Interesting how you pull Dean's tax hikes and massive new government programs out of my post before
questioning whether he is really `left', eh?
As for the others, abortion is an issue which follows a very clear left/right divide among politicians in this country,
although it is true that the big majority of the population as a whole, right or left, favors some limits on late
term abortion.
Affirmative action, which presumes that it is okay for the state to discriminate racially as long as it's ``for a good cause'' (``for the children'', if you will) is another issue whose support in this country comes almost exclusively from the left.
So, to the extent that Dean supports unlimited abortion in the last trimester and supports affirmative action, he is taking
left wing positions, just as to the extent to which he wants tax hikes and more government bureaucracy, he is taking left
wing positions. Since he supports abortion and affirmative action more than than the other democratic candidates, and wants
a much larger tax hike than they do, he is clearly to the left of them.
Indeed, there is only one area in which Dean takes a typically right-wing position, or one on which a majority of us self-identified
conservatives would agree with him, and that's gun control, where Dean has always earned perfect scores from the NRA.
While I'm not thrilled about the Steel Tarrif (now repealed), the medicare bill is
so large and bloated for the simple reason that it's a compromise measure which would
not otherwise have passed. It also does have provisions (though not enough)
to force exploration of competition and privatization to reduce the cost of medicare.
But on spending, you're only correct if you count tax cuts as spending (as the Democratic
party candidates do, oddly enough). This is clearly nonsensical -- if I take less of your
money away, that's not an expenditure of my part, and if taking less money away from
consumers and investors results in the biggest economic growth in 20 years (as Bush's tax
cuts have for two quarters now), well, it sure looks like a good idea to me.:-)
This is certainly true -- remember that Dean was the leader of the Democractic Governor's Association,
which is about as mainstream a Democratic Party group as you're likely to find. So the real story here
is not about a `revolution' (much less a `hijacking') of the party, but of a more or less traditional
power struggle between factions within the party.
At the moment, the factions in the fight are mainly Dean and his backers, and the Clinton wing of the party,
including party head Terry MacAulliffe. Whether the party leans toward Dean, or toward the Clintonistas'
chosen candidate (Clarke) will tell us a lot about where the party is going.
I'm happy to say, however, that I don't think either of them has a snowball's chance in the hot place of
beating Bush.
And as a final note, one thing to keep in mind about last-minute shifts in the 2000 election is that the
last weekend of the race, after that last friday, saw the mysterious leak of a thirty-year-old accusation
of drunk driving by Bush -- so I think the shift may have as much to do with dirty tricks as with
electioneering.
Okay, let's see: Social issues? Dean is pro-civil-unions, pro-abortion-through-the-third-trimester-without-p arental-consent, pro-affirmative-action. Fiscal issues? Dean wants
a massive tax hike, a massive new government medical bureaucracy, and increased spending. Foreign policy? Dean wants to pull out of Iraq before
reconstruction is complete, ``reach out'' to state sponsors of terror, and pay off North Korea.
In other words, I can only think of one issue on which Dean is anything but far left, and that's gun control, where he has indeed
earned a perfect score from the NRA.
`down the middle'? I guess I'm just not seeing it...
There we go ladies and gentlemen -- for yet another post, `jasonbw' tells us that the
post is `statistical' (though `not as much as he remembers'), and is `inaccurate' (though he
can't find a single `inaccuracy' to point at.
I'm not really convinced, at this point, that he has any `credibility' left to `insult' (if
defending the article is an insult to his credibility, that is -- by now I'd say that the point
that he hasn't read it stands for itself).
While I understand that reading is not your strong suit, had you read
the parent post, you would have seen that jasonbw said:
Actually, you missed one of my first points, that being, that the article has changed since i read it back in
april of 2003. The following mostly refers to an earlier version of the article.
There you go -- the reason `jasonbw' gave a description of the article which in no way resembled the
article itself was not because he hadn't read the article. Oh, no, ladies and gentlemen -- the reason
was that `they' had gone in and changed the article right after he read it.
I'd say anyone still reading can judge for themselves how credible a theory that is, so instead I'd like
to review each of the ten points made by the article, to see if either of his two claims about the article
(that it was ``all statistics'' or that ``all but two or three points were bullshit'') hold up:
Point 1: Willie Horton Moore's Claim: That an ad George H W Bush ran in 1992 refered to Willie Horton by name Why it's a lie: To make this point, Moore, incredibly, splices together the ad Bush did run, which
never mentioned Willie Horton, with a video from another group. But this isn't enough for Moore -- he then
photoshops text of his own into the ad, so he can claim it says something it never said. Is it `statistical': No. Is it `bullshit': No, Moore has admitted that he spliced two videos together and added text of his own.
