Rand Paul Has a Little Problem w/ the Civil Rights Act

[seemslikeadream]

Weekend Edition
May 21 - 23, 2010

CounterPunch Diary

The Rand and Rachel Show

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

American politics continue their plunge into ritual farce. Last week we had the spectacle of progressives rallying to the right-wing Elena Kagan, largely on the grounds that it’s improper of dirty minded Republicans, not to mention Glenn Greenwald, to suggest that sexual identity might be a relevant element in assessing a candidate for the US Supreme Court. In other words, 41 years after Stonewall, long live the closet!

Now we have the uproar over Rand Paul, the libertarian Tea Bagger who just won the Republican primary in Kentucky. His grilling by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC on his lack of commitment to every Title of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is being cast as a political encounter as momentous as that between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in the Monkey Trial. Turn on the radio and you’ll hear howls about Rand on every liberal and leftist frequency. Because Paul had deprecated the ADA, on Democracy Now! on Friday morning Amy Goodman even fished some spavined old nag from that dismal body to join her in execration of the Slouching Beast that is Rand. David Corn herded him into the 9/11 nutball corral, because Paul had gone on the Alex Jones Show (though he’s never endorsed 9/11 conspiracies). By the same token he’s a liberal for having gone on the Maddow Show.

That Maddow-Paul set-to on MSNBC was tragic-comic. As CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St Clair remarked, “Maddow and Paul agree on probably 90 per cent of the BIG issues confronting us, from ending the drug and Afghan war, to ending bail outs & aid to Israel. But because of their own peculiar prejudices, his doctrinaire libertarian, hers PC progressive, neither of them can talk about anything other than a non-issue such as the Civil Rights Act of 19 -- SIXTY-FOUR. It's like a Dadaist play.”

Start with Rand. Like many libertarians he is never happier than in dashing back through the corridors of history to distant, sometimes obscure champions in the fight for liberty, as construed by libertarians. On the night of the MSNC face-off it was William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832. When Paul rolled out his name in response to one of her early questions about his posture on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Maddow blinked in astonishment as though he was mustering to his side the shade of the Venerable Bede. If she’d asked him about his posture on the rights of juries to nullify, to act according to the dictates of conscience and to set the law aside, he’d probably have brought up Edward Bushell and the landmark case against William Penn and William Mead in 1670.

Libertarians are like that. On some big and important things they’re admirable and staunch. Many of them, on some big and important things, are rancid. Half of Rand Paul’s positions are disgusting, like his end-of-week defense of BP. Other libertarians decry him from being evasive on O’Reilly’s Show about opposing war with Iran. Libertarians in the dust and heat of the political arena have no grasp of scale or priority. At heart many of them are nutty, martyrs to their truths, like fourth-century Christian schismatics. Ardent to refute charges that they favor the untrammeled sway of the market, the rejection of all federal intrusion, they dash to Von Mises and kindred heroes with all the childish enthusiasm of Gabriel Betteredge invoking Robinson Crusoe in The Moonstone. They have no sense of timing. Rand Paul, after five minutes of jabbing from Maddow, could have easily swerved the conversation towards issues more congenial to the MSNBC audience than his theoretical take on the Civil Rights Act. He could have denounced the farce of financial “reform”, of Bush’s and Obama’s wars, of constitutional abuses. These are all libertarian positions. But no. He couldn’t stop himself shoving his foot in his mouth. He seems dumb.

It’s the easiest thing in the world for a grandstanding liberal to push a libertarian into a corner. Then they’ll get praise for their unflinching courage, like Morris Dees’ South Poverty Law Center putting another “hate group” in the Index and waiting for the contributions to roll in.

Here’s Maddow, brandishing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as though this is the only matter worth considering in the forthcoming race between Rand Paul and the Democrat, an awful neo-liberal prosecutor, Kentucky’s current attorney general, Jack "I'm a Tough Son-of-a-Bitch" Conway. Between Conway and Paul, which one in the U.S. Senate would more likely be a wild card – which is the best we can hope for these days – likely to filibuster against a bankers’ bailout, against reaffirmation of the Patriot Act, against suppression of the CIA’s full torture history? Paul, one would have to bet, and these are the votes that count, where one uncompromising stand by an outsider can make a difference, unlike the gyrations and last-ditch sell-outs of Blowhard Bernie Sanders, no doubt a hero to Maddow and Goodman. Liberals love grandstanding about what are, in practice, distractions. You think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is going to come up for review in the U.S. Senate?

