I hear a few arguments, repeated verbatum from Fox News watching, Limbaugh listening zombies, and I’d like to address them in super, super short terms. Because honestly…these arguments are ridiculous. 1 - The constitution guarantees us the right and abilities to protect ourselves from tyrannical government. As such, we ought to be allowed to have “Weapon X” (teehee). Where does this one end? The government also has ballistic missle shields operated from space. The obvious idea is if we are to be able to fight the government, we need to be equally equipped. So then…where do we draw that line? No one is really for the private ownership of nuclear bombs, which is obvious. But what else? Are we prepared to give any a-hold with a decent job an EMP? Think someone in Montana ought to be able to amass a collection of F-18s? Tanks? Nobody argues about the fact that an AR-15 is the CIVILLIAN version of the M-16…So what are we actually arguing for here? What is the basis of the point in context of the world? 2 - They’ll never be able to get all the assault weapons/extended clips/whatever else off the street. Never. That makes any proposed law banning the sale of assault weapons/clips/whatever ineffectual and a waste of time. Weird…let’s replace the word “assault weapon” with something else and see if the logic still holds up, as it should. We’ll never get all of the child pornography off the street. Never. That makes any proposed law banning the sale of child pornography ineffectual and a waste of time. We’ll never get all the meth off the street. Never. That makes any proposed law banning the sale of meth ineffectual and a waste of time. See what I mean? Wherever you fall on any arguement…take a step back and consider whether or not your argument withstands even basic logic tests and still works within the context of the world at large. If not…figure out a better argument. P.S. - This constitution argument is ridiculous. Again, put your favorite senators/politicians/freedom fighters/whatever the eff’s arguments into context. They all talk about being “constitutionalists”. The constitution says the President can operate the military without declaration of war for I think it’s 90 days (it’s 30/60/90, I forget but it maxes at 3 months for sure). The last time the US declared war? 1941. If they don’t mention that little fact, that every military opersation St. Reagan ever conducted was against the constitution, that whoever their favorite president, after 1945, is, they have ALL broken the constitution. Be sure to mention that.
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Guest staring my brother - Jofrin Pezzati - http://blog.jofrin.com/ I was going to post about an exciting event that will be taking place in the near future, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. That shit is so well said.
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I’mma break rank for a second here. There’s a lot of discussion about how the GOP will react to their losses. Will they go farther right, will they become moderate, etc etc. However, on the other side of the aisle, I’m wondering what this election will mean for the Democrats. There are a ton of things they have done over the last 4 years that I severely disagree with, almost all of which can be characterized as moving farther to the right wing, and I’m wondering if they just got solidified or not. Will the Obama win, and the general winning by the Dems mean even less discussion over drones, over our operations in Pakistan, Yemen, etc etc? What does it mean for our policy towards Iran? Remember, this is the WH that quit announcing new drilling permits on federal lans for oil, sends DEA agents into foreign countries against that countries wishes, that walked away from Cap and Trade, refused to weigh in on the Union Busting shit going on, etc etc. While I’m super, super glad, as someone who is fairly liberal, that Obama got voted in, but all of these things REALLY make me worry about the future of liberalism in America. Is this the defeat of batshit crazy conservatism (of course not, this is hyperbole), or is this the beginning of the co-opting of the left (seems a lot more likely)? A little fly in your desert.
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Seriously, my balls jumped through my face with excitement when Biden made the point of if we had privatized social security, which the GOP has been yearning for since AT LEAST 1964 with Goldwater, where would we be? It’s such a god damn OBVIOUS statement that nobody seems willing to make because heaven forbid you upset the donors. It underlines the EXACT philosophical reason, no matter what all the Paul-Bots/GOP-ers yell and scream, why every single thing on earth can NOT be trusted to markets, will NOT benefit from having a price tag attached, that markets cause not only booms, which are awesome, but busts, and that SOME things are just too goddamn important to assign these astronomical risks too, no matter the benefits. Some things, not all things, but some, need to be played close to the chest by people who have responsibility to the public. When’s the last time y’all voted on a decision by Goldman-Sachs? Never? Don’t have enough money to buy enough shares to be in the boardroom? EXACTLY. It’s the core of my beliefs, of so many peoples beliefs and is the embodiment of why the social contract between Citizens and Government should not be for sale. Fucking. Thank. You.
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”According to the most recently released data on food stamps, more than 44.7 Million people received food stamps in 2011. Well this should be a no-brainer because according to the last US Census data there are only 38 Million total black people in the United States or 12% of the entire US population. Herein lies the rub, though blacks are only 12% of the population, black households make up 1/3 of all food stamp participants. “
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Aint this some shit. Listen to Gingrich accuse Mathews for being racist for calling Gingrich out for what he knows he’s inferring, what Mathews knows he’s inferring, and what we all know Gingrich is inferring. I’m debating writing some big long thing about Gingrich’s policies and how they affect minorities, but I feel like they’re pretty obvious and better explained than I could do. But I will say this. I don’t think Gingrich is an out and out racist, nor do I think most of the GOP is racist. I think race in this country has morphed into a kind of classism that is honestly older than racism in western culture (I’d say America, but both racism and classism were there from the start and to think they weren’t is kind of silly). It just so happens that Gingrich and most people put minorities at the bottom of the pile, economically, and so it’s kind of a classism that works in ways that institutionalize racism type of thing. Gingrich is a smart motherfucker. What a tricky little trap he’s laid.
