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Billy_TParticipantI would respond and in the same vernacular but again I would be accused of name-calling. Enjoy the safe space.
Unless I misunderstand the board rules, it’s not out of bounds to criticize public figures here. That’s what I did. And I speak the truth about them.
It is, however, out of bounds to engage in “name-calling” with fellow posters. Again, if I understand the board rules. And I didn’t do that.
No “safe space” needed for what I wrote.
Billy_TParticipantwikileaks empowers the increasingly threatened whistle-blower who can at least through wikileaks shine the spotlight on government corruption, malfeasance, lies etc. It is what the press used to do.
They don’t “shine the spotlight on government corruption, malfeasance, lies etc.” If they did that, we would have had a massive leak about the Republicans too. Who controls Congress, bnw? Who controls most of the states?
Do you honestly believe “corruption, malfeasance, lies, etc.” only comes from the Democrats?
And I gave you all kinds of proof that wikileaks has harmed innocent people, even gotten some killed.
We can shine the spotlight on all the things you believe need transparency without doing that. Assange obviously couldn’t give a shit about “collateral damage.”
Billy_TParticipantI learned a new term today, reading this very board: Crybully.
If there was a dictionary that had pictures of people next to terms, whose picture do you think would be next to “crybully”?
It’s similar to the hysteria against “political correctness.” In reality, PC is just the call for decency, civil dialogue, courtesy and good manners. Are there abuses? Yeah. But they’re incredibly rare. The thing the right does so well, and so effectively, is to take a tiny, tiny part for the whole, and blow that up into the Apocalypse. Its followers lap that stuff up like kids and koolaid, repeating it endlessly, across social media, until they’ve turned it into a supposed national crisis.
It’s like if the Rams had this wide receiver, who was really excellent, caught everything thrown his way, until one day . . . . he drops one. And the media picks up on that one drop, blows it up into an end of the world story, fans go crazy, spread it through social media, and they get so whipped up into a frenzy, they burn the guy’s house down and he flees for his life.
That’s what the right does. That’s how they work. From Alex Jones to Trump, they lie, lie, lie or, at best, on their best days, exaggerate things beyond all bounds, sending their fans into paroxysms of hate. So a completely innocent comment about “cheese pizza” becomes “code” for child sex-trafficking, and every mass shooting becomes a government-led “false flag” operation.
These people, before social media and the Internet, were basically harmless, isolated and alone. But in the Internet age, they’ve managed to find each other and become dangerous. Right-wing, paranoid, fringe lunatics have found one another and together they’ve mainstreamed their crazy.
This is NOT going to be a safe and happy four years.
Billy_TParticipantAs for being a journalist organization.
Generally speaking, with exceptions that go against the rules, journalists interview willing participants and publish their findings. They investigate an event, a company, the government, by collecting a large enough number of those interviews and connecting the dots.
Wikileaks doesn’t do that. They receive stolen information, from unwilling victims, and leak it.
In the past did they leak some information in the public interest? Yes. But because they tend to do mass dumps of stolen information, this will always include innocents whom they hurt, destroy, and in some cases, help kill in the process.
Committed journalists don’t do that. At least they do everything possible to avoid that. Assange obviously couldn’t care less about the “collateral damage” in his wake, and this last election proved, without a doubt, that he has an extremely narrow agenda. He decided to help Trump and the corporate world by leaving them alone, while he focused all of his attention on the Dems to cripple them.
And this helped spur mass hysteria and pure idiocy (among the easily duped) like Pizzagate, which led to a North Carolinian, driving up to that pizza shop, and firing his gun inside it. The innocent people there were very lucky he missed.
In short, Assange has become a menace. If you don’t trust the government, or corporate America, why on earth would you want to add another self-appointed “god” to the list?
