First there was the Death Star menacing humanity. Now, there is “the Death Panel.” Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin called President Barack Obama’s health plan “downright evil” on her Facebook page and warned American of Obama’s “death panel” that will hold the power of life or death over average Americans. Indeed, the Obama Death Panel appears to have their sights on little Trig. Presumably, the chair will be Palpatine (aka Darth Sidious), the Dark Lord of the Sith.
Palin states in her first statement after quitting her job as governor that “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care . . .Such a system is downright evil.”
The following footage from one of the patient reviews of the Death Panel has been located:
The real news here is the disclosure that Palin’s page has 700,000 readers, making it the most popular comics page in the world.
For the full story, click here.
IS,
“…brainwashed by liberal professors…” Is that all you’ve got? The fact is that I don’t know the politics of 95% of the professors that I had, not because they didn’t have strong opinions, but because they were irrelevant to the subject matter (their isn’t really a way to teach fluid dynamics with a liberal bias). Since the majority of highly educated people that I interact with are in the hard sciences, I assume that their education was similar. It is much more reasonable to assume that as scientists they are trained to dispassionately consider how the facts impact their arguments and are uncomfortable with arguments that tie themselves into knots to account for facts or just ignore them completely. I don’t think that may of us had leftist professors telling us how smart we were to embrace leftist ideology (I did have an anthropology professor who liked to talk about how christian missionaries were are precursor to slavery, though…). Saying “all the smart people were just brainwashed, but I really know what’s going on” seems like a pretty transparent attempt to make yourself feel superior to people that you believe are smarter than you and avoid considering the possibility that they understand something better than you do.
IS writes: Anyway I thought bdaman could not be a racist as a member of an oppressed minority.
pish posh. this may be the stupidest thing you have ever written and that is saying alot.
to elaborate, to try to explain why this is just a pile of steaming bs is not worth my time.
Mike S:
WB and AR did not like each other, probably WB more so as he hammered her in the National Review whenever he got the chance.
I would like to know why you think her ideas will lead to what you said it will. Lay it so I can understand it, maybe I am missing something a concept a fact?
How does the logic lead you to that? Maybe you are confusing her works with Nietzsche’s’ Superman?
Mike S writez: GWLSM,
You’re missing the serious point that IS just made that he thinks Bdaman is an OK guy. How could we both be so gauche as to go against that ringing endorsement?
I know i missed that. I’ve been off-line and not at my best lately.
I know what it means when a bigot is endorsed as an “okay guy”
this speaks to the general atmosphere of hate in america, something that people much smarter than me undertake in a very real,very unemotional way. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the ADL speak to the rise in anti-jewish, anti-black rhetoric encased in the slogan “I want my country back”
back from what? from whom? well we know from what and from whom. jews and blacks, in particular the president and his chief of staff. its okay to have jews for the money stuff, well it used to be, until this financial meltdown and suddenly a pack of Jews are giving all the money to their friends on wall street or running up the deficit so ordinary decent white christians will have to face death panels. and there you are : mass hysteria. hyperbole. guns. big guns. guns in places where guns don’t belong.
Hate is not okay and haters are not okay people. not ever.
Mike S:
I am glad you take my opinion seriously.
Anyway I thought bdaman could not be a racist as a member of an oppressed minority.
“William Buckley thought as you do, that her ideas would lead to a civilization like North Korea.”
IS,
When Bill Buckley and I agree on anything except the legalization of pot, people should take notice. He saw the inevitible logic that objectivism leads to anarchy and then on to oligarchy/monarchy/aristocracy, as do I. The logic of it is irrefutable, but if like Peter Pan you want to believe in Fairies, who am I to asperse?
Bob,
It’s probably more accurate to say we’re just still operating on basically the same dynamics as a tribe of chimps.
What gives me hope is that we actually have some say in how we adapt.
“but in this case, writing about bigotry in general and jew hating in particular is something I cannot ignore”
GWLSM,
You’re missing the serious point that IS just made that he thinks Bdaman is an OK guy. How could we both be so gauche as to go against that ringing endorsement?
Gyges:
If I am wrong on a particular subject I will acknowledge and change my direction. When my supposition differs from the facts of reality it would be useless to continue.
I am only offering a different viewpoint from what is presented here. I happen to believe it is correct based on what I see going on around me.
If government health care works, I will change my mind and will be the first to admit it. If cap and trade works ditto, if global warming is proved to be man made same thing. If government regulation of industry works and puts people to work and saves millions of lives-I will be a believer. If high taxes leads to job creation and poverty reduction-count me in. But so far the objective evidence runs counter to those suppositions.
