by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
“Silence is argument carried out by other means.” – Che Guevara
“Hello darkness, my old friend,
I’ve come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.”
– “The Sound of Silence”, by Simon & Garfunkel, lyrics by Paul Simon
“Darkness isn’t the opposite of light, it is simply its absence.” – Terry Pratchett
“In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.” – Henry David Thoreau
Just as darkness is the absence of light, silence is an absence. We’ve considered the word and the image as propaganda up to this point, so let us pause to consider their antithesis as a form of propaganda. The phrase “[t]he only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” is often attributed to 18th Century Irish born English statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, although what he actually wrote in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents was that “when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Regardless of the apocryphal attribution, the quote goes right to the heart of the issue of silence being a form of propaganda. Like most tactics of propaganda, silence has multiple forms and uses. Let us examine some of these variations on a theme.
What is “silence”? According to Webster’s it is:
silence \ˈsī-lən(t)s\, n.,
1: forbearance from speech or noise : muteness —often used interjectionally
2: absence of sound or noise : stillness
These are the common meanings of silence that automatically leap to mind when one reads the word, but more to the point in discussing propaganda, we need to consider the full definition of the word and even enhance it a little bit. Consider the third meaning of the word “silence” . . .
3: absence of mention: a : oblivion, obscurity b : secrecy
With this fuller definition, it becomes clear that silence is more than the absence of sound or stillness. For discussion of propaganda, let us use an expanded specialized definition to have silence mean not just the absence of sound, but rather the absence of information. All propaganda is aimed at shaping the flow and content of information. With this expanded definition, we can see the broader scope of silence as a propaganda tactic. As you will see, this can lead to an interesting contradiction.
The first use of silence as a tactic is what you’d expect and the traditional definition of silence: the “No Comment” maneuver. You see this all the time coming from Hollywood and the entertainment industry as well as in the political arena. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t and this is dependent upon a variety of factors. The public’s perception of the speaker, the relative severity and the public or private nature of the topic not being discussed, any associated value loading that can go with a scandal, how amenable to obscuration or obviation is the topic in general and are there any related topics currently drawing the public’s attention that may either attract or detract attention are some of the mitigating factors that influence how well playing the “No Comment” card will work out. Let us consider a couple of examples from both the entertainment and political realms and why or why not they succeeded.
Movie stars are well known (or not) for their scandals (real or imagined) popping up from time to time in the tabloid press. Very often, attempts to mitigate the damage of an embarrassing disclosure do more harm than good. An example of this is the current Kristen Stewart/Robert Pattinson/Rupert Sanders story. After photos of Stewart and Sanders (a married man with children) surfaced, naturally her relationship with her Twilight co-star Pattinson became somewhat complicated. In an effort to mitigate the damage, Stewart made a very public apology to Pattinson. This effort backfired as she caught criticism for everything ranging from the public nature of what most would consider a private message to the content for not being apologetic enough concerning the impact on Sander’s marriage and children to the impact the negative press would have on the forthcoming installment of the Twilight series. This in turn led to speculation that the studio might be reconsidering her for future roles as well as much distress among the Twilight fans. To complete this study in contrasts, consider the recent development in this story where Stewart (possibly after taking advice from her former co-star and actress/director well acquainted with the silence strategy, Jodie Foster) is now refusing to answer questions about her and Pattinson’s relationship.
In the political arena, silence is playing a larger part than usual in the Presidential campaign. The Romney campaign is trying silence as a tactic on his business dealings, his tax returns and the more extremist views of his choice in Vice Presidential running mate Paul Ryan. So far this application of the tactic has generally backfired miserably. For his business dealings, silence makes him look like a liar and a fraud considering it is his past business dealings that make up the bulk of his alleged experience and skill set to lead a nation. With his taxes, silence simply makes him look like he has something to hide in addition to the arrogance he has displayed on the issue showing him to be massively out of touch with the American people and an elitist with remarks about “you people” and “trust me”. With silence about the points of view of his running mate, Paul Ryan? It is early in the use of that strategy to see how well it will work, but early indications are it is going to only serve to highlight Ryan’s extremist views as the media and the public start asking questions. Another spectacular backfire as Ryan’s stance come under greater scrutiny including his budget proposals (even attacked by Conservative King of Trickle Down Economics – David Stockman), the privatization of Social Security, replacing Medicare with a voucher system (also a form of privatization), cutting funding and participation in Medicaid, his dubious and manifestly politically expedient disavowal of his nearly life long love for Ayn Rand and all things Randian, his hypocritical support for economic stimulus when Bush was for it but attacks on it when it is Obama for economic stimulus, and reports of general dissatisfaction among voters of all persuasions about his selection.