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Will people PLEEEEEEEEEEEASE stop posting this. It is clearly bullshit. Want to know how you know? (People in the American Southwest need not do this) Look outside. See trees? Viola! Look at the area this picture shows. Do you reeeeeeeeally believe, deep down in your little heart of hearts, honestly and truthfully believe that Canada is currently a desert? No? Me niether. The thing is…global warming, deforestation, industrial neglect and irresponsibility are very, VERY real. I’m not saying any of that isn’t true. Of course it is. But spreading disinformation like an image showing the entire U.S. and parts of Canada as a lifeless desert? Please. Lies are lies. So seriously, from one concerned citizen to the next…stop spreading lies that do absolutely nothing but make people who are genuinely concerned with environmental issues look like liars and over state our case so much that it becomes easier and easier to dismiss the truths behind it. Use your heads. Don’t just repost nonsense from the internet because it fits your paradigm. If it seems to be almost comic book-y in its evil scope (I mean, damn near the same image was used in the third Resident Evil movie, for gods sake) use your Bullshit Detectors and detect some bullshit. Please. Stop. http://jootix.com/view/772/earth-satellite-map-earth-satellite-map-2560x1600.html
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It has been my experience that when dealing with females, you need to treat them as though they have a mental disorder… especially those that are constantly seeking equality in the workplace, the military, and in the home. Women need to know their place and need to know when it is okay for them to speak. They were put on this earth for two reasons, and two reasons alone: taking care of their husband, and giving birth to his children… that is all. Any woman who tells you otherwise is obviously touting the liberal agenda of equality, and they need to be told the truth of their purpose. It is a disorder that can be fixed, but not until they go through several years of therapy to understand that they need to be subservient. - Rick Santorum Goddammit people this is faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake. The minute you read shit like this you Bullshit-O-Meter should go off and you should do just a tiny bit of research. I wish people would realize that the minute they get all pissy about some fake news, it leads credence to the person they’re all pissy about, as it makes the opposition to them look like a bunch of uninformed children complaining about nothing. I don’t care what you do/don’t support (though I’ll probably argue with you about it either way) as long as it’s actually legit and not some internet/ignorant fueled nonesense. But here’s some things the man ACTUALLY said, just in case you didn’t do that tiny bit of research (or this is your research…and hey look at that…sourcing! THAT HAS NO PLACE ON THE WEBERNET) - This is from http://theweek.com/article/index/223041/9-controversial-rick-santorum-quotes Most pundits are attributing Rick Santorum’s 11th-hour Iowa sprint from the back of the Republican presidential pack to a statistical tie for first place to something Santorum did right, says Ezra Klein at The Washington Post. “But there’s a simpler explanation, too: Santorum finished in the top three because he was lucky.” Nobody took him seriously until mere days before Tuesday’s Iowa caucuses, so Santorum never got the media scrutiny and voter vetting that sank his once-high-flying rivals. Well, people are taking Santorum seriously now, and he’s getting all kinds of scrutiny. Here, nine of the zanier or more controversial things Santorum has said over the past decade: 1. Opposing birth control Reaction: This is “pretty basic: Rick Santorum is coming for your contraception,” says Irin Carmon at Salon. “Any and all of it.” Threatening to “send the condom police into America’s bedrooms” is pretty bad politics: More than 99 percent of sexually active women have used some form of birth control, and “helping people get access to birth control is actually a popular issue,” supported by 82 percent of Americans. But a national contraception ban is “clearly the world Santorum wants.” 2. Keeping moms at home Reaction: Santorum is actually right, says Bonnie Alba at Renew America. Degrading “the stay-at-home wife and mother while idolizing women who chose careers” is “certainly part and parcel of the feminist ideology which has twisted our society into a pretzel of me-ism.” 3. Re-spinning the Crusades Reaction: ”If you were worried there wouldn’t be a 2012 candidate touting the pro-Crusades platform, then today is your lucky day!” says Jillian Rayfield at Talking Points Memo. The religiously sanctioned European military campaigns were aimed at recapturing Jerusalem, and “along the way the Roman Catholic forces massacred thousands of Jews, among others.” I know the Crusades predated the U.S. by a few centuries, but how exactly does this military campaign reflect “core American values”? 4. Rejecting the very idea of “Palestinians” Reaction: ”The striking thing about his comments is that they represent an even more conservative position than that taken by the Israeli government,” says Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post. Israel’s anti-Palestinian position itself isn’t “accepted by much of the world, but it seems that the very least a potential U.S. president could do is accept the definitions used by the Israeli government.” 