’s case was largely supportive of his actions; and I still think he was legally justified to take the actions he took, even if I would have listened to the operator’s advice myself and let the cops handle it (because they were there and witnessed the shooting) still, his victims were black, making them easy targets to dismiss.
It’s not the race of the shooter that is in question, because the statistics show even black cops distrust black faces. It is the race (skin color) of the victim that allows their deaths to be easily dismissed.
Outside of the black communities who are protesting and outraged over the dismissal of charges against the police, the attitude still remains largely dismissive of the victims rights, of the needs of survivors and family members to see justice done, to have their day in court. FOX (as Jon Stewart and others point out) seems willing to lead this parade of monkeys consistently seeing no evil, hearing no evil, but managing to sound pretty evil all the same.
I write about podcasts I listen to on this blog quite a bit. There was a phase I went through when I first started listening to podcasts and having a lot of free time due to disability, a phase of needing to document the various episodes that I had enjoyed. If you do a tag search for FFRF you can see that my obsession with recording my impressions of this particular podcast was quite intense (and yet another subject that I have a series of lengthy articles on that I haven’t published. I really need become obsessed with finishing my writing and publishing it) likely because I felt their online library lacked any real organization.
I’ve noticed this compulsion in other’s behavior over the years, a need to retain copies of all the things they’ve watched, or all the things they’ve listened to. I had never attributed it to myself until I had time to reflect and notice the stacks and stacks of books, music and movies that cover every shelf in every room of my house. Since that time I have consciously tried to restrict the impulse to retain every smidgen of information that I run across, trust the internet not to lose the data that seems to sieve out of my mind, everyone’s mind, unless we are reminded of it on occasion.
Our last tube television
Besides, it has become clear over the past few years that there really isn’t time enough to watch all the things I want to watch, or listen to all the things I want to hear; much less space in my, our, homes for all that content. Space in our minds for all that memory. Youtube’s content alone expands so quickly that if you attempted to start watching it, you would never get to the end of it. My Tivo (thanks to Grande) is always full of things I want to watch, but almost never get time to watch sans distractions. Gaming occurs while watching and listening to other content that I need to catch up on, and it all gets blended together in a sort of melange of information that I can’t separate cleanly.
Try as I might to break obsessions when I find them (I used REBT methods to quit smoking and learn to hate the taste of french fries just because both were obsessions that were bad for me) I can’t seem to shake a process once I get started on a project. The process that I’ve gotten into with podcasts is I go back and listen to their back libraries once I’ve determined that the content is dense enough and worthy of further scrutiny. So while I have followed Freetalk Live off and on for years, I have felt no need to go back and review the hundreds (thousands?) of hours of talk show inanity like I have for Dan Carlin’s podcasts which are generally shorter and more informative than 3 hours of random callers. Those are just examples. If I listed all the podcasts that I dabble in we’d be here for days. Just listing the ones I love will take hours.
My most recent project is the Radiolab podcast. I rediscovered Radiolab recently; and I say rediscovered because I remember hearing it on NPR years ago. Or perhaps that is a false memory. I want to say I remember it, because I remember a lot of the voices I hear on it, but I have to say that I haven’t run across an episode yet that I distinctly remember hearing on the radio. Which may be a way of saying that the internet is the modern example of public radio, television and the library all rolled up into one, because a good portion of PBS and NPR are available on the internet if you know where to look.
Apocalyptica (above) was the episode that decided me on going back and listening to the rest of the catalog for the podcast, and I had started into that list on the podcast feed when I discovered that the feed isn’t all inclusive, that there are several years (years) of episodes on the website which are not on the feed. So I had to backtrack (the obsession kicks in) and start from the beginning, from the shows on the website.
I like relying on the podcast feed to tell me what I’ve listened to. None of the podcasting apps track your listening across platforms, so if you are like me and can’t remember if you’ve listened to something just based on the title of the episode, it can become quite tedious downloading, listening and then discarding content because, meh, I’ve heard that before.
So this morning I roll out of bed and decide “enough” of the current book I’m struggling through (The Last Dark, book 10 of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant) I think I’m in the mood for something lighter. What did I listen to last from Radiolab…? Memory and Forgetting is loaded on the phone. Did I listen to that one? I can’t remember. So I crank it up. Rats and Spotless Mind; false memories; the muse of a New York painter; the story of Clive Wearing. Listened to the whole thing again. I have a hard time believing I forgot this episode; Clive Wearing’s experience (like the movie Memento mentioned in this story) is a rather potent nightmare for me. His repeated statements “It’s like death” ring with a certain terror in my mind.
I have to admit that I was running on hour 20 something with no sleep, and had listened to two other episodes that same day. I noted the other two episodes (Zoos are depressing, I agreed with Jad. I was struck with the statement “At the beginning of the morning, the things left standing are the things you need to know.” 37 mins into the episode Sleep) but somehow the last episode got lost in subsequent sleep. I would go on to mention that the episode Stress reminded me so much of myself and might go a long way to explaining how and why I forgot Memory and Forgetting but I think the rabbit hole is deep enough now.
…and I’ve just discovered that the Radiolab feed/website is as freeform as the show is. There are two different archives for the show. There is the podcast archive and the radio show archive, some of which overlaps. Not all of it does. It’s actually worth the time to go back to the early radio shows in the archive and listen. Especially shows like Emergence, a subject I will be spending a lot of time talking about in the future.
Welcome to my morning.
Editor’s note
Radiolab’s old website was incorporated into the WNYC studios website sometime in 2019. I don’t know that all of the shows listed in the old Radiolab.org website made it onto the new one. I have redirected show links to their new homes on WNYC. The radio and podcast page links now point to the Wayback Machine, where the pages are preserved.
I have a confession to make; several of them actually, and not all of them will occur here. I used to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging out on the forums of Dan Carlin’s website (newly renovated) largely because I tended to agree with his political arguments and loved his history show. Since I first signed on those forums I’ve abandoned them several times because of various hostile posters, only to be drawn back again because of some inane argument presented in of his Common Sense podcasts.
The latest Common Sense(titled Kickstarting the Revolution) is a nice illustration of why I have stopped spending time arguing with devotees of Carlin’s on his website, and why I contemplate abandoning his political podcast altogether. Starting from the false attribution to Churchill which he repeats and is debunked on Churchill’s website like so;
“If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” There is no record of anyone hearing Churchill say this. Paul Addison of Edinburgh University makes this comment: “Surely Churchill can’t have used the words attributed to him. He’d been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35! And would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie, who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?”
Never mind that I personally can disassemble the assertion by simply observing that I have never been an ideologue, and it is not solely the realm of the young as he insists when he brings up that misquote (ideologues making up the bulk of liberalism in his argument) since there are any number of hidebound hoary old ideologues out there insisting that their ideology must be followed, and that make up the bulk of the Conservative wing of the Republican party. But that’s just where he starts to go off the rails.
