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Thread: Libertarianism/Anarchism - Page 23







Post#551 at 06-15-2009 09:07 AM by haymarket martyr [at joined Sep 2008 #posts 2,547]
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except there is no evidence at all that von Brunn was a "bigtime Democrat". There is plenty of evidence that links von Brunn with the Ron Paul site and the views of Paul and many libertarians.

Those on the far Right are doing all they can to create some distance between themselves and von Brunn

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/06/11/ore ... -shooting/

or you can look no further than right here.

Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck have formed a tagteam of sorts to publicly defend each other.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/ ... ugman.html

If you can get through all seven minutes it does provide some laughs. Both men make statements then later contradict themselves when they attempt to prove they did not do what they are accused of and have to explain why they first did it buts it not what you think it is. Confusing???? You betcha. And they single out the new favorite target of the Rightwing hate crowd - Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman - as he dared to write a column airing their dirty laundry in the Times two days ago.
Last edited by haymarket martyr; 06-15-2009 at 09:10 AM.







Post#552 at 06-15-2009 11:05 AM by haymarket martyr [at joined Sep 2008 #posts 2,547]
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Where have you been the past four days???? It has been verified and verified and verified. Not one person associated with this has denied it. The only people floating silly stuff like you are seem to be those who have a massive public relations problem or the ostriches who prefer to hide their head in the sand and pretend it did nto happen and if it did will soon go away and people will forget about it.







Post#553 at 06-15-2009 11:34 AM by K-I-A 67 [at joined Jan 2005 #posts 3,010]
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Well, that doesn't surprise me, most racists and anti-Jew types are actually Democrats.







Post#554 at 06-15-2009 11:39 AM by haymarket martyr [at joined Sep 2008 #posts 2,547]
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And do you have objective statistics to present back up that outrageous claim KIA?







Post#555 at 06-15-2009 12:10 PM by K-I-A 67 [at joined Jan 2005 #posts 3,010]
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Quote Originally Posted by haymarket martyr View Post
And do you have objective statistics to present back up that outrageous claim KIA?
No, I've just been around a lot of Democrats during my life. BTW, the bulk of them opted not to vote in the last election.







Post#556 at 06-15-2009 12:44 PM by K-I-A 67 [at joined Jan 2005 #posts 3,010]
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Quote Originally Posted by The Rani View Post
He saw it on CNN so it must be true.
More like, HM has never saw or heard anything about it on CNN so it can't be true.







Post#557 at 06-15-2009 12:57 PM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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Hm, I don't get what you're aiming at.

Are you trying to make people think? About what? Because all you're posting is random ad-hom that my six-year-old (I think I may have mentioned before his powers of reasoning in argumentation as contrasted with yours) could see through.

Or are you trying to embarrass someone? If that someone is "you", or "people on your side", congratulations -- total success. Otherwise, Fail.

Or maybe, like in Die Hard, you're actually just trying to distract us with garbled incoherencies while you make off with a pile of our loot in a bigger-than-life crime of the century type caper?

Which is it?
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy

"[it]
is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#558 at 06-15-2009 01:07 PM by playwrite [at NYC joined Jul 2005 #posts 10,443]
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Who listens to Fox Cable News...

... and sends in all that hate mail?


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/op...exprod=myyahoo

WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.

The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.

What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.

Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States ...” He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid.

These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network’s highest-rated star, Bill O’Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him “Tiller the baby killer” and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O’Reilly was unrepentant, stating that only “pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters” would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of blaming O’Reilly, was breaching his network’s brand of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters.

What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe in.

We don’t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues — though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck — well before another “antigovernment” Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April — there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.

This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama’s name with “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponent’s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats’ “Arab” candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.

That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.

Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging “in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president — a lifelong Christian — “may still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.”

If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.

The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is “if there is really a way to put a hold on” those who might run amok. We’re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any “mainstream media” debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.

It’s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as “the height of insult,” in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was “warning us for a reason.”

No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight’s devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama.”

This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned.
"The Devil enters the prompter's box and the play is ready to start" - R. Service

“It’s not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed … so, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It’s much more akin to printing money.” - B.Bernanke


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If you meet a magic pony on the road, kill it. - Playwrite







Post#559 at 06-15-2009 01:13 PM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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Quote Originally Posted by K-I-A 67 View Post
Well, that doesn't surprise me, most racists and anti-Jew types are actually Democrats.
You've got that wrong. Kitten-squishers are generally democrats.

backup statistics
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy

"[it]
is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#560 at 06-15-2009 03:34 PM by Brian Rush [at California joined Jul 2001 #posts 12,392]
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Quote Originally Posted by The Rani View Post
Maybe we should turn the TV (and the computer) off and take a walk outside. It's nice out!
Wish I could, but I'm stuck at work for an uncertain number of hours yet.

