Big Lies of Our Time in the United States

nohero said:

paulsurovell said:

nohero said:

drummerboy said:

paulsurovell said:

Citing the USSR as the only example of socialism is a straw man argument.

 Oh.
That's ridiculous. From the 50's through the fall of the USSR, pretty much no European country was known as a socialist country - almost all of socialism/communism was associated with the USSR and its clients in American discourse. Except for maybe Sweden.

 I think Mr. Drummerboy knew what a strawman argument is, so providing the definition was a little pedantic.

Bizarre. 

 Okay, I will happily replace "pedantic" with "bizarre", if that floats you boat.

 Do you think positing the USSR as the only example of socialism is a straw man?

tjohn said:
Who believes in the Trump-Russia conspiracy?

 Lots of people on this board.

paulsurovell said:
And Sbenois,
Still waiting for you to demonstrate your Russia-photo-expertise and explain the circumstances of this photo:

After several fruitless rounds of this, anyone who was as interested in constructive discussion as he was in argumentative gamesmanship would have provided his own caption by now.

DaveSchmidt said:

paulsurovell said:
And Sbenois,
Still waiting for you to demonstrate your Russia-photo-expertise and explain the circumstances of this photo:

After several fruitless rounds of this, anyone who was as interested in constructive discussion as he was in argumentative gamesmanship would have provided his own caption by now.

 Normally I would "bump" the comment, but that doesn't show the photo.

sbenois said:
The guilt is gnawing at you.   Good.

 I love the way you go after Nan for (wrongly, IMO) voting for a third party candidate while taking no responsibility whatsoever for nominating an unelectable moldy ham sandwich (who I voted for in the General because she had a D next to her name).  Have you been diagnosed with narcissism or are you just suffering in the dark?

ridski said:

paulsurovell said:

sbenois said:
It IS voter shaming.  And it is deserved.

Let's put the shame where it belongs:

 Isn't this the exact same strategy document you posted in another thread as an example of DNC corruption?

 Same document, but as I pointed out in response to you, it is not an example of corruption, but an example of the truth we need to know, made possible by Wikileaks.

The document enables Sbenois and other misguided "shamers" to be aware of where the real shame lies -- in the DNC's promotion of the candidacy of Donald Trump.

paulsurovell said:

ridski said:

paulsurovell said:

sbenois said:
It IS voter shaming.  And it is deserved.

Let's put the shame where it belongs:

 Isn't this the exact same strategy document you posted in another thread as an example of DNC corruption?

 Same document, but as I pointed out in response to you, it is not an example of corruption, but an example of the truth we need to know, made possible by Wikileaks.
The document enables Sbenois and other misguided "shamers" to be aware of where the real shame lies -- in the DNC's promotion of the candidacy of Donald Trump.

 Well, it's interesting to see, but does it really tell us anything? I mean, I'm sure that there were plenty of strategy emails flying around about how to deal with Hillary from the various exploratory committees on the other side, but we don't get to see them. Do we need to? Donald Trump won the primary but at the expense of Ben and Ted, if all three were given the same treatment, then why did only one win?

This was a preliminary strategy paper. At this point Ted Cruz was the only person officially running for president. Hillary would declare herself a few days after this email was sent, but all the others were still in the exploratory phase. Most people expected Trump to fizzle out when his show was expected to start filming like he did in 2012. So, as I said, this was a bad strategy, but only in hindsight. This document is an example of "truth we needed to know" but only in hindsight, and its value is minimal. If this had come out a week after it was sent, then maybe it would be worth something - the DNC would have to adopt a different strategy from someone else more than likely - but looking at this email now, or even in October of 2016, all it tells me is that DNC were given a bad plan. Can you post the reply to this email?

Klinker said:

sbenois said:
The guilt is gnawing at you.   Good.

 I love the way you go after Nan for (wrongly, IMO) voting for a third party candidate while taking no responsibility whatsoever for nominating an unelectable moldy ham sandwich (who I voted for in the General because she had a D next to her name).  Have you been diagnosed with narcissism or are you just suffering in the dark?