I don’t think a lot of you have perhaps considered that we are a month away from the 2016 election kickoff, and I know what you are thinking because I always think the same thing; already?!? Yeah, the midterm elections are a month away. If you’ve got some fancy-schmancy wise interesting outside the box idea for impacting the 2016 Presidential elections for all our good, you need to start it now.
No Dan, that isn’t what I’m thinking. What I’m thinking is that you (and the vast majority of the electorate apparently) are once again mistaking authority for ability. Attributing to the President more power than he actually has, and holding him accountable for actions beyond the powers of his office (on the one hand) and expecting the next President will be able to exercise powers he doesn’t have in order to fix things which aren’t under his control in the office of President (on the other) What this podcast represents, at the end of another long and winding hour and a half, is one more episode chalked up in support of the dictator theme; the false dream that electing the one right person will fix things, skipping over the very obvious fact that what is important right here and right now is that people go vote in the midterms.
The lackadaisical way that US Americans approach the obligation to participate in government both highlights the need for a requirement that people participate in their government; while at the same time reinforcing the observation that we get the government we deserve.
This reliance on the President, this common belief that this one person can fix the ills of an increasingly complex system inhabited by hundreds of millions of people who are all going about their merry way living their own lives, is the worst kind of naivete. Couple that with the blind insistence that the calcifying remnants of the two party system are no different from each other, in the face of the popular takeover of the Republican party by the Religious Right in the form of the Tea Party, evidence that the revolution that you agitate for is already occurring, has been occurring since 2008…
…Well, it boggles the mind, the lack of understanding of the system itself that these views now represent. I’m more than a little mortified. The reference link for this podcast points toward Lawrence Lessig’s site. I agitated for Dan to interview Prof. Lessig for ages on the show, and now that he’s done that and promotes him, he links the Prof. to the completely dysfunctional idea that 2016 is somehow more important than the day to day operations of party machinery, or the impending disaster that will be handing the Senate over to the hidebound Republicans if only their Ebola-fearing voter base goes out and votes this month.
That isn’t how the world really works. Yes, the individual can matter, does matter. Yes, authority grants a certain amount of power, but that power is limited by design and by the reality of there only being so much one person can do.
The fallacy here, as I so often come up against, is the externalizing of purpose. The false idea that your purpose in life can be satisfied by some external agent, can be defined by someone else than yourself. That voting actually does something aside from (as I’ve alluded to many times) seal the deal that you make when you set out to support a candidate or a position and then work to see the goal come to pass.
You have to decide what is important, you have to do the work to see it successful. You cannot simply go vote and expect others to carry your goals forward with them while you deal with things you deem are more important. They will do what they think is important. Either you accept that their goals are at variance with yours, or you don’t and are never (and will never be) satisfied with any outcome no matter how much better it may make your actual conditions in life.
…in that vein, the Democratic party and the Republican party are simply tools to be used, just like any other social structure. They are no more and no less good or evil (or monolithic) than the individuals who work in those groups to advance the goals they set for themselves.
So go vote this month! But not just vote, go scope out your local party, see how the sausage is made in the hands of the people who currently hold power; and if you want wild ideas about how the internet can fix the problems of aging structures in or government, maybe you should take a look at this;
Pia Mancini and her colleagues want to upgrade democracy in Argentina and beyond. Through their open-source mobile platform they want to bring citizens inside the legislative process, and run candidates who will listen to what they say.
If we want to get away from the kind of world that Noam Chomsky outlined in Manufacturing Consent, or the kind of world where the wealthy buy the votes of or representatives as described by Professor Lessig in Republic, Lost; How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It then we should listen to people like Pia Mancini, or dedicate ourselves to one of the many groups who are working daily to modify the system so that is is more responsive to the voting population of the US.
The Wolf-pac – We must reverse Citizens United, Restore our Democracy, and Save the Republic. Join the Fight for Free and Fair Elections in America! That has had success in at least one state house.
Move to Amend – which has been trying to get legislation through congress; and not having much luck at it.
Lessig’s own Rootstrikers.org – which is the third iteration of his groups attempts to form a movement behind the ideas he has put forward again and again.
Or maybe even a group like Represent.us that is facing pushback on the local level in Tallahassee right now while trying to make inroads on the problem of corruption in or governments.
Governments. Plural. More than one. Local, County, State & Federal; not just the President. So go vote, because that’s all that is left to do right now with one short month left in this election cycle. But don’t allow yourself to sit back after voting and expect the problems to be solved, or (even worse) wait for a President to be elected who will fix the problems we face, that will do so in a way that you approve of (which is a pipe dream) go out and change the system by participating in it. At least then you will have earned the right to bitch about how things turned out, rather than just pretending you have that right because you have a right to free speech.
Rachel Maddow whittles away the unsubstantiated reports in the Malaysia Airlines plane crash investigation and points out that NATO warned the world on June 30th that Russia was training Ukrainian separatists on vehicle-borne anti-aircraft capability.
I’ve spent a good portion of today writing responses to accusations that the segment is biased and not based on facts.
I get it, it’s popular these days to insist that television news is biased. If it isn’t FOX news’ conservatives incessantly whining about liberal bias (liberal meaning “anything not Conservative” i.e. mindlessly jingoist with a heavy helping of Jesus on top) it’s the blatant bias of FOX news itself making up stories that they think their viewers will ascribe to (#Benghazi, anyone?) as detailed on any number of channels including MSNBC which the clip above comes from.
The “why” of the location of the plane, it’s status right before it fell out of the sky, will only be answered by the fight recorders if they are ever found. Flight recorders that the separatists claim to have already found.
Conspiracies are already spinning on the subject. Ukraine shot the plane down. Ukraine thought they were targeting Vladimir Putin’s plane (the story from Russian news sources that Rachel Maddow relates) the plane was loaded with corpses and crashed on purpose to frame the Russians. I’m sure there will be more.
Ukraine hasn’t been shooting down planes in the area; Ukraine would have known (since they control their own airspace) that the plane was a commercial airliner. The separatists have been, and shot down a plane at the same altitude and similar heading earlier in the week (not to be confused with a shootdown from more than a decade ago) So they clearly had the capability to do it again, and the motivation to continue hampering Ukrainian efforts to put down the separatists.
The separatists exist largely because Russia funds them. There is a conspiracy theory (which theorists like Dan Carlin deny is one) that suggests that the unrest in the Ukraine is due to US intervention in the region, that we’re trying to pull the former soviet state into the NATO alliance. That that is why Russia acted to claim the Crimea through the use of the separatists.
The truth is that Kiev wants to get closer to the EU, to be considered part of the EU rather than a satellite of Russia. If I understand the political structure of the country, the governors of the various regions are appointed not elected. That has lead to unrest in the outlier areas away from Kiev and its direct control, parts of the country that want to elect their own leaders directly. There is also a history of distrust between the Eastern and Western sections of what we call ‘Ukraine’ today (bad blood from WWII during the occupation by Germany) That is why the separatists accuse the government of Kiev of being under the influence of fascists.
