Displaying 31 To 60 Of 81 Comments The Court Ruling that Could Kill ACA @kesmarn @SueInCa @monicaangela The three of you have been taken in by someone who tied your search phrase to a book that has no relation to what you think. So you don’t have to look it up again, here it is: or simply: It’s called Human Manipulation – A Handbook, by Malcolm Coxall, edited by Gary Caswell originally published in 1985 with copyright renewed in 2013. It is a book on recognizing and protecting yourself from manipulation. It’s an interesting book and I’m about halfway through it. You guys really got taken in. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 13, 2014 @ 6:31 pm That book is really interesting. I may even buy it. You should read it before you make any other categorizations of it though. It’s actually aimed at recognizing and avoiding being manipulated, not how to do it. 🙂 » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 13, 2014 @ 5:30 pm After 9/11 as in the first few weeks, not 3 years later. You have a habit of putting words in my mouth that I never said. Does that fall under Moving the Goalposts or Overgeneralization or maybe Manipulation of Memory? » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 13, 2014 @ 5:30 pm “Do you have any proof that the guide book mentioned in the article of 2013 that I posted is no longer in use?” Perfect example of a loaded question or more formally, » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 13, 2014 @ 4:21 pm I just went to Monica’s link. Go there and put in the book search box on the left the supposed text “Libertarian handbook to manipulate liberals.” It’s not anywhere in the book or the title. In fact, do a search on just “Libertarian.” What do you get? No result found in this book for Libertarian. Someone set it up as a link text, maybe in a comment or on another site, but has absolutely nothing to do with anything Libertarian. I’m thinking that maybe it’s Progressives doing the manipulation, using loaded emotional terminology and making unsupported claims trying to create a mental state of fear. Heck, running down the table of contents, I’m sure seeing a lot of those very techniques used in all the sites you’ve sent me to and a lot of what’s being written here. Agenda control This could actually be a pretty good reference for me for identifying all sorts of manipulative propaganda. I’m not saying you have used all of these personally, but you definitely have on a few of them. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 13, 2014 @ 4:08 pm Read your own link. It was two articles in Reason Magazine in 1977. It’s there in black and white as you put it. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 13, 2014 @ 3:39 pm Dispassionate, yes. That’s the whole point of having police and courts. They aren’t tied up emotionally in the case, whatever it is. Brutal? Not unless you consider justice to be brutal. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 10:44 pm What “they” are you talking about that trusts or not based on money? It’s not me and it’s not the Libertarians I know. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 10:36 pm Sorry. I read it as you meant that it was a good thing that they refused to borrow again, not just who they borrowed from. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 10:34 pm No problem 🙂 » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 10:29 pm There was no handbook, not 37 years ago and not today so there is nothing to be taken seriously. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 10:29 pm Why? Because what most politicians want is the power to control others. They may mean to rule well, but they mean to rule. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 10:27 pm I don’t know how much you think your 30 year old example mother would be getting from SS. When my mother died and I took in my 14 year old sister (I wasn’t about to let her rich child molesting father have her) I got all of $150 a month from them. No one’s living on that. Day care … The day my mother died was the same day I came home from the hospital with my newborn son, still trying to finish up school. A friend and I swapped off turns. That one day and the financial repercussions of it ended the whole career path I had spent 6 years in college working towards. Has this mother got any sort of work history? Is she a good worker? Do you think businesses don’t compete for the best workers they can afford? If someone can afford the 15% or so currently taken off the top for SS and Medicare, why can’t they afford to save that same money? Don’t you think they should be able to make that choice for themselves as to when and how much? Why this need for a minimum wage? It’s not universal by any means. One of the richest countries in the world is Switzerland. Yet somehow they manage without one and seem to be doing just fine. It sounds like unless we can deliver some sort of utopia, the current system or more of the same is the only un-alternative you think worth even considering. Since that standard can’t ever be met, why bother reading or replying to what I write? If you find out that someone has been cheating you for years on end do you pretend that you don’t know it and keep on giving them your money or do you suck it up, knowing that you’ll never get it back and admit that you screwed up by trusting someone you shouldn’t have? Would you be doing your children a favor by continuing to throw your money away? If you’re operating to remove a malignant tumor, do you ask what you will replace it