 It is my understanding that Nan and Sbenois voted for the same candidate, to wit: Hillary Rodham Clinton, former First Lady, US Senator, Secretary of State.

But I am beginning to think that you are all nuts which must mean that I am.

ridski said:

 all it tells me is that DNC were given a bad plan.

That's the point.

LOST said:

 It is my understanding that Nan and Sbenois voted for the same candidate, to wit: Hillary Rodham Clinton, former First Lady, US Senator, Secretary of State.
But I am beginning to think that you are all nuts which must mean that I am.

 So..... then why is Sbenosis waging a partisan jihad against Nan?

paulsurovell said:

ridski said:

 all it tells me is that DNC were given a bad plan.

That's the point.

Can you post the reply to this email?

ridski said:

paulsurovell said:

ridski said:

 all it tells me is that DNC were given a bad plan.

That's the point.

Can you post the reply to this email?

 Also, where the hell did you find it? I've searched through the Podesta emails on wikileaks using various keywords through the whole of April 2015 and can't find it anywhere.

The us be clear that the DNC was not corrupt in 2016.  Party organizations, for better or for worse, can do whatever the **** they want to do as long as it is legal.  Back room deals are legal.  So, maybe the DNC was over confident or stupid or inbred or whatever, but they weren't corrupt.  So let's stop with that ********.  It's sickening and makes people who make this claim look like little babies who lost a game.

It is also worth noting that had either HRC or BS won, internationally, things wouldn't be hugely different although we probably wouldn't have to contend with all the Trumpian reality T.V. drama.  Domestically, either HRC or BS would be stymied by a Republican House and Senate.  What would be better is that the Democrats would not have lost control of the judicial branch for the next 25 years.

Meanwhile, I looked at FoxNews and not a peep about the fires in California or the generally very hot summer in the Northern Hemisphere.  To me, climate change is the scariest thing because it will end up making the current refugee problems look like child's play as swaths of the tropical countries become uninhabitable.  I foresee a time when we will end up using deadly force to keep people from entering the country.

So, to all the Hillary-haters and conspiracy theorists, please redirect your energy to the global-warming crisis.

Trump didn't need the HRC/DNC pied- piper strategy to win the Republican primary - he demolished his primary opponents. Trump sucked the air out of the room with his ability to be on cable news 24/7. 

Klinker said:

LOST said:

 It is my understanding that Nan and Sbenois voted for the same candidate, to wit: Hillary Rodham Clinton, former First Lady, US Senator, Secretary of State.
But I am beginning to think that you are all nuts which must mean that I am.

 So..... then why is Sbenosis waging a partisan jihad against Nan?

 Why did you pick on that cute girl in Junior High School?

Just read last three posts by:

ridski

tjohn

cramer

I guess not everyone here is nuts.

I'm nuts for continuing to post here and asking questions no one has any intention of answering.

Join the club

nan said:

University of Kentucky history department chair Ronald Formisamo’s latest book is titled volumes: American Oligarchy: The Permanence of the Political Class (University of Illinois, 2017). By Formisamo’s detailed account, U.S. politics and policy are under the control of a “permanent political class” – a “networked layer of high-income people” including Congressional representatives (half of whom are millionaires), elected officials, campaign funders, lobbyists, consultants, appointed bureaucrats, pollsters, television celebrity journalists, university presidents, and executives at well-funded nonprofit institutions. This “permanent political class,” Formisamo warns, is taking the nation “beyond [mere] plutocracy” to “the hegemony of an aristocracy of inherited wealth.”  It:

“drives economic and political inequality not only with the policies it has constructed over the past four decades, such as federal and state tax systems rigged to favor corporations and the wealthy; it also increases inequality by its self-dealing, acquisitive behavior as it enables, emulates, and enmeshes itself with the wealthiest One Percent and .01 percent …[It engages in] the direct creation of inequality by channeling the flow of income and wealth to elites [while]… its self-aggrandizement creates a culture of corruption that infects the entire society and that induces many to abuse positions of power to emulate or rise into the One Percent” …[and as it] contributes to continuing high levels of poverty and disadvantage for millions that exceed almost all advanced nations.”

