@ Ill Papa Fuster:
I'm not sure that there are a lot of "people just like" our narc. Not that there aren't many who share his predispositions, but I think there are relatively few who collect and assemble "evidence" with his diligence.
Gee, I thought the Tea Party was about limited government and restraint on spending, and had nothing to do with race, religion or cultural resentment (or whatever leads you to bring Bedell, Stack, or Bishop into this discussion).
The "template" is that you want the Tea Party to be a Rightwing Judeo-Christian Power Movement, and that you're upset that anyone has the poor manners to point it out, to tie the TP to its natural and vocal would-be political allies and compare it to its historical precursors, to consider the implications of its agenda, and to view its ideological underpinnings and carefully nurtured hurt feelings as anything other than Objectively Superior Truth.
The New Black Panther Party is an ant. The Tea Party is an elephant (for now). Please make a note of the difference.
There was Dale Robertson, then some Larouchites and probably some
provocateurs from “Crash the Tea Party’ but it not organized along racial lines
Uh-huh. In my experience, the majority of "Tea Party Americans" exhibit insensitivity, often aggressively and demonstratively. The whole GZ Mosque discussion has been typical.
As their/your "I'm not a bimbo!" "don't give an inch" reaction to the NAACP demonstrates, TP Americans tend to reject and denounce invitations to self-examination and self-criticism, as though admitting imperfections and taking responsibility for anything outside their preferred definitions of terms is a sign of weakness. Those are the mental habits of bigots.
Like many on the far left, they offer an image to the unaffiliated that says "whether or not some of what they say makes sense, god help us all if they're ever in power." It's nothing that Nancy Pelosi said, or the appearance of a Larouchie at a rally, that has finally led people, young people especially, to associate the Tea Party with the far right/reactionary/culturally defensive wing of the Republican coalition, captured by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck - in other words, just the kind of people who seem perfectly normal and reasonable to you, while the rightwing punditry struggles to define it more moderately
That's who the TP is, that's how the TP acts, that's all the TP has to offer. The opportunity to catch this year's political wave was just too juicy to resist, and they're only human.
For some good examples of guilt by association (as well as ideological presumptions and cultural biases treated as objective and universally obligatory) look at that typically loathsome piece from PajamasMedia linked above by narciso..
The other day, unless I’m misremembering, you asserted that buyers of Middle Eastern crude share guilt by association since their money spawned and feeds the extremism.
This should be elementary: "Guilt by association" is a phrase for the opposite of co-responsibility, for the fallacious assignment of responsibility merely on the basis of association. Guilt by association is "You met with" or "You are the niece of a man who" or "People like you have done" - not you failed to, you are one of the people who, you turned a blind eye because you directly benefited from, you blame others for problems you have caused or significantly contributed to.
It goes without saying that being responsible for something will associate you with it. It does not go without saying that merely being associatable with something or someone makes you responsible.
And, in another thread you hold with the NAACP that Tea Party people are responsible for purging those who associate at their rallies without pure motives.
"Pure motives"? The NAACP argument is that if the TP does not condemn the David Duke, Mark Williams, and other types, then it becomes responsible for promoting them and facilitating their agenda. My argument is further that the TP agenda itself will have the tendency to be racially divisive and to impact minorities disproportionately, and that serious people pursuing small government/"federalist" and ultra-patriotic politics would actively confront this problem in an effort to broaden the movement and their vision.
And you appear to go further and argue that the mere holding of certain ideological beliefs about the size of government grants a group of people the right to believe that another whole group of people is guilty of meaning them harm.
See above. Hold whatever beliefs you want. When you go about seeking to make changes on their basis, they become the concern of others. The TP isn't about a lot of people saying "Hey these are the wonderful things I believe," it's about trying to get something done - or trying to stop other things - through political activism.
@ narciso:
Possibly they reacted to the Islamophobic stupidity that led to the attack on the name "Cordoba." I take it you actually believe that comical "symbol of conquest" theory about the project?
But I can see why the piece appealed to you. Just the kind of guilt by association pseudo-argument that you feed on.
Schwartz is to be congratulated for merely participating in guilt by association while successfully suppressing the Islamophobia behind most of the "widening protests." But it still amounts to a guilt-by-association smokescreen for the curtailment of someone else's freedom of association, speech, and religion:
Non-Muslim defenders of Rauf—including Cuomo and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg—have rejected demands for investigation of the ideological and financial underpinnings of the Ground Zero mosque. They have argued that such an inquiry would violate the First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion. But faith should not serve as a pretext for extremist or potentially criminal activities.