Russia would of course like its territory back. Kiev has been historically in and out of Russian control for centuries, and was actually the first city to be called Russia (Kievan Rus) and would probably be the capital of the country of Russia if the Mongols hadn’t taken it and occupied it. But none of this means that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin should be handed the keys to Kiev just because he wants it under his control.
Putin and Russia are as accountable for MH17 deaths as the US is for funding and equipping terrorists in other regions; as in, completely accountable if you are living anywhere outside of Russia or the US. As the saying goes “live by the sword, die by the sword.” The trick is to not be the one living by the sword. Vladimir Putin is the last of the KGB. When he dies, that era dies with him. If we can just stop funding the MIC in the US, the other half of the equation will also close.
It really isn’t propaganda or fallacy to say Russia is to blame for downing the plane. The separatists exist as a military force because Russia has encouraged them. Whether the equipment came from Russia recently, or was soviet equipment left in Ukraine at the end of the USSR, it exists because of Russian expansionism and empire that goes back centuries in time.
Putting the shoe on the other foot (to turn another phrase) I saw the same kinds of denial surrounding the downing of Iran Air Flight 655, the Iranian commercial airliner destroyed during the Iran/Iraq war, a conflict we heavily funded and supported. Everything from the excuse that Reagan gave and the US government still sticks to (an accident) all the way to full blown conspiratory “plane full of corpses flown at the Vincennes on purpose” insanity.
But we shot that plane down in cold blood and killed all those people because we were there and ready to kill. The same is true for the groups fighting in Ukraine right now, and the group in question gets its backing from Russia and is equipped with weapons made in Russia. They are the ones ready to kill. They get the blame. As much of the blame as the US got for that downing of an Iranian airliner.
Does that mean war? No. Not even vaguely (I’m sure John McCain is already strapping on his sword, if he ever takes it off anymore) that does mean that Russia and their proxy separatists should answer in international court and pay restitution at the very least. If someone can be found that actually gave the order to shoot that plane down, that person should be put on trial. But I think we’ve had enough killing in the world of late. How about we not call for more, just right now?
The original thread for this episode on the bulletin board went way over sixty pages within hours of the podcast releasing. There was a flood of pointless back and forth about getting involved in Ukraine, and very little about whether or not it was the fault of the United States that Ukraine was in outright revolt.
…Which was the core assertion that Dan made in the episode, that the United States was to blame for the violence occurring in Ukraine. Directly at fault for it, if not actually conducting it ourselves.
I couldn’t get a word in edgewise to discuss the issue that I thought was more important than whether or not we could keep Ukraine away from Russia without destroying all of human civilization in the process. Whether or not the DCBBS-hated President Obama was to blame for Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine.
Nor did I buy that the United States would be actively trying to undermine a government that it had contracted to fly into space with for the next four years:
NASA has signed a new deal that will keep American astronauts flying on Russian spacecraft through early 2017 at a cost of $70.7 million per seat — about $8 million more per astronaut than the previous going rate.
The $424 million deal, which was announced today (April 30), is good for six seats aboard Russia’s Soyuz space capsules. Under the agreement, Soyuz vehicles will now ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station through 2016, with return and rescue services extending until June 2017. The previous contract provided Soyuz flights for NASA astronauts through 2015, at a cost of roughly $62.7 million per seat.
NASA has been dependent on the Soyuz since the retirement of its space shuttle fleet in July 2011. The agency is currently encouraging American private spaceflight firms to develop their own astronaut taxis under its Commercial Crew Program….because, you know, we’re always going to gen up hostilities with people we’re contracted to fly into space with for the next 4 years. Sorry, Dan. I’m simply not buying this one.
A common assertion on the DCBBS. I was simply not buying the argument. Any part of the argument. I’m not buying 9/10’s of the history of spying that spies relate, because they can’t offer proof until long, long after the events in question are over and done with. Dan’s main source for the episode was this newscast from Democracy Now. The last I checked Democracy Now wasn’t a legitimate news source. Until there is real news to relate, citing fringe sources makes Dan sound like the guy that the Estonian poster on the first page of the thread recollected:
…it is often very easy for me to agree with Dan and see the common sense in his arguments, because I’m not from US. So having no personal bias and being completely disengaged from the vast majority of issues he addresses, it is very easy for me to agree.
But today was little different. Today he touched some issues which also involve me a bit. And it wasn’t that the big picture view of potential US vs russia+china cold war didn’t make rational sense and isn’t worrying, it just felt odd hearing this american-centric view on things, where I know I’d also be involved in the equation(together with 10s of millions other people), yet not important enough in the big picture.
I’m speaking here about what was briefly mentioned, the NATO expanding it’s borders right next to russia and what potential problems it can cause. I’d like to put it out there, that there was/is actually 2 sides to that coin. With those countries, as much as it was probably NATO looking to expand east, it was as much about those counties running for their lives, as hard and fast as they could so they could get as far far away from russia as they could.
I live in Estonia and our entire foreign policy seems to be built up only on 1 thing – maintaining extremely good relations with US and advocating they would in fact get involved in situations like the one in Ukraina, in case when we get in trouble with russia ourselves. And what we also think like Dan does, that with russia getting stronger over time, is just matter of when, not if. For us, the US policy of playing the world policeman is the best we have going for us. So Dans nightmare scenarios of US being forced to involve itself against russia is our dream scenario in such situation. Cause if not, my country would probably done within days and I myself would be likely dead. Or actually the real dream scenario the perception of that looming threat of US getting involved keeps russians away in first place, high stakes game this. Anyways I guess it is much easier not to worry about global power balances stuff if things are very black and white for you personally
I just feel like this is a small niche perspective which went slightly ignored in todays show, justified or not, just wanted to get it off my chest.
The short answer is, Dan is assigning too much importance to the presence of the US in the region and downplaying the aspirations of Vladimir Putin and Russia, the actors present on the scene at the time.
There is real news out there to be commented on. We don’t have to go to fringe elements to get our news. Might I suggest surfing over to the BBC and watching As it happened: Ukraine turmoil for a little more level-headed view of what is happening in Ukraine right now. It’s too bad we don’t have real news agencies in the US.
If we’re going to talk about unwanted United States interference in Russia today, let’s talk about this interference:
IN NOVEMBER 2010, Russia’s Sanctity of Motherhood organization kicked off its first-ever national conference. The theme, according to its organizers, was urgent: solving “the crisis of traditional family values” in a modernizing Russia. The day opened with a sextet leading 1,000 swaying attendees in a prayer. Some made the sign of the cross, others bowed or raised their arms to the sky before settling into the plush red and gold seats of the conference hall at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral.
On the second morning of the conference, the only American in attendance, a tall, collected man, stepped up for his speech. Larry Jacobs, vice president of the Rockford, Illinois-based World Congress of Families (WCF), an umbrella organization for the US religious right’s heavy hitters, told the audience that American evangelicals had a 40-year track record of “defending life and family” and they hoped to be “true allies” in Russia’s traditional values crusade.
