This is wild:
I was watching a multi-part video of John McCain, putting a whipping on Barack Obama at Rick Warren's "Faith Forum," when - out of the blue - that proceeding stopped, and whoever posted it online edited the video to give me (surprise!) some anti-Right-wing propaganda instead (above). Now, I'm sure, whoever created this video expects me to be aghast at the lunacy that followed - goofy Ron Paul, spouting nonsense about an oncoming American fascist movement, and some ugly religious indoctrination from that despicable documentary "Jesus Camp" - but, unfortunately, the editing just didn't have the intended effect,...
Instead, it just reminded me of the equally bizarre behavior of the post 9/11 Left in this country. 
Think about it: why would a Leftist switch to propaganda if not to attempt to manipulate me? 
I tuned-in to watch a debate, but this person decided his/her political views were more important - important enough that he/she would knowingly lure me in with one thing so he/she could subject me to another. 
That's underhanded and wrong, but this person doesn't care about right or wrong; he/she cared only about positioning me so I'll be subjected to their nasty agenda. That's extremely bad politics, to say the least. What else am I to make of it? Well, I'm about to tell you: 
First of all, by attempting to con me - by lying to me about what I'm watching - they've insulted me to no end; obviously thinking I'm too dumb to understand what they're doing or to have a mind of my own. 
Second, by doing it this way, they've merely reminded me how much the Left has become like the thing they hate: sure, the people in "Jesus Camp" are crazy - and (let me be clear:) what they're doing to kids is child abuse - but no crazier than Leftist NewAgers, suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome, while giving their "Indigo Children" water as medicine; keeping them from getting vaccinated, and filling their heads with terrible environmental nightmares. Those, also, are all forms of child abuse, no different than what's in "Jesus Camp." 
You're all nuts as far as this atheist is concerned, and (since the Left thinks of itself as the antidote to religious madness) such acts of "spiritual" and political cultism are just as grotesque, if not more so. 
"He seems really concerned that Democrats are going to ruin everything to spite Republicans because everyone they pick has cult friends.
I don't see how this is any more alarming than Republicans touting leaders who want to rule by the Bible and other totally irrational and sickening religious views."
That quote about me, from someone on Live Journal, is disgusting because it shows the extreme relativism Leftists have fallen into: they don't mind "fighting fire with fire" - even when they know what they're doing is wrong. 
Even when they know cultism is crazy. How is this an improvement?
At some point, the Left (showing an education has been completely wasted on them) decided the "totally irrational and sickening" beliefs of cults are just the thing to fight religion - and potentially turn America around - like any of that makes more sense than Christian zealotry. 
I mean, since when did cultism bring anything positive into the world? 
What? Did Charley Manson's story get a make-over when I wasn't looking? David Koresh's? Jim Jones's? Heaven's Gate's? The lying Maharishi? Those idiot hippies who tried to levitate the Pentagon? 
What's happened to you people? 
If you ask me, you're all going completely insane.
goofy Ron Paul, spouting nonsense about an oncoming American fascist movement,
ReplyDelete---------
RP correctly predicted the popping of the real estate bubble, the devaluation of the dollar and the meteoric rise in gold, all side effects of currency manipulation by the corporate-govt socialist goons who are currently in charge.
The fastest growing economic sector under Bush has been government jobs - all that massive orgy of deficit spending had to go somewhere!
Even if you don't give a hoot about the Constitution, you should care about the economy. My 2 cents.
But it's a MAGIC economy that can stand any amount of abuse. Don't you know anything, anonymous.
ReplyDeleteBut the other thing that's always wrong with these assessments is that they are written by a conservative atheist who somehow still makes the mistake of assuming the big l Left are all cultists or New Agers when nothing could be further from the truth.
Though I have little truck with socialists and communists, they tend to be hardnosed materialists, looking for better living conditions for the poor here and now (that's almost a definition). And anarchists are notorious for their distrust of organised religion, never mind whacko cults.
So which of the Left is the rant being pitched, or in other words, who on the Left is left?
Nice to have you back, Berko, demoralizing fuck that you are (smile): you'd be shocked at what our economy is capable of.
ReplyDeleteAnd you can't deny (after visiting this site) the leadership of the Democratic Party is in the hands of occultists - Obama being just the latest convert.
Communists and socialists care about the poor? Puh-leaze. It's always the same with you guys: if we'll only give them one more chance. To kill people, in mass, for not being pure or something. And anarchists? The term "lunatic fringe" was invented for them. I'm an atheist and I'm not as distrustful as they are.
The Left is a joke, and I don't care which "side" of it you're on. Thank goodness it's almost over:
The end is near, my friend,...
CE,
ReplyDeleteI saw your writings over on the REALITY SANDWICH blog, which I'd found through the writings of Gary Lachman. (Despite his questionable political leanings, he's a good scholar of fringe spiritual movements. You'd probably like his TURN OFF YOUR MIND -- a critical social history of Sixties oc/cultism.)