Where did this guy get his degree or his job? If he were a physicist he'd write that he just discovered a mysterious force because while he was sitting in his yard an apple fell on his head. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Elite

Well maybe I judges too harshly. From an online ad for his book:

A permanent political class has emerged on a scale unprecedented in our nation’s history. Its self-dealing, nepotism, and corruption contribute to rising inequality. Its reach extends from the governing elite throughout nongovernmental institutions. Aside from constituting an oligarchy of prestige and power, it enables the creation of an aristocracy of massive inherited wealth that is accumulating immense political power.

In a muckraking tour de force reminiscent of Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, and C. Wright Mills, American Oligarchy demonstrates the way the corrupt culture of the permanent political class extends down to the state and local level. Ron Formisano breaks down the ways this class creates economic inequality and how its own endemic corruption infects our entire society. Formisano delves into the work of not just politicians but lobbyists, consultants, appointed bureaucrats, pollsters, celebrity journalists, behind-the-scenes billionaires, and others. Their shameless pursuit of wealth and self-aggrandizement, often at taxpayer expense, rewards channeling the flow of income and wealth to elites. That inequality in turn has choked off social mobility and made a joke of meritocracy. As Formisano shows, these forces respond to the oligarchy’s power and compete to bask in the presence of the .01 percent. They also exacerbate the dangerous instability of an American democracy divided between extreme wealth and extreme poverty.

paulsurovell said:

nohero said:

paulsurovell said:

nohero said:

drummerboy said:

paulsurovell said:

Citing the USSR as the only example of socialism is a straw man argument.

 Oh.
That's ridiculous. From the 50's through the fall of the USSR, pretty much no European country was known as a socialist country - almost all of socialism/communism was associated with the USSR and its clients in American discourse. Except for maybe Sweden.

 I think Mr. Drummerboy knew what a strawman argument is, so providing the definition was a little pedantic.

Bizarre. 

 Okay, I will happily replace "pedantic" with "bizarre", if that floats you boat.

 Do you think positing the USSR as the only example of socialism is a straw man?

 I didn't say that sir. Learn to read better.

drummerboy said:

paulsurovell said:

nohero said:

paulsurovell said:

nohero said:

drummerboy said:

paulsurovell said:

Citing the USSR as the only example of socialism is a straw man argument.

 Oh.
That's ridiculous. From the 50's through the fall of the USSR, pretty much no European country was known as a socialist country - almost all of socialism/communism was associated with the USSR and its clients in American discourse. Except for maybe Sweden.

 I think Mr. Drummerboy knew what a strawman argument is, so providing the definition was a little pedantic.

Bizarre. 

 Okay, I will happily replace "pedantic" with "bizarre", if that floats you boat.

 Do you think positing the USSR as the only example of socialism is a straw man?

 I didn't say that sir. Learn to read better.
 

Well you certainly defended the statement (see above).

paulsurovell said:

drummerboy said:

paulsurovell said:

Do you think positing the USSR as the only example of socialism is a straw man?

 I didn't say that sir. Learn to read better.
 

Well you certainly defended the statement (see above).

 He didn't say it, so stop trying to create your own alternate reality instead of accepting what was actually said.

And by the way, the answer to the bolded question, which you directed to me, is "I don't comment on your personal fantasies of what's been posted."

paulsurovell said:

drummerboy said:

paulsurovell said:

nohero said:

paulsurovell said:

nohero said:

drummerboy said:

paulsurovell said:

Citing the USSR as the only example of socialism is a straw man argument.

 Oh.
That's ridiculous. From the 50's through the fall of the USSR, pretty much no European country was known as a socialist country - almost all of socialism/communism was associated with the USSR and its clients in American discourse. Except for maybe Sweden.