Billy_TParticipantAlso, about that praise of Wikileaks in Wikipedia. Don’t stop there. Wikipedia also says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks
Inadequate curation and violations of personal privacy
Wikileaks has drawn criticism for violating the personal privacy of a multitude of individuals and inadequately curating its content. These critics include transparency advocates, such as Edward Snowden, the Sunlight Foundation and the Federation of American Scientists.[341]
Wikileaks has published individuals’ Social Security numbers, medical information, and credit card numbers.[342] An analysis by the Associated Press found that Wikileaks had in one of its mass-disclosures published “the personal information of hundreds of people — including sick children, rape victims and mental health patients”.[342] Wikileaks has named teenage rape victims, and outed an individual arrested for homosexuality in Saudi Arabia.[342] Some of Wikileaks’ cables “described patients with psychiatric conditions, seriously ill children or refugees”.[342] An analysis of Wikileaks’ Saudi cables “turned up more than 500 passport, identity, academic or employment files… three dozen records pertaining to family issues in the cables — including messages about marriages, divorces, missing children, elopements and custody battles. Many are very personal, like the marital certificates that reveal whether the bride was a virgin. Others deal with Saudis who are deeply in debt, including one man who says his wife stole his money. One divorce document details a male partner’s infertility. Others identify the partners of women suffering from sexually transmitted diseases including HIV and Hepatitis C.”[342] Two individuals named in the DNC leaks were targeted by identity thieves following Wikileaks’ reveal of their Social Security and credit card information.[342]
Wikileaks’ publishing of Sony’s hacked e-mails drew criticism for violating the privacy of Sony’s employees and for failing to be in the public interest.[343][344] Michael A. Cohen, a fellow at the Century Foundation, argues that “data dumps like these represent a threat to our already shrinking zone of privacy.”[343] He noted that the willingness of Wikileaks to publish information of this type encourages hacking and cybertheft: “With ready and willing amplifiers, what’s to deter the next cyberthief from stealing a company’s database of information and threatening to send it to Wikileaks if a list of demands aren’t met?”[343]
The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for open government, has criticized Wikileaks for inadequate curation of its content. With the DNC leaks, “Wikileaks again failed the due diligence review we expect of putatively journalistic entities when it published the personal information of ordinary citizens, including passport and Social Security numbers contained in the hacked emails of Democratic National Committee staff. We are not alone in raising ethical questions about Wikileaks’ shift from whistleblower to platform for weaponized transparency. Any organization that “doxxes” a public is harming privacy.”[345] The manner in which Wikileaks publishes content can have the effect of censoring political enemies: “Wikileaks’ indiscriminate disclosure in this case is perhaps the closest we’ve seen in reality to the bogeyman projected by enemies to reform — that transparency is just a Trojan Horse for chilling speech and silencing political enemies.”[345]
In July 2016, Edward Snowden criticized Wikileaks for insufficiently curating its content.[346] When Snowden made data public, he did so by working with the Washington Post, the Guardian and other news organizations, chosing only to make documents public which exposed National Security Agency surveillance programs.[346] Content that compromised national security or exposed sensitive personal information was withheld.[346] Wikileaks, on the other hand, makes little effort to remove sensitive personal information or withhold content with adverse national security implications. Wikileaks responded by accusing Snowden of pandering to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.[346]
University of North Carolina Professor Zeynep Tufekci has criticized Wikileaks for exposing sensitive personal information: “WikiLeaks, for example, gleefully tweeted to its millions of followers that a Clinton Foundation employee had attempted suicide… Data dumps by WikiLeaks have outed rape victims and gay people in Saudi Arabia, private citizens’ emails and personal information in Turkey, and the voice mail messages of Democratic National Committee staff members.”[347] She argues these data dumps which violate personal privacy without being in the public interest “threaten our ability to dissent by destroying privacy and unleashing a glut of questionable information that functions, somewhat unexpectedly, as its own form of censorship, rather than as a way to illuminate the maneuverings of the powerful.”[347]
In January 2017, Wikileaks proposed to create a database tracking verified Twitter users which would include sensitive personal information homes, families and finances.[348][349][350] According to the Chicago Tribune, “the proposal faced a sharp and swift backlash as technologists, journalists and security researchers slammed the idea as a “sinister” and dangerous abuse of power and privacy.”[348] Twitter furthermore bans the use of Twitter data for “surveillance purposes,” stating “Posting another person’s private and confidential information is a violation of the Twitter rules.”[349]
Billy_TParticipantYou assume it involves a hack and theft. You do not know that. Besides why would Twitter even want that information? wikileaks is proposing to verify the so called Twitter “verified” designation. Governments use social media to gain information on people all the time. Governments use social media to manufacture a history on people too in order to set the narrative in the MSM. I suspect a recent example is the Ft. Lauderdale shooter who supposedly took out a social media account only a week before but never added anything to it.