There is a second variation on silence as a tactic and that limited silence or partial disclosure. A fine example of this is the career of Michael J. Fox in its post-Parkinson’s phase. Since his diagnosis, he was careful with the media but remained largely silent. After announcing his condition, he carefully controlled his media presence until the scope and effect of his condition and the effectiveness of his treatment could be assessed. What started with silence became partial disclosure of his progress, using his celebrity to draw attention to the condition and support for research, and eventually a slow and partial reintroduction into promoting active acting projects. This illustrates that in the process of information management, what you don’t say and when you don’t say it can be as important to image management as what you do say and when you say it, and that balance in tactics can be crucial.
The third use of silence is a close variant to the “no comment” form of silence and that is the tactic of externally enforced silence. Oddly enough, this tactic can arise from tactical missteps as well as situational elements and there is a perfect example of this going on in the current Presidential campaign. Consider Mitt Romney’s camp and their inability to mention one of his (few) great successes in political leadership without having it blow up in their face and that is the so-called Romneycare he shepherded to life while Governor of Massachusetts. Their silence on this issue is externally enforced because of the similarities to Obama’s ACA plan. Romney cannot attack Obama for actions incredibly similar to actions he took as governor and then tout his actions as governor without tactically shooting himself in the foot with his target audience.
The fourth use of silence is where silence as the absence of information comes to the forefront as well as the previously mentioned interesting contradiction. Sometimes silence can be noisy. Another way to create silence in the sense of an absence of information are the strategies of obfuscation and distraction (which can employ many tactics from white noise to straw men to simple misdirection). In this regard, when evaluating information it is just as critical to ask “what does this speaker not want me to think about or discuss” as it is to look at the explicit content of what they are saying.
Consider in a broader media sense the contrast between the television news coverage of World War II, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, and Iraq/Afghanistan. The media kept silent about a great many details of World War II and in those days of analog media dominance, it was possible to maintain such silence. To the credit of those in government who controlled the flow of information during World War II, the bulk of what was kept silent was validly done so in the name of operational security and once Allied troops were out of danger fuller disclosure was usually forthcoming. Contrast this with the media coverage of Vietnam and the then relatively new medium of television. The collapse of public support at the end of the Vietnam war was due in part to the inability of the government to exert control over television. Once the images of what was really going on over there and the cost it was taking on our citizen draft military with daily visions of caskets being broadcast into a majority of American homes, it was only a matter of time before any public support for that war evaporated.
Fast forward to the first Gulf War. The war mongers in government had learned their lesson from Vietnam and the Draft was not a concern with a volunteer force – removing some of the direct impact into American homes from a war abroad. True, many civilians were against conscription, but getting rid of it came with a hidden cost to civic duty and a hidden opportunity for the unscrupulous to make war easier because of less public challenge. Add to this a high level of embedded journalists, a whole new bag of technology that made showing night actions possible and a theater conducive to night actions and relatively low casualties and you get the first war sold to the American public as essentially a video game. This war as an exercise in modern media control can only be termed a success from the point of view of policy hawks. Silence was kept where needed to keep public support flowing and the flow of information out was carefully controlled. The effectiveness of pro-war propaganda was back to WWII levels.
