Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Truean]

truean its your fault that I failed out of college!
Did I do it right?

I see what you did there. Either the sarcasm hasn't been detected or it certainly has.

Yes? Yes, you did?

[ECrownofFire]

That's one of the tenants of Christianity I really like, heh. The alternative, obviously, is hating people.

No, people with that attitude still hate gay people, they're just apologetic about it and try to obscure the point. There's absolutely nothing morally wrong with being gay.

There are Christians who aren't homophobic. I'm not sure how many, but they exist.

Wikipedia says that Lutheran churches tend to be a bit better (Here)

Also, the local United Methodist church that my mom goes to allows gay people to be members. Although note that the "official" church policy is rather against homosexuality.

[RedKing]

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that this is how it goes. Yes, in a technical sense, we the people are the ruling agency of our country. But for most people (especially anyone who's ever struggled with making headway against the Federal bureaucracy), it doesn't ever feel that way. Especially when the political party you support (which is supposed to be the mechanism by which your will is made known to the government) is in the minority and/or ineffectual at making changes or (perhaps more importantly) stopping changes that you don't like. When that happens, the common fallacy is "the government = the OTHER party" and hence partisan anitpathy becomes anti-government antipathy.


When Clinton was President, the right-wing fringe was in full froth mode. From this impotent rage sprung the paranoid fantasies of the New World Order and black helicopters and UN-backed armies of inner-city gang members forcing Christians into FEMA re-education camps (yes, that was a conspiracy theory I remember from that time period). There arose an entire cottage industry of people feeding into that frenzy and enriching themselves greatly as a result.

Rush Limbaugh's entire career and the rise of AM talk radio and FOX News can be more or less attributed to that feedback cycle: people get worried, feel powerless. Start coming up with crazy-ass ideas about the opposition politician's nefarious intent. Opportunist starts giving them selectively filtered news and commentary designed to support and encourage those ideas, without explicitly legitimating them. Frenzy grows, as does the appetite for said opportunist's broadcasts.

The thing is, I saw the exact same cycle played out in the mid-late Bush years. Yeah, there was a lot of bad shit going on, but there was WAY more shit prophesied that didn't. Bush didn't declare martial law, didn't suspend elections, didn't start rounding up protesters as enemy combatants, didn't pull us out of NATO or the UN, didn't invade Iran or Syria or North Korea, and didn't stage a terrorist attack on American soil to justify a naked power grab.

Now, before I get dunked in magma, let me be very clear: This is not an endorsement of the presidential tenure of George W. Bush. I STILL think the man was the worst President in American history, and that it will take decades, if ever, to undo the damage wrought on his watch. BUT...he still wasn't half as bad as some people worried he would be. He was horribly incompetent, but a good number of people on the left-end of the political spectrum worried that he was a modern-day Franco, or that other guy with the funny mustache who will remain unnamed so as not to invoke Godwin's Law. And there were certainly pundits and media figures who fed into that belief and grew quite popular by doing so.

And now the pendulum has swung back the other way, and you have the cottage industry catering to the birthers, the Tea Party, the "he's a closet Muslim commiefascist" breed of Republican. That Rick Santorum is simultaneously buying and selling the fear-hate-paranoia cycle doesn't surprise me in the least.

And if (gods forbid) Romney or Gingrich win the White House, you'll see the fear-hate-paranoia cycle spring up on the other side just as fast.

I guess what I'm saying is that for way too many people (Left and Right), political discourse is ever more approaching the level of sophistication of Liberal Crime Squad.

[Nadaka]

I actually never saw the "left fear mongering" in the later years of the bush administration you talk about. I spoke with people who had those fears, but they were not made public in any media that I saw. I also spoke with people on the right who desperately wanted a 3rd term for Bush and were vocally and seriously hoping that Bush would nuke iran, declare marshal law and execute all liberals.

[Andir]

When Clinton was President, the right-wing fringe was in full froth mode. From this impotent rage sprung the paranoid fantasies of the New World Order and black helicopters and UN-backed armies of inner-city gang members forcing Christians into FEMA re-education camps (yes, that was a conspiracy theory I remember from that time period). There arose an entire cottage industry of people feeding into that frenzy and enriching themselves greatly as a result.

I thought the whole "New World Order" was a Bush I thing... hell, there's even a song using the sound clip from one of his speeches.

[Leafsnail]

"Go back and read what the sirens did once you arrived on that island," Santorum warned students at Colorado Christian University this week, invoking mythology. "They devour you. They destroy you. They consume you."

"Ladies and gentleman we cannot listen to the siren song," he added. "We cannot listen to President Obama and we can't listen to those in our party who want to be just a little bit less than what the Democrats and the left is doing to our country."