The gathering marked the beginning of the family values fervor that has swept Russia in recent years. Warning that low birth rates are a threat to the long-term survival of the Russian people, politicians have been pushing to restrict abortion and encourage bigger families. Among the movement’s successes is a law that passed last summer and garnered global outrage in the run-up to the Sochi Winter Olympics, banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors,” a vague term that has been seen as effectively criminalizing any public expression of same-sex relationships.
Interference that is coming straight out of Dan’s religious blind spot as per usual. I mean, if it matters that NGO’s are pushing American agendas in Ukraine, the crux of Dan’s complaints in the episode, then it should be a matter of great concern for Vladimir Putin that American evangelicals are exporting their religious beliefs to his people. But he doesn’t seem concerned about that. He only seems concerned about what happens in Ukraine. As if his real problem is controlling Ukraine and not the influence of the United States at all.
The discussion that I wanted to have on the DCBBS was getting lost amidst the wargaming scenarios that were taking over the Poking the Bear thread, so I created another thread. The title of this post was the title of that second thread. In the original post I simply observed that:
Since Nostradamus has never predicted anything with accuracy or precision, I’d grant Buchanan resides in that realm.
The entirety of the argument that Dan was relating in the Poking the Bear episode relied upon whether or not Pat Buchanan’s book A Republic Not an Empire (chapter two) was prescient in predicting that America’s meddling in Russian politics while it was weak after the USSR collapsed lead directly to Putin’s aggression on the world stage. Pat Buchanan is only accurate because Dan deems his predictions accurate, like Nostradamus fans deem Nostradamus accurate while they squint at disjointed phrases and try to apply them to modern events. What Buchanan’s predictions are proof of is that you can make generically vague predictions and then sit back and wait for their very vagueness to make them appear prescient. People will laud you for your foresight when something that looks almost like what you suggested comes true.
They do all the work, you get all the credit. That is what is wrong with opportunists like Pat Buchanan. Opportunists are just in it for the credit, they just want to look good while saying I told you so.
There are no honest actors on the conservative/neo-con side of the political spectrum today. No people willing to act in good faith. None of them can admit what their true agendas are because the public would not approve of the agenda. Maybe Bill O’Reilly would be that stupid. He’s politically clueless enough to air what he really thinks and has been subsequently embarrassed because of it. Honest actors do not conceal what their real motives are. You can find them in the pundit class because the pundit class doesn’t have to win election. They are almost unheard of in politics and Pat Buchanan has political aspirations. He’s going to lie and he’s not very good at it, either.
…although I didn’t hit publish on the research that I started in the Poking the Bear thread until June, after Russia shot down a civilian airliner in Ukrainian airspace, and there was a subject that wasn’t being discussed elsewhere for me to comment on here on the blog. I know I started it then because I posted links that I use in that article in the thread at that point, and I saved them.
Kyiv was the original Russian capital. It was the original Russian/Slavic capital until it was sacked by the Mongols, and the people who survived fled North and established Moscow. That is a crude oversimplification of the facts, but it remains true that the population of Kyiv is more European than the more Northern Russian speakers are, because the city’s bones were refleshed by people who were not Slavic, even if Kyiv itself remains essentially a Russian city. As the good professor says in the Democracy Now interview:
And the longer-term outcome may be—and I want to emphasize this, because nobody in the United States seems to want to pay attention to it—the outcome may be the construction, the emergence of a new Cold War divide between West and East, not this time, as it was for our generation, in faraway Berlin, but right on the borders of Russia, right through the heart of Slavic civilization. And if that happens, if that’s the new Cold War divide, it’s permanent instability and permanent potential for real war for decades to come. That’s what’s at stake.
…even if every other thing he says in the interview was unsubstantiatable bullshit, that part remains true. It’s true because that is how events have played out since then, with no resolution.
I have to hand it to Smitty-48 who replied to my posts in the original Poking the Bear thread. He had it right. Russia and Putin were coming for us, and we weren’t ready. Just like he said. Talk about prophetic.
If Dan’s major point was that Pat Buchanan objected to efforts to democratize Ukraine, similar to the kinds of systems that the rest of Europe has adopted, if Pat Buchanan saw that as attempting to sway Ukraine and bring it under our influence, then Dan Carlin should have said that and illustrated why this activity wasn’t what it pretended to be on the surface, an attempt to make Ukraine more European and less oligarchic. Less like Putin’s Russia and the other countries still under his control. Less corrupt than it was. Dan never did that legwork and so consequently never got my buy-in on his and Buchanan’s supposition.
I was not going to spend a month reading a bullshit book authored by someone whose basic premises I disagreed with just to shoot down the mistaken hype of those premises by a podcaster that I only vaguely still agreed with anymore. Pat Buchanan and Vladimir Putin agree that the US is trying to take over Ukraine. History has proven that assertion to be the correct one. I’m not sure that proof is a convincing defense for either Pat Buchanan or Dan Carlin from a historical perspective. At best it is advice for future leaders dealing with Russia, and what they might take from that advice is completely open to question.
As I pointed out with my one example in the thread, there were hundreds of NGO’s working in all of the various former Republics of the Soviet Union including inside of Russia. Efforts that changed Russia and that Putin embraced as part of his power grab. The problem wasn’t the NGO’s, the problem was and is Vladimir Putin. If you don’t deal harshly with the aggressor in your midst you will come to rue the day that you didn’t act sooner. The regret will occur because the aggressor will not by stopped by appeasement.
In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity.
My apologies if this was posted previously. I find it unfathomable that this hasn’t been trumpeted across the universe as government waste that we have to address right now. But no, it’s all food stamps and lazy poor people.
Special Enterprise Reporter Scot Paltrow unearthed the “high cost of the Pentagon’s bad bookkeeping” in a Reuters investigation. It amounts to $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 that has never been accounted for. (The year 1996 was the first that the Pentagon should have been audited under a law requiring audits of all government departments. Oh, and by the way, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with this law.)
I post this here simply to point out how willing I am to admit error (those of you who don’t know where I started on this forum, just click here) and embrace a different way of approaching a problem. The charge of cult is one of those thought-ending metaphors; however, the observation of of cultish devotion to an anarchist ideal demonstrated in this post (to the point of fabricating histories. Something I’ve experienced first hand) should give any honest libertarian pause.
My previous Salon essay, in which I asked why there are not any libertarian countries, if libertarianism is a sound political philosophy, has infuriated members of the tiny but noisy libertarian sect, as criticisms of cults by outsiders usually do. The weak logic and bad scholarship that suffuse libertarian responses to my article tend to reinforce me in my view that, if they were not paid so well to churn out anti-government propaganda by plutocrats like the Koch brothers and various self-interested corporations, libertarians would play no greater role in public debate than do the followers of Lyndon LaRouche or L. Ron Hubbard.