Now comes the invasion of Iraq. America was reeling in the aftermath of 9/11, but anyone who focuses on intelligence in looking at foreign policy issues knew that Iraq didn’t have a damn thing to do with those heinous terrorist attacks. The general public was in a state of fear and the Bush Administration seizing upon that opportunity forced through Congress the purposefully vague Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) as well as the arguably prime facie unconstitutional Patriot Act. Using their media savvy sharpened by the Gulf War, little if any media mention was made of the pure irrationality of attacking Iraq was mentioned during the lead up to that action and once again the television was ablaze with video game warfare images. However, that silence about the cost and irrationality of this invasion had to deal with a change in technology analogous to what transpired in Vietnam with television: the Internet. Although it had technically been around for a while, the World Wide Web hadn’t reached maturity until roughly the same time the war in Iraq started. Due to the very nature of the medium, government found it difficult to control the message and enforce silence, but also due to the massively increased number of media outlets, the impact of negative reporting of the true costs of invading Iraq were somewhat diluted compared to the impact of television on Vietnam. Combined with the lack of impact created by a conscription military, a situation ensued where dissent against the invasion slowly built though the alternative information channels the World Wide Web provided, but instead of ending the war in 13 years (1962-1975) in Vietnam, the pressure to end the invasion of Iraq took 8 years (2003-2011) to “officially” end – seemingly an improvement. But is it? We still have troop presence there so anyone paying attention knows that it is not over. A lesson learned in Vietnam is the euphemistic language of calling a war something other than what it really is, like “police action”, “liberation”, and “nation building”.
This is not to mention that we are still in Afghanistan, a country well known to military history buffs both professional and amateur to be a place practically impossible to occupy due to both terrain and a fractured culture in part created by that terrain. So here we are, still involved in two wars, one an invasion of questionable legality and unquestionably bad tactics (unless you’re in the oil business) and the other an attempt at occupation against a legitimate target but a target that historically has been shown highly resistant to occupation strategies. Unlike Vietnam though, the propaganda masters in government rapidly adapted to the World Wide Web. If you look only at MSM Web sources for news, you might be minimally aware of some sanitized facts of what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you only watch television, you might be hard pressed to even realize there are two wars going on at all. In either case, you can hear the media’s politically driven drumbeat starting already for war with Iran.
The propaganda masters have learned their lessons and put them into application. Where they could not directly silence, they sowed confusion. Where they could not sow confusion, they manufactured false support with tactics like hiring propaganda trolls and astroturfing. Where they could not manufacture support, they outright lied. And when their lies where exposed by whistle blowers like Bradley Manning and Wikileaks, they resorted to that old standby of fascists and totalitarian regimes to enforce silence about their misdeeds and malfeasance in representing the best interests of the general citizenry: threats and intimidation.
In being or seeking to become a critical thinker and a responsible citizen in the age of modern media and propaganda techniques, silence as an absence of information is your enemy. It can be overcome by diligent research, practiced evaluation, supporting whistle blowers who bring the public evidence of institutional and personal wrong doings by government, industry and its members and to practice through and proper analysis (in context) of as many sources of information as your mind can handle. But is it enough to overcome the silence of information to make your decisions about such matters? As George Orwell so famously noted, “Speaking the truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.” Is it enough to find the truth behind the silence? Or is it your civic duty to speak truth to power?
I think the answer is quite clear if you are following the sage advice of Marcus Aurelius and “seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed.”
What do you think?
________________
Source(s): E!, The Daily Beast, Times Live, Huffington Post (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), Politico, New York Times, League of Women Voters, CNN (1, 2), Slate, Vanity Fair, The Raw Story
~submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
The Propaganda Series;
Propaganda 105: How to Spot a Liar
Propaganda 104 Supplemental: The Streisand Effect and the Political Question
Propaganda 104: Magica Verba Est Scientia Et Ars Es
Propaganda 103: The Word Changes, The Word Remains The Same
Propaganda 102 Supplemental: Holly Would “Zero Dark Thirty”
Propaganda 102: Holly Would and the Power of Images
Propaganda 101 Supplemental: Child’s Play
Propaganda 101 Supplemental: Build It And They Will Come (Around)
Propaganda 101: What You Need to Know and Why or . . .
Related articles of interest;
Mythology and the New Feudalism by Mike Spindell
How about Some Government Propaganda for the People Paid for by the People Being Propagandized? by Elaine Magliaro
Tony C,
They’re appealing to the whacko base and the real base, sensible Republicans, know it. Gotta get those nutters to the polls so Romney doesn’t end up in Carter’s shoes. Anyone with any sense knows there is absolutely nothing they can do about changing the law regarding either abortion or Medicare … it’s all talk aimed at the whackos.