with? One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge — even to ourselves — that we’ve been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) – Carl Sagan » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 9:33 pm Being rich doesn’t necessarily make you superior in any way. Nor is there any sanctity in being poor. The question is have you earned your money, however much or little of it you have, honestly? Almost invariably, if the government is involved, the answer is no. If two people or organizations make an exchange that both are making voluntarily, then it is honest. That doesn’t mean that everyone is happy with the deal, but if you need or want what the other person has more than you need or want the other things you could have spent that money on, it’s still honest. If one party is threatening or forcing the other or lying or cheating then it is not honest. The most basic definition of a government is that it is that organization that is authorized to use, or threaten to use, force, deadly force if necessary, to ensure that the people in a given geographical area follow its rules and decisions made on the behalf of those people using the just powers that they have given to it. A human being that has no interactions with other people is generally a short lived creature doing nothing but ekeing out the barest survival. It takes a society to have the great variance in what people can do and make and trade that allows us to have the incredible options that life today offers. The most options are available in the societies that are the most free to make those trades with each other as they see fit. So if force is so bad, why not get rid of government altogether? Because people are not angels. There are bad people out there who would like nothing better than to kick back and rob people of whatever they feel like they might want with a few extra kicks thrown in just because they feel like it. If you get home and your house has been broken into, you want to get your stuff back and probably get in a few kicks of your own. But who did it? You might think you know, but what if you’re wrong? A government, first in the form of police, gathering evidence and then in courts, making judgements about guilt or innocence and deciding and enforcing sufficient penalties to deter future repeats, takes the anger out of it. They are not directly involved and don’t have the high tide of emotions that are all too likely to lead to mistakes if you try and take justice into your own hands. That also extends to the need to be able to stop another person or organization who is doing harm to others, even if that is not their primary intent. Whether it’s a neighbor whose band loves to practice at full volume at 3 in the morning or a business that simply dumps its waste into a river they are doing harm to others without their consent. The band problem may be taken care of if they build a soundproof room so that you don’t hear them. The business may find a way to clean up their waste. But in either case, if the problem is NOT ended and possible restitution for damages already done (5000 watts of sound can put a permanent hurting on your hearing) paid, they have entered the zone of criminal behavior and once again, the force of government is needed to put an end to it in an equitable fashion. Another needed aspect is the fact that even honest people can have differences of opinion as to what they thought they agreed to or what is an equitable settlement of responsibility. Arbitration can only go so far. At some point someone needs to be able to say “Enough! This is the final decision.” and be able to enforce it. Finally, you can’t pretend that there isn’t the rest of the world out there and there’s bad people in it. A society needs to be able to put up a joint defense when someone outside threatens or undertakes military action against it. These days a purely civilian militia isn’t going to cut it so a permanent military force is needed sufficient to hold the line until the rest of the society can gear up to defend itself. These are both the minimum and maximum functions that are needed for a free and honest civilized society. Police, courts and military and the ancillary functions needed to support them. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 8:31 pm It will be 227 Years on September 17th since it was approved by the convention and was ratified by the minimum number of states less than a year later on June 21st. I’m a bit of a history buff too. I’ve got Madison’s notes on the convention and all the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers and private correspondence and minutes from state ratifying conventions. I’ve also got a large percentage of both the contemporary and ancient political and philosophical books and papers the ideas of the Founders came from. I’ve got a lot of them in electronic form you can download at http://mygauntlet.com/book-list/ if you’re interested. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 7:16 pm Just on terminology – something that caught my eye in re-reading this. You’ve phrased it like “Have you stopped beating your wife?” This pair of magazine articles has *never*, to the best of my knowledge, being in a position 4 or 5 years after it was published that I would know if it was, been used as anything, official or unofficial. I have never seen it or even heard of it or read anything even similar to it until I followed your link. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 7:00 pm Quick FYI – It’s Diane. 