Maybe I can take a break and go to the park or something.
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"

My blog: https://brianrushwriter.wordpress.com/

The Order Master (volume one of Refuge), a science fantasy. Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GZZWEAS
Smashwords link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/382903







Post#561 at 06-15-2009 11:43 PM by independent [at Jacksonville - still trying to decide if its Florida or Georgia here joined Apr 2008 #posts 1,286]
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I'm back from over the seas and the all-American death metal festival, I'm sorry to hear you were stuck at work on such a fine summer day.

I am glad though, to hear some libertarians refuse to accept subjugation and still will to live their lives as their spirit screams.

I say, let's forget about our obsessions of protection and let one another live in a harmony. The finest music often hints at dissonance - let us embrace the flats and the sharps alike.

I am not a praying man but I will send a plea to the universe for my brothers in Iran and China and North Korea. We should not bring bombs but love. The world needs it now more than ever.
'82 iNTp
"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question." -Jefferson







Post#562 at 06-16-2009 06:19 AM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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More on the point of sources -- it continues to amuse me that the winning of the "Nobel" prize for economics is taken as some sort of quality stamp on the ravings of the kind of guy who a scant couple years ago said things like this (emphasis mine):

Quote Originally Posted by Paul Krugman
The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn't a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

and whose line really hasn't changed fundamentally at all in the interim. Why is this guy considered -- by people who know how to read, at least -- an authority on anything at all?
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy

"[it]
is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#563 at 06-16-2009 07:54 AM by haymarket martyr [at joined Sep 2008 #posts 2,547]
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Perhaps you should send your musings to the Nobel Committee in Stockholm and await a full and detailed explaination? Or it just might be that the criteria used by the Committee for the awarding of the Nobel Prize is a bit different than the criteria used by folks like you for making economic judgments. Not everyone in the world subscribes to the arcane pseudo-science of Austrian economics.

Perhaps you should send a strongly worded letter to ABC News and ask them why they employ Mr. Krugman and allow him to hold forth on his views?

If that is not enough, several cable stations enjoy allowing Mr. Krugman to be on their shows and provide him with both a forum and money for his expertise. You may want to write them also.

And then you should again write letters of protest to his publisher who offers him the forum of books which are published, purchased and read.

And if you are not yet tired, the New York Times would probably be a convenient target of your ire for giving him a paycheck and a forum as well.

Justin, it seems like a great number of people other than yourself seem to hold Paul Krugman in a high regard, are willing to offer him a variety of ways to get his views out to the pubic, and are willing to compensate him for his professional services.

You should aks yourself who is the odd man out here? Clue: it is not Paul Krugman.
Last edited by haymarket martyr; 06-16-2009 at 07:58 AM.







Post#564 at 06-16-2009 08:19 AM by playwrite [at NYC joined Jul 2005 #posts 10,443]
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Quote Originally Posted by Justin '77 View Post
More on the point of sources -- it continues to amuse me that the winning of the "Nobel" prize for economics is taken as some sort of quality stamp on the ravings of the kind of guy who a scant couple years ago said things like this (emphasis mine):




and whose line really hasn't changed fundamentally at all in the interim. Why is this guy considered -- by people who know how to read, at least -- an authority on anything at all?
Are you suggesting that Krugman was recommending or prescribing the housing bubble as the ultimate solution to the economic conditions back then? One might get that from the entire opinion piece perhaps but only if they squint their eyes and read it in a tossing boat in the middle of a stormy sea, and perhaps were predisposed to that reading. However, within the context of everything else he was saying back then, as well as now, that reading would be nearly 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
"The Devil enters the prompter's box and the play is ready to start" - R. Service

“It’s not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed … so, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It’s much more akin to printing money.” - B.Bernanke


"Keep your filthy hands off my guns while I decide what you can & can't do with your uterus" - Sarah Silverman

If you meet a magic pony on the road, kill it. - Playwrite







Post#565 at 06-16-2009 08:20 AM by Virgil K. Saari [at '49er, north of the Mesabi Mountains joined Jun 2001 #posts 7,835]
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Right Arrow On Krugman's crotch

...spread in Walter Duranty's & Judith Miller's broadsheet:

Quote Originally Posted by haymarket martyr
...Justin, it seems like a great number of people other than yourself seem to hold Paul Krugman in a high regard, are willing to offer him a variety of ways to get his views out to the pubic, and are willing to compensate him for his professional services.