In effect, he concedes that the inquiry WOULD violate freedoms, but pleads a kind of "clear and present danger" excuse for going ahead and violating them.
The "pretext" he mentions exists only in his mind, and is justified strictly by connections, or connections to connections, or associations with connections to connections, that don't amount to anything remotely approaching a clear and present danger. Instead, he shows that the sponsors may be connected to, or have connections to people have connections to, or may be associated with people who have connections, to people with whom all good right-thinking people disagree.
I mean this is unbelievable, regarding Rauf's wife:
She is the niece of Dr. Farooq Khan, formerly a leader of the Westbury Mosque on Long Island, which is a center for Islamic radicals and links on its website to the paramilitary Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the front on American soil for the Pakistani jihadist Jamaat e-Islami.
She's the niece of someone who formerly led a mosque that has links on its website to a front group? Sheesh. I know the Westbury Mosque has been a problem, but this standard - promoter linked to man linked to suspicious group - is ridiculous. Other apparent new standards, via Lazio/King, for being able to build a cultural center in Manhattan are that you conform to government-approved language on terror designation, and that you remain uninvolved with leftwing-pacifist organizations. You also aren't allowed to have any connections with the consensual mainstream leadership of the Arab world, like Amr Moussa - if they disagree with you on the Gaza Blockade, along with the majority of US allies.
It's not as obviously repugnant as Pamela Geller shouting about evil Muslims - but it's still repugnant.
I wonder how many Catholic churches in New York, Florida, and beyond were built with money or support from people whom someone might be able to connect as directly to suspicious activities, criminal and political conspiracies, acts that many people consider terrorism, and so on.
The opponents of the project want to suppress people who think differently than they do, and will grasp at any excuse.
@ Rex Caruthers:
Nope. That's not the issue. $100/bbl wouldn't break our economy. Not even close. I won't repeat the analysis from other discussoins, but we could easily handle a world market at $100/bbl oil. It would cost us a lot less than a major war.
One conspiracy theory in the Arab world is that we plan to finish using up all of the easily and cheaply available oil, then toss their countries on the historical scrap heap and corner the market ourselves with the currently off-limits off-shore and other sources as a bridge to some combination of long-term alternatives. There's just enough factual basis to the scenario to make it plausible.
Relatively small-scale adventures to the Middle East and Central Asia have been fantastically expensive. A major war would throw us into incredible deficits. And a major aggressive war would upset our relations with the entire rest of the world, even if we tried, Nazi-like, to cut chosen allies in on the larceny. It would probably also require the permanent elimination of republican democracy. And for what?
We could establish true energy independence with a lot left over for a lost less than the costs of a major war of conquest and larceny. But the messy set of compromises we're involved in now are cheaper than either. For now.
I think we are at war with the Muslim countries of the Near East over oil,but we’re not allowed to have a direct oil war,so we pretend it’s about National Security.
Very strange war, where we at great expense protect the ability of our allies to pay the sovereign governments of those countries billions and billions of dollars for their oil. It's a very stark version of the general pattern that's been in evidence ever since the "age of discovery" brought the West into general contact with the rest of the world.
I would actually be interested in seeing precisely who CK thinks we are at war with.
If JED hadn't stricken us from the book of the Optimistic Living, she might be here to explain to us how they defined "war" for her when she was in officer's school.
My impression is that the legal and historical definitions are complex and subject to opinion. Otherwise, I think it's a semantic question, and I don't see why Congress wouldn't be capable of "declaring" "war," but handling the thing otherwise in pretty much the exact same way it's handled our "undeclared" wars or war-like enterprises, and vice versa.
It's very similar to the question we had our fill of last year regarding "torture." What do we need to achieve? What are the trade-offs? Even, what do we gain or lose by calling it "war" (or "torture") or not doing so?
I'm also nowhere near as confident as Rex seems to be about determining "what would have happened" if we had or hadn't done x, y, or z. I think everything big that's ever happened pretty much had to be that way, and the lucky breaks even out over time.
@ Rex Caruthers:
McCarthy makes some intelligible points but overall is completely out of his mind and in a sickeningly irresponsible way. He seems to think that the public, if properly stimulated by aggressive demagoguery, might have swung around in favor of a global war on "Jihadist Terror" as an aspect of Islam, the struggle to be elaborated on the basis of an undifferentiated, reciprocally escalating hostility toward Muslims. It's a formula for turning us into everything we hate.
Still can't figure out why you're stuck on the draft. It would have been terrifically wasteful, and the statement 9/11 was equal to Pearl Harbor is silly. Pearl Harbor was an act of war by a nation-state that had already built a sizable empire and possessed large, well-equipped armed forces and the will to use them. AQ was none of that: It's an empire only in its dreams.