Point 2A: NRA Reaction to Columbine Moore's Claim: The NRA Scheduled a meeting in Colorado in response to Columbine, in which Charlton Heston
gave the speech shown in the movie Why it's a lie: The meeting in Colorado was an annual shareholder's meeting required by law for the NRA
to maintain non-profit status, and was scheduled months before Columbine. In response to Columbine, Heston ordered
the meeting scaled back to the minimum size and length required by law, and gave a somber speech. However, Moore
is up to his video-editing tricks again -- he edits together clips from several speeches given on other locations
to create a different speech than the one Heston gave. Is it `statistical': No. Is it `bullshit': No, the article links the text of the speech from the movie and the full text as recorded
by the news media at the time.
Point 2B: NRA Reaction to Mt. Morris shooting Moore's Claim: The NRA met in Flint Michigan ``48 hours'' after the shootings in Mt. Morris, Michigan Why it's a lie: The meeting in Michigan occurred as part of the presidential campaign eight months
after the shooting. Moore takes the following sentence from a news report ``48-hours after Kayla Rolland is pronounced dead, Bill Clinton is on The Today Show telling a sympathetic Katie Couric, "Maybe this tragic death will help."'' and zooms the words ``48-hours after Kayla Rolland is pronounced dead''
to cover the rest of the text, then reads the rest as ``Charlton Heston showed up in Flint, to have a big pro-gun rally''. Is it `statistical': No. Is it `bullshit': No, the article shows the real text of the article and the zoomed version as used in the film.
Point 2C: Charlton Heston Moore's Claim: Charlton Heston, when interviewed by Moore, was insensitive to a shooting death Moore described Why it's a lie: A close look at stills of the scene in question show that Moore asking the question was filmed later,
without Heston present, and then spliced in Is it `statistical': No. Is it `bullshit': No, the article links to the stills which show this
Point 3: NRA and KKK Moore's Claim: That the NRA was created by KKK members Why it's a lie: The NRA was created by Ullyses Grant, who had been one of the KKK's strongest opponents (he's the one who banned
the Klan in 1871(, and it's early leaders were Grant and General Sheridan, who had routed pro-Klan officials from posts in So
On the contrary, I find all ten points correct, and I'm confident that others here who go read it will
do the same.
These are not minor things, after all -- each of the ten points is a case where Moore claimed one thing,
and the truth was drastically different.
However, it's clear that your claim to have even read the article is highly suspect, since:
You repeatedly described the article's arguments as `statistical', when in fact only one of the
ten points is statistical in nature at all, and that one only to point out that Moore is misrepresenting
crime figures by not scaling to crime figures (Moore seems to think that a country with 10% of the US'
population but more than 10% of the US' number of gun crime incidents has a lower crime rate than the US).
You claim to have `extensively analyzed' the arguments in the article, yet in four or five posts so far,
you haven't named a single statement in the article which you disagree with.
Your constant handwaving and avoidance of discussing any of the article's actual statements suggests
a real reluctance to actually read or respond to the article.
So, how about it: you've claimed that ``all but two or three'' of the articles ten points are ``just statistics''
and are ``bullshit'', yet in this entire thread so far, you have yet to provide a single example of either.
There we have it, ladies and gentlemen: ``since Moore is doing this for the wellbeing of more people (for the children, if you will), it's okay that he lies. And besides, he didn't lie so much.''
As for what he changed ``about the man'', let's look at the facts: Charlton Heston was a close friend of Martin Luther
King, a civil rights activist back when that was a dangerous and career-limiting thing to be, and a leader of the March
on Washington in which Dr. King gave his famous `I have a dream' speech. Moore, in the process of splicing a half-hour-plus
interview into about five minutes of screen time, splices together a word here and a word there from several sentences to try to create the impression that Heston is a racist.
`op51n' feels that this is ``doesn't make it fiction'' -- that this doesn't `change anything about the man', and that in any case, it's acceptable because Moore is doing this for your own ``wellbeing''.
