babble Hall of Fame: version X.2.1

You want gun control?  Start a website devoted to arming the left.  Education on weapons, how to purchase, how to navigate the regulations, etc.

You'd have gun control faster than Flaherty at a blind man kicking contest.

Hey, this is a thread about personal attacks, not techo-babble. Either launch a personal attack or go elsewhere.

Bagkitty shadow moderating the personal attack thread...

 

Sven,

I think the individualism you promote would have been very sensible in the 18th century, when the state of philosophical knowledge was as it was. The simple fact is that a lot of these individualist theories have been comprehensively discredited by reasoned arguments and detailed research. They simply don't hold. I don't buy into the environmental determinism of a few on this thread but they very much have a point and they're closer to reality than you are. I'll address some of your points.

 

This for example is a completely false dichotomy. The example that immediately comes to mind is the 1960s USian civil rights act, which a lot of charlatan libertarians like to argue forced a behavioral system on innocent business owners by government fiat. It was nothing like that... it was the business owners forcing their backwards way of mind onto African Americans for hundreds of years. The nominal change that there was was not brought in "by government", but actually by the collective individual actions of millions of people who were actively fighting the system and bringing tremendous pressure on the Johnson administration.

 

Blaming video games is a nice populist theory but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. There simply are better schools, better learning environments and better teachers and these make a tremendous difference. There's an excellent article in this month's The Atlantic which investigates 20 years of data that Teach for America has collected on the rrecent graduates it sends to inner city schools. They try and select for better teachers, and now they find that 44% of their teachers succeed in raising their students test scores by over 1.5 grade levels. If teachers didn't matter as you imply then that wouldn't be the case.

In all schools, there's a distribution of the amount of time kids spend on video games, as there is between schools as well. It's not the games. It's everything. Teachers, schools, home environment, etc.

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If anything, going after simple explanations like "video games" is not jut false, it's lazy. You're being frightened away from the underlying complexity of reality, because you don't want to think that hard and you might not like the answers.

Well, there is the thousand David Frum rule, I'll give you that.   

 

But without mummy, and unless marrying astutely is a journalistic skill, there's not much between him and "would you like fries with that?"

In fact, a true conservative would look at the huge amounts put away by Norway over a relatively short period of time and recognize Alberta as financially imprudent, at best, and probably stupefied by an idiotic ideology that argues you put yourself first by screwing thyself and beggaring thy neighbour while handing all thine wealth to huge corporations that will leave your home a smoldering ruin when they're done. What a bunch of fucking idiots.

Come on; who else defends ethnic cleansing, theft and murder because God is their realtor?

I don't understand these kinds of comments.  They're portraying the people who are crticial of DiNovo with all these stereotypes of people on the left.  That we're purists who denounce anyone who strays from the party line, that we're doctrinaire, wtc.

We need to remember, that it was DiNovo who denounced us and called people nasty things on facebook and whatnot.  Why aren't people saying "Okay, so the IAW folks aren't perfect.  Who is?  But so, not every one of their views aligns perfectly with the self-anointed adjudicator of what is acceptable on the left, Cheri DiNovo"

I mean, this is really showing some messed up and unbalanced power relations between activists and politicians on the left.  It's almost saying that we need to quickly forgive them for their transgressions, while they are free to constantly denounce us for our principles.

Well the problem with a monument to the victims of capitalism is that you need to put an electronic ticker on it to keep tallying up the victims...

What a moron.

I think there are US style Trotskyists who feel that socialism can't possibly survive without first condemning the Soviets, Koreans and Cubans as having been the evil empire. They feel obligated to legitimize themselves in the presence of liberals and conservatives. And I find they tend to sound a lot like American and Canadian conservatives at times when regurgitating the rabid anti-communist cold war era rhetoric.

Apparently there's such a clamour out there for making parliament work with the harpocrites, that it compels opposition parties through the sheer weight of public opinion to bend their entire ideology to the task.

Those who preach cynicism about social change are worse enemies than the "real" enemies. Their efforts demoralize others and poison them with the same virus that they are infected with.

Relax trippie this is a party of one.

I'm not sure if you realize the irony of your post.

Alan -- I agree.

The media, owned by big business love him, and enough voters either want a tax cut because they are doing well; hope to do well and use the tax cut later; or are stupid enough to think that policies designed to help those better off than them are somehow in the end going to help them and the apathetic.

We already have a coalition of sorts: the greedy, the stupid and the apathetic and the currency is propaganda.

This is true. Liberals seem to believe they are "entitled" to the support of NDP voters in close races with the Cons.

In my riding, Etobicoke Centre, the incumbent Liberal lost to the Conservative by 26 votes (there will be a recount). The Liberal blames the NDP, who ran third. In actual fact, the Conservative vote increased by 2,822 and the Liberal vote decreased by 2,902; those Con votes didn't come from the NDP, but from the Liberals.

Personally, I blame the Marxist-Leninists for the Con win. Their 149 votes exceeds the Conservative margin of victory! 

As the saying goes, I'd use The Province for toilet paper, except it's already covered in crap.

[Generic troll name], you've been warned about displaying contempt for leftist politics through your baiting before. I think you know what's wrong with post 7 and you're smart enough to be more precise in your smearing off the left, this board and it's politics. Be more judicious in the future.

Where did this happen?

Bigfoot goes down on the science of it. [...] But religion cowers and claims special protection from such examination, and those who hold those positions get all huffy and feel persecuted when their ideas wither in front of reasoned probing. 

So I'm not so sure it's us being rude, so much as the awakening.

I've been following US politics since Eisenhower, and, if you'll exuse my use of the vulgate, it gets more fucking nuts every year.  Exponentially so I might add. Like really it's gone from Dr. Strangelove to a bad Coen brothers movie way past anything The Onion could imagine as satire, right into the realm of methyl alchohol induced nightmares.

They should replace bloody Washington on their money with Edvard Munch's 'the Scream"!