Apparently the envisioned future is that the Chinese and Mexicans will do all the work while we sit back and "manage" them, e.g. continue glutting ourselves by skimming all the profits off their work. Personally I think we're headed for trouble.
Why? That would imply that trusting economic policy to the self-interested wisdom of businesspeople would be a bad thing. What are you, some sort of commie?
"His statement does not excuse his refusal to apologize, when asked, for the racism printed in his publication."
Go ahead and claim that wasn't a demand for an apology.
I could personally give a flying fuck whether or not he apologises, and do not demand that he does so. I've said that his failure to do so shows poor judgment about acceptance of responsibility and an inability to deal with offended constituents, neither of which are desirable traits for this president. (In fact, I've said that repeatedly in this thread, which I doubt you've bothered to read.) I would only be demanding an apology if I was an offended supporter - as it is, I'm quite glad that he preferred to fumblingly attempt to justify the statements, since any demonstrative occasion that showcases the typical blinkered, hypocritical "libertarian" perspective is a good thing.
Then I can demand you apologize for lying[...]You're a lying troll and I caught you.
No, you didn't. All you did was let/.ers know what an illiterate sack of hot air you are.
Fuck off now.
Aww...how cute. How about you fuck off back to Digg. I hear literacy isn't a requirement for participation there.
He is definitely the only candidate espousing such positions, and since he's got a hell of a lot of campaign money, we'll be hearing from him nationally. It'll be like Dean and Goldwater all over again - popular grassroots candidate, whose ideas are objectionable to 80% of the population and 100% of the seriously rich, will inspire the beliefs of a large minority, who will react bitterly to his defeat. I was a Dean supporter in 2004, so I can sympathize with your feelings, if not your economic politics.
There are many other points why I like Ron Paul such as his non-interventionist foreign policy position. I'm a little tired of the US being the police force of the world, and then not paying for things we need in our country like roads, bridges (cough), and education. I'm a little tired of us invading countries at the whim of a President. Isn't congress supposed to declare war? What happened there?
Amen to that.
I hope Ron Paul wins and I hope he cleans house.
I would love it if he won - there's not a single candidate that I believe can handle this country's problems, but it would be amusing seeing the Paul DOJ and judiciary go after the whole lot of crooked fucks.
Why should he apologize for something he claims he didn't do?
If I've loaned my name to an organization, it should be based on my confidence that they will not abuse the trust I have placed in them by allowing them to publish opinions in my name, as was the case in this instance. Why? Because it implies that I endorse what that organization writes above my name, and makes me responsible publicly for what they say. If Ron Paul let his name be used as a platform for a racist ghostwriter, then he should apologize for having given such an idiot a platform, even inadvertantly. Don't forget that I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt by assuming there's any backing for the ghostwriter story, other than a bunch of anonymous fucking sources and a politician's words.
Wouldn't that belie his claims?
No.
And seriously, sometime you people and your demands for "apologies" make me ill.
"You people?" No wonder you don't find ridiculous generalizations offensive.
If you wee nearly as equitable as you pretend to be, you sure as hell wouldn't be demanding apologies from him for something he never said.
I'm not demanding any apologies. I'm just saying that he should have given one to the people offended by the consequences of his irresponsibility, and that his failure to do so contributes to his unsuitability for the highest political job in the United States. Follow along, please.
It's funny how, just because he's every 15 year old Randroid's wet dream candidate, so many/.ers turn off their brains and just accept the spin. Ah, well. He's third in the money race and will therefore command national attention as the election approaches, so prepare for your own Howard Dean Experience, "far-righters." (And get ready for the media to bring that term out for a spin.) Popular grassroots candidate collects a bundle from small donors but fails to claim the presidency (or, usually, candidacy) because the other 80% of the population (including all the people with serious money) finds their ideas objectionable for a variety of reasons? Soundsfamiliar.
I must admit, as a Dean supporter in 2004, I'll probably get a bit of schadenfreude watching the/. right-libertarian crowd get wound up by the defeat of a candidate they believe in - and if they don't believe in his chances yet, wait until the national advertising hits. All these erstwhile "media skeptics" will lap it up. Sorry, folks, but all the candidates are shit, and 2008 will feel just like 2004 except with less of an economy.
So how about you mention why you don't like Ron Paul?