If Rand Paul hadn’t been so preoccupied with winding up for what he plainly thought was his knock-out punch, concerning Maddow’s posture on the right to bear arms in every restaurant in America from Joe’s Diner to Le Cirque, he could have turned the tables easily enough, just by saying that this ritual flourishing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act doesn’t have too much to do with what has happened to blacks since that glorious day, from an appalling school system, to blighted housing, constricted employment possibilities, shriveled share of the national income and most recently the great transfer in US history of money and assets from African Americans to rich white people by the mortgage speculators, given free rein by Democrats and Republicans.

The truth this year is that liberalism is in awful crisis, symbolized by BP’s broken oil pipe spouting maybe 70,000 barrels a day into the Gulf of Mexico, not on Rand Paul’s say-so but on that of Obama and Interior Secretary Salazar. Obama to Salazar: helluva a job, Kenny! (As a evidence of Rand Paul’s utter insanity he says Obama is being too tough on BP.) Forty–six years after the Civil Rights Act, with its noble liberal principles one can smell not just the nuttiness and often straight-up racism of the Teabaggers but the un-nutty, methodical corruption of liberalism in fifty thousand concrete instances, most of them well known to ordinary Americans.

Nuclear Disarmament: Not What He Promised

It’s been an active year so far in the rhetoric of nuclear disarmament. First the “nuclear posture statement” of the Obama administration put out in early April. Then the non-proliferation meetings, then the START negotiations. What do they add up to, in terms of significant reduction of the threat of nuclear Armageddon? The answer is: nothing.

Looking back on it, could there ever have been a glimmer of hope that the United States would adopt a “no first use” policy on nuclear weapons; concede that there is zero reason to maintain a full arsenal of strategic missiles and a fleet of bombers, on full alert to repel a Russian invasion of Europe; and start winding down the nuclear-industrial-scientific complex? Not really. It would be like expecting the single-payer approach to healthcare reform or strenuous regulation of the banking industry.

But for those who cheered President Obama’s commitment, made in Prague a year ago and at the UN in September, that “we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy,” the Defense Department’s Nuclear Posture Review, released on April 6, was a savage disappointment. The administration did not merely reassert the essential premises of US nuclear strategy but used the publication of the review and the subsequent Nuclear Security Summit in Washington as occasions to intensify the threats against North Korea and Iran. In the case of North Korea, Obama doomed any positive advances and reminded its leaders that America’s preferred method of negotiation takes the form of eight nuclear submarines in the North Pacific within a twelve-minute range of Pyongyang. The crucial sentence in the review, insistently repeated by Obama, states that “the United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the NPT and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.” This is great news for the Holy See, Venezuela and Yemen, which along with 180-plus other nations have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And no, the president was not threatening to attack Israel, which has nuclear weapons but has not signed the NPT.

The US position is that the biggest nuclear threat in the world today comes from those who do not have nuclear weapons, or whose nuclear armory is diminutive to the point of invisibility, and that global security is properly vested in the hands of those who have substantial nuclear arsenals, starting with the only country that has actually dropped nuclear bombs—and indeed lost them (eleven in the case of the United States since 1945).

Here’s how the ongoing commitment to “first use” is expressed in the review: “In the case of countries not covered by this assurance—states that possess nuclear weapons and states not in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations—there remains a narrow range of contingencies in which U.S. nuclear weapons may still play a role in deterring a conventional or CBW [chemical or biological weapons] attack against the United States or its allies and partners. The United States is therefore not prepared at the present time to adopt a universal policy that deterring nuclear attack is the sole purpose of nuclear weapons.”

The US strategic nuclear triad will remain on action stations, ready to destroy the planet. The review concluded that “the current alert posture of U.S. strategic forces—with heavy bombers off full-time alert, nearly all ICBMs on alert, and a significant number of SSBNs at sea at any given time—should be maintained for the present.” Forward-deployed US nuclear weapons in Europe will remain. Though Article VI of the NPT famously commits its signatories to “negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament,” heading toward a “Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control,” the United States remains dedicated to “NATO’s unique nuclear sharing arrangements under which non-nuclear members participate in nuclear planning and possess specially configured aircraft capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”

As of 2005, the United States was providing about 180 tactical B61 nuclear bombs for use by Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey under these NATO agreements. Articles I and II of the NPT prohibit the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states. So why should countries under threat be asked to surrender the nuclear option when states under no such risk are supplied with nuclear bombs or missiles?