Imagine Twitter having an account for a Donald Trump claiming to be the president of the USA but really isn’t. You seem to trust Twitter? Why? wikileaks has a proven journalistic history-
It’s not an assumption, bnw. It’s a mathematical certainty. There is no other way for them to get that information. It doesn’t exist in public form. It only exists on servers its (Twitter’s) customers assume are protected from prying eyes.
And I never said I trust Twitter. I don’t. I don’t trust corporate America. I don’t trust any of the social media companies. I also don’t trust the government on all of these matters. And I definitely don’t trust Assange.
But the difference between them is rather key. Twitter uses choose to give certain information to that corporation. Me? I wouldn’t. I don’t trust them with it. But that’s a person’s choice. Assange doesn’t ask anyone for permission to use their info. He just steals it and leaks it online against their will. When and if the government ever did this, you’d be against that, right?
Why do you support and the leaking of private information without permission when Assange does it?
Billy_TParticipantWe’ll have to wait and find out. I know my being clued in to this election (in reality I paid attention to what was happening in the real world) would give you the impression that I am in the loop, but I am not.
I’m not asking you because I think you were in the loop. I’m asking you because you use the phrase a lot and then tell us we shouldn’t “fear it.” We should “embrace it.”
So what is “it,” exactly? One would think you wouldn’t bother repeating a phrase if you didn’t know what it meant. And one would also think you know the plan to implement this and make it happen, or you wouldn’t say we should embrace it, etc.
This is pretty basic stuff. Just askin’.
We’ll see. Why fear the prospect of Making America Great Again?
If you’re okay with embracing something you can’t define, without a plan to make the something you can’t define work, go for it. But you shouldn’t expect others to join you in the embrace of the non-existent.
Trump is expecting his supporters to be just like the subjects of this masterpiece by Brueghel:
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1568) The Blind Leading the Blind-
This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by
Billy_T.
Billy_TParticipantYes, this would involve a hack and theft. They couldn’t develop that database of “family/job/financial/housing relationships” without hacking and theft. When people sign up for a Twitter account, they assume this information is private, that it won’t be made public by Twitter, or they never would sign up.
Assange is saying he will steal those records, those private records, and make them public without anyone’s permission.
This may well risk people’s lives. Literally. That’s not an overreaction. And people who know IT know it will.
I have fifteen years experience in the field and it’s more than obvious to me that it’s extremely dangerous, and illegal, and immoral. And the people cited in the article are among the most knowledgeable people about the Net and the World Wide Web in its history. Plus Anonymous, another hacktivist group.
Billy_TParticipantThe information is about “verified” users only.
“Twitter “verifies” certain users, such as world leaders, nonprofit organizations and news outlets, with a blue check mark beside their names so that other users of the service can be confident about the posters’ identities.”
In other words wikileaks would be a check on the veracity of the Twitter “verified” user. Where do you see that wikileaks would be “hacking” this information? I don’t see it. As for the AI component that is so abundant these days in so many forms as to be expected. Don’t have to like it but better expect it.
You should continue quoting that part of the article. And add this part near the beginning:
“We are thinking of making an online database with all ‘verified’ twitter accounts & their family/job/financial/housing relationships,” WikiLeaks tweeted Friday.
Here’s what follows your part of the quote:
WikiLeaks, which has a verified Twitter account, did not say whether it would subject itself to the scrutiny it was proposing. (It was also unclear whether, under its plan, WikiLeaks would seek to uncover information about the financial lives of Russian President Vladimir Putin or President-elect Donald Trump, both of whom are verified on Twitter.)
Asked by journalist Kevin Collier why it needed to build a database of dossiers, WikiLeaks replied that the database would be used as a “metric to understand influence networks based on proximity graphs.”
But the proposal faced a sharp and swift backlash as technologists, journalists and security researchers slammed the idea as a “sinister” and dangerous abuse of power and privacy.
“This is a good plan. If you’re Darth Vader,” Matthew Green, a professor who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, tweeted.
Timothy Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, compared the WikiLeaks proposal to a piece of British legislation that has been criticized as a massive boon to the surveillance industry.