Perhaps op51n is happy with this position. Read the article (which presents a number of such outright lies, of which this one is not even the most blatant) and see if you are, too.:-)
And, again, unless your position is that the Soviets would not have built a nuclear stockpile
in the absence of a US buildup, the US buildup has nothing to do with proliferation of the Soviet
stockpile.
And if proliferation is entirely at the feet of the Soviet system, we should be happy that that system is no more (this is but one among the many reasons
we should be happy for the decline of that system, of course). That that
occurred through US maintenance of a credible deterrent (as even Gorbachev now acknowledges) is a strong argument that that deterrent
was a good idea.
Let's see if I understand your argument here: ``a bunch of fanatics who want to destroy
any country which does not match their idea of what God wants a government and society
to look like are receiving state sponsorship which makes their attacks much more deadly.
So the right solution is not to set about removing these state sponsors (which are also
horribly oppressive of their own people), but to try and convince these madmen to like us,
so they won't attack us again''.
All of which misses two big facts here: a.) the former Republics did, in fact, almost universally return not
only all nuclear munitions and missiles, but most other weapons systems to Russia when the Soviet Union broke up, and
it is from Russia that proliferation is a concern, and b.) far from being `bankrupt', Russia is a large economy, a net
oil exporter, and likely soon to be a major world economic player.
Is it really your position that Russia was `too poor' to keep track of its nuclear weapons, yet somehow not too poor to
maintain a large military, and to keep purchasing new conventional weapons systems?
Do not mistake ``too poor to maintain a vast empire'' with ``too poor to function as an independent country''. North Korea
is hardly an economic powerhouse (much of its population is on the verge of starvation), yet it continues to produce nuclear
weapons, for instance.
If proliferation were a factor of the number of weapons produced, you could argue that this was
the case. However, as I just pointed out, were this the case, the US and the Soviet stockpiles would
both be proliferation sources. Since, in actual fact, the US stockpile is not such a source, it's
clear that it is the mismanagement of existing stockpiles by both the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia
which produces a proliferation risk.
That means that unless you are arguing that the Soviets would not have produced a stockpile of nuclear
weapons in any case, you're in no position, try as you might, to blame the US for the handling of Soviet
weapons -- and in any case, you can't blame the weapons system which the Soviets failed to
produce for proliferation of those they did produce.
But there's more to the picture even so -- that the threat model we are now worried about is a terrorist
group or rogue state with one, or two, or five warheads, rather than a global human-life-on-earth-destroying
thermonuclear war shows that the end of the Soviet Union was a huge win even if you find some way
to `Blame America First' for Soviet mismanagement of nuclear munitions. And this holds even if you,
incorrectly, assume that ``what didn't happen was thus never likely'' and thus hold that nuclear war was not
a very real possiblity had deterrence failed.
Your parent cited fundamental flaws in who seemingly exerts influence within each organization.
No, no the parent post did not. It made vague claims about the `nature' of DHS, without providing any of the specifics which
might, if true, make such claims anything more than FUD.
So maybe we can attribute the massive nuclear arms buildup, and the very real current risk of nuclear proliferation to terrorist
states and "rogue nations" to the "peacemaker" and as well??? Thats not what I call peace.
If you could provide us with any reason to believe that the Soviets would not have built nuclear weapons without the Peacemaker,
you might be able to make this claim -- you'd still have to explain why you're so eager to blame a weapons program which the Soviets
failed to reproduce for the weapons the Soviets had made in earlier decades, however -- as well as why, if building the MX
Misslie is what leads to proliferation, it is Soviet warheads, and not the MX Missile, which are the weapons actually at risk of being proliferated.
Leaving Godwin aside for a moment, do you actually have a point here? Would you care to actually back up any of your claims?
You assert that the creation of DHS is `unconstitutional', for example, yet you fail to give any argument why combining several
federal agencies which had existed for decades could be `unconstitutional' if the prior existence of the agencies themselves was not.
You suggest that the `favored mode of operation' of DHS is to `suppress' people, but surely you agree that this is mere FUD if
you cannot provide any examples.
And finally, you suggest that DHS is not interested in protecting the homeland (the only claim which might make the original poster's
claim that the name `Department of Homeland Security' is `Orwellian'), but you don't back this claim up either, nor explain whether
you think the customs service, the coast guard, the office of the postal inspector-general and the other organizations which were merged to form the DHS were ``oppressive'' before they merged, or if cutting through the
bureaucratic mess which made these agencies so ineffective before is what makes them ``oppressive'' in your view.
