Displaying 2,611 To 2,640 Of 3,373 Comments I agree that he is wasting precious time, especially now in this era of “Disaster Capitalism” and a world system that seems to be spinning out of control. The chickens of Reaganism have now come home to roost in a huge way, and Obama needs to either seize this moment or be overwhelmed by it (and I confess to having little by way of optimism in this regard). » Posted By whatsthatsound On June 6, 2010 @ 5:38 pm Great comments, Q. Yes, Lincoln was a doubter of the highest degree. And if ever there was a time that called for doubts and self assessment, it was during his presidency. And now as well. Don’t get me wrong, I WANT Obama to examine his choices carefully and make his decisions thoughtfully, like a grownup. But the best “parents” don’t leave their children fumbling around in the dark – Daddy and Mommy have to make some very important decisions now, so run off to bed so we can do our best thinking – and the child goes, “Gulp!” » Posted By whatsthatsound On June 6, 2010 @ 5:33 pm Thanks, MsB. I am so sorry to hear about your situation, just as I find your words, “new pariah” to be so poignant. It makes NO sense that some companies are refusing to look at resumes from people who aren’t working, when so many jobs were lost due to outsourcing, automation, and the recession. Thousands of highly skilled folks out there to fill ANY position, and what? – it makes an HR person’s (who is lucky to have their position)job harder to have to sort through all those resumes? Talk about a Catch-22! You have a distinct talent at HP for making people feel good and cheerful, even just for a few moments, and if this world was saner, THAT would be your job! » Posted By whatsthatsound On June 6, 2010 @ 5:24 pm Hey BT, I agree, if we stop criticizing our presidents it’s time to stick a fork in the U S of A. They are the ones who want the crazy job, and like you said, they know what they’re getting themselves in for. Over at HP, there is such a knee jerk reactivity to criticism of POTUS, as if they have assembled a “crack response team” of hardcore supporters. Is this discourse? Is reducing everything to absurd strawmen arguments going to accomplish anything but make his supporters look like blind Kool Aid drinkers? I don’t think so. It seems to me that attempting to squash or mischaracterize criticism of Obama will have greater adverse effects than letting people make their cases. » Posted By whatsthatsound On June 6, 2010 @ 5:17 pm Hi Kalima, Thank you for your comments. Of course you have a “right” to comment on American politics just as you have a right to use this forum on my post for expressing views counter to mine. However, I think you are reading into my article if what you take from it is that I want the president to “show anger”. I hardly think that a mere demonstration of powerful emotion will satisfy me, or any of the people who are becoming disgruntled by the increasingly troublesome times we are facing. I agree with the Frank Rich article Patsy posted at the bottom; the president seems all to happy to leave in charge the very people who created the problems. The notion, “problems are so complex now that only a few experts really know what to do about them, and sadly, they are the very ones who caused them” hardly seems like a satisfying assuagement, and in fact seems like a recipe for disaster – or three! The task the president faces is monumental; he has to beef up governmental oversight – exactly BECAUSE today’s world creates highly specialized, metaproblems. We can’t throw in the towel on that. That’s perhaps the biggest lesson of all in this situation, that we need to do SOMETHING from the government side to technically grasp the problems we face. We are putting our best engineers and scientists to work building weapons systems when what they SHOULD be doing is boning up on all the things that can go wrong in today’s world on the civilian side, where the problems are causing the most damage right now. » Posted By whatsthatsound On June 6, 2010 @ 4:51 pm Thanks for the link, Patsy, and I am very flattered! I certainly don’t feel that I am in Rich’s league when it comes to providing sources and doing research. But if anything, I’m guessing I can draw better than him! » Posted By whatsthatsound On June 5, 2010 @ 11:54 pm Patsy, that’s a great scene, and these are great comments! Yes, I agree with you that the “shark” bearing down on us seems larger than the mechanisms, including the presidency, we have to confront them with. » Posted By whatsthatsound On June 5, 2010 @ 10:50 pm Yes, it seems that Aussies have the unique distinction of being very much like us and yet always willing to look down on us! I think they don’t realize that if there were 330 million Aussies intstead of 20 million they’d be causing just as much trouble as we are! 