“Don’t.even.think.about.it,” he tweeted.
Billy_TParticipantWe’ll have to wait and find out. I know my being clued in to this election (in reality I paid attention to what was happening in the real world) would give you the impression that I am in the loop, but I am not.
I’m not asking you because I think you were in the loop. I’m asking you because you use the phrase a lot and then tell us we shouldn’t “fear it.” We should “embrace it.”
So what is “it,” exactly? One would think you wouldn’t bother repeating a phrase if you didn’t know what it meant. And one would also think you know the plan to implement this and make it happen, or you wouldn’t say we should embrace it, etc.
This is pretty basic stuff. Just askin’.
Billy_TParticipantSo then why post? You just stated it didn’t affect you. Why were you compelled to post your three word post?
Why not? You seem to think Twitter is some set in stone entity that will allow an unlimited base of ever powerful information? I don’t. Only thing working for Twitter these days is Trump. Facebook, like MySpace before it is on its way down. Twitter will be no different. Besides with the known spying by the government on all its citizens via all forms of electronic communication why is what wikileaks is thinking about such an issue? Twitter is public not private information.
It looks like you didn’t bother reading the article, or the excerpts I posted.
Assange is threatening to steal and perhaps divulge private information that no one puts out on Twitter, by hacking into its database and collecting private info unavailable to the public. That info is private, not public information. Private. Until Assange decides to leak it without anyone’s permission.
One would think this would bother you, whether or not you use Twitter. I don’t. And I don’t have the same kind of exposure on social media that billions of people do these days, especially the young. But it still upsets me. I’m upset for them, and it’s pretty easy to see how this could really hurt millions of people . . . and even put their lives at risk.
Google “Doxing,” for starters.
Billy_TParticipantThis isn’t about the pledge of allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer (although I’m opposed to students being asked to recite either in a public school…).
This is what it’s about…
Ms. DeVos is a chip off the old block. At a 2001 gathering of conservative Christian philanthropists, she singled out education reform as a way to “advance God’s kingdom.”
She wants to use education to forward the religious right’s agenda.
That is HER opinion. You vote for YOUR school board accordingly.
She’ll be setting federal policy, bnw. So that makes it a national problem on a huge scale.
Trump has brought in a host of swamp creatures, including the most billionaires, lobbyists, CEOs and Wall Street big wigs in our history. And most of the people he’s tasked with running this or that agency have a long record of battling them (in order to increase their own wealth), undermining them (in order to increase their own wealth), suing them (to increase their own wealth), or seeking their destruction. Devos is easily one of the worst possible choices for the job she’s going to hold. She wants to do away with public education itself, and privatize it to make way for a theocracy instead.
That’s like the Rams hiring a football coach who hates the NFL, hates LA, hates football in general, and hates team sports.
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This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Billy_T.
Billy_TParticipantHey Billy.
I believe I get what you are saying.
I think WV will back me up here when I say, we all have to be very careful on how we evaluate what the hell is going on around us.
We all live in our own reality tunnels, made by our initial imprinting and reinforced by our social programming.
The way our language is structured causes us to make and receive statements that are absolute: You are wrong. I am right. This is all bullshit. It should be, I believe you are wrong, I think I am right.
I know I am preaching to the choir. Thanks for coming back and good luck with the novel.
Best,
MattThanks, Matt.
I hope you and yours are well.
Billy_TParticipantTime to Make America Great Again! Don’t fear it. Embrace it!
I asked this of you before, and unless I missed it, you never responded. Could you please define what “Make America Great Again!” actually means?
Please be specific, and then tell us how Trump plans to make that happen, exactly. Cuz he never did. And it’s just empty rhetoric without an actual plan. It’s just a bumper sticker without an iota of actual substance.
Trump never told anyone what it (MAGA) actually means, nor did he describe his plans to make that bumper sticker slogan happen. But that empty rhetoric sure did resonant with neo-Nazis in particular, and white supremacists in general. It sure did make them cheer and say heil Trump with the salute to boot.
So, again, what does it really mean, bnw?
Billy_TParticipantThat’s a good article, Billy.
I don’t like the idea of vouchers for religious education. I don’t care for any voucher system, religious or not. In the 60s vouchers were used in the south to keep black kids from getting a good education. Public schools were shut down and the vouchers allowed access only to private segregated schools.