🙂 » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 6:36 pm Even if I was elected President tomorrow with a Libertarian majority in both houses of Congress. it’s not like we’d just chop everything off overnight. Social Security would have to go down some sort of buy down process. Various welfare programs would have to be phased out. Even corporate welfare would have to be given a year or two to totally wind down (remember, I’m imagining a situation where the Libertarians get voted in overnight with no warning). New legal structures would have to be worked out to handle class action suits or something similar for taking care of problems like pollution or wanton endangerment on the part of companies towards their employees. Once people know that they’re going to be able to keep a lot more of their own money and also that the thought “My taxes are paying to take care of them. I can’t afford to give much more on top of that.” isn’t operative any more, a lot more organizations and probably more specialized ones, will be created. We wouldn’t have bailed out Wall Street. Let them stew in the juices of their own making and if they go under … let ’em. There’s a term for it in free market economics, “Creative destruction.” If a company has so badly mismanaged their money and plans, then their demise opens up the resources that they were using to be put to better uses, better as defined by the people who are actually buying the end products with the money that they’ve earned, not what some third party has decided that they “should” want. A defense department that is actually just that, for defense, would be far smaller than the behemoth we have today. After WWII Europe and the Pacific had been decimated. We were the only western country that still had an undamaged manufacturing structure. Those decades were the American heyday while the rest of the world put itself back together, and in large part with our help. But they are capable of defending themselves now. We spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined and the largest part of that is continuing to pay for everyone else. Again, it would take a few years to wind down, but we don’t need NATO. If Europe wants to maintain it for their own purposes on their own nickel, then fine. It’s not our responsibility. As to love, peace and weed … kids have been saying that for a long time. College students don’t usually think of the responsibilities that go along with the freedoms. The freedom to succeed requires the freedom to fail. The freedom to make your own choices means the responsibility for the consequences of making bad ones. It also means that sometimes semi-solid fecal matter happens and if there’s rotating air movement machinery in the area it can spread it far and wide. Overall, Americans are a pretty generous crowd and almost always willing to help when they can. They’re usually willing to give second or even third chances even if a person causes their own misery if they believe they’ve learned to stop doing whatever it was that got them into trouble in the first place. But there are limits. If an adult person is capable of making better choices but doesn’t because they expect someone else to keep taking care of them, there comes a point of saying no. “Sorry son, you’re on your own this time.” My sister’s old mega-church in Vegas did pretty much the same thing (although not as bad circumstances) to her. It was quite a shock to her that all the money she’d been giving to them wouldn’t be so easily available when she was on the needing side. She had a pretty rough few weeks trying to put together the money to keep the power on. For some strange reason she also quit tithing and started giving to some other charities instead. My accident? The guy who was driving and the guy who owned the truck had no insurance and were already in the middle of filing for bankruptcy. Nothing there to get a settlement from. My disability insurance from work hasn’t anywhere near kept up with inflation and when there’s almost no tutoring available to do in the summer … after rent, utilities and the like there’s nothing left to eat on. About $30 so far for July and less than $10 worth of jewelry sales. I stock up ahead of time on big things like laundry detergent and toilet paper and non-perishable food. August is still going to be really hard. That “handbook” thing wasn’t any sort of book. It was two articles in a magazine. As I said to Sue. I’ve never seen them or heard of them anywhere in over 35 years. It’s not an official Libertarian thing at all and the excerpts that the link she sent me to were definitely unethical and would be flat out stupid techniques, even in the short term. But it was a far more slanted and emotionally rigged piece than the Forbes one. Sue gave me a link to the CA budget and it turns out that, at least on the matter of unfunded liabilities, the Forbes article was correct. I haven’t tried to track down the rest. Implicitly trust the rich? No way. The government has no business being able to give any advantage to someone based on their wealth or who their friends are or who they went to school with. If they can’t earn their money honestly then maybe it’s time to put a huge pin into their inflated egos. If you think my defense (such as it is) of the Kochs is because I see them as somehow special because of their money, then you’ve been reading me wrong. I just despise the technique of demonizing someone and then using that as a method of emotional manipulation to cut off the need or even possibility of discussion on the issues. Here’s that evil Adam Smith on it … “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 6:31 pm I’ve mentioned the anarchist wing of the party before. Anarchists pissed me off 35 years ago and they still do to this day. I’ve gotten in some pretty heavy arguments with them. If all people were angels, then anarchy and socialism would work equally well. But they won’t and they never can. Basing a societal structure in the belief that “the right people” will be running them and that people will do the “right thing” are doomed to fail. Yet, like the perennial weed that you can never seem to completely get the roots dug out, the idea keeps popping up, saying “But this time it’s different. This time we really do have the solution.” The Roman Empire tried to buy off the common people with free “Bread and Circuses” while they devalued the currency and Caesar after Caesar grew ever more wasteful. It didn’t work then and no variant of it ever has. It probably wasn’t helped by the fact that a lot of them were drinking water delivered by lead lined aqueducts 🙂 FDA? It’s kind of a tossup whether they have killed or saved more people by keeping drugs off the market for years and years of testing, even though the rest of the world is able to take them. As to food, just like many other “regulating” agencies or licensing boards, there are two huge problems. First, they give the public a false sense of security. It must be safe if it’s being sold. The government will take care of us so I don’t have to worry about it. Bernie Madoff has to be above board. The elevator has to be safe. The restaurant must be clean enough. He’s a doctor. He has to be competent. The building inspector checked off on it. You don’t need to worry about a company’s reputation. They meet the minimum codes. What happens in practice is that the minimums become the maximums. There’s little economic benefit to doing anything more. In a lot of cases it’s easier and cheaper to bribe the inspector or cheat on the test than to do it right. Where there’s a path to corruption on either side, people WILL be on it. One accidental delay on Thalidomide over 50 years ago raised the FDA to hero status. It also taught them that you don’t get noticed for the things you approve, only for the ones that you don’t pass that may or may not actually do harm. So they sit and demand test after test, study after study. And people die waiting. If you’re looking for a utopia where nothing bad ever happens, it’s a fantasy. No one can promise that. The question is what are the costs for that imagined safety? What products, what jobs, what entire industries are never created because of the artificial roadblocks put up in the name of safety (and in reality, it’s control that’s being sought)? We’ll never know about most of them. However here’s a sample: One of the pharmaceutical companies has developed a vaccine for herpes. They decided not to even try to bring it to market. Too expensive to get FDA approval and too fraught with potential legal dangers under the deep pocket theory of liability. Multiply that by 100 or 1000 to guess at what we’ve lost. OSHA? Workplace accidents were already consistently declining, even before OSHA came into being. They didn’t even change the slope of the trend line. All they’ve done is add more and more layers of added cost to everything you buy. Sure, you can almost always come up with some example or another of a regulator turning up a problem and saving the day, but again, at what cost? They say that you can’t put a value on a human life, yet courts do it every day in legal settlements. Let’s make the airlines put in this and that new feature. So what if it all adds up to double the cost of a ticket? It will save lives. But does it really? If people can’t afford to fly, then they drive. Cars are way more dangerous than flying. You wind up with more deaths overall, not fewer. These kinds of questions aren’t easy to think about. They’re uncomfortable. Reality is like that. You think you sound cynical and uncaring even talking like this. You don’t want to make those kinds of admissions and choices. We’ve changed from believing in an all powerful, all knowing, beneficent God to take care of us and put in its place an all powerful, all knowing, beneficent government to take care of us run by the elites who must know better than you so you can trust them to make your choices for you. I don’t believe in either. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 5:10 pm Are we talking about the same link that was about two articles in Reason magazine? There’s no way to prove a negative, but I’ve never read or even heard of what the article you sent me to was describing. I was active enough in the early ’80s that I was 3rd District Rep and then vice chair of the Libertarian Party of Kentucky and that was just a few years after these articles (from what the link said) were published. I would think if they were actually any sort of guidebook or even a training source I would have at least heard of it. It’s not being used anywhere now that I know of and it was never used then either. There was about 15 years after that where I wasn’t active at all other than voting. I got active again in the late ’90s for a few years when the Indiana party needed a district candidate. Then again about a year ago when I moved back to Kentucky. Personally, I agree that some of what they quoted (I’d like to read it myself to make sure they are accurate quotes) is pretty bad. It’s true that you have to find some points of agreement from which to start talking to someone, but to pretend that those specific points