Our Degenerate Discourse
Just a few words that say it all from Factcheck.org's takedown of that email describing all the horrors to be unleashed on an unwitting America by the House health care reform bill that the teashirts have been waving around and ranting about all summer.
Wondering where that thing came from? Factcheck knows:
We can trace the origins of this collection of claims to a conservative blogger who issued his instant and mostly mistaken analyses as brief "tweets" sent via Twitter as he was paging through the 1,017-page bill.
Got that? Some half-crazed wingnut flipping through a bill that was way above his reading comprehension level tweeted out some witnutty nonsense between handfuls of Cheetos, created the illusion of "sourcing" by psuedo-citing to section numbers in the bill, and, presto, within a few weeks, millions are screaming their fool heads off and packin' heat to public gatherings. and Blue Dogs in Congress are restocking their depleted supply of Depends.
And they called me a curmudgeon when I said that if I'd intentionally set out to invent a technogy to make people even stupider than TV had already made them, I couldn't have done better than the guys who came up with Twitter did.
As I have said elsewhere, clearly a good number of our fellow Americans are mentally ill and behaving in an irrational, crazed, and fearful fashion.
So, the responsibility falls to us to make sure real health care reform passes in spite of their fears and madness so that they will all be able to get the treatment they need.
I think it then follows that we, as sane grown ups, must also pass climate change legislation to protect them so that it might keep them safe and might lead to answers about environmental causes for their mental illness.
I think we should
"turn every excuse given against passing health care reform,
into a 'reason' why we must pass real health care reform."
August 28, 2009 6:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's all part of the new information gathering style here in the US. At least we shouldn't be seeing the national threat alert level gamed to skew the public debate as it was under Bush.
August 28, 2009 6:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the link. I read every word of it. I continue to be amazed at the number of people who believe everything they see in their inbox...seriously.
August 28, 2009 6:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Curmudgeons aint so bad
Hell
I mean we have the old anglo-saxon
CUR
A mangy angry old dog
hah
August 28, 2009 7:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Republican response:
(1) Democrats do it too
(2) whatever it is it isn't their fault, or George W.'s
(3) you just don't like free speech
(4) its a slippery slope to taking their guns
(5) or Lalo35adm-'you say people are stupid just because they disagree'
August 28, 2009 8:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
They're Republicans.
(1) They know what they want society to do, and they look around for arguments that will get people to do it.
(2) Sometimes what they want to do has no rational argument that supports it.
(3) Then they find a lie. In our modern media, only the lie is transmitted. There is no fact-checking unless it is so egregious as to be worth the effort.
(4) When fact-cheching does occur and they are caught lying, they resort to every trick pulled by an addict or alcoholic to avoid or deflect blame.
Your list, NobelCD, is a list of some of those tricks used by alcoholics to avoid blame for addictive behavior they are going to do anyway whether they should do it or not. They are just things you say to defend irrational behavior.
The difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives do things because they are traditional; they fear and hate change unless they start it to return to some mythical past.
Liberals are different in accepting change, establishing goals and using rational methods to achieve those goals. Something that is irrational is inherently bad to a liberal. It demands a change. And that is the conflict. They work for and often enjoy the changes that the conservatives are trained from birth to fear and hate.
August 29, 2009 12:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the link, NCSteve, and congratulations to FacrCheck, but...
Holy moly!
A 1017 page healthcare bill!
Why do I suspect that nobody understands that thing?
But when "nobody" understands a bill, there are always a few invisible fiends who actually understand it, and in this case those invisible fiends are probably working for Big Pharma and the HMO's.
Does that sound just a wee bit paranoid?
So who isn't paranoid about that bill?
Progressives think they're about to get royally screwed over, right-wingers think Obama is Satan, and Democrats...
What the heck are Democrats thinking?