5. Reminding America that some view Mormonism as “a dangerous cult” Reaction: Santorum was responding to Mitt Romney’s famous speech reassuring evangelical Christians that he shares their values, and to be fair, “Santorum’s ultimate verdict on Romney was more or less positive,” says Dan Froomkin at The Huffington Post. But he draws plenty of “distinctions between Mormonism and Christianity that others have avoided lest they seem overly inflammatory.” 6. Dissing welfare programs that “make black people’s lives better” Reaction: ”This is the sort of subtle racism” that should, but won’t, harm Santorum among Republicans, says Steve Benen at Washington Monthly. Why did he single out black people when talking about cutting government aid? 7. Bringing race into Obama’s abortion views Reaction: Equating fetuses to slaves got Santorum some pretty bad press, says David Weigel at Slate. But critics don’t “appreciate how mainstream Santorum’s point is among pro-life activists” who commonly “consider their work a continuation of other movements that protected human life and elevated the status of people whom the law doesn’t consider ‘human.’ In the 19th century, it was African-Americans; in the 21st century, it’s children in the womb.” 8. Equating gay marriage to loving your mother-in-law Reaction: Did noted “homophobe” Santorum just admit to a “weird sexual relationship with his mother-in-law” and brother? says Michael J.W. Stickings at The Reaction. He may be atop the Republican heap, “but make no mistake about it, Santorum’s still a bigot and a moron.” 9. Comparing homosexuality to “man-on-dog” sex Reaction: ”Rick Santorum has expended a great deal of thought and energy to finding new words to disparage gay marriage,” says Daryl Lang at Breaking Copy. And even if you agree with Santorum, “would you really want a president who is this obsessed” with gay sex?
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![This is a reblog from - http://uglyuglyugly.tumblr.com/ but I believe the post got taken down. The last part is mine, I marked it pretty clearly.
Why I would NOT vote for Ron Paul: A wake-up call to voters and, specifally, to his mindless followers. »
Obviously, I wouldn’t vote for anyone. As an anarchist and someone who is generally conscious of how America, democracy, and plutarchy works, I know that my vote is irrelevant. I also think that it is unethical and counter-productive to society to vote for the lesser of two evils; after all, the lesser of two evils is still evil. Representative democracy simply does not work. It has failed us, the people, regardless of our political party affiliations, for over a century now and I am baffled that we still so mindlessly support it. In the case of Ron Paul, he has become very popular amongst voters, particularly the college youths, thanks to the Internet. He went viral like a meme and like a video on YouTube entertained people without them ever asking what the source was. In my generation of pseudo-political consciousness, active laziness, blissful ignorance, and a constant search for easy solutions, it seems my peers have chosen Ron Paul as their new Band Aid. Of course, they did so without research and, at best, with plenty of compromise.
Fact is, Ron Paul is just another politician. Politicians have never and will never totally defend the people. What’s most startling about Ron Paul’s popularity, especially amongst my peers, is that his platform consists of two main concerns: 1.) a strict adherence to the Constitution, an archaic political document that was never perfect and certainly doesn’t apply to the context of today’s issues and situations; and 2.) stingy federal budgeting and fiscal responsibility. I had no idea that my generation was so concerned with fiscal issues and the Constitution! I thought my generation wanted affordable or free health care, gay rights, environmental protection, and our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan! The funny thing is, Ron Paul at his core is just like every other politician we’ve ever had: he is obsessed with an archaic doctrine of beliefs and rules and is obsessed with money and preserving capitalism. If we absolutely must live within a democracy here in this country, you would think we would need someone who will fight for and defend our rights and pave the way towards a sustainable and bright future for our species, not just another suit and tie tax attorney who is old, out of touch, and socially conservative.
Below are a few important reasons why I personally do not and cannot support Ron Paul. I think you should take them all into heavy consideration before forming an opinion of him, especially if you already consider yourself a supporter of him as a potential voter.
First and foremost, let me clarify two things:1.) I do not believe that, even if Ron Paul were a worthwhile candidate for president, he could actually win this thing. While he may be “just another politician” in the grand scheme of things, he’s also adamantly against the Federal Reserve and promises to abolish it if president. In America, elections are bought and sold and play out exactly as planned the same way any other scripted, televised event would. These political curve balls are shown to us to create the illusion of choice. But have these underdogs ever won? No. There’s a reason for that: The Federal Reserve owns this country.2.) I do agree with some of what Ron Paul believes in. I totally support his belief in a more limited government and especially his promise to abolish the Federal Reserve. However, as I’ve already said, voting for the lesser of two (or six or eight) evils is still evil. I absolutely refuse to support anyone short of perfect. I would never be able to find within my conscience the ability to do so. If we, the people, responded this way and refused to vote until we finally had candidates that actually were chosen by us in the first place, maybe things could change.
Now.