The experiences I've had and the people I've encountered since that age, in both the public and private sector, showed me that the assumptions made about human nature and psychology by the Randian anarcho-capitalist model are contradictory, and based on fantasy notions of thought and behavior that are fortunate enough to be enshrined as economic wisdom by influential people with money.
I've observed since those days that government and business (indeed, most human endeavors that require cooperation between individuals) suffer from the same weakness: in the absence of effective and motivated oversight and transparency, they become the tools by which individuals gratify themselves at the expense of many others. Both are "collectivist," effective solutions to particular problems in particular circumstances if people are willing and motivated to hold them accountable, and instruments of tyranny otherwise. Ascribing the shared evils of their present-day incarnations solely to government (and describing it as a "collectivist" form in opposition to the market's supposed "individualism") is both logically flawed and dangerous. It reduces a society's options for action in the face of crisis, and generally does so on the basis of dubious hypotheticals while dismissing inconvenient historical evidence.
So, why don't I like Ron Paul as a politician? Simple. I believe his economic ideas are divorced from reality, and I believe the 1992 newsletter incident shows him to possess either a tendency to lump people into arbitrary groups or an inability to deal effectively with the individuals acting on his behalf, neither of which are desirable qualities for a president. I also think his vote for the AUMF was fundamentally mistaken, although I'm quite sure that applies to all of the candidates with legislative history. I haven't seen a single candidate I like so far, and I am pessimistic about the future of Jeffersonian democracy's last vestiges as a cultural force.
I do like Ron Paul as a person, though, and if I was enough of a tool to cast my vote for the person with whom I'd most like to have a few beers, he'd probably get it.
It has certainly been contested, by Ron Paul himself in the Texas Monthly magazine in 2001[...]Ron Paul said those were not his words, and were those of a ghostwriter.
It certainly has not been contested that those words were printed above his name, and it certainly has not been contested that he responded to questions about them (nine years after the fact.) All that is in dispute is his responsibility for them (which he disavows) and the nature of his response. His statement does not excuse his refusal to apologize, when asked, for the racism printed in his publication. More importantly, it certainly doesn't excuse his casually racist and factually inaccurate dismissal of the comments as being derived from "current events and statistical reports of the time," either. Of course, this has been brought up elsewhere in this post, as you might find by reading the other comments posted before your own.
And why, I wonder, is the normally critical crowd on/. so willing to accept a "ghostwriter" assertion that would raise eyebrows coming from any other major or minor candidate? Does everyone wnt this guy's babies? Just because the guy's right about Iraq doesn't make him a fucking saint.
Ah, well. Last I read, he's third in the money race among Republicans, so we'll be seeing a lot more of him in the future as the media comes to grips with his huge popular support. Enjoy your own Dr. Dean, right-wingers.
I think people in the US (definitely in Canada) say "I go to university".
I've moved around a lot and have been attending higher education for a couple of years, and in my experience, most Americans use "I'm in school" or "I'm a student" conversationally. I've never heard Americans say "I'm going to university,"* unless they were affecting a particular Commonwealth mannerism, which is a pretentious thing for a Yank to do (and I'm speaking from the position of authority here, having gone through a terrible Mockney-while-drunk phase in a late teenage year.) Of course, I haven't been everywhere, but this has been the rule all up and down the East Coast, although perhaps some of the Connecticut WASP enclaves have their own thing.
* "I'm going to the university/college" is used in towns and cities with one major school.
Good news everyone! They've started smearing Ron Paul. That means they have noticed him and believe he is now important enough to warrant attention.
I "noticed" Ron Paul well before the newsletter incident came to light, and have always believed him to have the courage of his convictions. Unfortunately, at least some of those convictions appear to come from the sort of blinkered view of the world that produces...well, right-libertarians, to name a ready example.
This "smear" is a matter of pointing to documented and uncontested history. If candidates were alleging that Paul used Texas Rangers to procure cocaine and whores, or cold-calling voters with stories of illegitimate children, that would be a "smear." Pointing to a statements reasonably attributed to a candidate (and his further statements regarding the original statements, where he claims that the original statements are not his own while simultaneously dismissing their relevance) is not a smear, unless you assert that Mr. Paul is smearing himself, which I doubt.
By the way: when you respond to a/. poster by throwing around repeated third-person plurals ("They're doing X now; they must know Y"), you come across as a nutter. Food for thought.