Actually, when one refers to language as ``Orwellian'', it is exactly to doublespeak
that he is referring -- one of history's supreme ironies, since Orwell himself, of course,
was a constant advocate against such political speech-games, as in his famous essay
Politics and the English Language.
This is the claim which the original poster was attempting to make about the name ``Department of
Homeland Security'', and it is a claim which rings false, inasmuch as, competent or not (and that
remains to be seen), the department's purpose is, in fact, to secure the American homeland.
You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means...
Whatever you may think about the Department of Homeland Security, it has, in point of
fact, the most honestly descriptive of almost any of the department names. That
is to say, whether it does a good job or not, it is here to secure the American
homeland.
Now, if you want to talk about `Orwellian' names, meaning names like 1984's Ministry
of Truth (which handled propaganda), Ministry of Peace (which handled war), and Ministry
of Love (which handled torture and brainwashing), let's look at some of the big
social-program departments which you seem more fond of:
The Department of Agriculture -- which pays farmers not to grow crops
The Department of the Interior -- which mainly handles subsidies for Indian casinos
The Department of Labor -- which pays the unemployed not to work
just to pick a few examples.
Of course, since the rest of your post is at least as confused as your use of the work ``Orwellian'',
right down to your last example (the `Peacemaker', of course, was a famous Colt firearm, as used by
the sherrif in just about any old western -- though if you want to wax philosophical, even Gorbachev
has admitted that it was the inability to keep up with American defense spending that brought about
the Soviet Union's collapse, so the missile made peace in a very literal sense as well), and the
general tendentiousness of your claims shows that your looking for political points more than accuracy anyhow...
I welcome anyone reading this thread to go read the article
for yourselves -- those of you who do will, of course, see immediately, that `jasonbw' has not read it, and is speaking from his posterior.:-)
You will also see a list of a large number of outright lies told by the film -- not `statistical' points, which Mr. `bw' may have `analyzed' or may handwave away, nor `inaccuaracies' which may have occurred by mistake (presumably, Mr. `bw' will not claim that one can `accidentally' photoshop a television ad to add text which one can then disagree with, or that such an action is a mere `inaccuracy').
I suppose one can argue honestly for the political claim which Moore is trying to make in this film. It clearly tells us something, however, that neither Mr. Moore, nore `jasonbw' are interested in doing so.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting how you pull Dean's tax hikes and massive new government programs out of my post before questioning whether he is really `left', eh?
As for the others, abortion is an issue which follows a very clear left/right divide among politicians in this country, although it is true that the big majority of the population as a whole, right or left, favors some limits on late term abortion.
Affirmative action, which presumes that it is okay for the state to discriminate racially as long as it's ``for a good cause'' (``for the children'', if you will) is another issue whose support in this country comes almost exclusively from the left.
So, to the extent that Dean supports unlimited abortion in the last trimester and supports affirmative action, he is taking left wing positions, just as to the extent to which he wants tax hikes and more government bureaucracy, he is taking left wing positions. Since he supports abortion and affirmative action more than than the other democratic candidates, and wants a much larger tax hike than they do, he is clearly to the left of them.
Indeed, there is only one area in which Dean takes a typically right-wing position, or one on which a majority of us self-identified conservatives would agree with him, and that's gun control, where Dean has always earned perfect scores from the NRA.
While I'm not thrilled about the Steel Tarrif (now repealed), the medicare bill is so large and bloated for the simple reason that it's a compromise measure which would not otherwise have passed. It also does have provisions (though not enough) to force exploration of competition and privatization to reduce the cost of medicare.
But on spending, you're only correct if you count tax cuts as spending (as the Democratic party candidates do, oddly enough). This is clearly nonsensical -- if I take less of your money away, that's not an expenditure of my part, and if taking less money away from consumers and investors results in the biggest economic growth in 20 years (as Bush's tax cuts have for two quarters now), well, it sure looks like a good idea to me. :-)
Indeed, thanks. Though I still think you need a nick. :-)
This is certainly true -- remember that Dean was the leader of the Democractic Governor's Association, which is about as mainstream a Democratic Party group as you're likely to find. So the real story here is not about a `revolution' (much less a `hijacking') of the party, but of a more or less traditional power struggle between factions within the party.