The legitimate polls have been stable for months and all show Obama winning. The news media pounds on the economy but polls continue to reflect that although the economy is seen as having only weakly recovered, it has still recovered so Obama numbers aren’t affected much by the economy drumbeat.
Partisan loyalty is also polling at stable numbers. In fact, Obama is more popular among Democrats at the end of this first term than Clinton was. Interestingly enough, he is as popular among Democrats as Reagan was among Republicans in his first term. You might not think that is so if you’re just reading the Turley Blog, but all the pollsters, political scientist and party bigwigs know it. Democrats are more loyal to Obama than they were to Clinton and just as loyal to Obama as Republicans were to Reagan. That has surprised a great many of the experts.
In short, Republicans know the writing is on the wall and, in my opinion, they’re giving the abortion thing one last hurrah to satisfy the whackos and they’ll drop it completely come 2016. It’s had a good run for the last 3 decades but the younger voters are now getting older and going to the polls and they don’t give a da*n about the Catholic Church/Christian Right’s abortion hang-ups. Same sex marriage and equal rights for gays and lesbians may get some further mileage for Republicans … we’ll see.
Gotta feel sorry for them … the economy thing isn’t hurting Obama and isn’t helping them and Obama got Osama so they can’t even pound him on defense.
I think they are prepared to lose at all levels … they’ll pick up again in 2014 and push really hard at 2016.
@Blouise: Back to the backlash: The platform the Republicans just approved will Ban All Abortions without exception, Ban Gay Marriage Everywhere, Replace Medicare with a voucher system, repeal all aspects of Obamacare, etc.
How is that going to play with the “Independent” voter? I think it will lose Republicans races everywhere, in the House, Senate and White House.
@Gene: Also consider that just because an idea is new doesn’t mean it is good and/or inherently deserving of respect.
I analogize this to venture capital funding, which I know a little about. Even after vetting the hell out of potential companies, by the best businessmen in the country, the actual success rate of venture-capital funded businesses (meaning those that returned an annualized rate of 20% or more via the exit strategy) is around 35%. The dead-loss rate is about the same; companies that looked good enough on paper to get six and seven figure funding, and lost it all and closed their doors. And those rates are from well after the dot com era.
Most new ideas are crap. In my academic research, I have wasted many a month on an idea I then abandoned. Like the venture capitalist, the point is to explore enough ideas that eventually something clicks and you have something useful. It could be likened to baseball batting averages; 0.267 is typical, and even then it us far more likely to be a single than a home run.
So yes, maybe I over-reacted, but I get irritated when I am trying to FIND a new idea, and people rush to find fault, jeer at it, or dismiss it as laughable. Like most new ideas it IS probably untenable, but if we play those odds we will never find anything new worth trying.
Besides that, the criticism in this particular case is flawed; certainly the founding fathers formed a committee that produced something most Americans agree has had enormous value. Committees are not destined to fail and should not be dismissed out of hand.
@Bron: if 95% is true, how come around 50% are on some form of government assistance?
A) That just isn’t true,
B) Some of what you call “government assistance” is the deserved payoff of insurance policies the government administers; including unemployment insurance, social security, and Medicare. These work like any private insurance program in the sense that current premiums are not sequestered or kept aside, they are used to pay off claimants when claims are made. They are run by the government because unlike private insurance, the government cannot transfer the value of premiums to private parties in the form of salary and perks, and then claim corporate bankruptcy to screw their policy holders out of coverage that, due to the aging and accumulated disability of the policy holders, is coverage they cannot replace. The government is the ONLY entity that can guarantee coverage for the entire lifespan of a citizen, barring the extremely unlikely end of the country.
Those benefits are not “government assistance” any more than insurance paying for a house fire is “assistance,” they are defined benefits paid for by taxes.
Just like the roads, you are not supported by “government assistance” when you are transported on public roads, you are entitled to them by your various taxes, even in states far from your own.
Tony,
I agree on all points.