Slarti:
maybe well educated people are brainwashed at university by leftist professors who tell them, at an impressionable age, how smart they are to embrace leftist ideology?
That argument is so lame and used so often it has become a joke in our house because of it’s usage by my sister in-law, another of your fellow travelers down your highway to nowhere.
“First off, I’m a rational skeptic.”
Gyges,
I was going to take up the cudgel with IS again, but then read your post and realized I couldn’t come near it for its’ pertinence to the discussion. Oh well, back to reading Andrew Vacchs, which you, or one of the others of similar tastes recommended to me and performed a great kindness.
“The health care debate has only re-affirmed my believe that mankind has not evolved an inch from the slime that spawned him.”
Bob,
In many ways I am SO with you on that. For me, however, if I let myself give into that side of me I’d be jeopardizing my health and my belief in a future for my progeny. Sometimes though it takes a bunch of self convincing, deception perhaps, for me to believe otherwise.
“I believe bdaman is of African American decent. This is based on some of the things he said on the Global Warming thread prior to the Palin thread so he had no reason to be disingenuous.
Personally he seems like an OK guy to me”
IS,
I feel so much better now that you believe in Bdaman, that certainly supplies the truth right there. I’m also peachy keen on the fact that he seems like an OK guy to you. To me I find it difficult to think anti-Jewish bigots are OK guys. Just a quirk on my part, I’m sure you understand, but bigots of any stripe are usually not OK guys.
Mike S.,
The health care debate has only re-affirmed my believe that mankind has not evolved an inch from the slime that spawned him. Accordingly, my championing of Plato was purely in the juristic sense. After all, when Lord Scalia bastardizes Kantian ethics to look as if it were comparable to the Old Testament, it’s best to retain an understanding of the aforesaid neo-platonist’s foundational philosophy.
And yes, I’m sure that up there or wherever it is that the philosophers of old are collected, I’m sure Plato is sporting an Aristotle dart board.
Gyges,
I think that asking a person what standard would be sufficient to change their minds is a quick way of finding out if a person is open-minded or unwilling to challenge their own opinions.
Gyges,
Well said. I love it when people here explain things I’ve been thinking about far more eloquently than I ever could. And I totally agree with you about Dick’s definition of reality.
IS,
Almost forgot to answer your question. Of course my standard of proof is my opinion. If you don’t want to try and convince me something is true, you don’t have to. I just try and be upfront about what would convince me.
There’s no gotcha there.
IS,
First off, I’m a rational skeptic. A large part of my philosophy can be put as “Exceptional claims require exceptional proof.” Now you claim to be at least partially of French descent, not a very important or unlikely claim, so I just assume you’re telling the truth. Now “The world is round” has important implications, so I require more proof of that claim then just someone’s say-so. Ships disappearing over the horizon, the edge of the earth’s shadow during lunar eclipses is always round, etc. etc. Now admittedly I do have to take some things on faith. I’m never going to be able to do the necessary work to prove what the composition of the atmospheres on various planets are.
Now that’s all well and good for hard sciences, what about politics? Well, if you’re going to make an over-arching philosophical statement (Liberal policies never work), how do you propose to convince me that what you say is what is reality? Repetition just means that you really believe it. Quotes and appeals to authority just mean that OTHER people may have believed that (you could misunderstand the quote, or take it out of context). Hypotheticals and analogies are good for explanation, but thought experiments can fail to take into account certain factors and different situations are… different.
That’s all a lot of words to say: If you’ve got a better method of proving a statement then giving verifiable facts, I’d love to hear it. Our goals in these conversations are probably different. I like learning new facts and finding out what is true. You seem to favor telling people what you think is true (I say that non-judgmentally). This isn’t a case of not seeing the forest for the trees, this is a case of making sure that there are actual trees for the forest to be made of.
My favorite definition of reality is from Philip K. Dick- “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Gyges writes: You want to see how to deal with him, go look at the Global warming thread from a couple of weeks back. He was eventually ignored and that thread stopped at 200 instead of the 500+ length that this one has gotten to. I’d be willing to bet at least 1/5-1/4 the comments are his spam. He is the only person currently here I’ll say this about, but all that his views deserve is the occasional mocking, and being ignored. Intelligent conversation and debate is one thing, he is another.