The deals extorted by the nuclear-industrial-scientific- complex are starkly on display: “The U.S. nuclear stockpile must be supported by a modern physical infrastructure—comprised of the national security laboratories and a complex of supporting facilities.… Increased funding is needed for the Chemistry and Metallurgy -Research Replacement Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory to replace the existing 50-year old facility, and to develop a new Uranium Processing Facility…in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”

What does this bode for START negotiations? The Russians, who are being asked to reduce their nuclear-force levels, point not only to NATO’s ongoing aggressive moves to establish bases surrounding their country but to the fact that this rehabbing of the US processing facilities is enhancing its capacity to produce plutonium and thus swiftly multiply its nuclear arsenal with a change in regime and hence of nuclear posture.

The cause of nuclear disarmament has sustained a very serious, albeit predictable defeat. The news will only get worse. Ahead lies the impending redraft of NATO’s strategic concept, last reformulated in 1999: “The fundamental purpose of the nuclear forces of the Allies is political…to fulfill an essential role by ensuring uncertainty in the mind of any aggressor.… The supreme guarantee of the security of the Allies is provided by the strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance.”

Ironic, is it not, to read these invocations of “security” amid the impending bankruptcies of Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland and the destruction of the euro, and as the unemployment lines grow steadily across the United States and Europe, oh-so-safe beneath the nuclear umbrella?

America’s Fastest Growing Cult: the Confederate Flag

In our latest newsletter, read Kevin Alexander Gray on the folks who REALLY think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a big mistake. Kevin, who set fire to a confederate flag on the South Carolina Statehouse grounds a few years back, has written a marvelous piece about the comeback of the Confederacy, memorialized in parks, graveyards, front yard flags, gubernatorial tributes, “confederate history months” and a hundred other ways of saying that in the Civil War the wrong side won.

“The perfect moral compass of a climber and a lickspittle” – that’s how Norman Finkelstein describes her in our latest newsletter, looking back on how Elena Kagan covered for Alan Dershowitz during the plagiarism face off. How did she seem at Princeton? Fellow-class member Fritz Neal remembers. Also, Carl Ginsburg on how Wall Street is making billions, betting on national collapse.

[JackRiddler]

Cockburn's making up numbers here. Maddow and Rand would agree on 90 percent of issues that matter, but 50 percent of Rand's views are horrible, blah blah.

Fact is, Rand's backed altogether off his father's anti-imperialism and ending the drug war, so there's less than ever left to cheer.

Also, it's his fault, as Cockburn says, for not steering to the more common ground himself. The usual libertarian intellectual autism.

The current national campaign against Rand is going to help get him elected in Kentucky, where at any rate the Senate seat he's running for is completely safe Republican. It's being used by the Democrats to shore up their support. Rand in is bad news for Republicans long-term, so I'm all for it.

ANYWAY... I'm here to post this fine historical look by William Blum:

http://counterpunch.org/blum05132010.html

Terminally Stupid People Have Always Been With Us
We've Seen the Likes of the Teabaggers Before

By WILLIAM BLUM

If you shake your head and roll your eyes at the nonsense coming out of the Teabagger followers of Sarah “Africa is a country” Palin and other intellectual giants like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh ... If you have thoughts of moving abroad after the latest silly lies and fantasies like “Obama the Marxist” and “Obama the antichrist” ... If you share Noam Chomsky’s feeling: "I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime” ... keep in mind that the right wing has long been at least as stupid and as mean-spirited. Consider some of the behavior of the same types for half a century during the Cold War with its beloved -- albeit imaginary -- "International Communist Conspiracy”.

* 1948: The Pittsburgh Press published the names, addresses, and places of employment of about 1,000 citizens who had signed presidential-nominating petitions for former Vice President Henry Wallace, running under the Progressive Party. This, and a number of other lists of “communists”, published in the mainstream media, resulted in people losing their jobs, being expelled from unions, having their children abused, being denied state welfare benefits, and suffering various other punishments.

* Around 1950: The House Committee on Un-American Activities published a pamphlet, “100 Things You Should Know About Communism in the U.S.A.” This included information about what a communist takeover of the United States would mean:

Q: What would happen to my insurance?

A: It would go to the Communists.

Q: Would communism give me something better than I have now?

A: Not unless you are in a penitentiary serving a life sentence at hard labor.

* 1950s: Mrs. Ada White, member of the Indiana State Textbook Commission, believed that Robin Hood was a Communist and urged that books that told the Robin Hood story be banned from Indiana schools.