Your response is typical of what I bemoaned in my original post,
And yours is typical of what I regularly bemoan on/. - people linking in "support" of their argument without reading the entirety of the linked materials. I would say the article's citation link pointing out Mr. Paul's failure to apologize for these statements, as well as his attempt to dismiss these racist remarks as "within the context of current events and statistical reports of the time," doesn't exactly make your case.
And for the record, I'm registered as an independent and vote for candidates based on what I have researched, not just D or R like many mindless party drones. I would rejoice at ANY other political party being nationally recognized on ballots as it might finally break the stranglehold of the current (imho failed) two party system.
I'm with you. I think it would be great if right-wingers had to divide their political affiliations between "have the government give money to shareholders" (traditional Republican right-authoritarianism) and "get rid of the government" (right-libertarianism.) Of course, I also think it would be great if left-wingers divided theirs between left-libertarian and left-authoritarian parties, so that all the elections were a toss-up.
Mind you, since this is an article in the Wall Street Journal, I am not surprised they spent more time talking about the guys wealth and his company's income than they did investigating the working conditions or environmental practices in his factories.
At least the WSJ hasn't been fully "Rupertized" yet. At that point, they'll probably spend the entirety of these articles asserting that Chinese entrepeneurs' successes are proof that we should all go back to living in company towns, where the evil libruhls won't be able to poison our minds with their propaganda.
Do you mean this guy (likely primary candidate Fred Thompson), or this guy(Jack Thompson, who crusades against music, video games, and sick fun in general?
Assuming you're referring to the first person, I think the "big knock" isn't so much his wife's big knockers as the fact that he's a former lobbyist and a current believer in Bush's Big Military Adventure.
Oh, you meant "big knock" from the perspective of our childish news media. My bad.
that speech she gave about 2 years ago about "We're going to have to take some things away from you for the common good" smacked of communism.
Seeing as she was addressing a group of hundreds of wealthy supporters, and referring specifically to the Bush tax cuts, I don't see your point. Unless you consider progressive taxation to be "communism", in which case, I hear the Birchers are always looking for members.
The Democrats came up with literally hundreds of accusations
Wrong again. The House Ethics Committee, both Repubs and Demos with a Repub majority, filed eighty-four ethics charges. Perhaps that may figuratively equal "hundreds," but not literally.
And every one was bogus, but ONE where he accidentally used a certain type of donation for the wrong purpose.
Wrong again, as you would know if you actually read the article I linked which discussed the findings of the ethics committee, instead of disgorging some half-remembered Republican talking point (that I also remember from the relevant period of history.)
Gingrich admitted that he brought discredit to the House and broke its rules by failing to ensure that financing for two projects would not violate federal tax law and by giving the House ethics committee false information.
Far be it from me to hold up the rest of Congress as an ideal of purity, but Gingrich is still a lying hypocrite. And especially so, given his stance as a "reformer."
Slashdot Mirror
Why? That would imply that trusting economic policy to the self-interested wisdom of businesspeople would be a bad thing. What are you, some sort of commie?
It must be the movies. Before movies, everybody had a perfect understanding of physics.
An expensive disaster at that, aided and abetted by irrational zealots. By, this analogy just keeps on giving.
I could personally give a flying fuck whether or not he apologises, and do not demand that he does so. I've said that his failure to do so shows poor judgment about acceptance of responsibility and an inability to deal with offended constituents, neither of which are desirable traits for this president. (In fact, I've said that repeatedly in this thread, which I doubt you've bothered to read.) I would only be demanding an apology if I was an offended supporter - as it is, I'm quite glad that he preferred to fumblingly attempt to justify the statements, since any demonstrative occasion that showcases the typical blinkered, hypocritical "libertarian" perspective is a good thing.
No, you didn't. All you did was let /.ers know what an illiterate sack of hot air you are.
Aww...how cute. How about you fuck off back to Digg. I hear literacy isn't a requirement for participation there.Smart and crazy can co-exist. Indeed, they seem to come as a package deal in varying degrees. See Nash, John Forbes, for a well-known example.
Amen to that.
I would love it if he won - there's not a single candidate that I believe can handle this country's problems, but it would be amusing seeing the Paul DOJ and judiciary go after the whole lot of crooked fucks.