What's particularly strange is that you're so clear on what a mistake WWI was for us in your view, yet you somehow seem to believe that WWIII would have the shape of a winning business deal, not to mention a morally and politically sound adventure.
@ Sully:
He's 90 years old, and won a Nobel Prize in 1986. He was speaking to a conference of eminent economists from around the world, and he doesn't have the time or inclination to simplify for the masses. What the masses do with his ideas is something he's unlikely to live to see or care about much if he does live to see it. Yet for all the apparent difficulty of his language, he sees right to the center of a fundamental problem of economics and politics, and points to a beautifully simple, elegant, and deeply American solution that also has a certain sense of inevitability about it.
@ Rex Caruthers:
More concise than my effort currently under way. But for Buchanan's idea to catch on, someone will need to work to popularize it - and it could be done.
@ narciso:
You've just fully conceded one major, concrete, inescapable, constantly renewed share of responsibility on "our" part for creating, instigating, motivating, arming, and constantly/cyclically re-creating the enemy you're so happy to slap around. That's not the only share - since, even without oil, America's implication in the shaping and enforcement of the New World Order would be paramount.
Yet, next go-around, I suspect it will all be the fault of the Salafis and whichever other enemy of choice in obscure collaboration and conspiracy with "them," and any recognition of that share of responsibility - in its intersecting practical and moral dimensions - will be inexplicable, morally defective surrender to "them."
For some reason the utter dysfunctionality - moral as well as concrete dysfunctionality - of this arrangement escapes you, over and over again. The failure to recognize it renders any attempt to criticize and interpret events that occur along the "clash of civilizations" axis as utopian and merely ideological as the strategic blindness of those on the left, for instance, when they argued for an immediate pullout from Iraq in 2007, or in favor of carbon reduction schemes more socially costly than the harms they're supposed to prevent.
@ narciso:
America's deep and thoroughgoing implication in the ills of Islam goes back all the way to the last time any of us filled up his gas tank, to start with - as you well know, except when it pleases you to forget.
Yes, at this time, Christianity had it’s ‘Wild and Crazy” period, Judaism
Right. We woke up one day - no one knows the exact date, as far as I've heard - and were washed of all our sins, then sprayed with moral Scotch-Gard so that no new sins can leave a stain. Our actions advance the moral truth known to a small minority of conservatives - everyone else being on the other side whether they know it or not, though somehow the victory was won anyway. That's how powerful that moral truth is: It can triumph even though it's carried forward only by a small percentage of Americans whose main contribution is to watch Fox News or scan the internet in a rage. It remains embattled, but the key is to tell ourselves over and over again that it's her fault for not listening to us that's why we had to hit her.
@ Ill Papa Fuster:
how do you know he isn't a newt?
@ Ill Papa Fuster:
I'm not sure that there are a lot of "people just like" our narc. Not that there aren't many who share his predispositions, but I think there are relatively few who collect and assemble "evidence" with his diligence.
Gee, I thought the Tea Party was about limited government and restraint on spending, and had nothing to do with race, religion or cultural resentment (or whatever leads you to bring Bedell, Stack, or Bishop into this discussion).
The "template" is that you want the Tea Party to be a Rightwing Judeo-Christian Power Movement, and that you're upset that anyone has the poor manners to point it out, to tie the TP to its natural and vocal would-be political allies and compare it to its historical precursors, to consider the implications of its agenda, and to view its ideological underpinnings and carefully nurtured hurt feelings as anything other than Objectively Superior Truth.
The New Black Panther Party is an ant. The Tea Party is an elephant (for now). Please make a note of the difference.
Uh-huh. In my experience, the majority of "Tea Party Americans" exhibit insensitivity, often aggressively and demonstratively. The whole GZ Mosque discussion has been typical.
As their/your "I'm not a bimbo!" "don't give an inch" reaction to the NAACP demonstrates, TP Americans tend to reject and denounce invitations to self-examination and self-criticism, as though admitting imperfections and taking responsibility for anything outside their preferred definitions of terms is a sign of weakness. Those are the mental habits of bigots.
Like many on the far left, they offer an image to the unaffiliated that says "whether or not some of what they say makes sense, god help us all if they're ever in power." It's nothing that Nancy Pelosi said, or the appearance of a Larouchie at a rally, that has finally led people, young people especially, to associate the Tea Party with the far right/reactionary/culturally defensive wing of the Republican coalition, captured by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck - in other words, just the kind of people who seem perfectly normal and reasonable to you, while the rightwing punditry struggles to define it more moderately
That's who the TP is, that's how the TP acts, that's all the TP has to offer. The opportunity to catch this year's political wave was just too juicy to resist, and they're only human.