* As evidence that anti-communist mania was not limited to the lunatic fringe or conservative newspaper publishers, here is Clark Kerr, president of the University of California at Berkeley in a 1959 speech: “Perhaps 2 or even 20 million people have been killed in China by the new [communist] regime.” One person wrote to Kerr: “I am wondering how you would judge a person who estimates the age of a passerby on the street as being 'perhaps 2 or even 20 years old.' Or what would you think of a physician who tells you to take 'perhaps 2 or even twenty teaspoonsful of a remedy'?”

* Throughout the cold war, traffic in phoney Lenin quotes was brisk, each one passed around from one publication or speaker to another for years. Here's U.S. News and World Report in 1958 demonstrating communist duplicity by quoting Lenin: “Promises are like pie crusts, made to be broken.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles used it in a speech shortly afterward, one of many to do so during the cold war. Lenin actually did use a very similar line, but he explicitly stated that he was quoting an English proverb (it comes from Jonathan Swift) and his purpose was to show the unreliability of the bourgeoisie, not of communists.

“First we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia, then we will encircle the United States, which will be the last bastion of capitalism. We will not have to attack. It will fall like an overripe fruit into our hands.” This Lenin “quotation” had the usual wide circulation, even winding up in the Congressional Record in 1962. This was not simply a careless attribution; this was an out-and-out fabrication; an extensive search, including by the Library of Congress and the United States Information Agency failed to find its origin.

* A favorite theme of the anti-communists was that a principal force behind drug trafficking was a communist plot to demoralize the United States. Here's a small sample:

Don Keller, District Attorney for San Diego County, California in 1953: “We know that more heroin is being produced south of the border than ever before and we are beginning to hear stories of financial backing by big shot Communists operating out of Mexico City.”

Henry Giordano, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1964, interviewed in the American Legion Magazine: Interviewer: “I've been told that the communists are trying to flood our country with narcotics to weaken our moral and physical stamina. Is that true?”

Giordano: “As far as the drugs are concerned, it's true. There's a terrific flow of drugs coming out of Yunnan Province of China. ... There's no question that in that particular area this is the aim of the Red Chinese. It should be apparent that if you could addict a population you would degrade a nation's moral fiber.”

Fulton Lewis, Jr., prominent conservative radio broadcaster and newspaper columnist, 1965: “Narcotics of Cuban origin -- marijuana, cocaine, opium, and heroin -- are now peddled in big cities and tiny hamlets throughout this country. Several Cubans arrested by the Los Angeles police have boasted they are communists.”

We were also told that along with drugs another tool of the commies to undermine America's spirit was fluoridation of the water.

* Mickey Spillane was one of the most successful writers of the 1950s, selling millions of his anticommunist thriller mysteries. Here is his hero, Mike Hammer, in “One Lonely Night”, boasting of his delight in the grisly murders he commits, all in the name of destroying a communist plot to steal atomic secrets. After a night of carnage, the triumphant Hammer gloats, “I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it. I pumped slugs into the nastiest bunch of bastards you ever saw. ... They were Commies. ... Pretty soon what's left of Russia and the slime that breeds there won't be worth mentioning and I'm glad because I had a part in the killing. God, but it was fun!”

* 1952: A campaign against the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization because it was tainted with “atheism and communism”, and was “subversive” because it preached internationalism. Any attempt to introduce an international point of view in the schools was seen as undermining patriotism and loyalty to the United States. A bill in the US Senate, clearly aimed at UNESCO, called for a ban on the funding of “any international agency that directly or indirectly promoted one-world government or world citizenship.” There was also opposition to UNESCO's association with the UN Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that it was trying to replace the American Bill of Rights with a less liberty-giving covenant of human rights.

* 1955: A US Army 6-page pamphlet, “How to Spot a Communist”, informed us that a communist could be spotted by his predisposition to discuss civil rights, racial and religious discrimination, the immigration laws, anti-subversive legislation, curbs on unions, and peace. Good Americans were advised to keep their ears stretched for such give-away terms as "chauvinism", "book-burning", "colonialism", "demagogy", "witch hunt", "reactionary", "progressive", and "exploitation". Another “distinguishing mark” of “Communist language” was a “preference for long sentences.” After some ridicule, the Army rescinded the pamphlet.

* 1958: The noted sportscaster Bill Stern (one of the heroes of my youth) observed on the radio that the lack of interest in "big time" football at New York University, City College of New York, Chicago, and Harvard "is due to the widespread acceptance of Communism at the universities."

* 1960: US General Thomas Power speaking about nuclear war or a first strike by the US: "The whole idea is to kill the bastards! At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!" The response from one of those present was: "Well, you'd better make sure that they're a man and a woman."