If I've loaned my name to an organization, it should be based on my confidence that they will not abuse the trust I have placed in them by allowing them to publish opinions in my name, as was the case in this instance. Why? Because it implies that I endorse what that organization writes above my name, and makes me responsible publicly for what they say. If Ron Paul let his name be used as a platform for a racist ghostwriter, then he should apologize for having given such an idiot a platform, even inadvertantly. Don't forget that I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt by assuming there's any backing for the ghostwriter story, other than a bunch of anonymous fucking sources and a politician's words.
No.
"You people?" No wonder you don't find ridiculous generalizations offensive.
I'm not demanding any apologies. I'm just saying that he should have given one to the people offended by the consequences of his irresponsibility, and that his failure to do so contributes to his unsuitability for the highest political job in the United States. Follow along, please.
It's funny how, just because he's every 15 year old Randroid's wet dream candidate, so many /.ers turn off their brains and just accept the spin. Ah, well. He's third in the money race and will therefore command national attention as the election approaches, so prepare for your own Howard Dean Experience, "far-righters." (And get ready for the media to bring that term out for a spin.) Popular grassroots candidate collects a bundle from small donors but fails to claim the presidency (or, usually, candidacy) because the other 80% of the population (including all the people with serious money) finds their ideas objectionable for a variety of reasons? Sounds familiar.
I must admit, as a Dean supporter in 2004, I'll probably get a bit of schadenfreude watching the /. right-libertarian crowd get wound up by the defeat of a candidate they believe in - and if they don't believe in his chances yet, wait until the national advertising hits. All these erstwhile "media skeptics" will lap it up. Sorry, folks, but all the candidates are shit, and 2008 will feel just like 2004 except with less of an economy.
The experiences I've had and the people I've encountered since that age, in both the public and private sector, showed me that the assumptions made about human nature and psychology by the Randian anarcho-capitalist model are contradictory, and based on fantasy notions of thought and behavior that are fortunate enough to be enshrined as economic wisdom by influential people with money.
I've observed since those days that government and business (indeed, most human endeavors that require cooperation between individuals) suffer from the same weakness: in the absence of effective and motivated oversight and transparency, they become the tools by which individuals gratify themselves at the expense of many others. Both are "collectivist," effective solutions to particular problems in particular circumstances if people are willing and motivated to hold them accountable, and instruments of tyranny otherwise. Ascribing the shared evils of their present-day incarnations solely to government (and describing it as a "collectivist" form in opposition to the market's supposed "individualism") is both logically flawed and dangerous. It reduces a society's options for action in the face of crisis, and generally does so on the basis of dubious hypotheticals while dismissing inconvenient historical evidence.
So, why don't I like Ron Paul as a politician? Simple. I believe his economic ideas are divorced from reality, and I believe the 1992 newsletter incident shows him to possess either a tendency to lump people into arbitrary groups or an inability to deal effectively with the individuals acting on his behalf, neither of which are desirable qualities for a president. I also think his vote for the AUMF was fundamentally mistaken, although I'm quite sure that applies to all of the candidates with legislative history. I haven't seen a single candidate I like so far, and I am pessimistic about the future of Jeffersonian democracy's last vestiges as a cultural force.
I do like Ron Paul as a person, though, and if I was enough of a tool to cast my vote for the person with whom I'd most like to have a few beers, he'd probably get it.
Ah, I'd forgotten Adams' often-tragic fascination with multimedia projects. Novels were always his best form.
Dammit...now I wish you hadn't reminded me. I need a drink.
True. My 15-year-old Randroid self definitely would've worn a "Ron Paul for President" T-shirt if Paul had run for office at the appropriate time.
Sorry, Ron, I grew up too soon for you to get my vote.
Hardly. Adams' writings are more consistent, structured, and believable than Hubbard's.
Also, it helps that Douglas Adams wasn't a complete batshit loon.
Apparently, Ron Paul rocks so hard you want to spam his campaign literature on multiple posts, too.
It certainly has not been contested that those words were printed above his name, and it certainly has not been contested that he responded to questions about them (nine years after the fact.) All that is in dispute is his responsibility for them (which he disavows) and the nature of his response. His statement does not excuse his refusal to apologize, when asked, for the racism printed in his publication. More importantly, it certainly doesn't excuse his casually racist and factually inaccurate dismissal of the comments as being derived from "current events and statistical reports of the time," either. Of course, this has been brought up elsewhere in this post, as you might find by reading the other comments posted before your own.
And why, I wonder, is the normally critical crowd on /. so willing to accept a "ghostwriter" assertion that would raise eyebrows coming from any other major or minor candidate? Does everyone wnt this guy's babies? Just because the guy's right about Iraq doesn't make him a fucking saint.