Enron did rent him and his views were made pubic as a rent-boy's ought be. And, the Swedish bikini wax team did much to improve his custom.







Post#566 at 06-16-2009 08:48 AM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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Quote Originally Posted by playwrite View Post
Are you suggesting that Krugman was recommending or prescribing the housing bubble as the ultimate solution to the economic conditions back then? One might get that from the entire opinion piece perhaps but only if they squint their eyes and read it in a tossing boat in the middle of a stormy sea, and perhaps were predisposed to that reading.
Funny. I took the time to look through his archives from the time and all I could find was more of the same. My blackwhite skills must not be as good as yours. Maybe you could link to something from then where he said (as were people in, for example the Austrian school at the time) that the recession needed to play itself out and that inflating a new bubble to keep the level of spending from dropping was ultimately the path to worse ruin? Because that's the 180-degrees you're claiming your guy was really advocating.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy

"[it]
is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#567 at 06-16-2009 08:54 AM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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Quote Originally Posted by haymarket martyr View Post
Perhaps you should send your musings to the Nobel Committee in Stockholm and await a full and detailed explaination?
Why? The point was that your reliance on the word of some committee somewhere to tell one who was worth listening to, rather than relying on his own reason, was perhaps misguided. Given, you know, the fact that one of the guys the committee decided was worthwhile is a pretty transparent buffoon and all...
Since I'm not the one insisting that people rely on their word, what difference does it make to me how they come to their decisions?

Or it just might be that the criteria used by the Committee for the awarding of the Nobel Prize is a bit different than the criteria used by folks like you for making economic judgments.
Clearly it is. I prefer a two-part standard: making sense, and getting results. It's not the Expert Certification path that you seem to favor, I know.
I would think that an Epic Fail of Krugman's scope on your path might be cause for some soul-searching, but apparently you are more resistant to influence from your surroundings than I has guessed.

-remining argument-from-King-Numbers snipped as balls-crushingly irrelevant-
Last edited by Justin '77; 06-16-2009 at 09:09 AM.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy

"[it]
is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#568 at 06-16-2009 09:08 AM by haymarket martyr [at joined Sep 2008 #posts 2,547]
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Yet again, we return to the need for Justin and his ilk to get their own sovereign island or at least their own ocean liner where they can impose their own set of values and beliefs upon those willing to drink the kool-aid.

If you do not like Paul Krugman - ignore him. He has no power over you. For some reason, the libertarians have decided that Krugman is the new enemy and must be railed against at every opportunity. I guess they wanted an Austrian witch doctor who reads tea leaves or animal entrails to win the Nobel Prize. Sour grapes it seems.







Post#569 at 06-16-2009 09:15 AM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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Quote Originally Posted by haymarket martyr View Post
Yet again, we return to the need for Justin and his ilk to get their own sovereign island or at least their own ocean liner where they can impose their own set of values and beliefs upon those willing to drink the kool-aid.
Who's the one imposing? I'm merely pointing out buffoonery. People are free to make their own conclusions (something I would contrast to the Credentialled Expert model). Information just is, and as you may have heard before, wants to be free.

If you do not like Paul Krugman - ignore him.
Generally speaking, I do ignore him, much like I ignore voodoo priests, eugenecists, astrologers, and californians (or do I repeat myself?). But you keep bringing him up as if he had something worthwhile to say, so I figured, check him out. And then returned here with a piece of my results. I fully intend to go back to ignoring him, and merely periodically reminding (as need arises) that you are asking people to rely on a proven Fail.
Last edited by Justin '77; 06-16-2009 at 09:18 AM.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy

"[it]
is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#570 at 06-16-2009 09:33 AM by Marx & Lennon [at '47 cohort still lost in Falwelland joined Sep 2001 #posts 16,709]
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Quote Originally Posted by Justin '77 View Post
More on the point of sources -- it continues to amuse me that the winning of the "Nobel" prize for economics is taken as some sort of quality stamp on the ravings of the kind of guy who a scant couple years ago said things like this (emphasis mine):

... and whose line really hasn't changed fundamentally at all in the interim. Why is this guy considered -- by people who know how to read, at least -- an authority on anything at all?
Did you actually read the entire commentary, or did you just decide to complain about something you noticed in passing? Krugman was right on the money. What was needed then was not more consumer spending, but no one else was stepping-up. As surmised, Greenspan just kept everything afloat by blowing yet another bubble, which, as we have since learned, created even greater havoc when in broke than the stock market bubble would have created by itself.