Protectionist, nativist paleoconservatives of the Patrick Buchanan school might have reason to idealize the U.S. as it existed between 1865 and 1932. But libertarians who want to prove that a country based on libertarian ideology can exist in the real world cannot point to the United States at any period in its history from the Founding to the present.
While the liberal welfare-state left, with its Scandinavian role models, remains a vital force in world politics, the pro-communist left has been discredited by the failure of the Marxist-Leninist countries it held up as imperfect but genuine models. Libertarians have often proclaimed that the economic failure of Marxism-Leninism discredits not only all forms of socialism but also moderate social-democratic liberalism.
But think about this for a moment. If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world? Communism was tried and failed. Libertarianism has never even been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world.
This problem is one that was brought up time and again at LP and Libertarian outreach events throughout my 20 years in the Libertarian movement. Contrary to the heated outrage leveled at the cult charge (or perhaps symbolically linked to it) is the fact that there are no functioning libertarian governments in existence after 40 years of the libertarian movement, and even less embracing of libertarian ideals by the public than there has been historically. These facts pose the question “does libertarian thought have any basis in reality?”
(after the thread had run for six pages and several days, I went back and culled the favorite arguments presented in those six pages so that I could rebut them in an addendum. This was a trick I learned while shepherding the Atheism is Not a Belief System thread. It worked pretty good. The flamers had all burned themselves out by that point, and the triumphalists would quit in disgust when the OP short-circuits their bad arguments in the first post, making their arguments look even dumber when read by a newb to the thread.-ed.)
Wikipedia is a legitimate fast reference. Dismissal of Wikipedia as a reference requires that you find an actual respected source with which to dismiss the wiki (I may have to add this one to my signature) you cannot simply roll your eyes and state “wiki” as if it proves something.
“The word cult is not a term of abuse, as this paper tries to explain. It is nothing more than a shorthand expression for a particular set of practices that have been observed in a variety of dysfunctional organisations.”
So the use of the word cult is not itself an ad hominem fallacy upon which the entire argument can be dismissed.
Libertarianism as discussed here is American libertarianism as endorsed by the Libertarian Party, and found defined here. We are not talking about the flavors of libertarianism found in other countries, so please don’t drag those assumptions into the thread.
Dismissal of anyone who thinks government is necessary as Statist simply confirms your membership in the libertarian cult. Government exists and exists because that is what the large majority of people want; structures that they can rely on to maintain a relatively stable and reliable system in which to do business, live their lives, etc. It is not statist to accept the status quo as having a legitimate reason to exist.
Libertarians do not have a problem with violence. Libertarians have a problem with government violence, sometimes referred to as force. Violence in defense of person is absolutely endorsed. The government cannot have a monopoly on force, because anyone can trump the ban by exerting force themselves. If they are never caught and brought to justice, their use of force remains an example of productive individual force, and the so called monopoly for government remains the pipe dream of those who wish to believe themselves ‘safe’, a condition non-existent in the temporary condition known as life.
(My first reply to the thread, on page seven, went as follows. -ed.)
I see I waited long enough for the thread to tangent. Going to interrupt the tangent. My apologies for exercising the rights of a thread author and doing that. I was waiting for the insanely-long-winded cult membership to stop harping the standard “it’s my freedom and I’ll do what I want to” string of bullshit arguments and finally wind down to the two or three people willing to continue patting each other on the back. When I visited the thread yesterday after starting it, whole pages of rambling had occurred in an hour or less. There really is no point in attempting to converse in a reasonable fashion when the replies scroll that fast.
So, here we are. Anyone who wants to start the harping back up should probably go back and read the 6 previous pages of the thread. It’s all there, don’t need to hear it again. Having said all that, the first post of any merit and it’s first meritorious response went like this:
Bouncing Bear wrote:
Not trying to be an ass here….the joke being that Somalia is a libertarian country….what about the plains indians of America? (Comancheria?) Basically no government to speak of, just tribes of people doing their thing and fighting when they rubbed each other the wrong way.
The Mad Zeppelineer wrote:
The Comanches had a government. Read Hamalainen’s “The Comanche Empire.” He’s a Scandinavian who studied the Comanche without all the inbred condescending prejudices Americans have against Indians. He discovered a very well organized government which reigned over large swaths of North America for centuries.
And Somalia is not Libertarian. Its tribal and partly ruled by religious figureheads. Very stern in their governing philosophy. Nobody is quoting Austrian economists there.
The real reason there has been no Libertarian societies is that people generally don’t like their ideas. People prefer one big dysfunctional commons to 10,000 petty tyrants nickel and dime-ing them for everything. If libertarianism was more popular it would win more elections.
I would say the reason is that most people really love freedom, and one of the freedoms they love is not having to reinvent the wheel each and every time they want to do business with another person. Government is what has grown out of this desire to have certain rules apply to all transactions between people. To put it as bluntly and simply as possible.
(Now I’m skipping to the forth reply. I was still trying to wend my way through the various self-congratulatory hold-outs occupying the thread. Reply two was simply an observation about how much I liked a particular users posts. Reply three was chastising a user for continuing to post on subjects that I had already rebutted. When I hit the discussion of US healthcare, that was when the rubber solidly met the road I wanted to drive on.-ed.)
Healthcare does not lend itself to market forces in the first place. You don’t shop around for life-saving drugs. If you economize at all with healthcare, it’s to not pay for preventive medicine. All that does is kick the can down the road and make the later treatments for disease all that much more expensive.
“Should the young have to pay for the healthcare of the old?” is the question that everyone is asking. How about we turn that around and apply it just like Social Security does. The young are paying for the services they will need when they in turn get old, they are simply doing it in advance. Imagine how much easier we’d have it now, if only our parents had paid for the healthcare they are consuming now by paying for it over the course of their working lives. Would they have whined about paying for their parents healthcare?
This argument is at the heart of the cult mentality. The demonstration of this is that libertarians wave their hands and say “we don’t want the sick and the poor to die, we just want them to not consume what they haven’t paid for.” Never understanding that the second necessitates the first. People will die because medical services will be denied them since they are unable to pay. The poor clog emergency rooms now, because the cost of providing healthcare to the poor is externalized and picked up by the various cities large enough to fund and staff emergency rooms. Shall we allow free-ridership to continue, or do we actually make people pay in advance knowing that they will utilize the health services eventually?
So many of the arguments fall out this way. Anti-abortionists don’t want to have to pay to raise all the children the poor will have, an act that would dramatically reduce the abortion rate, the stated goal of those people. Much easier to externalize the cost of raising those children by simply forcing the women to have the children that they can’t pay for. Take away their choice, and they’ll just struggle along not costing the rest of us a cent more in welfare (and they wonder why I label it hypocrisy) never mind that poor unwanted children drive up crime rates, fill the prisons, destabilize the society.