Paint it anyway you want but vouchers are exclusionary. If we want to improve the education of our students it has to be with everyone in mind. Not a select few. We have to improve public schools. A voucher system would just perpetuate the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
Agreed. I can’t stand vouchers. As you say, it’s just a backdoor way to screw-over the non-rich, and has deep roots in racist policy.
Again, I already knew Devos was a nutcase about vouchers. I just didn’t know she was also a religious zealot, or related to Erik Prince. From everything I’ve read about him, he’s one of the most despicable human beings in America, and Blackwater was in reality a for-profit “terrorist” group.
The more we learn about the people Trump is surrounding himself with, the more it becomes impossible to claim it didn’t matter who won.
Two rotten choices — I voted for neither of them (Stein). But the one we ended up with is significantly worse than the other candidate from the duopoly.
Billy_TParticipantTSRF,
And it’s not really even about Twitter. It could be anything. It’s the idea that Assange thinks it’s okay to set up a secret database from any social media site of his choosing, without anyone’s permission, and with the very real possibility that any average Joe or Jane could be Doxed. Not just Big Wigs. Anyone. At Assange’s own discretion. His choice, like he’s some god or something.
And if he’s willing to tell us about this one particular plan, what about the stuff he doesn’t want to tell us about?
Is he any better than any corporate or government surveillance regime, when he acts like that? Not in my view. He has never once, not ever, asked anyone’s permission before leaking personal information, the vast majority of which has absolutely zero public benefit, and may have actually destroyed the lives of hundreds or thousands of innocent people.
And he’s completely discredited himself this election cycle by choosing to only leak Democratic Party info — again, virtually none of which helps improve quality of life one iota and may have done the opposite. Whether or not he once benefited the public, he isn’t doing that now, and it sounds like he’s turned into a full blown menace.
Billy_TParticipantAnother article about Devos and the Christian Right:
Excerpt (There are several links within the article as well):
Education is arguably the most important front in the battle to bring the Kingdom of God to bear on contemporary culture. For the religious right, this means promoting alternatives to public schools including Christian schools, charter schools, and home schooling, with the longstanding goal of replacing the public education system with private Christian education. I wrote about the efforts back in a 2012 essay here on RD but those efforts date as far back as the 1960s and the work of R.J. Rushdoony.
Framed as “school choice,” vouchers, charter schools, and tuition tax credit plans serve this goal by shifting public funds toward religious schools with little to no accountability to the public. In Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction I wrote about one such school in Florida that teaches creationism, dominionism, women’s submission, and so forth, with public money.
Opposition to public education for the religious right is rooted in a worldview in which education is solely the responsibility of families (and explicitly not the civil government), and in which there are no religiously neutral spheres of influence. There is no secular sphere that can function as a neutral space; only the Kingdom of God, and “the world” to be influenced by Christians for the Kingdom. (For our religion nerds this is Van Til and Kuyper, key architects of the Reformed tradition from which DeVos comes.) These views were popularized in the work of Rushdoony and the Christian Reconstructionists and became dominant in the religious right, which is not to say that everyone who holds them is a Christian Reconstructionist.
Religions Dispatches is typically very good when it comes to the intersection of public policy and religion. Very good reporting.
Billy_TParticipantShove down their throat? Like the 10 commandments? Or a Christmas Party? Oh the horror!
No. Like teaching creationism in science class.
I’m sure that if your kid’s school was teaching that Christianity was wrong and was immersing them in Islam, you’d be fine with it.
Yeah, this is what I want my kid to learn…
Way to leap to the absurd. I remember when in public school we recited the pledge of allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer (protestant version) every day at the start of the day. No one was forced to participate. No creationism was taught. No “immersing” involved.
bnw,
It’s not an absurd leap in the slightest. The Christian Right is on record calling for exactly what Nittany is talking about, and more. I live in the state that houses the Fallwell indoctrination machine. Liberty University doesn’t try to hide any of this, nor do the other folks mentioned in the article. They’re actually loud and proud about it all. They seek theocracy in America, and they’ve been doing their best to ram that down our throats since the early 1970s, with some success.