At the moment, the factions in the fight are mainly Dean and his backers, and the Clinton wing of the party, including party head Terry MacAulliffe. Whether the party leans toward Dean, or toward the Clintonistas' chosen candidate (Clarke) will tell us a lot about where the party is going.
I'm happy to say, however, that I don't think either of them has a snowball's chance in the hot place of beating Bush.
And as a final note, one thing to keep in mind about last-minute shifts in the 2000 election is that the last weekend of the race, after that last friday, saw the mysterious leak of a thirty-year-old accusation of drunk driving by Bush -- so I think the shift may have as much to do with dirty tricks as with electioneering.
Funny, that's not what things look like on the map...
He wants to pull out of Iraq before reconstruction is complete, they voted to go there.
He wants a massive tax hike, they want a smaller one.
He wants Hillary Clinton -style single-payer health care, they want more modest reforms.
So he wants more taxes, less military, and more government than they do. In other words, he's to the left of them.
Next question?
He did Marilyn? Is there something about Howard Dean and Brittany which you know and aren't telling us?
Okay, let's see: Social issues? Dean is pro-civil-unions, pro-abortion-through-the-third-trimester-without-p arental-consent, pro-affirmative-action. Fiscal issues? Dean wants
a massive tax hike, a massive new government medical bureaucracy, and increased spending. Foreign policy? Dean wants to pull out of Iraq before
reconstruction is complete, ``reach out'' to state sponsors of terror, and pay off North Korea.
In other words, I can only think of one issue on which Dean is anything but far left, and that's gun control, where he has indeed earned a perfect score from the NRA.
`down the middle'? I guess I'm just not seeing it...
There we go ladies and gentlemen -- for yet another post, `jasonbw' tells us that the post is `statistical' (though `not as much as he remembers'), and is `inaccurate' (though he can't find a single `inaccuracy' to point at.
I'm not really convinced, at this point, that he has any `credibility' left to `insult' (if defending the article is an insult to his credibility, that is -- by now I'd say that the point that he hasn't read it stands for itself).
While I understand that reading is not your strong suit, had you read the parent post, you would have seen that jasonbw said:
Nice try, though...Sorry, I don't have time for your family photos. Why don't you mail them to me.
There you go -- the reason `jasonbw' gave a description of the article which in no way resembled the article itself was not because he hadn't read the article. Oh, no, ladies and gentlemen -- the reason was that `they' had gone in and changed the article right after he read it.
I'd say anyone still reading can judge for themselves how credible a theory that is, so instead I'd like to review each of the ten points made by the article, to see if either of his two claims about the article (that it was ``all statistics'' or that ``all but two or three points were bullshit'') hold up:
In order, here are the article's ten points, as you can go read for yourself:
Moore's Claim: That an ad George H W Bush ran in 1992 refered to Willie Horton by name
Why it's a lie: To make this point, Moore, incredibly, splices together the ad Bush did run, which never mentioned Willie Horton, with a video from another group. But this isn't enough for Moore -- he then photoshops text of his own into the ad, so he can claim it says something it never said.
Is it `statistical': No.
Is it `bullshit': No, Moore has admitted that he spliced two videos together and added text of his own.
Moore's Claim: The NRA Scheduled a meeting in Colorado in response to Columbine, in which Charlton Heston gave the speech shown in the movie
Why it's a lie: The meeting in Colorado was an annual shareholder's meeting required by law for the NRA to maintain non-profit status, and was scheduled months before Columbine. In response to Columbine, Heston ordered the meeting scaled back to the minimum size and length required by law, and gave a somber speech. However, Moore is up to his video-editing tricks again -- he edits together clips from several speeches given on other locations to create a different speech than the one Heston gave.
Is it `statistical': No.
Is it `bullshit': No, the article links the text of the speech from the movie and the full text as recorded by the news media at the time.
Moore's Claim: The NRA met in Flint Michigan ``48 hours'' after the shootings in Mt. Morris, Michigan
Why it's a lie: The meeting in Michigan occurred as part of the presidential campaign eight months after the shooting. Moore takes the following sentence from a news report ``48-hours after Kayla Rolland is pronounced dead, Bill Clinton is on The Today Show telling a sympathetic Katie Couric, "Maybe this tragic death will help."'' and zooms the words ``48-hours after Kayla Rolland is pronounced dead'' to cover the rest of the text, then reads the rest as ``Charlton Heston showed up in Flint, to have a big pro-gun rally''.
Is it `statistical': No.