* Ron Paul is very likely a racist.Other than the fact that his son, Rand Paul (senator of Kentucky) has several ties to white supremacists and the groups they belong to, as well as other fringe right-wing extremists who harbor racist tendencies, Ron Paul’s newsletters have been the subject of controversy since the ’90s. Below are quotes from these newsletters…(# = confirmed, admitted statements written by Paul; & = claimed to have been written by his “ghostwriters”)
# “If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.”# “Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action.”# “Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the ‘criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”# “[Although] we are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.”# “We don’t think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That’s true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such.”& “Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.”& “Listen to a black radio talk show in any major city. The racial hatred makes a KKK rally look tame.”& “[Y]ou’ve probably already heard about the newest threat to your life and limb, and your family: carjacking. It is the hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos.”
Ron Paul has also negatively criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a landmark move towards the end of institutional racial discrimination in this country that allowed blacks to vote, go to school, and eat in public places of business with whites. According to Paul, “[It] not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society.” Because of how extremely he adheres to his libertarian beliefs, he believes that it directly infringed on the individual liberties of Americans by, for example, federally forcing business owners to allow people who weren’t white into their establishments. His son has also come out with the exact same sentiments and both of them have stuck to them. Basically, they believe in individual liberties to the fullest extent… even if those individuals use their liberties to oppress another’s.
He has also spoken highly of David Duke, a former state representative and presidential runner, as well as a former grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
http://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/opinion-ron-paul-is-a-white-supremacist/http://web.archive.org/web/20070512114222/http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/aol-metropolitan/96/05/23/paul.htmlhttp://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/ron-pauls-racist-newsletters-revealed/http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/269671/20111219/ron-paul-2012-racist-newsletters.htmhttp://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul188.htmlhttp://www.tnr.com/downloads/November1990.pdf
* Ron Paul is anti-abortion and will not protect a woman’s right to choose.Despite the fact that Ron Paul usually avoids divulging his personal, honest perspectives on almost all social issues during campaigns and uses the libertarian philosophy of state-by-state legislation to abdicate any responsibility to protect the rights of all human beings, he certainly still fights in his spare time to try and end abortion at all levels, even by federally means.
In 1981, he wrote as a member of the group Libertarians For Life, “Pro-life libertarians have a vital task to perform: to persuade the many abortion-supporting libertarians of the contradiction between abortion and individual liberty; and to sever the mistaken connection in many minds between individual freedom and the ‘right’ to extinguish individual life.”
As an obstetrician and gynecologist who has delivered over 4,000 babies in his career, he often uses his experience to validate his stance against abortion. Telling a story of one time accidentally witnessing a late-term abortion, he claimed, “It was pretty dramatic for me to see a two-and-a-half-pound baby taken out crying and breathing and put in a bucket.” He says this despite the fact that partial-birth abortion procedures kill the fetus before it passes its head out of the woman’s body and induced labor is almost always in the case of life-threatening pregnancies or for fetuses who died in-utero.
He has reintroduced a bill called the Sanctity of Life Act several times, first in 2005 and then again in 2007 and 2009. The bill would have defined life and legal personhood as beginning at conception, regardless of the fetus’s, “health, defect, or condition of dependency.” This would have given each state the right to completely ban all abortion. Even though he has stated that, “the federal government has no authority whatsoever to involve itself in the abortion issue,” he voted in favor of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2000 and 2003, which goes as far as saying in its statute that partial-birth abortion, “is never medically necessary and should be prohibited.” He himself has called it a, “barbaric procedure.”
http://www.dailypaul.com/157342/ron-paul-being-pro-life-is-necessary-to-defend-libertyhttp://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/abortion/http://www.washingtonwatch.com/bills/show/110_HR_1094.htmlhttp://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance133.html
* Ron Paul has exhibited homophobic tendencies and will do nothing to support or protect equal marriage rights for homosexuals.Aside from his appearance in Bruno where he looks literally terrified of the character long before he pulls his pants down, and his subsequent reaction of, “He’s queer as the blazes!” Ron Paul has made it clear that he will not do a single thing to ensure equal rights for homosexuals. Again, he will use state-by-state legislation to cop out of defending the rights of all Americans. While many will still side with his extreme libertarian dedication, we must all realize that to allow the discrimination of human beings based on their skin color, orientation, or gender is to be complicit in it.