Hell, during the campaign several GOP candidates often held political gatherings with top hard-right Christian zealots, and they always talked about the need for America to put “biblical law” ahead of our own. Rubio, Cruz, Huckabee among others said this or cheered the statements. And in one of those gatherings, a couple of the speakers said gay people should be executed. Literally. They weren’t talking about just denying their civil rights. They were calling for their execution.
These are sick, sick people, and if they get their way, America will become a theocracy. It’s what they want.
January 7, 2017 at 6:25 pm in reply to: get rid of the idea that Russian hack stories are about disgruntled dems #62629Billy_TParticipantTrump is going to tweet us into war, and he almost did already with China. He has a real “thing” against Iran, too, and cuz of his slavish devotion to Netanyahoo and the right-wing Israeli government, another Middle East war is just a matter of time.
He also broke with decades of precedent and installed a general to run the Defense department. He has three or four in key positions, so far, including the nutcase Floyd, who actually peddles far-right, fake news stories like Pizzagate at the drop of a hat, and is known as an Islamophobe.
Trump is so incredibly thin-skinned, narcissistic and ignorant about the way governments work, he’s gonna start more than a few wars if he lasts the full four years. He’s also got the emotional age of a spoiled three-year-old, and keeps proving that on a daily basis.
And he’s surrounded himself with a bunch of people who will profit mightily from war, like the generals and the Big Oil folks.
Billy_TParticipantHmmm. Secular education versus religiously based.
An analogy . . .
The secular version is kinda like this:
Kids get to pick any of the 32 teams in the NFL to root for, in any way they choose, or not root for any. There is no official position on the matter.
Faith-based:
“You must choose the 49ers. That’s the official position on the matter from on high.”
And to make it even worse, cuz Devos and company want to propagandize and indoctrinate young people with just one, extremely narrow, reactionary version of Christianity:
“You must choose the 49ers, and adhere to our rigorous examples on how, exactly, to worship them. Our official book on the subject details the right way versus the wrong (read, evil) way to worship our one and only team.”
Billy_TParticipant
Shove down their throat? Like the 10 commandments? Or a Christmas Party? Oh the horror!
No. Like teaching creationism in science class.
I’m sure that if your kid’s school was teaching that Christianity was wrong and was immersing them in Islam, you’d be fine with it.
Yeah, this is what I want my kid to learn…
Thanks for posting the article, Nittany.
I knew Devos was an extremist, anti-public-school, billionaire nutcase. But I didn’t know she was also an extremist, far-right religious zealot, with family ties to Erik Prince no less.
The latter, in a just world, would be called a “terrorist,” and his Blackwater band of Christian warriors would be labeled that as well.
January 7, 2017 at 2:10 pm in reply to: Obama should pardon the 11 million undocumented immigrants before leaving office #62560Billy_TParticipantYeah, that’s not going to happen.
What Obama should have done…and I can’t think of why he didn’t…is appoint Garland to the Supreme Court as a recess appointment. That would have circumvented congress and directly placed Garland on the SC (temporarily – for one year) which would have been a practical and legal thing to do.
But he didn’t do that.
And he’s not going to pardon illegal immigrants.
Picking Garland in the first place was a huge mistake, IMO, and indicative of the Democratic Party’s false sense of its own cleverness and its bad faith. Obama and the Dems knew the GOP would block anyone he chose, so why not go big, go to the left of liberal, and really make a statement showing the stark contrasts between the parties — even though they don’t actually exist?
Fire up the base. Inspire new people to get out and vote.
But they thought it would be really clever to choose a moderate-to-conservative jurist, and force the GOP’s hand. The GOP just slapped that hand away and laughed.
Which brings us back to your original suggestion. Yes, he should have done a recess appointment, but how much better would that have been if the judge had been at least a true progressive?
Billy_TParticipantI think the American mind is fascinating. This is obviously a huge generalization, but I think some people really prefer real monsters to monster lite. They’ll choose aggressive SOBs, who un-apologetically stand up and without shame say fuck you . . . . rather than the folks who ask permission first.
The Dems, IMO, are clearly the lesser of the two evils, but that’s not working for them anymore. Their centrist, neoliberal, cowardly, spineless Republican Lite and “moderate conservatism” isn’t working. People want the real thing, from whichever side of the political spectrum has the guts to offer it and back it up.