There's something deeply ridiculous about what Santorum's saying here.  It's partly that he's almost literally telling people to put their hands over their ears and not listen to the other side of the debate because they will pull you in

[palsch]

I thought the whole "New World Order" was a Bush I thing... hell, there's even a song using the sound clip from one of his speeches.

The term goes back to the post-war years while the conspiracy theory side adopted the term in the mid 60's. It gained popularity as it assimilated more and more conspiracy theory groups and ideas. Then H. W. Bush gave a little speech in 1990, just as the death of the Soviet Union meant that the survivalists needed a new boogieman. Cue Pat Robinson and the mainstreaming of the concept. The wiki page makes fun reading.

[RedKing]

When Clinton was President, the right-wing fringe was in full froth mode. From this impotent rage sprung the paranoid fantasies of the New World Order and black helicopters and UN-backed armies of inner-city gang members forcing Christians into FEMA re-education camps (yes, that was a conspiracy theory I remember from that time period). There arose an entire cottage industry of people feeding into that frenzy and enriching themselves greatly as a result.

I thought the whole "New World Order" was a Bush I thing... hell, there's even a song using the sound clip from one of his speeches.

What palsch said. It got started under Bush I (in part because he wasn't conservative enough for some corners, such as the people who, now that the Soviet Union was dead, wanted us to slam the door and seal the borders and go back to pre-WWII isolationism) but it really took on a life of its own once Clinton was in office.



@Nadaka: Olbermann and Maddow kinda crossed that line from journalistic criticism to fear-mongering and sensationalism at times, IMHO. And some of the more popular websites like DailyKos became echo chambers where the most terrifying/rage-inducing stuff ended up on the front page, regardless of veracity.

[Tellemurius]

truean its your fault that I failed out of college!
Did I do it right?

I see what you did there. Either the sarcasm hasn't been detected or it certainly has.

Yes? Yes, you did?

Well I had to blame some other poor bastard for my faults!
God no I didn't fail college I just don't have credits that I done anything yet.

[Truean]

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that this is how it goes. Yes, in a technical sense, we the people are the ruling agency of our country. But for most people (especially anyone who's ever struggled with making headway against the Federal bureaucracy), it doesn't ever feel that way. Especially when the political party you support (which is supposed to be the mechanism by which your will is made known to the government) is in the minority and/or ineffectual at making changes or (perhaps more importantly) stopping changes that you don't like. When that happens, the common fallacy is "the government = the OTHER party" and hence partisan anitpathy becomes anti-government antipathy.

When Clinton was President, the right-wing fringe was in full froth mode. From this impotent rage sprung the paranoid fantasies of the New World Order and black helicopters and UN-backed armies of inner-city gang members forcing Christians into FEMA re-education camps (yes, that was a conspiracy theory I remember from that time period). There arose an entire cottage industry of people feeding into that frenzy and enriching themselves greatly as a result.

Rush Limbaugh's entire career and the rise of AM talk radio and FOX News can be more or less attributed to that feedback cycle: people get worried, feel powerless. Start coming up with crazy-ass ideas about the opposition politician's nefarious intent. Opportunist starts giving them selectively filtered news and commentary designed to support and encourage those ideas, without explicitly legitimating them. Frenzy grows, as does the appetite for said opportunist's broadcasts.

The thing is, I saw the exact same cycle played out in the mid-late Bush years. Yeah, there was a lot of bad shit going on, but there was WAY more shit prophesied that didn't. Bush didn't declare martial law, didn't suspend elections, didn't start rounding up protesters as enemy combatants, didn't pull us out of NATO or the UN, didn't invade Iran or Syria or North Korea, and didn't stage a terrorist attack on American soil to justify a naked power grab.

Now, before I get dunked in magma, let me be very clear: This is not an endorsement of the presidential tenure of George W. Bush. I STILL think the man was the worst President in American history, and that it will take decades, if ever, to undo the damage wrought on his watch. BUT...he still wasn't half as bad as some people worried he would be. He was horribly incompetent, but a good number of people on the left-end of the political spectrum worried that he was a modern-day Franco, or that other guy with the funny mustache who will remain unnamed so as not to invoke Godwin's Law. And there were certainly pundits and media figures who fed into that belief and grew quite popular by doing so.

And now the pendulum has swung back the other way, and you have the cottage industry catering to the birthers, the Tea Party, the "he's a closet Muslim commiefascist" breed of Republican. That Rick Santorum is simultaneously buying and selling the fear-hate-paranoia cycle doesn't surprise me in the least.

And if (gods forbid) Romney or Gingrich win the White House, you'll see the fear-hate-paranoia cycle spring up on the other side just as fast.

I guess what I'm saying is that for way too many people (Left and Right), political discourse is ever more approaching the level of sophistication of Liberal Crime Squad.