In one of his newsletters, a column entitled “The Pink House” (get it?) ranted, “What an outrage that, for the first time in our nation’s history, the organized forces of perversion were feted in the White House…. I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities. They could also not be as promiscuous. Is it any coincidence that the AIDS epidemic developed after they came ‘out of the closet,’ and started hyper-promiscuous sodomy? I don’t believe so, medically or morally.” Later that year, this quote also showed up in his newsletter: “Many Americans belong to the Smithsonian Institution, which is charged with collecting artifacts that reflect the spirit of American history. But now homosexuals are being asked to contribute memorabilia of their struggle for ‘civil rights’. The Smithsonian is planning an exhibit to advance the gay political agenda, which is uniformly statist.” Again in 1994, a column in his newsletter said,“[G]ays in San Francisco do not obey the dictates of good sense. They have stopped practicing ‘safe sex.’ … First, these men don’t really see a reason to live past their fifties. They are not married, they have no children, and their lives are centered on new sexual partners. These conditions do not make one’s older years the happiest. Second, because sex is the center of their lives, they want it to be as pleasurable as possible, which means unprotected sex. Third, they enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.” When brought up, Ron Paul has claimed that these don’t exist or that he didn’t write them, once again laying blame on ghostwriters for his newsletter.
He spoke in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, favoring the way it supported state-by-state legislation of gay marriage; under this act, a gay marriage recognized as legal in one state does not have to and will not be recognized in a state where gay marriage is illegal. It also, at afederal level, recognizes the union of marriage as, “between one man and one woman.” The only reason Ron Paul did not vote for this act was because, at the time of its admission, he was not a member of Congress. According to Paul, recognizing gay marriage at a federal level would be, “an act of social engineering profoundly hostile to liberty,” although, apparently, recognizing same-sex marriage at a federal level is okay. In a televised interview, when asked if gays should be allowed to get married, he responded, “[T]hey should be allowed to do whatever they want and call it whatever they want, [as long as] they don’t expect to impose their relationship on somebody else. They can’t make me personally accept what they do.”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/01/08/433066/-Ron-Pauls-Racist-Newsletters-Revealedhttp://www.tnr.com/downloads/June1990.pdfhttp://www.tnr.com/downloads/december1990.pdfhttp://www.tnr.com/downloads/january1994.pdfhttp://web.archive.org/web/20070207225148/http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2004/cr093004.htmhttp://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul207.htmlhttp://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul160.htmlhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJz81lAwY0M
* Ron Paul does not believe in global climate change.Despite the fact that the vast majority of scientists support the theory of global warming and global climate change, Ron Paul does not and has been open about not believing in it. He considers himself a “free-market environmentalist”, which essentially means that he believes that environmental destruction caused by a business is the business’s responsibility to fix, not the government’s, and that nature is all just “property”. While he sees polluters as “aggressors”, visualizing nature, and hence the ecosystems and land contained within it, is detrimental and unsympathetic towards nature and the environment as a whole. It is not a pragmatic means of viewing the world as we know it. In fact, it is the capitalistic redefining of nature and natural resources that has systematically destroyed it over the last couple of decades. His plan for preventing or limiting pollution? Making it more costly for the business to do so; basically, making it a tad more inconvenient for businesses to harm the environment. He also opposes favoring one energy over another and believes that capitalism will naturally phase out the least popular and sustainable method; a lax means of approaching the inevitability of reaching peak oil without even beginning the transition towards a more sustainable fuel. Of course, this not only plays in appropriately with his libertarian beliefs, but also with the fact that he simply does not believe that we are in danger.
When asked in an interview if he, “considered climate change a major problem threatening civilization,” he responded with a laugh, “No. I think war and financial crises and big governments marching into our homes and elimination of habeas corpus — those are immediate threats. We’re about to lose our whole country and whole republic! If we can be declared an enemy combatant and put away without a trial, then that’s going to affect a lot of us a lot sooner than the temperature going up.” Unlike government and laws, the environment isn’t a human abstraction. Without the planet to sustain us in the first place, we can’t have tyranny or freedom. Along with this, he believes, of all sources, nuclear power is, “the safest form of energy we have.” His voting record has done nothing in favor of environmental protection or sustainability, either, voting “no” on just about any legislation that would have federally regulated or put a stop on corporate pollution.
Ron Paul has been quoted as saying that global warming is, “the greatest hoax that has been around in many, many years.”
http://www.ronpaul2012.com/the-issues/energy/http://web.archive.org/web/20070927093141/http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=154http://www.grist.org/article/paul1http://www.ontheissues.org/2008/Ron_Paul_Energy_+_Oil.htmhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hCc5Gk1nops#t=416s
* Ron Paul is a hypocrite.Perhaps a lot more consistent than most politicians, but a hypocritical politician nonetheless. Putting someone on a pedestal because they’renot as bad as the majority of something is like choosing prison over homelessness.
An earmark is funding from a bill that is allocated toward a specific project or cause. Even though Ron Paul vocally opposes federal spending on most things, he has had no issue in his career as a politician of requesting earmarks to fund things, even the arbitrary (such as for a Texas shrimp company and the renovation of an old movie theater). In 2007 alone, he requested $400 million in earmarks, some of it from bills he voted against. Now, my problem isn’t with his government spending, it’s with his hypocrisy. Based on the staunch standards of Ron Paul, Ron Paul would likely not support what Ron Paul has done with earmarks if he wasn’t Ron Paul.