Everyone is looking for a way to externalize costs, internalize profits. All of us do it. If libertarians weren’t pursuing this, they’d pay for the health insurance without being forced to. Would gladly pay the taxes, and more, in order to reap more benefits from society. But that’s not how you come out on top, in a competition judged on how little you are forced to give. The way to do that is to make sure someone else pays for the things you need. Corporate welfare far outstrips ‘entitlements’ that weren’t paid in advance like social security; but all the talk about economizing centers around stripping SS recipients of benefits that they paid for in good faith over their working lives, while closing tax loopholes and revoking tax cuts and corporate welfare are rejected out of hand.
…and again, the cult embraces this, the corporate plan to suck even more cash out of the American populace.
The false choice is the vain belief that individuals acting alone can fix the problem. Collective action is the only way to fight back, and that means joining a party, unionizing, working for a common goal. It is the opposite of what Dan Carlin says, it is the opposite of what libertarians preach. Not more government, but smarter government.
As to the request for a source demonstrating that healthcare does not lend itself to market forces? You go to your doctor and he says “you need drug X.” Do you haggle over price for the drug? do you ask him to change the diagnosis? Whether you personally do or not, most people do not, even though they should.
A further example. Chemotherapy is one of the most expensive areas of health care, and yet it has very little proven benefit. Very few people will decline to get the treatments, because it really is the last hope for most cancers.
What is sobering about this booming business is that, as a group of oncologists wrote earlier this year, “most anti-cancer drugs provide minor survival benefits, if at all.” They often (but not always) reduce the size of inoperable tumors, but they rarely eradicate the disease. For relatively uncommon malignancies like testicular cancer, some forms of leukemia, and lymphoma, drugs effectively cure the disease; for the common “solid tumor” cancers (lung, breast, colon, prostate, and so on), which account for the vast majority of annual cases, drugs buy some time—precious time, to be sure, but time usually measured in weeks and months rather than years. And even though many of the newer drugs are less toxic, they often still have to be given with older drugs whose side effects include nausea, hair loss, fatigue, and decreasing blood counts. One anti-cancer drug produces a skin rash so severe and disturbing, according to Saltz, that some patients have been asked by employers not to come to work.
In 1965, at the dawn of Medicare, the chemotherapy drug Vinblastine cost $78 a month, according to a widely cited Sloan-Kettering price compendium. In 2011, Bristol-Myers Squibb introduced a new melanoma drug called Yervoy at a cost of about $38,000 a month for a three-month treatment.* Yervoy followed, by about a year, a new prostate-cancer therapy called Provenge that cost $93,000 per course of treatment. Even an ancient chemotherapy like nitrogen mustards, cousins to World War I’s mustard gas and in use since 1949, have gotten caught in the cost updraft; in 2006, a course of treatment experienced a thirteenfold price increase, from $33 a month to $420 a month.
And it’s not just that the price of cancer drugs has doubled in the last decade—it’s that the rise in prices, according to cancer doctors, has far exceeded the drugs’ effectiveness. In 1994, the median survival rate for someone with advanced colon cancer was eleven months, according to Saltz, and the lifetime costs of the drugs used to treat the average patient would be about $500 at today’s prices. By 2004, the median survival rate had increased twofold, to 22 months, but Saltz says the drug costs had increased hundreds of times for that extra eleven months.
Another source? Trying reading any number of psychological texts, studies on healthcare usage, etc. Try going places that aren’t CATO or dominated by delusions of free markets. You’ll find plenty of material that illustrates just how far from the mythical free market that healthcare is just in concept, much less in execution.
“I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one”
Corporations were created to shield investors from liability, consequently the very existence of corporations is destructive to the free market. The depth of restructuring for all of society that would be required for ‘free markets’ to succeed makes the chance that something like that to ever be tried exceedingly remote. As a philosophical exercise, it may be intriguing, but highly unlikely and impractical.
One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.
Free ridership must be combated, and the hippocratic oath binds doctors into treating patients who cannot pay, so the only way to insure funding of necessary healthcare functions is to mandate it. Taxes or non-profits, makes no difference. Funding has to be done in advance of services being needed, or we simply end up right back where we are now, people going without necessary care.
Yes, charitable giving can be increased, and there are subtle ways that people can be nudged in the right direction; that is to say, the direction that yields the benefits we desire. Freakonomics: Riding the Herd Mentality (Ep. 80) gets into how you motivate people in the direction you want. Supposedly in some of the scandinavian countries, the wealthy contribute more to the government than they are required to pay in taxes; so it probably can be done, it just isn’t done here.
Saying “Self destructive people should be forced to face the consequences of their actions, and ask for charity, not expect or demand it.” is just describing how the healthcare system works now. How about we not let people die on the side of the road for lack of care, see how that works? How about we make it cheaper to eat right than it is to eat poorly? How about we let some of these empty houses go to people who need shelter? Or is that too much to ask?
The only group that cares about the cost of healthcare is the group that pays. If the insurance companies are charged with getting services to us as cheaply and efficiently as possible (not what they are currently charged with doing) and are rewarded for doing this, you’ll see changes in what you pay for healthcare. This doesn’t have to come down to each individual household duplicating the exact same work across the entire nation.
LifeIsBrief wrote:
There are insane government imposed regulations in every state. The most destructive of which is that nurses can’t learn to be doctors through work experience… Everyone needs a doctorate, and that’s insane. Most nurses know far more about human physiology after 10 years than a graduating doctor could have ever learned in “college”. On the job training ftw.
(where to start with simplistic solutions. I should be a master of this after all these years of listening to Dan’s) As one of the last licensed architects under the bar requiring a master’s degree to practice architecture, I have to say that a degree is worth a lot more than on the job training. What you learn is what you are exposed to on the job; so as long as nothing new shows up, you are equipped to deal with the problems of the job. Many, many times in medicine doctors are exposed to things they’ve never seen before. Then what? Then you fall back on the training you received getting your doctorate.
…aside from which, have you never heard of “nurse practitioners”?
LifeIsBrief wrote:
No one dies on the side of the road, except by choice. Pure self destruction, before the state got involved, led to bankruptcy and debt, that’s all. Even if I were to concede your point however… The richest most powerful country in the world, was the one where the state didn’t force its citizens to save everyone. It was done voluntarily. Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner… Or rather, we had a winner. One in which you could choose to help people, because that’s what humans naturally want to do.
Right. Because what we need is to make sure that we let people die on the side of the road. That will teach those poor people to take better care of themselves. That is who you will be punishing. The poor. Not the self-destructive. People don’t get diseases because they misbehave, they get diseases because that’s what happens to living organisms. After you’ve been sick for awhile, you run out of money. After that…? Die on the side of the road, and you deserved it, according to those who need that confirmation bias ego boost.
Look up how cancer is becoming more common as a cause of death. That’s because cancer will always win in the end. (Editor’s note: link directly to the podcast episode on cancer replaced with a link to my article that discusses the podcast episode on cancer. Because I’ve had to refer back to that episode at least a dozen times now.)
…Diabetes is an outgrowth of poor diet, and poor diet comes from being poor. Cheapest place to eat, from someone who knows? McDonald’s, and you get large fries with every order. Or Taco Bell. Now there is some bad for you junk food. It’s much cheaper to go to a fast food restaurant than it is to eat at home. I’ve demonstrated this in my own kitchen many, many times.