Ah, well. Last I read, he's third in the money race among Republicans, so we'll be seeing a lot more of him in the future as the media comes to grips with his huge popular support. Enjoy your own Dr. Dean, right-wingers.
Ah, yes. The moral superiority of ignoring racism over actively promoting it. God bless the "libertarian" right.
It's a shame that his position isn't in agreement with the past statements at question, in which he expresses the
Or, you know, 95% of them.
I've moved around a lot and have been attending higher education for a couple of years, and in my experience, most Americans use "I'm in school" or "I'm a student" conversationally. I've never heard Americans say "I'm going to university,"* unless they were affecting a particular Commonwealth mannerism, which is a pretentious thing for a Yank to do (and I'm speaking from the position of authority here, having gone through a terrible Mockney-while-drunk phase in a late teenage year.) Of course, I haven't been everywhere, but this has been the rule all up and down the East Coast, although perhaps some of the Connecticut WASP enclaves have their own thing.
* "I'm going to the university/college" is used in towns and cities with one major school.
I "noticed" Ron Paul well before the newsletter incident came to light, and have always believed him to have the courage of his convictions. Unfortunately, at least some of those convictions appear to come from the sort of blinkered view of the world that produces...well, right-libertarians, to name a ready example.
This "smear" is a matter of pointing to documented and uncontested history. If candidates were alleging that Paul used Texas Rangers to procure cocaine and whores, or cold-calling voters with stories of illegitimate children, that would be a "smear." Pointing to a statements reasonably attributed to a candidate (and his further statements regarding the original statements, where he claims that the original statements are not his own while simultaneously dismissing their relevance) is not a smear, unless you assert that Mr. Paul is smearing himself, which I doubt.
By the way: when you respond to a /. poster by throwing around repeated third-person plurals ("They're doing X now; they must know Y"), you come across as a nutter. Food for thought.
And yours is typical of what I regularly bemoan on /. - people linking in "support" of their argument without reading the entirety of the linked materials. I would say the article's citation link pointing out Mr. Paul's failure to apologize for these statements, as well as his attempt to dismiss these racist remarks as "within the context of current events and statistical reports of the time," doesn't exactly make your case.
I'm with you. I think it would be great if right-wingers had to divide their political affiliations between "have the government give money to shareholders" (traditional Republican right-authoritarianism) and "get rid of the government" (right-libertarianism.) Of course, I also think it would be great if left-wingers divided theirs between left-libertarian and left-authoritarian parties, so that all the elections were a toss-up.
And, while I'm at it, I'd really like a pony.
They will once their economic interests compel military involvement in the Middle East.
Come again? That's not exactly right.
It's a South Park reference, and so only as idiotic as most tags, not more so.
At least the WSJ hasn't been fully "Rupertized" yet. At that point, they'll probably spend the entirety of these articles asserting that Chinese entrepeneurs' successes are proof that we should all go back to living in company towns, where the evil libruhls won't be able to poison our minds with their propaganda.
Do you mean this guy (likely primary candidate Fred Thompson), or this guy(Jack Thompson, who crusades against music, video games, and sick fun in general?
Assuming you're referring to the first person, I think the "big knock" isn't so much his wife's big knockers as the fact that he's a former lobbyist and a current believer in Bush's Big Military Adventure.
Oh, you meant "big knock" from the perspective of our childish news media. My bad.
Seeing as she was addressing a group of hundreds of wealthy supporters, and referring specifically to the Bush tax cuts, I don't see your point. Unless you consider progressive taxation to be "communism", in which case, I hear the Birchers are always looking for members.
Wrong again. The House Ethics Committee, both Repubs and Demos with a Repub majority, filed eighty-four ethics charges. Perhaps that may figuratively equal "hundreds," but not literally.
Wrong again, as you would know if you actually read the article I linked which discussed the findings of the ethics committee, instead of disgorging some half-remembered Republican talking point (that I also remember from the relevant period of history.)Far be it from me to hold up the rest of Congress as an ideal of purity, but Gingrich is still a lying hypocrite. And especially so, given his stance as a "reformer."
Because, by definition, a good candidate is one who wins an election, since the purpose of a candidate is to win the election.
There's a difference between being a good candidate and being a good person, though. Or a good leader, chief executive, whatever.