I also think the Trump victory proves something else: People DO want government to work proactively on their behalf. They really don’t want “small government” at all. They just don’t like it when the government does proactive stuff for people they see as “undeserving.” It’s an issue of perception, not actual substance.
So, what follows from that logically? The party that decides to go all in on proactive, across the board, serious public sector help for everyone . . . would win — if they have the right people “selling” this. And, once the programs are established, the sales part becomes that much easier next time.
Chomsky, as always, nails it.
January 6, 2017 at 7:33 pm in reply to: When can we conclude that dark matter does not exist? #62526Billy_TParticipant________________________________________________________________
If there is such a supreme being, then why would that being only create inferior beings who could only act in one way, that is in ways that are only good and compliant? Would there really be any love possible in such a universe? It would be like creating a bunch of robots, wouldn’t it?
Not following you, NMR. Not sure why you would think it would be a creator god’s only option, in order to get rid of sadism, misery, suffering, inequality, war and so on. Honestly, I don’t know how you got from A to B on that one.
But as mentioned in response to Nittany, the bigger question for me is why anyone thinks a god is necessary in the first place. We have a long history of telling awesome stories, thousands of years of fiction, parables, poetry, allegory, symbolism and so on. We have thousands of years of art, music, and the most amazing creative inventions. We did that. Humans did that.
Why do you think we need an actual god behind those stories? That has puzzled me for most of my adult life. The idea that so many humans don’t have “faith” in our own capacity to give our lives meaning without the Divine. We really, really don’t need them, and as mentioned, and this is just me, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that humans invented every god and goddess throughout history, including the biblical god. And I also have no doubt in my mind that humanity would be far, far better off if it would just accept this, and rejoice in our emancipation, though I do not expect others to agree with me on that. Not at all.
It’s just my own view of things.
January 6, 2017 at 7:22 pm in reply to: When can we conclude that dark matter does not exist? #62525Billy_TParticipantTo me what appears to be design is really the product of 15.6 billion years of random chance and selective pressures. But however we arrived where we are now, at least we get to watch the Rams.
Yeah, that’s a major key for me. We’re looking at the results of nearly 16 billion years, and it’s all too easy to forget that. Forgetting that makes it seem that it can’t have happened without some “intelligent design.” We’ve basically telescoped the process in our minds because we’re hard-wired to do that, to find structure and logic in the here and now. Our brains have evolved to do this.
In reality, through all of that time, there were trillions of things that went absolutely haywire, explosions, flame outs, collisions, innumerable “mistakes” and resets. If there were an actual deity running things, with a plan, with the power to implement it, none of that would have happened. It would have been smooth sailing all the way, and it never has been. It also wouldn’t have taken billions of years.
In a very real sense, we humans are a fluke. The confluence of innumerable flukes that could have gone in all sorts of directions, with a host of different results. Yes, I definitely believe in Cause and Effect. But that has never required a plan.
And I think the universe is so magnificence, and amazing, and magical, all by itself, it doesn’t need our invented gods and goddesses. That’s my view. And I think we should celebrate our own ability to bring poetry into the world to try to explain it all and give it meaning. IMO, we radically short-change ourselves when we think it can’t have happened without the gods and that we need them to give our lives meaning, etc. etc. We should rejoice in our own capacity for wonder, fiction, poetic invention, and so on.
Billy_TParticipantBut on economic issues, taxes, spending, deficits, wars, the surveillance state, etc. etc. . . yes, he’s definitely governed as an old school conservative.
Absolutely. There’s no question of that. And some of us were saying exactly as much when he first got the dem nomination, and then it was driven home by who his appointments were.
This board will never have decent conversations until it’s clear to some that a leftist is not a liberal and that no leftist saw Obama as a liberal in terms of economic and foreign policy. It’s like we’re speaking german and some people keep insisting on saying “well you spanish speaking types are ALL [insert some absurd partisan-style wildly over-general empty conversation-killing stereotype].”
And I forgot another biggie: Obama actually froze Federal pay and hiring in the midst of a recession. No “liberal” would have done that. That’s boilerplate, conservative Republican nonsense.