* 1966: The Boys Club of America is of course wholesome and patriotic. Imagine their horror when they were confused with the Dubois Clubs. (W.E.B. Du Bois had been a very prominent civil rights activist.) When the Justice Department required the DuBois Clubs to register as a Communist front group, good loyal Americans knew what to do. They called up the Boys Club to announce that they would no longer contribute any money, or to threaten violence against them; and sure enough an explosion damaged the national headquarters of the youth group in San Francisco. Then former Vice President Richard Nixon, who was national board chairman of the Boys Club, declared: “This is an almost classic example of Communist deception and duplicity. The 'DuBois Clubs' are not unaware of the confusion they are causing among our supporters and among many other good citizens.”

* 1966: “Rhythm, Riots and Revolution: An Analysis of the Communist Use of Music, The Communist Master Music Plan”, by David A. Noebel, published by Christian Crusade Publications, (expanded version of 1965 pamphlet: “Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles”). Some chapters: Communist Use of Mind Warfare ... Nature of Red Record Companies ... Destructive Nature of Beatle Music ... Communist Subversion of Folk Music ... Folk Music and the Negro Revolution ... Folk Music and the College Revolution

* 1968: William Calley, US Army Lieutenant, charged with overseeing the massacre of more than 100 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai in 1968, said some years later: "In all my years in the Army I was never taught that communists were human beings. We were there to kill ideology carried by -- I don't know -- pawns, blobs, pieces of flesh. I was there to destroy communism. We never conceived of old people, men, women, children, babies."

* 1977: Scientists theorized that the earth's protective ozone layer was being damaged by synthetic chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons. The manufacturers and users of CFCs were not happy. They made life difficult for the lead scientist. The president of one aerosol manufacturing firm suggested that criticism of CFCs was “orchestrated by the Ministry of Disinformation of the KGB.”

* 1978: Life inside a California youth camp of the ultra anti-communist John Birch Society: Five hours each day of lectures on communism, Americanism and “The Conspiracy”; campers learned that the Soviet government had created a famine and spread a virus to kill a large number of citizens and make the rest of them more manageable; the famine led starving adults to eat their children; communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia jammed chopsticks into children's ears, piercing their eardrums; American movies are all under the control of the Communists; the theme is always that capitalism is no better than communism; you can't find a dictionary now that isn't under communist influence; the communists are also taking over the Bibles.

* The Reagan administration declared that the Russians were spraying toxic chemicals over Laos, Cambodia and Afghanistan -- the so-called "yellow rain" -- and had caused more than ten thousand deaths by 1982 alone, (including, in Afghanistan, 3,042 deaths attributed to 47 separate incidents between the summer of 1979 and the summer of 1981, so precise was the information). Secretary of State Alexander Haig was a prime dispenser of such stories, and President Reagan himself denounced the Soviet Union thusly more than 15 times in documents and speeches. The "yellow rain", it turned out, was pollen-laden feces dropped by huge swarms of honeybees flying far overhead.

* 1982: In commenting about sexual harassment in the Army, General John Crosby stated that the Army doesn't care about soldiers' social lives -- “The basic purpose of the United States Army is to kill Russians,” he said.

* 1983: The US invasion of Grenada, the home of the Cuban ambassador is damaged and looted by American soldiers; on one wall is written "AA", symbol of the 82nd Airborne Division; beside it the message: "Eat shit, commie faggot." ... "I want to fuck communism out of this little island," says a marine, "and fuck it right back to Moscow.”

* 1984: During a sound check just before his weekly broadcast, President Reagan spoke these words into the microphone: “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I have signed legislation to outlaw Russia, forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” His words were picked up by at least two radio networks.

* 1985: October 29 BBC interview with Ronald Reagan: asked about the differences he saw between the US and Russia, the president replied: “I'm no linguist, but I've been told that in the Russian language there isn't even a word for freedom.” (The word is “svoboda”.)

* 1986: Soviet artists and cultural officials criticized Rambo-like American films as an expression of “anti-Russian phobia even more pathological than in the days of McCarthyism”. Russian film-maker Stanislav Rostofsky claimed that on one visit to an American school “a young girl had trembled with fury when she heard I was from the Soviet Union, and said she hated Russians.”

* 1986: Roy Cohn, who achieved considerable fame and notoriety in the 1950s as an assistant to the communist-witch-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy, died, reportedly of AIDS. Cohn, though homosexual, had denied that he was and had denounced such rumors as communist smears.