Is it `bullshit': No, the article shows the real text of the article and the zoomed version as used in the film.
Moore's Claim: Charlton Heston, when interviewed by Moore, was insensitive to a shooting death Moore described
Why it's a lie: A close look at stills of the scene in question show that Moore asking the question was filmed later, without Heston present, and then spliced in
Is it `statistical': No.
Is it `bullshit': No, the article links to the stills which show this
Moore's Claim: That the NRA was created by KKK members
Why it's a lie: The NRA was created by Ullyses Grant, who had been one of the KKK's strongest opponents (he's the one who banned the Klan in 1871(, and it's early leaders were Grant and General Sheridan, who had routed pro-Klan officials from posts in So
On the contrary, I find all ten points correct, and I'm confident that others here who go read it will do the same.
These are not minor things, after all -- each of the ten points is a case where Moore claimed one thing, and the truth was drastically different.
However, it's clear that your claim to have even read the article is highly suspect, since:
- You repeatedly described the article's arguments as `statistical', when in fact only one of the
ten points is statistical in nature at all, and that one only to point out that Moore is misrepresenting
crime figures by not scaling to crime figures (Moore seems to think that a country with 10% of the US'
population but more than 10% of the US' number of gun crime incidents has a lower crime rate than the US).
- You claim to have `extensively analyzed' the arguments in the article, yet in four or five posts so far,
you haven't named a single statement in the article which you disagree with.
- Your constant handwaving and avoidance of discussing any of the article's actual statements suggests
a real reluctance to actually read or respond to the article.
So, how about it: you've claimed that ``all but two or three'' of the articles ten points are ``just statistics'' and are ``bullshit'', yet in this entire thread so far, you have yet to provide a single example of either.How do you expect to be taken seriously this way?
There we have it, ladies and gentlemen: ``since Moore is doing this for the wellbeing of more people (for the children, if you will), it's okay that he lies. And besides, he didn't lie so much.''
As for what he changed ``about the man'', let's look at the facts: Charlton Heston was a close friend of Martin Luther King, a civil rights activist back when that was a dangerous and career-limiting thing to be, and a leader of the March on Washington in which Dr. King gave his famous `I have a dream' speech. Moore, in the process of splicing a half-hour-plus interview into about five minutes of screen time, splices together a word here and a word there from several sentences to try to create the impression that Heston is a racist.
`op51n' feels that this is ``doesn't make it fiction'' -- that this doesn't `change anything about the man', and that in any case, it's acceptable because Moore is doing this for your own ``wellbeing''.
Perhaps op51n is happy with this position. Read the article (which presents a number of such outright lies, of which this one is not even the most blatant) and see if you are, too. :-)
And, again, unless your position is that the Soviets would not have built a nuclear stockpile in the absence of a US buildup, the US buildup has nothing to do with proliferation of the Soviet stockpile.
And if proliferation is entirely at the feet of the Soviet system, we should be happy that that system is no more (this is but one among the many reasons we should be happy for the decline of that system, of course). That that occurred through US maintenance of a credible deterrent (as even Gorbachev now acknowledges) is a strong argument that that deterrent was a good idea.
Let's see if I understand your argument here: ``a bunch of fanatics who want to destroy any country which does not match their idea of what God wants a government and society to look like are receiving state sponsorship which makes their attacks much more deadly. So the right solution is not to set about removing these state sponsors (which are also horribly oppressive of their own people), but to try and convince these madmen to like us, so they won't attack us again''.
That doesn't even pass the laugh test...
Then as long as we're both content in our positions, its time to let the readers decide. :-)
I'll take your resort to childish insult as an admission that you don't have any rational position to present, thank you very much.
I suspect most readers of this thread will do the same. :-)
All of which misses two big facts here: a.) the former Republics did, in fact, almost universally return not only all nuclear munitions and missiles, but most other weapons systems to Russia when the Soviet Union broke up, and it is from Russia that proliferation is a concern, and b.) far from being `bankrupt', Russia is a large economy, a net oil exporter, and likely soon to be a major world economic player.
Is it really your position that Russia was `too poor' to keep track of its nuclear weapons, yet somehow not too poor to maintain a large military, and to keep purchasing new conventional weapons systems?
Do not mistake ``too poor to maintain a vast empire'' with ``too poor to function as an independent country''. North Korea is hardly an economic powerhouse (much of its population is on the verge of starvation), yet it continues to produce nuclear weapons, for instance.