I was impressed with your hardline stance *contra* Daniel Pinchbeck and the other deluded phonies there. Speaking as someone who has a fair amount of sympathy for esoteric studies, I'm always amazed at the utter inability of allegedly-intelligent New Age types like Pinchbeck to respond to simple *reason*, and how utterly blind they are to common sense. (You think Mr. PoMo Psychedelicist's beloved Burning Man could exist in the premodern Rousseauvian mudpie-planet he thinks he wants to live in? I have a feeling that if such a Green wet-dream came to pass, it would look a lot more like *The Killing Fields* than *The Age of Aquarius*...)
I guess I see a lot of myself in you -- another former liberal/leftist, 40ish, Bay-Area dwelling *Creative Person* who is perpetually astonished by the hypocrisy, ignorance, naivete, viciousness, and sheer absurdity of the so-called "alternative culture" we live in around here, and the almost superhuman levels of self-delusion people expend to keep it going. Some alternative!
Nice observations about the Obamessiah. As a student of comparative religion and cultism, I had his act pegged from the beginning, and even wonder how much of it -- initially, anyway -- was conscious on his part. You'd think after the experiences of the last century, people would be smarter about making Messiahs out of hack politicians, but I guess the immense vacuum created in these peoples' lives by rejecting traditional religion had to be filled with *something*, and mere New Age fluffery didn't provide quite the *frisson* of a mass political movement.
Have you ever posted on Little Green Footballs? You'd be right at home there.
Best,
The Eagle
The thing that concerns me here is that you 'former liberal/leftists' are letting the experience of having to negotiate past nutjobs nominally on the left railroad you into supporting Bush neocons, a group of men who spent their entire term in office taking money from the less well off and giving it to those who already have plenty.
ReplyDeleteYou gain nothing from it - other than the satisfaction of pissing off flaky New Agers. Where's your jobs? Where's your standard of living? What about a decent healthcare system?
While the loony left are chanting 'anti-fascist' slogans: sturm und drang 'sound and fury signifying nothing', and the poor and middle class right are busy lambasting the empty-headed serial protesters, the real robber barons are happily feeding off the fracas and laughing all the way to the bank.
"Communists and socialists care about the poor? Puh-leaze. It's always the same with you guys: if we'll only give them one more chance. To kill people, in mass, for not being pure or something."
I'm talking about communists and socialists in the real world - people working in aid organisations in developing countries, tenant collectives trying to combat greedy and rapacious developers etc. This has nothing to do with advocating handing them the keys to power. How is that the best leftist band ever, the Dead Kennedys, had Holiday in Cambodia as their signature song? They well understood the danger of putting idealogues in power. But as balances to abuse of power they're brilliant.
There's nothing lunatic about anarchism. It's difficult to impossible to implement, more a tool for seeing clearly the bullshit that is taking place on both sides of the fence - Left and Right. I have never seen a "movement" more free of lunacy and I challenge you to show me one.
You almost had me, except for the "going."
ReplyDeleteIf you ask me, it's the invasion of the bodysnatchers. Or, the Zombie Apocalypse has happened but the problem is there's no way of telling a zombie from the average joe.
During the eight years of the Clinton administration, when rich people paid the same tax rates proposed by Senator Obama, the private sector added 15.8 million jobs. By contrast, in the seven years and six months of the Bush administration, when rich people paid the Bush-McCain tax rates, the private sector has added just 3.5 million jobs. And, it is losing jobs at the rate of almost 100,000 a month as President Bush prepares for retirement.
ReplyDeleteWhile job growth is probably the most important measure of the economy's health, almost every other measure also showed that the economy performed better with the Clinton-Obama tax rate than the Bush-McCain tax rate. The real wage for the typical worker rose by 6.6 percent in the Clinton years. By contrast, wages have risen by just 1.0 percent in the Bush years and are now falling. At the current rate of decline, real wages will be lower In January of 2009 than when President Bush took office in 2001. The typical family's income rose by 15.3 percent under Clinton, it fell by 1.6 percent under Bush.
Please. I told you you can't fool me:
ReplyDelete"How did all this progress come to pass? It was in fact president Reagan's 1981 tax reductions that turned America's kaleidoscope and began the economic revolution that has so greatly improved things over the past quarter century."
-- The Wall Street Journal
Johnny,
ReplyDeleteYes you can, but you have to listen to what they say and understand where it comes from. It's all in the code words they've adopted: women who feel "energy" and looking for their "soul mates" and "the love of my life." They talk like robots, while the men mostly adopt Marxist rhetoric that speaks of class warfare.
I'll try to collect some of the most popular words and phrases for you, so you can easily determine who's who in the future. Stay on me about it.
Please. I told you you can't fool
ReplyDelete----------------
Nobody is arguing that the economy hasn't grown - clearly it has.
The point is that the Bush tax code is geared to redistribute most of the gains from this to the top 5% at the expense of the bottom 95%.