* 1986: After American journalist Nicholas Daniloff was arrested in Moscow for “spying” and held in custody for two weeks, New York Mayor Edward Koch sent a group of 10 visiting Soviet students storming out of City Hall in fury. “The Soviet government is the pits,” said Koch, visibly shocking the students, ranging in age from 10 to 18 years. One 14-year-old student was so outraged he declared: “I don't want to stay in this house. I want to go to the bus and go far away from this place. The mayor is very rude. We never had a worse welcome anywhere.” As matters turned out, it appeared that Daniloff had not been completely pure when it came to his news gathering.

* 1989: After the infamous Chinese crackdown on dissenters in Tiananmen Square in June, the US news media was replete with reports that the governments of Nicaragua, Vietnam and Cuba had expressed their support of the Chinese leadership. Said the Wall Street Journal: “Nicaragua, with Cuba and Vietnam, constituted the only countries in the world to approve the Chinese Communists' slaughter of the students in Tiananmen Square.” But it was all someone's fabrication; no such support had been expressed by any of the three governments. At that time, as now, there were few, if any, organizations other than the CIA which could manipulate major Western media in such a manner.

NOTE: It should be remembered that the worst consequences of anti-communism were not those discussed above. The worst consequences, the ultra-criminal consequences, were the abominable death, destruction, and violation of human rights that we know under various names: Vietnam, Chile, Korea, Guatemala, Cambodia, Indonesia, Brazil, Greece, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and many others.

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.

He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com

Rand's quote about Obama at Copenhagen rolling back the industrial revolution alongside Our Enemies Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales fits right in. And again it's an example of how Rand's going out of his way to look for extraneous fights on traditional Republican hot-button memes. His current bad PR is hardly the result of the mean liberals out to get him.

[Wombaticus Rex]

@17Breezes 100% disagree -- there is nothing easy about the raw naked fact that the majority of the human race is terminally stupid and easily mis-led. Humans are sense-making machines and that is of course our greatest asset and our terrifying weakness, etc. The simple data point of how many humans identify with religious beliefs that are easily torn apart by a curious 5 year old is enough to end the conversation. Every democracy on Earth's track record only proves the case further.

Even when facts are big, obvious and hard to maneuver around, it's still not "Easy" to explain them, and it is most definitely not easy trying to figure out how to improve the collective lot of humanity when we remain our own biggest existential threat. The implications of the human herd are very, very hard. Men like Kissinger and Goebbels and Gingrich and Rubin and Soros and Brzezinski became monsters on the belief they were taking a logical approach to a global problem...Ghandi came up with some great shit, though!!

[17breezes]

@17Breezes 100% disagree -- there is nothing easy about the raw naked fact that the majority of the human race is terminally stupid and easily mis-led. Humans are sense-making machines and that is of course our greatest asset and our terrifying weakness, etc. The simple data point of how many humans identify with religious beliefs that are easily torn apart by a curious 5 year old is enough to end the conversation. Every democracy on Earth's track record only proves the case further.

Even when facts are big, obvious and hard to maneuver around, it's still not "Easy" to explain them, and it is most definitely not easy trying to figure out how to improve the collective lot of humanity when we remain our own biggest existential threat. The implications of the human herd are very, very hard. Men like Kissinger and Goebbels and Gingrich and Rubin and Soros and Brzezinski became monsters on the belief they were taking a logical approach to a global problem...Ghandi came up with some great shit, though!!

But see how easily you dismiss the the majority of the human race. Of course you must be ok cause you can see this while they can't. Fortunate you. The implications of such elitist thinking are creepy and have led historically to untold horrors.

[Jeff]

The implications of such elitist thinking are creepy and have led historically to untold horrors.

History is a horror, not its tragic and obvious lessons.

I don't understand what you're saying, and what you don't want to hear.

[17breezes]

The implications of such elitist thinking are creepy and have led historically to untold horrors.

History is a horror, not its tragic and obvious lessons.

I don't understand what you're saying, and what you don't want to hear.

I don't like to hear a person or persons setting themselves up as being smarter/better than the "majority," of humanity. There are no saints; merely people who are better at doing whatever the poster/critic admires. Odds are their IQ's fall into about the same average as the butchers and bad guys. Dislike them, hate them but don't generalize them. As nasty as the tea partiers can be it's counterintuitive to suggest that they are stupid, less moral or more racist as a group than the "enlightened." Funny how they and others who piss off the enlightened are an acceptable "other," to be targets now that the traditional "others," are off limits.

And of course the great majority of history is not horror although horrors did happen. The majority of it was just people being people doing great things and mundane things and everything in between. Lord save us from the saviours.