you make a valuable point about spam and trolls, but in this case, writing about bigotry in general and jew hating in particular is something I cannot ignore, not because bdaman can be silenced if we ignore him but because there are people who may read what he writes, not comment, but believe him and be convinced that his point of view is a valid one. it isn’t. advocacy against hate must be addressed every time it comes up
Mike writes: Can’t stay away from the Jewish thing can you? Do you know that among Jews next month marks our New Year? Do you further know that this New Year on the Jewish calendar is extremely important to us and in tandem with Yom Kippur rates as our holiest time period? The President was reflecting on his understanding that during this period any Jew who takes his faith seriously reflects upon the errors he has made in the previous years, seeks to redress them and resolves to be better in the year to come. President Obama, speaking to a group of Rabbi’s, was using the High Holy Days as a metaphor to make his point. This has nothing to do with separation of church and state, which incidentally the overwhelming majority of Jews believe in, for obvious reasons. As for the “evil” of his closing with “L’shana Tovah,” if you had a friend or acquaintance that was a faithful Jew that you weren’t seeing between now and mid September, that would be a very thoughtful and considerate thing to say. It
would be taken by a Jew as a sign of respect. However, since in your heart we are Christ Killers how dare that man show any Jew respect? Will you be up for three more days thinking about this faux pas?
if you saw the coverage of Barney Frank’s town hall where the nazi woman gave him grief and he served it right back to her, you should have gotten the shivers, as I did.
once a society makes hate okay, makes it okay for centuries or decades in this case of repressed bigotry to surface it is a short trip to well armed citizen militias following up on their twisted ideas of whose nation this is and how it ought to be run.
it is just 2 generations from the holocaust and the rising tide of jew hating in america has escalated to the point where I think that open violence against jews — you know we did elect obama and wreck their country — will be commonplace.
think it can’t happen here?
“never again” has to really mean something.
This is a little off topic, but as there has been some comments regarding the news media, I though it was appropriate. IS seems to believe (correct me if I’m wrong) that Fox News and MSNBC are just opposite sides of the same coin. This is a tactic commonly used by the right – define things as black and white and you lose the ability to compare the relative degrees – for example (admittedly somewhat contrived and hyperbolic) President Clinton received fellatio in the oval office and lied about it and President Bush lied to the country to get us to go to war and committed war crimes, therefore they are both criminals – while factually true, this totally ignores the difference in magnitude between lying about a consensual act between adults and lying to start an unjust war which resulted in large numbers of dead and wounded and trillions of dollars wasted. You cannot truly compare two things unless you take both quality and quantity into account. MSNBC is a news organization with a (mostly) liberal bias; CNN and the networks are news organizations with a (mostly) centrist/center-left bias; Fox News on the other hand is a propaganda arm of the conservative movement. Fox News has admitted to passing along the white house talking points during the Bush administration – pretty much textbook propaganda. Or you could compare the number of times that Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann has called out President Obama (as shown by just about any appearance of professor Turley on their shows) versus the number of times that Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity disagreed with President Bush.
Mike S,
I have to disagree with you about the efficacy of engage with people like bdaman. The point is not how he responds to your posts, but the contrasting quality of your posts versus his (which in my opinion lead to people giving much more weight to your opinions that to his;-)). The gold standard of this in my opinion is Vince Treacy on the birther thread. His posts may have encouraged other people to post birther twaddle, but any reasonable person reading the thread is forced to conclude that Vince’s arguments are the correct ones. So don’t feel bad about engaging any arguments you care to.
IS,
So backing up an argument with facts is a bad thing? Huh?
You said: “I am against it all and would like to see a private sector solution. But that is not going to happen in my life time.” Then instead of fighting the inevitable, you should do you best to insure that the best possible public solution is enacted – all you have to do is admit that the government can be a solution to some problems. Which brings us to…
You said: “The old people dying in the street is a lame argument and has been used for about the last 40 years.” My comment about old people dying in poverty was in regard to social security – take a look at poverty rates among seniors before and after SS, while the program has issues that need to be addressed, you cannot (rationally) question the fact that social security worked to fix the problem it was intended to solve.
You said: “As far as parroting goes there appears to be quite a good deal of that in here. Huffington Post seems to be a favorite.” Yes, many of us here get our news from similar sources, but as I pointed out above there is a difference between repeating something you read in the Huffington post and parroting the propaganda on Fox News.
You said: “There mayhave been , at one time, intellectual foment on the left but the new left appears to be a bunch of mindless automatons taking orders from Moveon.Org or the Daily Kos or George Soros. And it is pretty outrageous.” In my experience the intellectual content of debate on the left far exceeds that on the right these days and the intelligence and education of people I know is strongly correlated with liberal views. I’ve never visited Moveon.org or read Mr. Soros’ book (I visit Daily Kos from time to time, but not very often and I don’t think that I’ve given the impression of being a mindless automaton). What is outrageous is for someone in a group led by Rush Limbaugh and Caribou Barbie to make this statement.