Ironically, when Reagan faced his recession, he tripled the debt and spent like the proverbial drunken sailor to get out of it . . . and he, Bush Sr. and Dubya all added more than a million new public sector workers on their watch.
Obama? A net loss of 700K.
January 6, 2017 at 1:40 pm in reply to: When can we conclude that dark matter does not exist? #62501Billy_TParticipantIf the concept of “good and evil” come within ourselves, how does that negate the existence of a supreme intelligent being, otherwise thought of as God? In your initial response, you indicated that the existence of evil helped you to decide not to follow the Christian experience.
It’s complicated. And it’s not just the existence of “evil,” it’s the existence of suffering, inequality, the arbitrary, irrational and inexplicable differences in one person’s life versus another. If there were a supreme being, an all-knowing, all-seeing, compassionate father-god, say, he wouldn’t allow this. He wouldn’t allow so much misery and suffering. He would stop our endless wars, our sadism toward each other and Nature. He wouldn’t be okay with someone living like a king while another grows up in the slums or worse.
And if he were okay with that, why would anyone want to “worship” such a monster? And what purpose would he serve to begin with?
I just don’t think it makes any sense that a supreme being exists, or existed. Though, as mentioned, when I was younger, I was open to the idea that a completely detached, “clockmaker god” was possible, one that never intruded on our lives, being completely indifferent to them, like the universe itself.
But after that revelation I mentioned, I knew it was absolutely impossible that any god like the Yahweh of the bible could exist, as depicted by the humans who wrote it. As time went on, I also, after studying the texts, backgrounds and historical contexts closely, gained enough objectivity to be highly critical of the stories themselves. I won’t get into that right now, because I don’t want to needlessly offend anyone. But, suffice it to say, I don’t see the god of the bible in the same way believers do.
Billy_TParticipantGranted, that’s your perception of both Obama and Trump.
It’s not mine. Obama has many times used the power of his office to ram things through during his Presidency. The evidence is there. The concept of “right wing” is one that is created by the media. The mainstream ideologies were actually more on the right than the left until around 1980. Then as the media’s ideology moved left, the right appeared to move more right, when really their ideology changed very little.Actually, we started using the term “right-wing” in the 18th century. It started out basically to differentiate the left from right aisles in the French Assembly. On the left were the small “d” democrats, radicals, progressives who wanted a Republic, instead of a kingdom. On the right were the conservatives who wanted to keep the aristocracy and a powerful church.
But that’s another story.
Also, you and I disagree completely about ideological drift. I think the evidence is pretty clear that mainstream ideologies moved rightward after the 1960s, decidedly, and that there was a strong “liberal” consensus before that. More Americans, for instance, identified as “liberals” from FDR up until Reagan than “conservative.” This started to change with him and now more identify as “conservative.”
I also see the Media as having moved rightward from the 1970s on, though the MSM has never been “liberal.” It’s always been owned and operated by and for the Establishment, which has, with rare exceptions, always been center-right throughout our history.
And it’s never been moreso than now, after several decades of Media consolidation. It’s owned by huge multinational corporations, and those are decidedly “conservative” in their goals and agenda.
Billy_TParticipantObama governed as a “conservative”? Gay marriage, trans everything, ACA, yeah some “conservative” there. Will be worth watching his agenda swirl around and down the bowl.
You cite two culture war issues, and who knows what you even mean by “trans everything.” Those are the exceptions to the rule for Obama. But on economic issues, taxes, spending, deficits, wars, the surveillance state, etc. etc. . . yes, he’s definitely governed as an old school conservative.
I’ve listed the reasons in detail before. The evidence is overwhelming that he has governed from the center right, going back to his support for Bush’s wars, tax cuts, bailouts, keeping his Defense Secretary, rehiring his Fed chairman, offering up cuts to Medicare and Social Security when he met with Boehner, holding a deficit summit in the middle of a recession, etc. etc.
And the ACA was standard Republic policy until Bush. It came right out of the Heritage Foundation and was implemented by Romney in Massachusetts. It was a “free market,” private sector, extremely conservative response when we needed a leftist one instead.
January 6, 2017 at 11:05 am in reply to: When can we conclude that dark matter does not exist? #62495Billy_TParticipantApologies for the poor formatting.
Trying to cut down the length of these posts, and it’s not working so well.
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