We have, to quote from your last post to Bron, reached, in my opinion, the “point of diminishing returns” in that this government no longer protects us from harm but rather have become the agents of same.
@Blouise: I agree with him 100%. In particular:
When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.
I have been trying to stress that, and its implications, for years. On both sides of the aisle and for the President himself, claiming that a politician cannot exercise their constituted power because their hands are tied leads us to one conclusion: They put politics above principle. I have said it about Senators that settle for a “nay” vote instead of exercising their many rights to Holds, filibuster, or otherwise delay legislation they disagree with. I have said it about the President and Guantanamo, as the Commander In Chief he could close it in a week, it isn’t closed because he doesn’t want it closed. He could have terrorists tried in civilian courts in no time, but he puts political theater ahead of the principles of the rule of law.
Reese is right, there are no insoluble government problems, what we have is what they want, and what they want has been corrupted by political opportunists that are not at all interested in serving the people, but serving the rich and wealthy to enjoy the luxury they will share and earn the gratuity retirement they will provide for the services rendered.
@Bron: You would do well to listen to Mill, he isnt a conservative.
Mill is intelligent, but I think mistaken on several counts. I do not believe in his formulation of “utilitarianism.” I do not believe it is the government’s job to “maximize” any aggregate, like happiness or income.
Let me explain the arithmetic behind that argument, briefly: An aggregate is a sum, and therefore equivalent to an “average,” but an average ignores the distribution of wealth; it can be heavily weighted for the wealthy and against the poor. In fact if the top 1% grow money better than the bottom 99%, then government policies that take money from the 99% to put it in the more expert hands of the 1% will increase the aggregate wealth, while making the typical person poorer.
I have said before that I believe the first function of government is to protect the weak from the strong; it is why we have a military, police force and court system, why we have a patent and copyright system, why society enforces contracts and lets people with few resources sue people with enormous resources. There are secondary functions of government (general welfare functions, like building roads or public schooling), but in regard to Mill, let us concentrate on this first function.
Even though a minimizing function can usually be transformed into a maximizing function, this first purpose of government is best defined (meaning it produces the least confusion) as one of minimization, not maximization. The goal is to minimize crime, violence, fraud, economic catastrophe for individuals, medical catastrophe for individuals, exploitation and coercion of individuals, the latter includes effective extortion, such as demanding a person’s life savings to treat them for a life-threatening incident.
Corporations, on the other hand, are typically engaged in maximizations, of efficiency, margins, customers served, sales, and in general the maximization of profits.
This is a (subtle) difference between me and Mill, his conception of government is like a corporation trying to maximize a profit, but there is no limit on such profits, so the natural path of the government is to grow, to keep trying to finds ways to increase whatever has been defined as a “profit,” and that effort will come to dominate the society, and basically force everybody to adhere to whatever the government defines as “happiness.”
I think a more useful approach is to conceive of government as a servant of the people there to prevent various kinds of harm to the people, by investigating harm and punishing those that inflict harm. Using that definition, there is a natural practical limit on how much of that harm can be prevented, especially if people collectively decide the budget for that prevention, i.e. what that prevention is worth to them. Then the government prevents and / or punishes as much harm as they can within that budget.
I do not think these are equivalent ideas. If the government’s job is, as Mill put it, to maximize aggregate happiness, there is no good way to define that or put a ceiling on that effort. If the government’s job is, as I put it, to minimize violent crime, we can pretty clearly define that (and have), and there is a way to measure it and a way to tell when more money or bigger government (like more detectives or more officers) did or did not help.
There is a floor on violent crime, or on any definable harm. That means there is also a natural limit on the size of government, because we can search for that “point of diminishing returns” on a minimization with far more confidence than we can on a maximization. Bigger or Smaller government is not the point, for the purpose of protecting the weak from the strong, we want government to be the size that minimizes harm, and no larger, because “larger” would just be a waste of labor and money.
Interesting, Blouise. And very true.
Also, a great catch, eniobob! Well played and relayed.
Tony C. and Gene,
Here’s the last column written by Charlie Reese of the Orlando Sentinel … swan song.
545 vs. 300,000,000 People
-By Charlie Reese
Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.
Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?
Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?
You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The President does.
You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.
You and I don’t write the tax code, Congress does.
You and I don’t set fiscal policy, Congress does.
You and I don’t control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.
One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.
I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.
I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a President to do one cotton-picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s responsibility to determine how he votes.
Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.
What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The President can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.
The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House?John Boehner. He is the leader of the majority party. He and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to. [The House has passes a budget but the Senate has not approved a budget in over three years. The President’s proposed budgets have gotten almost unanimous rejections in the Senate in that time. ]
It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts — of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can’t think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.
If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair.
If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red.
If the Army & Marines are in Iraq and Afghanistan it’s because they want them in Iraq and Afghanistan …
If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it’s because they want it that way.
There are no insoluble government problems.
Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.
Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like “the economy,” “inflation,” or “politics” that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.
Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible. They, and they alone, have the power.
They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses. Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees… We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!
(Thanx, eniobob)
Oh, where to begin . . .
Tony,
Stop being psychologically cynical. Just as sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, a joke is sometimes just a joke. Also consider that just because an idea is new doesn’t mean it is good and/or inherently deserving of respect. Some ideas are simply bad ideas. Some ideas are good ideas. However, an attitude of “what could possible go wrong” doesn’t indicate a dismissive attitude on the part of the speaker but rather a skeptical attitude on the part of the speaker. As a trained critical thinker, you more so than most should appreciate the crucial role skepticism plays in critical analysis.
Curious,
Some of us do read what conservatives are saying. In the past, I’ve even agreed with some conservatives. I will stipulate that where I have historically found the most room for agreement with conservatives is observation of “phenomenas of concern”. This trend has begun to trend downward as the conservative movement becomes more and more radicalized and fanatical. While their observations may be causally and/or factually accurate, very rarely do I agree with a proposed solution. This trend has only amplified as the conservative movement has become more and more radicalized and fanatical. I’ve said this before although perhaps not phrased this way, but I am a liberal because I am a humanist and an egalitarian small “d” democrat, but foremost I’m a soft rule utilitarian. Maximized solutions that comport with a humanist and democratic ideal matter more to me than arguing strictly along partisan lines. Ideology can (and very often should if that ideology is one that aims at the greatest good for the greatest number) inform solutions, but it is not required for a solution to be maximally valid. That being said, your observation is accurate: extremist liberals are just as ideologically blind as extremist conservatives or indeed extremists of any stripe.
I include “every stripe” because many people passing themselves off as conservatives or Republicans are nothing of the sort. Many are neoconservatives, neoliberals (they tend to manifest as Libertarians), theocrats, or outright corporatist fascists (or a combination thereof). Eisenhower would recognize many people claiming to be conservative today. Hell, William Buckely wouldn’t recognize many of the people claiming to be conservative today. There as many variations on ideology on the right side of the line as there are on the left side of the line and being on the right end of the spectrum does not mean a person is automatically a conservative in the Eisenhower sense of traditional conservatism. There are extremist views from both the right and the left that are equally dangerous, myopic and ideologically locked no matter what reason or evidence is presented to the contrary. Witness the almost religious devotion those of the neoliberal Austrian School of Economics to their political polemic disguised as economics even though the failures of their ideas is being writ large across the world economic stage as we speak. They tend to be true believers and nothing will make them waiver; no logic and no evidence. Where a lot of these ideologies fail to properly set themselves on the political spectrum is that many are not purely creatures of the left or the right, but rather they are syncretic in their base ideology. That is why left or right is ceasing to be a useful distinction in describing ideology, but becoming ever more critical in describing what an ideology is in practice. For example (and not to play the Hitler card but rather as a accurate description of both schools of thought), both Nazi fascism and neoliberals as exemplified by many Libertarians (including Ron Paul) are syncretic ideological systems that draw from both left and right, but in practice they end up being far right. The primary distinction being that Nazism’s far right practice was seen in their totalitarian policies of genocide, militarism and anti-democratic (again, small “d”) policy whereas Libertarians far right practice is seen in removing social safety nets to create a permanent underclass and corporatism (which is inherently anti-democratic).