@ narciso:
You don't seem to be able to tell the difference between association and other logical relationships.
For some good examples of guilt by association (as well as ideological presumptions and cultural biases treated as objective and universally obligatory) look at that typically loathsome piece from PajamasMedia linked above by narciso..
Sully wrote:
This should be elementary: "Guilt by association" is a phrase for the opposite of co-responsibility, for the fallacious assignment of responsibility merely on the basis of association. Guilt by association is "You met with" or "You are the niece of a man who" or "People like you have done" - not you failed to, you are one of the people who, you turned a blind eye because you directly benefited from, you blame others for problems you have caused or significantly contributed to.
It goes without saying that being responsible for something will associate you with it. It does not go without saying that merely being associatable with something or someone makes you responsible.
"Pure motives"? The NAACP argument is that if the TP does not condemn the David Duke, Mark Williams, and other types, then it becomes responsible for promoting them and facilitating their agenda. My argument is further that the TP agenda itself will have the tendency to be racially divisive and to impact minorities disproportionately, and that serious people pursuing small government/"federalist" and ultra-patriotic politics would actively confront this problem in an effort to broaden the movement and their vision.
See above. Hold whatever beliefs you want. When you go about seeking to make changes on their basis, they become the concern of others. The TP isn't about a lot of people saying "Hey these are the wonderful things I believe," it's about trying to get something done - or trying to stop other things - through political activism.
@ narciso:
Possibly they reacted to the Islamophobic stupidity that led to the attack on the name "Cordoba." I take it you actually believe that comical "symbol of conquest" theory about the project?
narciso wrote:
Huh?
But I can see why the piece appealed to you. Just the kind of guilt by association pseudo-argument that you feed on.
Schwartz is to be congratulated for merely participating in guilt by association while successfully suppressing the Islamophobia behind most of the "widening protests." But it still amounts to a guilt-by-association smokescreen for the curtailment of someone else's freedom of association, speech, and religion:
In effect, he concedes that the inquiry WOULD violate freedoms, but pleads a kind of "clear and present danger" excuse for going ahead and violating them.
The "pretext" he mentions exists only in his mind, and is justified strictly by connections, or connections to connections, or associations with connections to connections, that don't amount to anything remotely approaching a clear and present danger. Instead, he shows that the sponsors may be connected to, or have connections to people have connections to, or may be associated with people who have connections, to people with whom all good right-thinking people disagree.
I mean this is unbelievable, regarding Rauf's wife:
She's the niece of someone who formerly led a mosque that has links on its website to a front group? Sheesh. I know the Westbury Mosque has been a problem, but this standard - promoter linked to man linked to suspicious group - is ridiculous. Other apparent new standards, via Lazio/King, for being able to build a cultural center in Manhattan are that you conform to government-approved language on terror designation, and that you remain uninvolved with leftwing-pacifist organizations. You also aren't allowed to have any connections with the consensual mainstream leadership of the Arab world, like Amr Moussa - if they disagree with you on the Gaza Blockade, along with the majority of US allies.
It's not as obviously repugnant as Pamela Geller shouting about evil Muslims - but it's still repugnant.
I wonder how many Catholic churches in New York, Florida, and beyond were built with money or support from people whom someone might be able to connect as directly to suspicious activities, criminal and political conspiracies, acts that many people consider terrorism, and so on.
The opponents of the project want to suppress people who think differently than they do, and will grasp at any excuse.
@ Rex Caruthers:
Nope. That's not the issue. $100/bbl wouldn't break our economy. Not even close. I won't repeat the analysis from other discussoins, but we could easily handle a world market at $100/bbl oil. It would cost us a lot less than a major war.
One conspiracy theory in the Arab world is that we plan to finish using up all of the easily and cheaply available oil, then toss their countries on the historical scrap heap and corner the market ourselves with the currently off-limits off-shore and other sources as a bridge to some combination of long-term alternatives. There's just enough factual basis to the scenario to make it plausible.
Relatively small-scale adventures to the Middle East and Central Asia have been fantastically expensive. A major war would throw us into incredible deficits. And a major aggressive war would upset our relations with the entire rest of the world, even if we tried, Nazi-like, to cut chosen allies in on the larceny. It would probably also require the permanent elimination of republican democracy. And for what?