The government used to deliver cheese, bread, milk, etc. to poor communities. Some of the worst years in my childhood, the block of government cheese and loaf of bread was all we had to eat on a day to day basis. They phased that out (Editor’s note: they ran out of cheese. See Planet Money Episode #862) and then started food stamps, now they want to cancel food stamps, and people are starving in the US. Wake the fuck up! It’s not the 70’s anymore. And we aren’t the richest nation anymore.
If wealth is power, then Qataris have some serious muscle to flex. The Persian Gulf emirate of 1.7 million people ranks as the world’s richest country per capita thanks to a rebound in oil prices and its massive natural gas reserves. Adjusted for purchasing power, Qatar booked an estimated gross domestic product per capita of more than $88,000 for 2010.
Diabetes, is the result of bad diet, also known as poor choices. It’s not that much cheaper to eat decent food, and where it is cheaper, guess what, government involvement.
That is a myth. Like so many things about health and healthcare, diabetes being a lazines problem is a complete myth.
Being overweight is a risk factor for developing this disease, but other risk factors such as family history, ethnicity and age also play a role. Unfortunately, too many people disregard the other risk factors for diabetes and think that weight is the only risk factor for type 2 diabetes. Most overweight people never develop type 2 diabetes, and many people with type 2 diabetes are at a normal weight or only moderately overweight.
You have to be genetically predisposed to get diabetes in order to be able to develop it. It’s genetics and lifestyle together. McDonald’s low food prices financed by government? Hardly. Tons of places want to loan to McDonald’s franchisees. They almost always make money.
…and if you want to eat healthy at McDonald’s, don’t eat the fries but do have an unsweetened drink. A hamburger alone has all the basic food groups. But it’s still cheaper to eat there than at home, and that is with wheat subsidies, corn subsidies (which makes the sweetened drinks cheaper) etc, etc, etc. The corporate farmers get their handout, but the poor do not get theirs. Not anymore.
LifeIsBrief wrote:
You’re winning, we have a centrally planned economy
Centrally planned economy? Really? I would really love to see the proof of that, because the last 5 year plan I heard of was for the USSR and they never completed it. What I hear is a fucking ton of whining about government interference, and a government so starved for cash that they can’t even inspect food plants and dangerous chemical plants more often than once a decade. What we have is a priority problem, in that the wealthy think they should have priority over the rest of us. The next 10 years will be interesting to watch, not much fun to live through.
LifeIsBrief wrote:
Is lung cancer still the number 1 killer among cancers? Yes.
Cancer itself is fast approaching number 1 killer, surpassing heart disease, that will probably happen this year. (Editor’s note: it has happened) Surpassing heart disease because we’re eating better. Those of us who can afford to. Did you miss the part where we all will get cancer if we live long enough? Because that’s kind of important in the whole “you get sick because you deserve to” mentality that you are stuck in. If you live long enough you will get sick with something that will first bankrupt you, then kill you. It’s called cancer. Keep repeating that mantra until it sinks in.
LifeIsBrief wrote:
The number one contributor to type 2 diabetes is obesity, and if the diabetes doesn’t get you, being obese will. Heart and liver diseases are common in fat and sedentary people as well.
See my point about cancer becoming the number one killer soon. It’s sort of relevant to this whole “Americans are fat unhealthy people” vibe you are giving off. It’s not nearly as true as the media would have you think. It’s bad, and those people who can’t get a handle on their eating will be something that gets studied into the future. The only way that happens is if we fund research into the future. Research that is largely done with government dollars.
(Editor’s note: They’re so obsessed with fat people sitting on a couch. Who wants to bet they’re 600 lbs and sitting on a couch while they type on their laptop keyboard about fat, sedentary, unhealthy people? I can almost hear the potato chip crumbs crunching under their ass while they type.)
LifeIsBrief wrote:
I already said, don’t let people die on the side of the road… let them ask for charity.
That has been tried. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t even almost work. Disabled people (like myself) are routinely told to get a job, even by family members. As if we wouldn’t work if we could. Only people who hate their jobs think that it would be fun to be disabled. To stay home, day after day, week after week, year after year. Most of us don’t survive the year after year part. That’s what not having a purpose in life does for you. It kills you.
…but never mind. When the disability runs out, I’ll be seen with the rest of them, dying by the side of the road. We’ll see then if you stop or not. Or you could just shut up and pay your taxes. Better yet, tell the wealthy to shut up and at least pay as much taxes as you do. Most of them don’t.
LifeIsBrief wrote:
You believe people are evil, and will just watch people die
Doesn’t have anything to do with evil, or with what I believe. Peoplewillwatch other people die on the side of the road. (Lookie-loos. Rubberneckers. -ed.) It’s a favorite pastime in the US, gawking at roadside accidents, watching while other people die. One on one. Out on foot. The person lying in the road might be someone you stop to care about if that someone doesn’t have the smell of homelessness about them. If they do you are more likely to not even notice their presence as you are to stop and ask them how they got where they were.
LifeIsBrief wrote:
Starved for cash? Really?
Yes. Because the military programs get funded, and the other programs do not. They don’t make money for the wealthy. Threats hit that fear button, causing the military to be funded to extents that the military doesn’t even want. Welfare programs don’t (especially since everyone believes they will get rich, or deludes themselves into thinking they are rich) and consequently go wanting for funding, just like inspection programs, infrastructure programs, etc, etc, etc. If there isn’t some direct route into the 1%’s pockets, it doesn’t get funded. That isn’t government’s fault, that is our fault for allowing our government to be the way it is.
I started a thread on the subject of real government waste (DCBBS Archive: $8.5 Trillion) as opposed to the fake waste of paying for healthcare for the poor, paying the disabled so that they can have a roof over their head in their last years. But whatever. Hate me for my disability. You won’t be the first and you won’t be the last.
I pulled the contents of this article out of the DCBBS archive and whittled it down to a few essential arguments. If you follow the link back to the thread you will notice I only pulled the contents of four our five messages out of a ten page thread to make up this article.
I’ve been trying to codify an argument that I’ve titled “Why Libertarians Lose” for several years now. I think I started it before I started this thread. This thread might even have been the original seed for that article. I can’t remember now. Going through some of these arguments again (as well as establishing links to them on archive.org) has helped convince me that I needed to write a completely different article than I had intended, and have published this compiled article simply to illustrate just how far my thinking had come back in 2013-2014, even though I hadn’t written much about it here by that time.
I was no longer a libertarian and I needed to stop pretending.
Unlike InquizaJamesatribalistand my other detractors on the BBS, I don’t and didn’t pretend to have answers to all of life’s problems. I simply know that most of what they believed was wrong and they should try to believe something different for a change. They might live longer if they did. Or do.
I like Medicare. I think more people should have it. Maybe that should be the goal? Maybe government can do things right? It seems to work in other countries.