😉 » Posted By whatsthatsound On June 1, 2010 @ 3:54 am our ships never passed in the night, fortunately. » Posted By whatsthatsound On June 1, 2010 @ 3:52 am Me too, Q. Amanda is like no other Canadian I have ever come across, and I know a lot. In general, I find that Canadian folks have greater humility, are more soft-spoken, and have a greater equanimity about them than we folks below. I am guessing that their education system is not as conducive to the “Me-ism” so common in the U.S. And then, there is Amanda. She’s a case! » Posted By whatsthatsound On June 1, 2010 @ 3:35 am The badger surfaces! MsB, I’m probably being obnoxious but I still want you to look at more of my posts. All you have to do is go up to “Members Directory”, scroll down the author’s list, click on a name, and all posts show up as links. Read the one about animals sleeping, at least! » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 31, 2010 @ 8:47 pm The Power of Intermittent Fanning Hey, MsB. I’m still waiting for you to check out my art posts here at POV. We keep missing each other. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 22, 2010 @ 8:28 pm Yeah, it was me. It was a bit rough, but quite stimulating! » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 22, 2010 @ 6:21 am Great article, Q. I wondered what you were up to with all that sockery. We had some fun together in that way, I think it can now be admitted, and I pride myself on being one of the first posters to fan “Pity-fan me”, and then withdraw it. I fanned you before I didn’t fan you. Is that fractionation? If so, I apologize for fractionizing you. Yesterday an obnoxious right winger at HP complained that nobody had fanned him that day. So I wrote that I would fan him and then unfan him later. I decided on a good, Warhol-ian time frame, and gave him his fifteen minutes. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 22, 2010 @ 12:33 am Masters of Illusion and Intolerance Hey, Khirad. I see myths the way you do, I think. Necessary to the whole human, not just the left hemisphere of the brain type functions that give rise to logic and the scientific method. Dreams are part of this as well, as Campbell’s quote points out. I actually believe that the loss of the profession of Dream Interpreter, such as often appear as advisors to kings in old stories, is one of the great tragedies of our human situation in its current sorry state. We need more Dream Interpreters, and less lawyers, lobbyists, advertising execs and other professional manipulators. Oh, and politicians! » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 20, 2010 @ 11:11 pm Hi KQ. Great comments. I hope I didn’t make it sound like it was ME who was the “very observant, deep thinker”! I was thinking more about people like Socrates, Plato, Jesus, the great mystics of India and China and Japan, etc. The writers of The Psalms, etc. It was their story I was putting into allegory. And I can easily add great scientific minds to that analogy as well, except that their insights are more testable. I always appreciate what you have to offer, friend, and respect your beliefs and ideas, both those that intersect with mine and those which go in another direction from my own. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 20, 2010 @ 11:07 pm Hi Kesmarn, » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 20, 2010 @ 9:14 pm This is primarily for KQ, as he wrote that his ruminations on the subject of a “creator” pretty much ends with the same argument Dawkins uses in The God Delusion. Okay, then, where did the creator come from? KQ being a scientist, I can easily understand how this question would seem to make the whole discussion pointless and moot. But I have an analogy that I think may be helpful. I actually wrote it out once on RDNet when the forum was still operative, but it received little response. So, I’ll repost it here: Everyone knows the painting “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LeGrand-Jatte” by Seurat, I’m assuming. Now, let’s suppose that the people in that painting are actually alive, and are able to communicate with one another solely through telepathy. One of them is very observant, and a very deep thinker. He looks around him, and notices that he, his co-inhabitants, as well as everything around him is made up of little things he calls “dabs”. He’s very excited about this, and he tells everyone else his discovery. They are all very impressed. He thinks more deeply about this, and he begins to ponder even deeper things. What if these dabs were put there deliberately? They seem to be, after all. He then starts to conceptualize how such a thing could come about. The dabs would have to be applied by something called a “brush”. There is no evidence of such a thing WITHIN THE PAINTING, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that such a thing could exist somewhere in the universe. Once again he tells his friends. “You’re stretching things”, they tell him, and seem mildly amused by his strange ideas. Then, his musings take him much further. For someone to be able to hold a brush and apply the dabs, they would have to be able to do something that not he nor anyone else among his companions can do, or have ever even thought about doing. He calls this miraculous phenomenon “movement”. Now he has gone too far! His companions tell him, “now you’re just making stuff up! Where’s your proof? You, my friend, are DELUDED!” You see my point, right? The man in the painting is right, about everything. And yet, from within the painting, no evidence of his wilder theories can be found. He’s not coming up with “fairy tales” and “bearded men in the sky”. He is looking around and intuiting things, correctly, that can’t be proven from within the constraints of his universe. His creator is beyond him, in other words. So I think that when Dawkins acolytes call people who have faith “nutters”, “deluded ones”, etc. as they tend to on atheist forums, it is they themselves who end up looking a bit foolish, and certainly constrained in their thinking by their so-called “reason”. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 20, 2010 @ 2:35 am It’s not just the seemingly intractable Palestinian issue, either. It’s the American military base presence in Saudi Arabia, the biggest thing that stuck in Bin Laden’s craw. And it’s the way the Saudi oil sheiks, from the viewpoint of many impoverished and unhappy Arabs, “sold out to the West”, turned the peninsula into a petrol-industrial park, and fattened themselves in the process. There is just so much dissatisfaction in the Middle East, and Palestine is only a part of it. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 19, 2010 @ 6:07 am One of Bill’s panelists said, or tried to say actually, the same thing. That religion has often been invoked as a cause for war, conquest, etc., but let’s face it, very few people would be willing to fight a war that could involve the end of everything they know unless there was something real, and terrestrial, on the line. This whole idea that they do it for the seventy virgins, etc. is just the hokum that Hitchens and Dawkins get their devotees to swallow. Islamic terrorists kill because of land, land they feel belongs to them, land that is being invaded, land that their own countrymen have enriched themselves by turning into oil fields, etc. If you solved the land problems of the Middle East, you would NOT have wars just based on religion. It’s too abstract a concept to risk ones life for for 99.9999% of the population. People like Maher miss this because their thinking about this is so blinkered by their own religion issues. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 18, 2010 @ 5:57 am Bill looked just plain awful in that segment, just plain awful. Almost rabid-awful. Totally drank the Dawkins Kool Aid and eager to show just how intolerant a true believer he has become.Trying to pigeonhole Cupp; if you’re an atheist who doesn’t believe EXACTLY what I believe (i.e. what Richard Dawkins tells to me to believe) about people of faith, you “lack the courage of your convictions”. I pretty much lost any remains of respect I had for the “other” Billo. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 18, 2010 @ 1:40 am Great article. And I must say, a very flattering photograph of Glenn Beck. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 15, 2010 @ 10:15 pm Elena Kagan Nominated to the SCOTUS Exactly! Meanwhile, Obamanots are complaining loudly that she is a corporate tool. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 11, 2010 @ 3:03 am Capitalism: A Good Kid Gone Bad hahaa! Probably. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 14, 2010 @ 2:18 am Or perhaps “libertine capitalists” » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 13, 2010 @ 11:01 pm Howdy, msB. Come back and spend more time here! » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 13, 2010 @ 10:54 pm Yes, that is cool! “Conservative” has become an Orwellian term now. Look how well they are conserving the Gulf of Mexico. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 13, 2010 @ 10:16 pm That’s a point of mine too. She was a professional writer. She fell in love with and married an actor. And hardly a big name actor at that. She was clearly not in her own work for the money. Accolades, perhaps, but first and foremost passion. She and her husband volunteered for the campaign of Wendell Willkie, sort of an “old school” conservative who had some very liberal social views. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 13, 2010 @ 9:17 pm “Best week I’ve had in years”; that is palpable, choicelady! I am very happy for both you, and the country and planet you are so tirelessly serving. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 13, 2010 @ 9:02 pm Just following up on my Ayn Rand comment, so this is for both choicelady and kesmarn. Ayn Rand loved and even idolized capitalism, and the folks at the top of it, no doubt. Nevertheless, the capitalism she idealized was spearheaded and maintained by PRODUCERS. Architects, builders, enterprisers. I think she would have sneered at today’s “winners”, who produce nothing but artificial wealth that only enriches themselves while harming society. That is NOT what she saw as an end result of capitalism, that it would actually harm and weaken society. Today’s oligarchs are much more similar in nature to her character Ellsworth Toohey in “The Fountainhead”. He was contemptuous, cynical, totally self aware in terms of the damage he is causing, etc. He was the villain, not the hero of that novel. I sincerely believe this parallel would not have been lost on her, and might possibly even have caused her to rethink her position. » Posted By whatsthatsound On May 13, 2010 @ 8:59 pmComments Posted By whatsthatsound
Thanks, Sue!