[JackRiddler]

@17Breezes 100% disagree -- there is nothing easy about the raw naked fact that the majority of the human race is terminally stupid and easily mis-led. Humans are sense-making machines and that is of course our greatest asset and our terrifying weakness, etc. The simple data point of how many humans identify with religious beliefs that are easily torn apart by a curious 5 year old is enough to end the conversation. Every democracy on Earth's track record only proves the case further.

Yes, but here I have to say that every dictatorship and every system of explicitly elite rule has provided even more proof. The reason for democracy is not in the greater wisdom of the crowd but in the fact that insulated elites get just as stupid and blindered, above all in their ability to persuade themselves that their interests should be primary, or to fool themselves into thinking their interests are general. A clash of empowered interests, including the "stupid" ones, puts the brakes on total abuse.

But beyond that, the temptation (which I take daily) is to try to figure out a system rational enough that it really does serve the people in a way they embrace it as just. I'm not talking coerced or spooky harmonies, if you take a look there are a great many institutions with overwhelming, near-unanimous consensus because almost everyone agrees they're just fine, like fire departments and the ban on chattel slavery. How to increase that sphere without coercion or self-delusion?

[JackRiddler]

The implications of such elitist thinking are creepy and have led historically to untold horrors.

History is a horror, not its tragic and obvious lessons.

I don't understand what you're saying, and what you don't want to hear.

I don't like to hear a person or persons setting themselves up as being smarter/better than the "majority," of humanity. There are no saints; merely people who are better at doing whatever the poster/critic admires. Odds are their IQ's fall into about the same average as the butchers and bad guys. Dislike them, hate them but don't generalize them. As nasty as the tea partiers can be it's counterintuitive to suggest that they are stupid, less moral or more racist as a group than the "enlightened." Funny how they and others who piss off the enlightened are an acceptable "other," to be targets now that the traditional "others," are off limits.

And of course the great majority of history is not horror although horrors did happen. The majority of it was just people being people doing great things and mundane things and everything in between. Lord save us from the saviours.

Insecure vagaries. Conservative platitudes about how anyone advocating changes beyond some tiny threshold of the mediocre imagination is a self appointed savior who will bring destruction. Rather contrary to the actual track record of the world, including all the great things that have happened.

The woo of mundane things: oh how beautiful and mysterious is this world as it is already, and all its parts equally beautiful and necessary! Can and has been used to justify any state. (For example, the abolitionists were the "enlightened" "saviors" of the 1830s.) Has its truth - in meditation - but little to say about what to do.

Stupid is as stupid does. The empirical evidence of Tea Party stupidity is in the stupid things they say. How this is related to their IQs is not my concern. I have no sense of biological superiority.

[17breezes]

@17Breezes 100% disagree -- there is nothing easy about the raw naked fact that the majority of the human race is terminally stupid and easily mis-led. Humans are sense-making machines and that is of course our greatest asset and our terrifying weakness, etc. The simple data point of how many humans identify with religious beliefs that are easily torn apart by a curious 5 year old is enough to end the conversation. Every democracy on Earth's track record only proves the case further.

Yes, but here I have to say that every dictatorship and every system of explicitly elite rule has provided even more proof. The reason for democracy is not in the greater wisdom of the crowd but in the fact that insulated elites get just as stupid and blindered, above all in their ability to persuade themselves that their interests should be primary, or to fool themselves into thinking their interests are general. A clash of empowered interests, including the "stupid" ones, puts the brakes on total abuse.

But beyond that, the temptation (which I take daily) is to try to figure out a system rational enough that it really does serve the people in a way they embrace it as just. I'm not talking coerced or spooky harmonies, if you take a look there are a great many institutions with overwhelming, near-unanimous consensus because almost everyone agrees they're just fine, like fire departments and the ban on chattel slavery. How to increase that sphere without coercion or self-delusion?

The eternal search for a utopia where the laws of human nature are suspended. Your only hope as I see it would be massive genetic re-engineering to rid us of basic biological drives.

[American Dream]

17breezes wrote:

The eternal search for a utopia where the laws of human nature are suspended. Your only hope as I see it would be massive genetic re-engineering to rid us of basic biological drives.

Your assumptions deserve more critical inquiry. Human beings have the capacity for solidarity and altruism as well as competition, aggression and selfishness.

Given that we are embedded in social systems that reward the search for self-interest far more than the collective values mentioned above, there seems to be be more going here than the simple biological determinism which you posit...