are the total of what the party is about? That seems to me not only unethical, but pretty stupid, even in the short run. The Kochs are Republicans now, not Libertarians. The Tea Partiers are Republicans, not Libertarians. Even the Pauls are Republicans, not Libertarians. I don’t know that the Kochs are all above board. I have no way of knowing that, one way or another. Other than the fact that David was our vice presidential candidate in 1980 and that they had a lot of personal money, all I’ve learned of them is what I’ve picked up online in the last 6 months or so. They are neither devils nor angels, but the way they are being used as a straw man whipping boy pisses me off. It’s setting them up as demonized figure which can then be used as a verbal shorthand to avoid specifics. You don’t have to know if a position is good or bad, right or wrong, you just need to be told that the Kochs are behind it or in favor of it and it’s defined as necessarily evil. It shuts down discussion and answers all questions, no matter what the issue is. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, but if the Koch name can be inserted into something, there can be nothing else to say. That’s bad. That’s wrong. It stifles reasonable discussion and debate and that can never be good. I can make no excuses for Bush’s spending. I didn’t vote for him. I didn’t support him other than those days right after 9/11 when we were all together. He and his Republican Congress were just as wasteful as any Democratic administration usually is. We had no business in Iraq and while I think we did have the right to go after Al Qaeda we fiddled around too long pretending that we weren’t all out going after them and missed our best shots. By the time we publicly ramped up in Afghanistan they were scattered and we mired ourselves in another nation building mess that we should never have been in. If you go into the CA budget you can select the summary, then select Statewide Issues and Various Departments. About a third of the way down that .pdf it discusses the unfunded benefits problem. Apparently there’s a proposal on the table to deal with it, but nothing has actually been done about it. The state is also saying that they are not responsible for paying for any increased benefit packages since 1990, even though they were passed by the legislature. So, at least on that point, he was right in the Forbes article. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 3:57 pm Why did the chicken cross the road? To prove to the ‘possum that it could be done. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 3:36 pm They didn’t uphold it as Constitutional. They addressed two individual points that made up the specific case. They can only rule on the points the individual case at hand. One they ruled against, that the federal government had no authority to force the states to expand Medicaid. That wasn’t a hard ruling at all. That basic type of issue has gone against the government every time they tried it. It’s why they usually work with carrots and sticks in terms of funding for programs or block grants to the states and the like. They ruled for the government on the individual mandate, but only if it is treated as a tax, which interestingly, enough we were assured over and over again in the preceding years that it was not. I did not agree with the Hobby Lobby ruling. A corporation is not a person. It is treated as an individual under a very few, very circumscribed business practices. It has no moral standing, no matter how many or how few people hold stock in it. I did finally track down the ruling itself though and found out why they had to. Apparently HHS had already quietly granted immunity on the contraceptives issue to several non-profit corporations. Legally, the profit status of a corporation doesn’t make a difference as to how it’s treated, so HHS shot itself in the foot. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 3:34 pm Not a major point, but just yesterday Putin forgave 90% of the 35 billion that they had loaned Cuba. They may not have borrowed from the World Bank again, but they didn’t stop borrowing altogether. I don’t know anything on the rest of them. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 12, 2014 @ 3:17 pm @kesmarn I hope I’m doing this right 🙂 Compendium of replies to the various replies to the various replies to … Maybe not as currently constituted, but I agree we still need something like the FBI and maybe CIA. Those are both legitimate and necessary governmental functions as part of defending us from outside harm and police power to find criminals. We also still need the Department of Defense by the same reasoning. The Department of State also serves a necessary national government function. I’ve said before that we have our own wacko far wing … the anarchists. I go after them wherever I meet them. The bottom line on anything that has anything to do with a government is that they are the organization that is authorized to use force, deadly force if needed, to back up their rules and rulings within a given geographical area. Competing groups using force are best described as gangs and thugs, not governments. Governments may be a necessary evil, but they are necessary for the continuation of any civilized society. I simply believe that we need to keep them as small as possible while serving those needs. I also believe that the ones that act at the farthest level from the people should be the most controlled and limited. There’s the old saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I