If proliferation were a factor of the number of weapons produced, you could argue that this was the case. However, as I just pointed out, were this the case, the US and the Soviet stockpiles would both be proliferation sources. Since, in actual fact, the US stockpile is not such a source, it's clear that it is the mismanagement of existing stockpiles by both the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia which produces a proliferation risk.
That means that unless you are arguing that the Soviets would not have produced a stockpile of nuclear weapons in any case, you're in no position, try as you might, to blame the US for the handling of Soviet weapons -- and in any case, you can't blame the weapons system which the Soviets failed to produce for proliferation of those they did produce.
But there's more to the picture even so -- that the threat model we are now worried about is a terrorist group or rogue state with one, or two, or five warheads, rather than a global human-life-on-earth-destroying thermonuclear war shows that the end of the Soviet Union was a huge win even if you find some way to `Blame America First' for Soviet mismanagement of nuclear munitions. And this holds even if you, incorrectly, assume that ``what didn't happen was thus never likely'' and thus hold that nuclear war was not a very real possiblity had deterrence failed.
Well?
Leaving Godwin aside for a moment, do you actually have a point here? Would you care to actually back up any of your claims?
You assert that the creation of DHS is `unconstitutional', for example, yet you fail to give any argument why combining several federal agencies which had existed for decades could be `unconstitutional' if the prior existence of the agencies themselves was not.
You suggest that the `favored mode of operation' of DHS is to `suppress' people, but surely you agree that this is mere FUD if you cannot provide any examples.
And finally, you suggest that DHS is not interested in protecting the homeland (the only claim which might make the original poster's claim that the name `Department of Homeland Security' is `Orwellian'), but you don't back this claim up either, nor explain whether you think the customs service, the coast guard, the office of the postal inspector-general and the other organizations which were merged to form the DHS were ``oppressive'' before they merged, or if cutting through the bureaucratic mess which made these agencies so ineffective before is what makes them ``oppressive'' in your view.
Well? Or are you just blowing hot air?
Actually, when one refers to language as ``Orwellian'', it is exactly to doublespeak that he is referring -- one of history's supreme ironies, since Orwell himself, of course, was a constant advocate against such political speech-games, as in his famous essay Politics and the English Language.
This is the claim which the original poster was attempting to make about the name ``Department of Homeland Security'', and it is a claim which rings false, inasmuch as, competent or not (and that remains to be seen), the department's purpose is, in fact, to secure the American homeland.
You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means...
Whatever you may think about the Department of Homeland Security, it has, in point of fact, the most honestly descriptive of almost any of the department names. That is to say, whether it does a good job or not, it is here to secure the American homeland.
Now, if you want to talk about `Orwellian' names, meaning names like 1984's Ministry of Truth (which handled propaganda), Ministry of Peace (which handled war), and Ministry of Love (which handled torture and brainwashing), let's look at some of the big social-program departments which you seem more fond of:
- The Department of Agriculture -- which pays farmers not to grow crops
- The Department of the Interior -- which mainly handles subsidies for Indian casinos
- The Department of Labor -- which pays the unemployed not to work
just to pick a few examples.Of course, since the rest of your post is at least as confused as your use of the work ``Orwellian'', right down to your last example (the `Peacemaker', of course, was a famous Colt firearm, as used by the sherrif in just about any old western -- though if you want to wax philosophical, even Gorbachev has admitted that it was the inability to keep up with American defense spending that brought about the Soviet Union's collapse, so the missile made peace in a very literal sense as well), and the general tendentiousness of your claims shows that your looking for political points more than accuracy anyhow...
Well, there we have it, ladies and gentlemen.
I welcome anyone reading this thread to go read the article for yourselves -- those of you who do will, of course, see immediately, that `jasonbw' has not read it, and is speaking from his posterior. :-)
You will also see a list of a large number of outright lies told by the film -- not `statistical' points, which Mr. `bw' may have `analyzed' or may handwave away, nor `inaccuaracies' which may have occurred by mistake (presumably, Mr. `bw' will not claim that one can `accidentally' photoshop a television ad to add text which one can then disagree with, or that such an action is a mere `inaccuracy').
I suppose one can argue honestly for the political claim which Moore is trying to make in this film. It clearly tells us something, however, that neither Mr. Moore, nore `jasonbw' are interested in doing so. :-)