[JackRiddler]

The eternal search for a utopia where the laws of human nature are suspended. Your only hope as I see it would be massive genetic re-engineering to rid us of basic biological drives.

You mean, the "search" that produced every single human institution since gathering and hunting gave way to settlements and agriculture? The "utopian" arrangements that founded every village and town and country, set rules for the sacraments of initiation, marriage and death, wrote every law and constitution, created the "market" and the "state" and the churches, brought forth every invention and convention, including the ones known as "tradition"? The human imagination thinking it was possible to devise ways to do things better for everyone, the horror that gave birth to the metric system and the ISO industrial standards? That mad utopian Tim Berners-Lee, who came up with the idea that there could be a single language and set of protocols for one, global communications platform on the Web? That totalitarian monster! Quick, get offline now, 17breezes, SAVE YOURSELF!!!

Rooted in the Western tradition of "anti-communism" that had very little to do with communism, the contemporary habit of attacking "Utopia" per se is prima facie meaningless. Its real meaning is as a codeword for preserving the status quo system and ruling class as the only possibility; anything other than the capitalist market system as practiced above all in the United States, where it is nothing more than "nature," any different idea no matter what it is, will bring horror and death and Zimbabwe and Somalia and the Soviets proved it didn't work and blah blah blah booga booga run away!

[17breezes]

The eternal search for a utopia where the laws of human nature are suspended. Your only hope as I see it would be massive genetic re-engineering to rid us of basic biological drives.

You mean, the "search" that produced every single human institution since gathering and hunting gave way to settlements and agriculture? The "utopian" arrangements that founded every village and town and country, set rules for the sacraments of initiation, marriage and death, wrote every law and constitution, created the "market" and the "state" and the churches, brought forth every invention and convention, including the ones known as "tradition"? The human imagination thinking it was possible to devise ways to do things better for everyone, the horror that gave birth to the metric system and the ISO industrial standards? That mad utopian Tim Berners-Lee, who came up with the idea that there could be a single language and set of protocols for one, global communications platform on the Web? That totalitarian monster! Quick, get offline now, 17breezes, SAVE YOURSELF!!!

Rooted in the Western tradition of "anti-communism" that had very little to do with communism, the contemporary habit of attacking "Utopia" per se is prima facie meaningless. Its real meaning is as a codeword for preserving the status quo system and ruling class as the only possibility; anything other than the capitalist market system as practiced above all in the United States, where it is nothing more than "nature," any different idea no matter what it is, will bring horror and death and Zimbabwe and Somalia and the Soviets proved it didn't work and blah blah blah booga booga run away!

LOL, Jack.

Hey just for you I looked up the location of Eden on Google. It says, "turn left and keep going as far as you can."

Have a good day.

[Jeff]

Hey just for you I looked up the location of Eden on Google. It says, "turn left and keep going as far as you can."

Cool. Though since utopians were among the first casualities of the Anthropocene extinction I don't know whose ribs you're poking.

[JackRiddler]

Hey just for you I looked up the location of Eden on Google. It says, "turn left and keep going as far as you can."

Have a good day.

Oh no! I'm so sorry. Now I see why you were upset by references to stupidity. I should have shown more sensitivity to your condition. Forgive me.

[82_28]

COMMAND SHORT WHAT IT DOES
FORWARD FD Moves the turtle forward. Requires a numerical input.
BACK BK Moves the turtle backward. Requires a numerical input.
RIGHT RT Turns the turtle right. You must define the number of degrees.
I present you with Terrapin Logo.

LEFT LT Turns the turtle left. You must define the number of degrees.
PENUP PU When this command is activated, the turtle will not draw as it moves.
PENDOWN PD Negates PENUP.
DRAW Clears all lines and returns the turtle to the center of the screen.
CLEARSCREEN CS Clears the screen. Duh.
HOME Returns the turtle to the center of the screen. It will draw a line unless PENUP is on.
PRINT [TEXT] Prints whatever text you put in the brackets. Oooh fun.
HIDETURTLE HT Hides the turtle.
SHOWTURTLE ST Come on, take a fucking guess.
PENCOLOR PC Change the color of the lines you draw. Totally useless on a monochrome monitor.
BACKGROUND BG Change the background color. Just as useless as PENCOLOR.
FULLSCREEN CTRL-F Hides the text prompt.
SPLITSCREEN CTRL-S Splits the screen between the drawing space and the text prompt.
TEXTSCREEN CTRL-T Hides the drawing space.
EDIT ED Enter editor mode and define procedures.

Keep turning left, as they say. You'll get there.



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