August 29, 2009 2:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Look. This is the modern world. People specialize. No one knows everything about how major projects work in detail. A guy once handed me a silicon chip disk that had a bunch of micro chips printed on it and was slightly flawed, so they threw it out instead of cutting it up and attaching wires. At the time he told me that fewer than 30 people in the world knew about all the processes that went into manufacturing that disk. That was in the 70's and it's much worse now.
When someone is designing a new process, no one knows in detail how everything is going to work. A large part of it will be worked out after the legislation in the implementation. We are surrounded by processes that no one fully understands. That's just the nature of the modern world.
But we have a good understanding that the current lack-of-healthcare-system is NOT working, and that many of the worst flaws are systemic. It's time to implement a system instead of hoping that some one will magically solve the existing problems when no one has done so since Teddy Roosevelt stated that national health care was needed.
You should not sound so shocked that humans are very limited mentally. As groups we still have some rather sophisticated ways of getting around that limitation. "Kludges" as some engineers call them.
August 29, 2009 1:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for your brilliant "Washington is a silicon chip" analysis of the mess of a bill which is creeping toward oblivion.
But inside the Beltway, your "kludges" are usually inserted by lobbyists, a species of "invisible fiend" which you are unlikely to encounter in a Silicon Valley cubicle, and those fiends aren't payed millions of dollars to make pretty speeches and recite slogans like the clowns we elect.
Lobbyists get paid mainly to fudge legislation with obscure provisions which nobody else can understand, and yet mysteriously return billions of dollars to their corporate masters year after year.
In the Washington version of Silicon Valley, Steven Jobs doesn't get the biggest office at Apple... that office belongs to a pitiful figurehead who obviously doesn't have a clue how to pass healthcare reform, and instead of engineers, Washington is full of sold-out former and future employees of corporate suppliers who couldn't care less if the end-product functions or fails, as long as they get their cut.
So your gear-head "wisdom" won't get you very far in the District of Columbia, but it may be some consolation to you that nobody's wisdom gets anybody very far, and money alone makes that world go round.
August 29, 2009 1:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you can't convince them...confuse them ??
C
August 29, 2009 1:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
The thing that amuses me is that this "death panel" nonsense they all have their undies in a twist over was actually implemented and in place already, under Bush.
Where were they then?
August 29, 2009 11:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Where have they been ?? Living under rocks Bwak. The ones they have chosen to slither out from under.
C
August 29, 2009 1:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
I hope nobody believes all the lies are the work of one individual.
It is the work of a bunch of persons with a detailed plan to demomize public healthcare as offered under a democratic administration. And that plan has been underwritten by healthcare companies and the other usual suspects. I have no doubt of this. Not one bit.
August 29, 2009 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not all the lies, but certainly all these lies.
August 29, 2009 2:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
I try to peruse as many TPM blogs on a daily basis as I can. Most bloggers are merely preaching to the choir while others do extensive research and their statements are quite enlightening. As previously stated it's a shame that some deeply though out posts disappear in so short a time. Then there are, what I would call the "chat room groupies" that mainly enjoy exchanges between others of similar philosophies. That's fine with me.
Generally speaking, I come away from TPM with a sense of depression and the awareness that we liberals and independents are in a full scale battle with those who will not willing divest themselves of their power, wealth and political control.
The health care town hall meetings have little to do with health care. Note that a majority of the attendees appear to be old enough to have already started taking advantage of the Social Security program. Reading, watching and listening leads me to believe that many of the attendees fall into the following categories:
Those who will not accept a nigger as their president.
Die hard Neocons.
Die hard Republicans.
Shills directed by Big Pharma, Health insurance and other financially impacted groups to incite fear and suspicion in a public health insurance program.
Gun toting - Minute men types crying out for any form of attention that can be afforded them.
Then there are those who sincerely attend the town halls to better understand potential changes. Of course, the MSM ignores that majority.
I have concluded that, during this time, a scalpel is not the instrument required for the drastic change that our economy and social structure requires. A sledge hammer would be far more suitable.
August 29, 2009 3:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
LA Times, August 24:
September 9, 2009 3:03 PM | Reply | Permalink