“Everything in moderation” was good advice when Aristotle gave it and it is doubly so since Oscar Wilde extrapolated on the idea to say “Everything in moderation, including moderation.” The political world is full of lunatics from both ends of the spectrum, but you cannot know what moderation looks like without considering both sides of the spectrum. While some fall into the confirmation bias habit of only reading those who agree with them, I have to say that the mark of a truly critical thinker is to consider all angles in your analysis. Sadly for us as a species and as we see demonstrated here frequently, critical thinking is a skill that not all possess and a skill that some are not capable of possessing.
The only way to change that is to create one critical thinker at a time where and when possible.
But I digress . . .
I’ll offer some more thoughts on the whole Plural Presidency issue later, but I’ll preface (teaser) that if it were going to work, a 3/5 formulation would be necessary and that although problematic and possibly complicated the electoral process for such a body could be worked out.
Now if you’ll pardon me, I have to play some sinus infection imposed catch up with other things today, so it may be later today or tonight before I’m able to address the issue in depth.
Great conversation in my absence, ya’ll. Keep it up. It reminds me about what I found attractive about this forum in the first place.
if 95% is true, how come around 50% are on some form of government assistance?
“Our government does not fit that description, at least with regard to citizens, because it is not free to give or withhold benefits that discriminate between Democrats and Republicans, votes are in secret and cannot be bought or sold. The government does not have the power of individual discretion, to reward it supporters or punish its detractors.”
now I know you are living in a dream world.
@Bron: “A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold,… [JSMill]
Our government does not fit that description, at least with regard to citizens, because it is not free to give or withhold benefits that discriminate between Democrats and Republicans, votes are in secret and cannot be bought or sold. The government does not have the power of individual discretion, to reward it supporters or punish its detractors.
I would agree our government has that power with regard to corporate favors, and that is a problem in dire need of correction, but correction by eliminating the government is not the answer: The very reason the corporations are involved in government is to relieve themselves of restraints on their actions, if the government leash were removed they would become even more sociopathic than they already are (and return to a state we have seen before, in the late 1800s, when they were similarly unrestrained by labor law, product safety law, polluting standards, antitrust laws or anti-market fixing and price fixing laws).
Business has no favors on the scale of government to provide…
For profit health insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and hospitals literally have the power of life and death over their “consumers.” They are a huge threat to liberty, without restraint by government they will (and have been) simply demanding everything people own in order to save their life, and if even that is not enough, they have the option of just letting them die. And do, btw. If a man is uninsured and cannot afford the $100K it takes to get a bypass operation, it is not considered emergency medicine and thus a for profit hospital will not do it.
So I would say yours is the fantasy world.
No, that is just more of your fantasy asserting itself. The world I want is already being executed in practice, in Norway, and I know you will argue that is oil (because you are incapable of learning), but we have far more natural resources per capita in the USA than Norway has, we could manage them like they manage theirs for the long term benefit of the people.
I fantasize about something that can work because it already does, something that is large enough to control the sociopaths and prevent them from harming the rest of us, while leaving the rest of us free to innovate, compete, and work to get ahead.
You fantasize about something that, by your own logic, cannot ever exist for more than a few years before sociopaths and psychopaths take it over and return you and everybody else to subjugated misery.
Fortunately your logic is completely wrong, it does not comport with a century of experiments in psychology that map out the shape of our true human nature. If you trim away the extremes of the mentally ill, the severely mentally or physically disabled, the sociopaths and terminally lazy, what 95% of people want is to work and live in peace and safety, both physical safety and financial safety. They are not asking for handouts, they are asking for protection and insurance for which they are willing to work and pay, and there is a big difference.
tony c:
the problem is that government does attract power hungry people. I am not saying all business people are pure as the driven snow but they dont get to hand out goodies and favors. Even John Stuart Mill agrees with me:
“A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.”
Business has no favors on the scale of government to provide and so it is not nearly the threat government is to liberty.
So I would say yours is the fantasy world. The only people who believe as you do are Ivy League professors or the students they teach.
You would do well to listen to Mill, he isnt a conservative.
I love those old dead guys, they really knew what they were talking about.