We could establish true energy independence with a lot left over for a lost less than the costs of a major war of conquest and larceny. But the messy set of compromises we're involved in now are cheaper than either. For now.
Rex Caruthers wrote:
Very strange war, where we at great expense protect the ability of our allies to pay the sovereign governments of those countries billions and billions of dollars for their oil. It's a very stark version of the general pattern that's been in evidence ever since the "age of discovery" brought the West into general contact with the rest of the world.
If JED hadn't stricken us from the book of the Optimistic Living, she might be here to explain to us how they defined "war" for her when she was in officer's school.
My impression is that the legal and historical definitions are complex and subject to opinion. Otherwise, I think it's a semantic question, and I don't see why Congress wouldn't be capable of "declaring" "war," but handling the thing otherwise in pretty much the exact same way it's handled our "undeclared" wars or war-like enterprises, and vice versa.
It's very similar to the question we had our fill of last year regarding "torture." What do we need to achieve? What are the trade-offs? Even, what do we gain or lose by calling it "war" (or "torture") or not doing so?
I'm also nowhere near as confident as Rex seems to be about determining "what would have happened" if we had or hadn't done x, y, or z. I think everything big that's ever happened pretty much had to be that way, and the lucky breaks even out over time.
@ Rex Caruthers:
McCarthy makes some intelligible points but overall is completely out of his mind and in a sickeningly irresponsible way. He seems to think that the public, if properly stimulated by aggressive demagoguery, might have swung around in favor of a global war on "Jihadist Terror" as an aspect of Islam, the struggle to be elaborated on the basis of an undifferentiated, reciprocally escalating hostility toward Muslims. It's a formula for turning us into everything we hate.
Still can't figure out why you're stuck on the draft. It would have been terrifically wasteful, and the statement 9/11 was equal to Pearl Harbor is silly. Pearl Harbor was an act of war by a nation-state that had already built a sizable empire and possessed large, well-equipped armed forces and the will to use them. AQ was none of that: It's an empire only in its dreams.
What's particularly strange is that you're so clear on what a mistake WWI was for us in your view, yet you somehow seem to believe that WWIII would have the shape of a winning business deal, not to mention a morally and politically sound adventure.
@ Sully:
He's 90 years old, and won a Nobel Prize in 1986. He was speaking to a conference of eminent economists from around the world, and he doesn't have the time or inclination to simplify for the masses. What the masses do with his ideas is something he's unlikely to live to see or care about much if he does live to see it. Yet for all the apparent difficulty of his language, he sees right to the center of a fundamental problem of economics and politics, and points to a beautifully simple, elegant, and deeply American solution that also has a certain sense of inevitability about it.
A man like that, offering this, deserves respect.
@ Rex Caruthers:
More concise than my effort currently under way. But for Buchanan's idea to catch on, someone will need to work to popularize it - and it could be done.
@ Sully:
I can, I can.
@ narciso:
You've just fully conceded one major, concrete, inescapable, constantly renewed share of responsibility on "our" part for creating, instigating, motivating, arming, and constantly/cyclically re-creating the enemy you're so happy to slap around. That's not the only share - since, even without oil, America's implication in the shaping and enforcement of the New World Order would be paramount.
Yet, next go-around, I suspect it will all be the fault of the Salafis and whichever other enemy of choice in obscure collaboration and conspiracy with "them," and any recognition of that share of responsibility - in its intersecting practical and moral dimensions - will be inexplicable, morally defective surrender to "them."
For some reason the utter dysfunctionality - moral as well as concrete dysfunctionality - of this arrangement escapes you, over and over again. The failure to recognize it renders any attempt to criticize and interpret events that occur along the "clash of civilizations" axis as utopian and merely ideological as the strategic blindness of those on the left, for instance, when they argued for an immediate pullout from Iraq in 2007, or in favor of carbon reduction schemes more socially costly than the harms they're supposed to prevent.
@ narciso:
America's deep and thoroughgoing implication in the ills of Islam goes back all the way to the last time any of us filled up his gas tank, to start with - as you well know, except when it pleases you to forget.
Right. We woke up one day - no one knows the exact date, as far as I've heard - and were washed of all our sins, then sprayed with moral Scotch-Gard so that no new sins can leave a stain. Our actions advance the moral truth known to a small minority of conservatives - everyone else being on the other side whether they know it or not, though somehow the victory was won anyway. That's how powerful that moral truth is: It can triumph even though it's carried forward only by a small percentage of Americans whose main contribution is to watch Fox News or scan the internet in a rage. It remains embattled, but the key is to tell ourselves over and over again that it's her fault for not listening to us that's why we had to hit her.