He voted in favor of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, which also permitted electronic surveillance of Americans without a warrant.
http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2007_4483248http://web.archive.org/web/20070625083730/http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2007/tst061807.htmhttp://www.dailypaul.com/1135/ron-paul-earmarksno-pork-herehttp://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,292334,00.htmlhttp://web.archive.org/web/20071104024813/http://www.vote-smart.org/issue_keyvote_member.php?cs_id=V3064
* Ron Paul is devoutly religious.This might not be a concern to some people, particularly with Ron Paul who doesn’t visibly impose his religion on the people through his proposals as president. However, we must take into consideration that he does carry all of the conservative, anti-social beliefs that come with right-wing evangelical ideology. I firmly believe that it is more this than his conservative libertarianism that keeps him from standing up in defense of human rights of any kind. Anti-abortion and anti-gay mentalities are deeply rooted in religious backgrounds.
He opposes the idea of separation of church and state, even going as far as stating that it isn’t in the Constitution and that the Founding Fathers wrote it with deep inspiration from their faith. He also believes that prayer in public school should be allowed, albeit not mandatory. In a column he wrote, he was quoted as saying, “[T]he secularists wage an ongoing war against religion, chipping away bit by bit at our nation’s Christian heritage. Christmas itself may soon be a casualty of that war.” The fact that he believes that our nation wasn’t built on secularism is scary in and of itself.
Ron Paul also does not believe in evolution. I personally cannot trust someone who, as a grown man, trusts a vague notion of a Creator over years upon years of scientific research.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/ron-paul-the-religious/2011/10/14/gIQAPdUFkL_blog.htmlhttp://web.archive.org/web/20040103072942/http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2003/tst122903.htmhttp://www.ontheissues.org/2008/Ron_Paul_Principles_+_Values.htmhttp://www.ontheissues.org/2008/Ron_Paul_Education.htmhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JyvkjSKMLw
* Ron Paul is very anti-immigrant, even aggressive towards children born to illegal immigrants.I don’t believe in borders either way, but even in the confines of this country, which has been built on illegal immigration and imperialism, to be so aggressively anti-immigrant is absurd. This is just another example of a politician who places capitalism, nationalism, and archaic documents over the lives and rights of human beings. You can swing it whichever way you want and I don’t care if this, like other things, fall perfectly into play under his political beliefs; this shit is wrong and anti-human, as well as at its core very anti-American.
He supports strengthened border security and opposes any and all welfare and support of gradual citizenship for those who have already entered the borders of our country illegally, even if the illegal immigrants in question are children born after the crossing. He voted for the infamous Secure Fence Act of 2006, which lead to over 700 miles of physical barriers and security along the U.S.-Mexico border. Just the fence cost over $1.2 billion in government spending. He also believes that we should completely end emergency hospital treatment of illegal aliens and that they should seek help from charities. On top of this total lack of sympathy for illegal aliens, he does not support birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants.
http://www.ronpaulforcongress.com/html/bordersecurity.htmlhttp://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul150.htmlhttp://www.abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=3985423http://youtube.com/watch?v=C4c9S9meOnghttp://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul346.htmlhttp://web.archive.org/web/20070430013426/http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2006/tst100206.htmhttp://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul269.html
* Ron Paul is a republican.Listen, I’m an anarchist. I don’t believe in anything a politician is going to say. But, hypothetically, if I had to choose, I certainly am not going to choose a republican. I know democrats aren’t any better, but republicans are the ones who are in your face about their extremist, anti-human values. Democrats, on the other hand, help the world crumble simply by not doing anything to stop it. It is in this respect that Ron Paul is the best of both parties. The way I see it, though, is that representative democracy isn’t going anywhere any time soon. If we absolutely must live under the rule of a presidential figure, the veryleast they could do is protect us. Ron Paul is just another republican when it comes to the rest of the issues, though.
He does not believe in universal health care, something almost the entire industrialized world offers their citizens. The minimization of income tax under his presidency, he theorizes, will shrink the cost and hence increase the affordability of individual health care. This is all well and good, but medical treatment and mere survival should not be just another privilege we must earn through hard work and wage slavery. That is, after all, why we’re a minority in the industrialized world: because other nations understand this.
Ron Paul loves guns and wants everyone to be able to have them. TheGun Owners of America gave him their A+ rating. Of course, he has the Second Amendment to cite for being so romantic about the right to bear arms. He doesn’t even care if they’re machine guns. According to him, “[T]he assault weapons ban does nothing to make us safer.” Um, neither does owning a gun, as statistics have proven. He believes that it is our individual duties as American citizens to own guns as a means of protecting ourselves from school shootings, terrorists, and violent criminals. I don’t disagree with that, as I do not condone in the calling of cops, but the idea that we are all somehow responsible for being able to protect ourselves implies that teachers, students, and bystanders should all be carrying guns. While this stamps out a heavy reliance on government legislation, it also places a huge emphasis on the need for guns, which have one purpose: to harm and/or kill people. “People don’t kill people, guns kill people.” No, people with guns kill people!