 I think Mr. Drummerboy knew what a strawman argument is, so providing the definition was a little pedantic.

Bizarre. 

 Okay, I will happily replace "pedantic" with "bizarre", if that floats you boat.

 Do you think positing the USSR as the only example of socialism is a straw man?

 I didn't say that sir. Learn to read better.
 

Well you certainly defended the statement (see above).

 Yet again, your inability to properly process pretty simple information is indicative of how you've ended up in the rabbit hole you are in.

LOST said:

Klinker said:

sbenois said:
The guilt is gnawing at you.   Good.

 I love the way you go after Nan for (wrongly, IMO) voting for a third party candidate while taking no responsibility whatsoever for nominating an unelectable moldy ham sandwich (who I voted for in the General because she had a D next to her name).  Have you been diagnosed with narcissism or are you just suffering in the dark?

 It is my understanding that Nan and Sbenois voted for the same candidate, to wit: Hillary Rodham Clinton, former First Lady, US Senator, Secretary of State.
But I am beginning to think that you are all nuts which must mean that I am.

 Yes, I voted for the moldy ham sandwich.  

tjohn said:
I guess for Nan, believing in conspiracies is a bit like being a devout believer in God. It lets you believe that there is some structure to human actions rather than accepting the more disturbing truth that we’re just a bunch of clever animals trying to get ahead in life. 

 What conspiracies do you think I believe in?  And please provide the evidence that they are false.  Also, this makes no sense and I'm an atheist. I don't think there is any structure anywhere.  

Ok, let's move on to lie #2 - Capitalism is about democracy

Someone already commented on this one and thought it was a head scratcher.  I think it's related to people thinking about non-capitalist countries, like Russia, which is now capitalist but people still think it's not and assuming that they are under extreme repression and we are free.

Here is what Street says:

No, it isn’t—and one need not be an anti-capitalist “radical” like myself to know better. My old copy of Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary defines capitalism as “the economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution … are privately owned and operated for profit, originally under fully competitive conditions: it has been generally characterized by a tendency toward concentration of wealth and, [in] its latter phase, by the growth of great corporations, increased government controls, etc.”

There’s nothing—nada, zero, zip—about popular self-rule (democracy) in that definition. And there shouldn’t be. “Democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs about the proper distribution of power,” liberal economist Lester Thurow noted in the mid-1990s: “One [democracy] believes in a completely equal distribution of political power, ‘one man, one vote,’ while the other [capitalism] believes that it is the duty of the economically fit to drive the unfit out of business and into extinction. … To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy is not.” More than being compatible with slavery and incompatible with democracy, U.S. capitalism arose largely on the basis of black slavery in the cotton-growing states (as historian Edward Baptist has shown in his prize-winning study “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism”) and is, in fact, quite militantly opposed to democracy.

“We must make our choice,” onetime Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said or written: “We may have democracy in this country, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” This statement was unintentionally but fundamentally anti-capitalist. Consistent with the dictionary definition presented above, the brilliant French economist Thomas Piketty has shown that capitalism has always been inexorably pulled toward the concentration of wealth into ever fewer hands.

Sounds like we are in the last stages of capitalism and the "economically fit" are driving the "unfit out of business into extinction."  The concentration of wealth in hands of a few was already underway before Trump, but he has accelerated the process.  Maybe we need to switch to another system, cause this one is getting played out. As an economically unfit member I vote "yes."

We are moving toward Russia's model, for sure. We look more like their oligarchy every day.

dave23 said:
We are moving toward Russia's model, for sure. We look more like their oligarchy every day.

 We created Russia's model in the 1990's.  The US fixed the election to get Yeltsen elected and then sent over Harvard's finest robber barons to loot the country for ten years.  So, it's not coincidental.  People did better with Putin, but don't say that in front of anyone or you will be called very bad names.  shhhh. . .

That's right! The Russians are completely under US control except when they aren't.

dave23 said:
That's right! The Russians are completely under US control except when they aren't.

 They are not now, but important to know the history.  Not often mentioned in the MSM.