At the time, Krugman was in the minority; seeing the economy as a series of bubble-blowing exercises. Even Mike Alexander thought he was a bit extreme in his beliefs, and Mike is no friend of bubble blowers.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.







Post#571 at 06-16-2009 09:48 AM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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06-16-2009, 09:48 AM #571
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Quote Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon View Post
Krugman was right on the money. What was needed then was not more consumer spending, but no one else was stepping-up.
What the hell? He came right out and said, that the Fed needed "soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment". His main complaint (of course, partisan hacks must complain, even when the Other Guy is doing more or less what they think neds to be done) was that he doubted Greenspan's Fed could "pull that off".
Even to the very end, he identified the success of a recovery with "start[ing to] spend a lot more". He just complained that what the Fed was doing wouldn't go far enough to achieve that goal.

As surmised, Greenspan just kept everything afloat by blowing yet another bubble, which, as we have since learned, created even greater havoc when in broke than the stock market bubble would have created by itself.
Exactly. Krugman's prescription -- to blow up the next bubble -- was poison itself. As some people even back then were astute enough to predict.
At the time, Krugman was in the minority; seeing the economy as a series of bubble-blowing exercises.
He was in the minority, not in recognizing the series of bubbles, but in recognizing it and saying it was good, anyway. That's a pretty interesting minority, to be sure. But not really a laudable one.
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Post#572 at 06-16-2009 09:55 AM by Marx & Lennon [at '47 cohort still lost in Falwelland joined Sep 2001 #posts 16,709]
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Quote Originally Posted by Justin '77 View Post
Funny. I took the time to look through his archives from the time and all I could find was more of the same. My black-white skills must not be as good as yours. Maybe you could link to something from then where he said (as were people in, for example the Austrian school at the time) that the recession needed to play itself out and that inflating a new bubble to keep the level of spending from dropping was ultimately the path to worse ruin? Because that's the 180-degrees you're claiming your guy was really advocating.
I see you only want to see your own opinions echoed back to you, but Krugman has his and you have yours.

Krugman always prefers the use of government largess to solve economic woes. Here's a 1998 article in Slate that discusses that. I don't see any indication that he likes bubbles. I do see a dislike of recessions.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.







Post#573 at 06-16-2009 10:01 AM by Brian Rush [at California joined Jul 2001 #posts 12,392]
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Justin, Krugman did not say what you say he said. I read the article, and your interpretation was dead wrong.

OTOH, he didn't say that the recession "just needed to blow itself out" either, which is what you would prefer he said. However, as that would have been as wrong as your interpretation of what he DID say, I don't hold it against him.

I've commented before that your apparent belief in the need for an economic downturn to reach a certain level of wealth destruction before the economy can recover is pure mysticism. There is simply no rational reason to hold that belief.
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Post#574 at 06-16-2009 11:20 AM by Marx & Lennon [at '47 cohort still lost in Falwelland joined Sep 2001 #posts 16,709]
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Quote Originally Posted by Brian Rush View Post
Justin, Krugman did not say what you say he said. I read the article, and your interpretation was dead wrong.

OTOH, he didn't say that the recession "just needed to blow itself out" either, which is what you would prefer he said. However, as that would have been as wrong as your interpretation of what he DID say, I don't hold it against him.

I've commented before that your apparent belief in the need for an economic downturn to reach a certain level of wealth destruction before the economy can recover is pure mysticism. There is simply no rational reason to hold that belief.
There is one side of the destruction argument that may be valid, and it's the one that's considered least often. The guilty need to be punished. Unfortunately, the guilty usually know they are, plan for the inevitable fall, and are comfortably otherwise engaged when the brown stuff hits the air-handler.

If Justin has a fix for that, I'm interested.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.







Post#575 at 06-16-2009 11:23 AM by Marx & Lennon [at '47 cohort still lost in Falwelland joined Sep 2001 #posts 16,709]
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Quote Originally Posted by The Rani View Post
I thought we weren't supposed to stick our heads in the sand...
... or something.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
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