He supports the death penalty, another outdated methodology protected by our outdated Constitution, but no longer used in most of the industrialized world due to the progression abroad while America stays the same. That’s what Ron Paul, appropriately as a conservative, will do: keep us where we are. He will conserve outdated traditions, even those that kill people, despite the fact that capital punishment does not and has not ever verifiably deterred crime and has been shown time and time again to kill innocent people. According to Paul, “capital punishment is a deserving penalty for those who commit crime.”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul105.htmlhttp://web.archive.org/web/20080301114038/http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2006/tst092506.htmhttp://web.archive.org/web/20070604202950/http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2005/tst042505.htmhttp://www.reason.com/news/show/118086.htmlhttp://www.gunowners.org/op0636.htmhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCM_wQy4YVghttp://web.archive.org/web/20080101055205/http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=509http://theamericanview.com/index.php?id=898&PHPSESSID=5fcc4750ffc284dbf49756d2142c7cf6
In summation, the lesser of two evils is still evil and Ron Paul is no savior. He is not the new hope we can believe in. He represents the Constitution and federal budgeting; not you, or me, women, homosexuals, black people, poor people, sick people, or the environment. I will not be voting for anyone in 2012 and neither should you. Regardless of whether or not you consider yourself an anarchist or whatever, you should refuse to compromise as an individual whose vote and voice are supposed to matter. How can someone represent you, or the people as a whole, when we are not in their interest? How can you support someone who doesn’t support us all? It is this constant compromise as voters, and as a generation, that has perpetuated the politics that have deprioritized us and brought us to where we are today. Wake up. The revolution is not in the form of a politician. It never has been and it never will be. Ron Paul is no different.
Oh, and one more thing, guys: Ron Paul will not legalize weed. He’ll make it so individual states can. And very few will.
THIS PARTS MINE -
I agree with all of this, but I think it STILL misses the point. When people like this talk about limited government, they put forth the argument that “The Markets” will take care of the poor, abused, sick, bottom 1/3rd, etc etc.
But, and I know I sound like a broken record at this point, how little we forget that Medicare, Medicaid, Social Seucirty, Unemployment, Housing programs, EBT/SNAP, The Civil Rights Act, Employment regulation, food regulation, pollution regulation, The Clean Air Act, Roe V. Wade, and shit, even School Lunch Programs were enacted due to direct FAILURES of “the markets”.
I saw a thing with him once that said that Government has no right to tell a business that they can’t bar blacks from their business. That the store owner has every right to block blacks from his business. Now, Ron Paul wouldn’t shop there and hopefully “the markets” would correct the problem and he’d go out of business for being racist.
Here is how that turned out. Not in theory, but in real actual life -
I wish to god I could convince people that Ron Paul, and Libertarianism as a whole, is just Uber Capitalism in Disguise.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lz03l4mDvG1qkykn6o1_500.png)
This is a reblog from - http://uglyuglyugly.tumblr.com/ but I believe the post got taken down. The last part is mine, I marked it pretty clearly.
Obviously, I wouldn’t vote for anyone. As an anarchist and someone who is generally conscious of how America, democracy, and plutarchy works, I know that my vote is irrelevant. I also think that it is unethical and counter-productive to society to vote for the lesser of two evils; after all, the lesser of two evils is still evil. Representative democracy simply does not work. It has failed us, the people, regardless of our political party affiliations, for over a century now and I am baffled that we still so mindlessly support it. In the case of Ron Paul, he has become very popular amongst voters, particularly the college youths, thanks to the Internet. He went viral like a meme and like a video on YouTube entertained people without them ever asking what the source was. In my generation of pseudo-political consciousness, active laziness, blissful ignorance, and a constant search for easy solutions, it seems my peers have chosen Ron Paul as their new Band Aid. Of course, they did so without research and, at best, with plenty of compromise. Fact is, Ron Paul is just another politician. Politicians have never and will never totally defend the people. What’s most startling about Ron Paul’s popularity, especially amongst my peers, is that his platform consists of two main concerns: 1.) a strict adherence to the Constitution, an archaic political document that was never perfect and certainly doesn’t apply to the context of today’s issues and situations; and 2.) stingy federal budgeting and fiscal responsibility. I had no idea that my generation was so concerned with fiscal issues and the Constitution! I thought my generation wanted affordable or free health care, gay rights, environmental protection, and our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan! The funny thing is, Ron Paul at his core is just like every other politician we’ve ever had: he is obsessed with an archaic doctrine of beliefs and rules and is obsessed with money and preserving capitalism. If we absolutely must live within a democracy here in this country, you would think we would need someone who will fight for and defend our rights and pave the way towards a sustainable and bright future for our species, not just another suit and tie tax attorney who is old, out of touch, and socially conservative. Below are a few important reasons why I personally do not and cannot support Ron Paul. I think you should take them all into heavy consideration before forming an opinion of him, especially if you already consider yourself a supporter of him as a potential voter. First and foremost, let me clarify two things: Now. * Ron Paul is very likely a racist. # “If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.” Ron