add an addendum to it: Power attracts the corrupt and the corruptible. The smaller the group a government acts on and the less power they are allowed to wield, the more limited the damage corrupt people can do. That was the whole idea of the way our Constitution was set up. A government of few and limited powers and those powers split up so that they are controlling each other. The 17th Amendment knocked one of those out. The Senate was originally appointed by the State governments and they were supposed to represent the States as governments against a would be encroaching National government – one more power group set against the others. Gridlock was intended to be central to the system. A national law had to get past the People’s House of Representatives, the State’s Senate, the Executive’s President and past the muster, if needed, of the Federal Judiciary. That’s a pretty high bar, or at least it used to be. One of my personal tests for any legislation I’m thinking about being behind is to ask myself: “If the worst person I can imagine got into control of this, would I still be ok with it?” Sooner or later, if not the absolute worst, but definitely someone I wouldn’t approve of will wind up in charge of or enforcing that legislation. Back to replies at point. You agreed with Sue’s “bait and switch” reference. Did you go to the link she gave and actually read it? It was a very badly slanted description of a 37 year old article. I did get myself to the middle class for a while. Not any more. As I think I said, if I could bring myself to accept it, I qualify for Section 8 housing and quite a few other government welfare programs. Fortunately I had disability insurance as part of my employment package when the car accident happened, especially since the guy who hit me had no insurance and was in the middle of filing for bankruptcy. That’s enough to cover my rent and utilities and a few other bills and I make and sell jewelry on eBay and tutor algebra online to cover (usually) the groceries. I just deleted a whole bunch of my background because I’m not looking for pity, a lot of people don’t believe it all happened to one person and I don’t really want the whole thing on the web for all time. If you’re interested I’ll email it to you. Even without it, what I’ve said above and elsewhere here should be sufficient to prove that I’m not some greedy rich bitch that’s never gone without a meal. I say it because I’m being accused of lying, of promoting issues while (secrecy being implied) working for the opposite, of being selfish and uncaring about the poor, of not understanding what those “on the bottom” go through and I’m tired of it. Is it embarrassing for an atheist or agnostic to ask for help from a church? It is a bit, but you know, not one of them ever asked me anything about my religion (or lack thereof). I’ve had to listen to a sermon over dinner on occasion, but if that’s their price for giving me a place to sleep indoors and a meal, I’ll give them their 10 or 15 minutes (not that it’s going to change anything). There are also many charities that aren’t church related, United Way being the biggest one. We had an umbrella organization called Seven Counties when I lived near Louisville that was totally secular. There are many others. I’m not sure what you’re referring to on standards being more of a problem with charity. It’s not like there’s just one charity like there’s just one government. If you get someone with a bad hair day in a government office you’ve got no where else to go. If it’s at a private charity, you just go to the next one. Kid’s nanny? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone in any charity I’ve gone to over the years that would be in any position to worry about a nanny. The rich donate. They don’t sit out front or do the cooking. Or at least if they did anywhere I’ve been, they did a pretty good job of not looking it. Bait and switch? Have I ever dodged a question? I wasn’t even here to talk about politics. I got here via Zemanta looking for a post to link one of my posts on my blog to and it looked interesting. The biggest problem we have, as Libertarians, is that we can’t and don’t promise the moon to everyone. It takes time to explain WHY we believe what we do, to build up the background as to why what a lot of people think is good, in the long run really isn’t. It’s not easy and if a person isn’t willing to listen and give you even half a chance to explain, then you’re just spinning your wheels. Time to move on. There are a couple of people here that I think might be at least interested in listening, which is why I take the time, even in the face of open antagonism and personal insults, to try to give those reasons. Right now I just got an email that eBay is having a free listing week, so I won’t have as much time for a bit, but I still will be putting a couple of posts together. That will have to suffice. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 11, 2014 @ 5:46 pm Fun (but sad) fact. Every member of the Supreme Court graduated from one of the Ivy League colleges. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 11, 2014 @ 2:55 pm Thanks Monica » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 11, 2014 @ 2:24 pm Sue – I’m replying to this post because we’re so deep in the others that we can’t reply directly there. I’ll try to get all of your replies to me in this one. There’s also the big one I accidently left for Murph and he re-posted to you that I don’t think you’ve had time to go over. The only thing out of it you’re mentioned out of the half dozen or so questions I asked so far is the Forbes article. I didn’t know that about that author. It was just the first one in search to get you a specific link of the half dozen or so I’d read that was saying about the same thing. I appreciate that you went and read the article. Are you saying that nothing of what he said was true? Has the Federal government been paid off? Have the pension funds and other unfunded liabilities been brought current or at least up to date with the original plan to get them funded? It’s the unfunded liabilities problem that compares California (and unfortunately several of the cities like Stockton) to Detroit and Chicago (really the whole state of Illinois). I do wish you’d stop with the Koch = Libertarian = me claims. Ad Hominum attacks are meaningless, simply what some “bad” person may or may not have said. That has absolutely nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of a claim. I’m looking for specifics as to what you want to know or what specific issues you’re referring to. On the “On the right they don’t talk about their other positions because…” The people who don’t talk about their other positions are the ones on the right that don’t want to let their own people to know, not the Kochs. As an example in specifics, Jerry Falwell isn’t about to announce to his followers that the Kochs are in favor of gay marriage. The Kochs have never hidden that, but Jerry Falwell has. You ask for citations. I asked the same and you sent me to a description of a 37 year old article as some sort of proof. Do you have anything more relevant? I think that’s actually everything that I haven’t responded to you before on. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 11, 2014 @ 2:23 pm Is there any way to continue conversations when we’ve hit the limit of reply depths? It’s getting moved around every which way. 🙂 Why? Because I don’t believe that my needs and wants give me the right to take your money without your express consent. The “general welfare” clause is in Article 1, Section 8, not the preamble. “Section 8 It is then followed by the enumeration of powers granted to the Congress. If you read the original notes of the convention, it’s clear that the phrase “general welfare” meant that the powers listed were only to be used where it was to the benefit of all the country, not just part. It has absolutely nothing to do with “welfare” as we think of it today. The original phraseology, as was resolved by the Convention on June 27, 1787, was … “and moreover, to legislate in all cases for the general interests of the union, and also those to which the states are separately incompetent, or in which the harmony of the United States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual legislation.” The Committee on Detail compressed it into the single “general welfare.” » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 11, 2014 @ 1:24 pm The Kochs are still mostly Libertarian, but they’re actually Republicans now. Some of their positions these days are definitely NOT Libertarian. I’ve been a Libertarian for a good 35 years now, almost from the very beginning. Sometimes active, other times not. I’ve got a lot more time on my hands these days so I’m getting active again. As far as I can tell, the general perception of the Libertarian Party is that it’s the same as the Tea Party. It most definitely is not. They have given themselves our name and tried to pretend that they are us, but they’re NOT. I want to do a short explanation on property, but I can’t find a short way to do it. It’s late. As I said to someone else, I’m planning a post on the LP and it may wind up having to be a couple of posts. I’ll have to let it go until then. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 10, 2014 @ 11:45 pm The early US is the closest we’ve come to a true small government, free market country. The last 100 years or so have generally been a downhill slide. » Posted By Diane Merriam On July 10, 2014 @ 11:32 pmComments Posted By Diane Merriam
http://books.google.com/books?id=60WUoMnCBMsC&pg=PT201&lpg=PT201&dq=Libertarian+handbook+to+manipulate+liberals&source=bl&ots=XAEW14f0Bt&sig=4M0NrLToV0amjTRX2hLOtx6nOdQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-bnCU6fbOJSuyATroIFI&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://books.google.com/books?id=60WUoMnCBMsC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Shifting the Burden of Proof: A fallacy that challenges opponents to disprove a claim, rather than asking the person making the claim to defend his/her own argument. E.g., “Space-aliens are everywhere among us, even here on campus, masquerading as true humans! I dare you prove it isn’t so! See? You can’t! That means you have to accept that what I say is true.”
Moving the goalposts
Propaganda
Overload
Linguistic manipulation
Rigging the obvious
Institutional inertia
Timing games
Reputation control
Media-Techno
Cultural manipulation
Political/organizational tricks
Judicial manipulation
Rhetorical manipulation
Historical manipulation
Statistical manipulation of several kinds
Loaded questions
Data dredging
Data manipulation
Discard unfavorable data
Overgeneralization
Null hypothesis
Politicization of science
Logical manipulation
Manipulation of morality
Emotional manipulation
Self delusion
Fear is the enemy
Social manipulation
Group manipulation
Induced animosity
Induced unity
― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations
1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;”
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