I used my post on Why I am a Libertarian as an example of how I would describe myself for many years. A decade and more of time has passed, and when I look back on this with an eye for continuity and history, I find my previous blind reliance on libertarian principles to be quite humorous.
I have never been an anarchist; in fact, anarchists are some of the people I disagree with the most. If I could point to a single reason why I almost never identify as libertarian any longer, it’s because libertarianism (especially on the web) is default anarchism. You have to struggle to get the average libertarian to admit that structure is required in society. That you need organization to build roads, do science, construct complex machinery. In fact, there is so much knowledge involved in a single field of expertise these days that it’s almost hard to find generalists with enough depth of knowledge to bridge the gap between specialists.
So this idea of the rugged individualist doing all for himself, with no one to thank for what he has other than himself is complete self-delusional bullshit.
From the hospital where most of us are born to the school paid for with tax dollars, from the roads we travel on during our working years to the social security system most of us will rely on in old age, almost nothing we experience occurs because we were the sole architect of its existence. Much less would we want to own any of the convoluted bullshit we have to deal with systems invented by madmen and executed by sadists? Better to be leaves floating on an irresistible wind than acknowledge that any of this is what we would have wanted, planned for, inflicted on others.
I played a mental game with myself for quite a long time. I still find it amusing on occasion, especially when opponents in argument will trot out the ad hominem, try to affix labels to me and my arguments in order to dismiss them. Flip the script is how you might describe it these days. How would you define yourself in as few words as possible, using only labels that others might use to discard you and your arguments. Epithets or titles applied to you by others to summarize and pigeonhole you or your views.
I could to get it down to three; Objectivist, Architect, Father (no longer licensed, so can’t call myself architect anymore. Libertarian was in second place at one point) These days the three would be more like Father, Skeptic, Objectivist; and Objectivist is left on the end simply because I still believe we can obtain glimpses of objectivity, not because I buy in to the whacky psychological ideals of Ayn Rand. That we have to be able to discern objective reality in some limited fashion unless everything we sense is complete illusion, which demonstrably is not the case. Most Objectivists these days make me cringe when they speak.
I daresay today’s Objectivists would make Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum cringe as well; but then I’m not her, was never a member of her cult of personality, don’t believe in revealed knowledge in even the vaguest sense. What I do know is that the system she describes as ideal doesn’t even resemble the current political, ideological or economic system; and the economic and political actors of today are more akin to the looters of her novels than her contemporaries in 1950 America could have been. That current self-identified objectivists laud the behavior and thinking of these people simply puts the lie to their claim of objectivity.
Consequently, when self-styled Objectivists start mouthing anarchist phrases while representing the Republican party, I almost disown the objectivist label, too. Who knows, maybe that one goes next. Would Ayn Rand have modified her ideals given the advances in knowledge about the workings of the mind and the social patterns of the human animal? I’d like to think she would have admitted fault at some point, but then that wouldn’t have been very Ayn Rand of her.
This introspection was brought on by a challenge from a fellow member of the now-defunct Dan Carlin BBS forums. Gone are all the threads and thoughts recorded on those boards, unless they are preserved somewhere on Dan’s private servers or happened to be picked up by the Wayback Machine, if even the Wayback Machine itself continues to function.
I get no satisfaction from the knowledge that I predicted the demise of the boards years before they were taken offline by Dan Carlin, but I knew that his hands-off approach to freedom of speech, his belief in the innate goodness of people, was a recipe for disaster. That the disaster did occur was in spite of my best efforts, for years, before finally giving up. Trolls will continue to troll until barred from trolling, and it takes a judicious use of the ban-hammer to make people respect you enough to be forthright in their posting habits. If you are anonymous and without rules, driving people away with harassment is simpler than trying to reason with them. The time spent is the only cost of such behavior, and that is essentially free if you have free time to spend. Some of us have far too much time.
But the challenge had been to be as self-reflective as you could and be open about things you might have learned since joining the forums. I believe it was cast against the more recent findings that people did not change with argument (more recent than the establishment of the forum) and the member who issued that challenge was de officiis I think. They were just another stranger on the internet, but someone who had reliably challenged me with heartfelt interrogation, always offering comments that I felt were honest. So I accepted the challenge in the fashion offered. These were my most honest thoughts of the time. They still hold some power over me.
Since writing the above, I tried out the word ‘Skeptic’ as defining me, and I find it too skeptical. The daughter thinks Freethinker is too pretentious, but then I think pretentious defines my assessment of the importance of my thinking quite well. So I’m going with the pretentious sounding ‘freethinker’ rather than the piss on your parade personal interpretation I get from the word skeptic (Yes, skeptics, I know that isn’t how you see the word) I would say that I approach all subjects with a healthy dose of skepticism, but I don’t enjoy the process very much. I do love finding truths, but telling others what the truth actually *is* is a very tricky process. A process I find I don’t do very well.
Consequently, I also feel the need to temper Objectivism with Humanism. Objectivists will say this means I’m not really an objectivist; something else I find funny since most of them don’t see the problem with being religious and claiming Objectivism as a philosophy. Human is the lens that modifies the world we see, and Humanism is the attempt to make our systems more humane. I’ll take that.
What makes a freethinker is not his beliefs but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.
Dan Carlin chose to make his latest Common Sense episode all about the historic outrage that is the NSA spying on us, likening it to the kind of outrage that Lawrence O’Donnell pokes holes in during the attached video segment.
Approaching this idea from the perspective of ‘Vampiric Memories’ (memories of several centuries) as Dan does, what would be most striking was not that governments do what governments have always done; but that the people who run this government are more varied in race and sex than at any time previously in history.
Now, this observation can lead to other insights such as how white men aren’t nearly as bad as we’ve been lead to believe since we don’t run everything anymore and it all still sucks, or that inclusiveness in government hasn’t gone far enough because the suckage of government hasn’t been alleviated yet.
But what you cannot say is that this is an outrage as has never been seen before, and it’s only our relative blindness to change (for various reasons) that allow this outrage to continue. Should the NSA programs be brought down? Certainly, and it appears that they will be. But can we tone down the histrionics, please?
Edited to add the following;
Seriously Dan? Another podcast on the same subject? Only this time to attack the false premise that NSA spying isn’t a big deal? I’ve been trying to tell people that privacy was dead for a decade or more. I use my real name on the internet and yell from the rooftops repeatedly that there is no such thing on the internet as privacy, precisely because I suspected the NSA was doing exactly what it’s been shown to be doing over the last year.
Just because I’m ready for a new subject to discuss, has nothing at all to do with the assumed importance of the NSA spying problem. The real problem is, most people who object to the spying aren’t willing to fight the hard fight it’s going to take to get the laws changed to forbid the government from engaging in this kind of data collection; largely because most of them think like you and don’t want to dirty themselves by getting into political fights, joining parties, and changing the system.
When you’re ready to seriously get involved, let me know. I have some pointers on that score.