For many this is a good trade-off - they are not concerned with putting their kids through college or medical care or keeping their homes because they are:
a)already mega-wealthy (like John McCain, married to an heiress worth $100 million, own 7 homes, etc)
b)like you, in the bottom 95% but more interested in purely symbolic issues like Batman movies, celebrity sex scandals etc than in boring stuff like economics.
Did you get fooled? Only you can know that for sure.
If you are worth more then $5 mil, then you probably have benefitted from the last 8 years - congrats!
crack emcee, I understand your logic but notice I'm in Europe - in the Scottish Soviet to be precise. Newspeak is in full effect. It's all Marxist BS and sympathetic magic as far as I can tell.
ReplyDeleteSomething I'd like to see you comment on is what you think of the thesis of these people as psychopaths, simply using the most effective techniques of mind control.
After all, mind control isn't about computer chips in the head. It's about disconnecting a person's ideation from external phenomenal reality so that they can no longer effectively perceive cause and effect and you can therefore make them do or believe anything providing they trust your judgment and explanation of the outcomes.
Johnny,
ReplyDeleteIt's funny you should mention that because I just linked it to psychopathic behavior on this post. (Check the last one under Prince Charles.) I'll do a follow-up on that for you, too.
*You'll notice the emphasis of this other commenter is based on class warfare,...sigh. (Anybody concerned about such things should know that donations to TMR are always welcome: I hate adding ads to the site,...)
Thanks for writing.
You'll notice the emphasis of this other commenter is based on class warfare
ReplyDelete===========
It turned out that Mr. [Warren]Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
“Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Interview w. Warren Buffet
LOL.
I'd rather think about Batman movies and celebrity sex scandals too, if i were you.
Man, you are such a doofus. (And I wish you'd get an Blogger account so I can put an actual name to the idiocy you post, other than the ones I already have for you: "Trouble," "Hostile," and "Loser.") Look, it goes like this:
ReplyDeleteHave you ever noticed that once people become rich and famous they don't have to wait for restaurant reservations? Hell, in some cases they may not even have to pay for their meal if they can bring more business to the place, right? That's your incentive to work hard - to get there: the payoff. The perks. "Easy Street" (which ain't called that for nothing.)
Compare that to Europe, where you're mostly stuck in your own class for life. And no perks at the top. As a matter of fact, they make life harder because you got there: penalized for being rich.
So what's the diff: the "poor" people I know in Europe (I'm thinking of France) don't work real hard because the state supports them whether they work or not. Those that do work are bone-tired because they're expected to do 40+ hours of work in only 35 hours, and taxed for everything, so they're sapped of incentive to do anything - a state I found totally alien, and destructive, when I lived there. And the "rich" people I know worked like dogs - much harder than Americans - because they needed the trappings of wealth but were taxed so heavily. It's nonsense.
You're right - I'm poor with a couple of years of college - but it didn't take money and some big-time college degree for me to see the wisdom of our system. I came back to the United States, kissed the ground, and decided to get to work. And, I think, you should, too, instead of whining all the time:
Free meals, with no reservations, are nice.
There's a difference between providing an incentive to work hard and 'make it', though, and behaving like the Sherriff of Nottingham. Using your example, this is the restaurant, taking the neighbourhood's food, making them do the cooking and washing up, and then serving the 'clever rich' for free.
ReplyDeleteEvery Bush budget has involved cutting social spending and benefits for working class families and giving it to the wealthy elite. You don't seem to have considered that he might be doing this not as some economic stimulus or because it is good for the country as a whole, but simply because he's rewarding those who bankrolled his Presidency with donations and patronage, at the expense of the average American.
The taxpayer is entitled to see that money used to benefit him/herself and their community with better services, not have some ruling elite take that money and use it for their own purposes.
What is difficult to understand about that?
Berko,
ReplyDeleteIt's not hard to understand; it just doesn't jibe with human nature, a charge I've thrown at you before: the willingness to dehumanize and demonize certain politicians (always on the Right) based on your belief they "may" be this or that. It never adds up to a portrayal that fits with reality. Bush seems to be a "good guy" - everybody says so - so why would he sell out the country? It makes no sense. But we can hear Obama (for instance) say, with his own mouth, that he wants to take money from people and raise our taxes. He didn't mince words: he wants our money. Where's your criticism of him?
And it doesn't help that the Left has never been able to make up it's collective mind about what W. is - the village idiot or Machiavelli. They've (you've) painted themselves into a corner as "The Boy Who Cried Wolf": people who will say anything to get their way. Then they cry that no one takes them seriously.
Sorry but we've chased their phantoms one time too many. I like Bush. He seems to be a good guy who cares about the country a whole lot more than the people talking mess. They seem to be liars, based on their own words.
Now what's so difficult to understand about that?
So don't bother listening to what people say or what their intentions appear to be, go study the record. If there's any indication that what I'm saying is not true then, by all means, shout me down, laugh in my face. I'd be happy that Bush was looking after the poor and the struggling working and middle class. But the figures don't support that.
ReplyDeleteJust stay with the facts and you can't go wrong.