O yeah, there's a cycle going on here, and the thing that keeps it going is ignorance of any useful knowledge of government and law. I mean like basic stuff. Most of the people I talk to didn't even know the phrase "county commissioner" until a local one got the doors kicked in by the FBI for corruption. They STILL don't even really know what a "County Commissioner" does. I maintain this is a large reason why he got so corrupt the FBI had to kick in his doors in the first place....

We've got people complaining about taxes and yet they don't even know basics of the job of the guy who has soooo much to do with that on a very real, very local level with a lot of money. We're talking millions or tens or hundreds of millions sometimes. They don't teach any of this and nobody wants to learn.

I totally get the idea that it feels completely hopeless sometimes and that your vote doesn't count. Truth of the matter is, your vote doesn't count, even and especially when your side is in office if you don't know any other way at all to participate in government.

That much of it isn't the government or the system's fault. People who refuse to educate themselves are going to get screwed and unfortunately we all refuse to do that. I mean, would it be so hard for some civics class to cover the basic structure of local government? These are mostly elected positions.... How the hell are you supposed to vote for someone for an office when you don't even know a.) what the office does, or b.) that it exists in the first place...?

Yeah, one side bashes the other; that's what keeps the cycle going. I don't care who started it; it's stupid and serves no good purpose.

I will always be more concerned with the homeless than the rich. I will always be more concerned with maintaining our roads, sewers, electrical grid and other failing industry than corporate profits. I will always be concerned with trying to help the middle class survive and dare I say thrive for their lifetime of efforts.

Right now, I see the rich want us to think they're somehow our heroes so when we are kept poor (by them) we'll blame ourselves as they loot the place while the government literally pays for their incompetence. I see Fox news being rich people paying other rich people to tell middle class people to blame poor people. I see a consumerist system propping up corporations who plan to have us work our entire lives and then die of Type II diabetes on top of a pile of scratch-off lottery tickets. I'm told this will bring prosperity, never mind to whom, how?

Truth is, I wouldn't mind having a fair deal of money, but I realize as Ford did, that if my employees can't afford my cars, then somethings wrong. I need people to sell stuff to who can afford to buy it. For that, I need well paid people who are actually appreciated for what they know.

TL:DR Yes, unfortunate name calling cycle. It was started and is kept going by ignorance. It will continue to compound. This is sad, because this isn't a solution to anything. Eventually, something will have to give.

truean its your fault that I failed out of college!
Did I do it right?

I see what you did there. Either the sarcasm hasn't been detected or it certainly has.

Yes? Yes, you did?

Well I had to blame some other poor bastard for my faults!
God no I didn't fail college I just don't have credits that I done anything yet.

I didn't mean to imply that you had failed college; I meant that you "did it right." We appear to be caught in a sarcasm vortex. Please keep your hands and arms inside the vortex and everything will be alright....

[Frumple]

Yeah, that bit about ignorance is a fairly good point. I'm not entirely sure what the hell a county commissioner does either, and my grandfather was mayor of the town I live in for a few years. I'm also at least partially college educated. Still don't know this shit, and I've never had it come up in any class I've been in.

Don't know what a lot of the local positions entail, really. What the hell does the school board actually do? Waste management? You get some broad strokes from the title, sometimes, but nothing specific. No one's bothered to bring it up and I've never really been interested in the local politics (beyond avoiding the frak out of it, because the majority of the people in this area are various forums of bigoted filth).

So, yeah. Is there like a pamphlet or something for this crap?

[GlyphGryph]

I'm under the impression that school boards mostly spend a lot of time desperately trying to justify their existence.

[Nadaka]

I'm under the impression that school boards mostly spend a lot of time desperately trying to justify their existence.

And finding new ways to impose zero tolerance for non conformity on children and crush every bit of independent thought and creativity out of the youth.

[RedKing]

It's also something of a Catch-22. The reason we have a republic and not a direct democracy, is because most people don't have time or inclination to be fully versed in the minutiae of governance. We elect people to do that shit for us. Problem being, if we don't have the slightest clue how they do what we pay them to do, it's hard for us to know who's doing it wrong. So we have other people (journalists) to do that job for us. But then if we dont understand how journalism is supposed to work, or the time to make sure they're doing it right....you see where I'm going with this.

It's not so much a "who watches the watchmen" as "who the hell has time to watch all the watchmen"

[MonkeyHead]

I'm under the impression that school boards mostly spend a lot of time desperately trying to justify their existence.

And finding new ways to impose zero tolerance for non conformity on children and crush every bit of independent thought and creativity out of the youth.

Dont forget the way they make an effort ruin the education of the pupils they are meant to be working for by stifiling any innovative educational practice. New ideas are dangeorus after all.