@Bron: If you disagree then you live in a fantasy world. Virtually every law passed that restricts companies or people from doing something has been passed because companies or people WERE doing it and the public was outraged by it. So it got prohibited.
Really, either way you live in a fantasy world, you advocate for a system you yourself admit cannot exist, because by your logic sociopaths would immediately corrupt it and people would be too gullible or greedy to not surrender power to them. What is the point of your advocating for a system you know will never work?
tony c:
“No they aren’t, that is ludicrous. It isn’t the people offering government that are to blame, the laws are passed because people are demanding relief from the sociopaths and psychopaths that are out of control.”
I disagree, the sociopaths are telling the people what they want and need to obtain power. The people believe the bull$hit about free goodies the sociopaths tell them and so they vote for the person who is the most sociopathic/psychotic because they are the ones offering all the free stuff and not telling the truth about it.
It is really pretty simple, the more sociopathic/psychotic the person, the more free stuff they tell the people they will give them. Look at Hitler, he promised the German people world domination.
Sociopaths have a will to power, I wonder how people in positions of power in government would score on the sociopath/psychopath scale? Any thing those people do is suspect because you dont know whether they are doing it for the public good or their own good. My guess is that if you have that will to power you do everything for your own good.
The public good is just a mechanism to get you into power and to keep it.
@Bron: people are controlled and manipulated by sociopaths …
No they aren’t, that is ludicrous. It isn’t the people offering government that are to blame, the laws are passed because people are demanding relief from the sociopaths and psychopaths that are out of control.
Most recently, in health care, and the insurance companies earning profits by denying health care to people that thought they were insured (and that most common people would have thought were insured too). When a woman dies of untreated breast cancer because her insurance company, after 30 years of taking her premiums as profits, denied her coverage by classifying her teenage acne as an undisclosed “pre-existing medical condition” that invalidates her contract, people are enraged. It isn’t sociopaths in government, it is sociopaths in business getting away with murder (usually literally) that cause the laws, and it is the sociopaths in business that engage in corruption that cause the laws to be watered down or crippled so they can keep on operating, and the sociopaths in political office that help them.
People that are demanding safe food, contracts they can understand, safe products, safe workplaces, safe streets, safe houses and public buildings, safe medicine, safe roads, and honest bookkeeping are not being tricked into demanding those things, it is what they really want. A stable environment where they can work and raise their children without being robbed, raped, defrauded, poisoned, or killed in a fire or explosion.
That is human nature and people are going to demand it forever. It is not because they want something for free; they are willing to pay for it, but the only way to get it is through government and law. Nobody has ever devised a free market system that will stop a sociopath willing to lie, cheat, steal, and exploit and endanger others for profit.
So even if you got what you wanted, human nature will make it disappear almost immediately, because 90% of people want the other 10% to stop their criminal predation and play fair, and the 90% will not tolerate a “limited government” that lets sociopaths leave a trail of lies, trickery and ruined lives behind as they accumulate personal wealth.
people are controlled and manipulated by sociopaths and psychopaths who tell them government can provide all their needs. The sociopaths and psychopaths then gain power which is what they crave.
Just like the Sirens, they call out with a pleasing voice and message but the result is nothing like what they promise.
I dont know why sociopaths and psychopaths have a will to power but they do and they will lie, cheat and steal to obtain their hearts desire.
@Bron: If limited government actually worked, people would not have demanded more and more of it, which they did, to control the sociopaths in society, which is why they kept demanding it.
Limited government does NOT work and that is why it never survives. That is basic logic, why would something that the vast majority of people agrees is working well be overthrown by something worse?
The phrase, “There oughta be a law…” is a timeless one. People WANT collective action to control predatory, unfair, unjust behavior, and that is why limited government is always undone if the people have any say in it, because limited government does NOT work to accomplish what people want their government to accomplish.
tony c:
the problems of 1787, of 500 BC or 1100 AD are human problems. New technologies, etc. dont matter all they do is make life easier and communication easier.
expanding government is not the answer, making government effective is not the answer. Limiting government is the answer. It worked in 1787 and it will work now.
Technology has nothing to do with it.
Limited government is what works. They had a pretty good guide, we should follow it.
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