Doesn’t it say something that Obama has disenfranchised so many on the left? Is it “their fault”, or his? If he had given high level positions to Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson, in order to build his “Team Of Rivals”, would things be the same right now? Would the rhetoric from the left be the same?
Actions speak louder than words, of course, and Obama’s disconnect from the left and their hopes as soon as he got in office speaks volumes, I feel.
They have their own lingo, too.
– Waaah! The President didn’t give me a pony so I’m taking my toys and going home!”
– What do you want the president to do? Don a wetsuit and plug the hole himself?
– Be careful, you’ll get what you wish for; enjoy President Palin!
Some of the folks over there seem to imagine that ANY criticism that goes unchallenged goes a step further toward putting Palin in the WH. I beg to differ.
Just as I agree that the picture we are getting of ourselves is not pretty, and is disheartening to say the least.
I don’t envy the president right now, that’s for sure. But I wish I had less misgiving and greater certainty about what, exactly, he intends to do about the ever increasing problems we are facing.
Paw bump!
🙂
I see the fanning thing as a ripe area for mischief, but I haven’t taken it to anything like the level that you did.
I’m in the middle of a move, and so wasn’t able to reply to this as punctually as I have liked. I am very much in agreement with you that ancient people, as well as modern people, are able to intuit much about the origin of our universe. It IS subjective and non-scientific, but it is nevertheless easy to imagine why it would be so: because, we, ourselves, ARE parts of the universe, and our consciousness and ability to think originated within it. Just as an embryo has within it all the coding it needs to become a fully formed adult human, it is very possible that as elements OF this universe, we can tap into information ABOUT it. There is nothing “woo woo” about that, unless one is dogmatically opposed to any interpretation of reality that posits any other kind of awareness other than our own.
Most dogmatic, Dawkinist atheists think religious thought came about quite simply. Ancient man observed that the most powerful thing he could observe was the sun, so the sun became a “god”. The thing he feared the most was a volcano, so, ditto, call it a god as well. The most necessary thing to him was the river, so, river = god too. But does that really explain all the richness and complexity of the myths they passed on? Of course not. Does it explain the high states of insight and ecstasy great spiritual practitioners reached? Decidedly not! In fact, can we imagine that ANYONE, ever, went into an altered, revelatory state just by thinking about a volcano? No, no no! The “religion is just stories” and it’s “the best people could do until science came along” memes the Dawkins types use is nonsense. It shows THEIR limitations, not the limitations of the people they belittle, as Maher does.
Just appalling!
Furthermore, the inane assertion, also lifting a page from Dawkins and his acolytes, that religion has caused more wars than anything else, is so easily argued that a high school student could do it, so he resorted to shouting his panelists down about it.
Bill, more wars have been fought over land than anything. Bill…..land??? Hello?
Even worse, he said that fascism and Russian totalitarianism were “state religions” so all the misery they caused could similarly be attributed to religion. Okay, in Bill’s Bizarro World, Hitler DIDN’T want to put all Germanic countries under his thumb, and make off like a bandit with the Slavic countries. Similarly, Stalin didn’t want Georgia and the Ukraine and the Caspian countries. Nope. Land had nothing to do with it. They were both religious fanatics that wanted to bring everyone under their “state religion”. I can hardly type now, recalling that segment and getting so steamed by it!
And agree with Khirad. Ms. Cupp was sexy enough to make me want to watch the whole segment again. ALLMost….!
Maybe it’s all the superhero movies, and so few nuanced characters in today’s biggest movies. It seems that a very large number of Americans on either side have come to see the glass half empty and constantly being poisoned by the other side.
I know she is loathed by progressives, and my personal feeling is that I would have found her to be too intense and sure of herself for me to want to spend time in a room with her! But compared to Reagan, Thatcher, and the unbelievable creeps we are seeing rise to the top of a sinking ship today, she was like a patron saint of reason and a paragon of wisdom.
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