Paul has also negatively criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a landmark move towards the end of institutional racial discrimination in this country that allowed blacks to vote, go to school, and eat in public places of business with whites. According to Paul, “[It] not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society.” Because of how extremely he adheres to his libertarian beliefs, he believes that it directly infringed on the individual liberties of Americans by, for example, federally forcing business owners to allow people who weren’t white into their establishments. His son has also come out with the exact same sentiments and both of them have stuck to them. Basically, they believe in individual liberties to the fullest extent… even if those individuals use their liberties to oppress another’s. He has also spoken highly of David Duke, a former state representative and presidential runner, as well as a former grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. http://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/opinion-ron-paul-is-a-white-supremacist/
In 1981, he wrote as a member of the group Libertarians For Life, “Pro-life libertarians have a vital task to perform: to persuade the many abortion-supporting libertarians of the contradiction between abortion and individual liberty; and to sever the mistaken connection in many minds between individual freedom and the ‘right’ to extinguish individual life.” As an obstetrician and gynecologist who has delivered over 4,000 babies in his career, he often uses his experience to validate his stance against abortion. Telling a story of one time accidentally witnessing a late-term abortion, he claimed, “It was pretty dramatic for me to see a two-and-a-half-pound baby taken out crying and breathing and put in a bucket.” He says this despite the fact that partial-birth abortion procedures kill the fetus before it passes its head out of the woman’s body and induced labor is almost always in the case of life-threatening pregnancies or for fetuses who died in-utero. He has reintroduced a bill called the Sanctity of Life Act several times, first in 2005 and then again in 2007 and 2009. The bill would have defined life and legal personhood as beginning at conception, regardless of the fetus’s, “health, defect, or condition of dependency.” This would have given each state the right to completely ban all abortion. Even though he has stated that, “the federal government has no authority whatsoever to involve itself in the abortion issue,” he voted in favor of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2000 and 2003, which goes as far as saying in its statute that partial-birth abortion, “is never medically necessary and should be prohibited.” He himself has called it a, “barbaric procedure.” http://www.dailypaul.com/157342/ron-paul-being-pro-life-is-necessary-to-defend-liberty
In one of his newsletters, a column entitled “The Pink House” (get it?) ranted, “What an outrage that, for the first time in our nation’s history, the organized forces of perversion were feted in the White House…. I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities. They could also not be as promiscuous. Is it any coincidence that the AIDS epidemic developed after they came ‘out of the closet,’ and started hyper-promiscuous sodomy? I don’t believe so, medically or morally.” Later that year, this quote also showed up in his newsletter: “Many Americans belong to the Smithsonian Institution, which is charged with collecting artifacts that reflect the spirit of American history. But now homosexuals are being asked to contribute memorabilia of their struggle for ‘civil rights’. The Smithsonian is planning an exhibit to advance the gay political agenda, which is uniformly statist.” Again in 1994, a column in his newsletter said,“[G]ays in San Francisco do not obey the dictates of good sense. They have stopped practicing ‘safe sex.’ … First, these men don’t really see a reason to live past their fifties. They are not married, they have no children, and their lives are centered on new sexual partners. These conditions do not make one’s older years the happiest. Second, because sex is the center of their lives, they want it to be as pleasurable as possible, which means unprotected sex. Third, they enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.” When brought up, Ron Paul has claimed that these don’t exist or that he didn’t write them, once again laying blame on ghostwriters for his newsletter. He spoke in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, favoring the way it supported state-by-state legislation of gay marriage; under this act, a gay marriage recognized as legal in one state does not have to and will not be recognized in a state where gay marriage is illegal. It also, at afederal level, recognizes the union of marriage as, “between one man and one woman.” The only reason Ron Paul did not vote for this act was because, at the time of its admission, he was not a member of Congress. According to Paul, recognizing gay marriage at a federal level would be, “an act of social engineering profoundly hostile to liberty,” although, apparently, recognizing same-sex marriage at a federal level is okay. In a televised interview, when asked if gays should be allowed to get married, he responded, “[T]hey should be allowed to do whatever they want and call it whatever they want, [as long as] they don’t expect to impose their relationship on somebody else. They can’t make me personally accept what they do.” http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/01/08/433066/-Ron-Pauls-Racist-Newsletters-Revealed
When asked in an interview if he, “considered climate change a major problem threatening civilization,” he responded with a laugh, “No. I think war and financial crises and big governments marching into our homes and elimination of habeas corpus — those are immediate threats. We’re about to lose our whole country and whole republic! If we can be declared an enemy combatant and put away without a trial, then that’s going to affect a lot of us a lot sooner than the temperature going up.” Unlike government and laws, the environment isn’t a human abstraction. Without the planet to sustain us in the first place, we can’t have tyranny or freedom. Along with this, he believes, of all sources, nuclear power is, “the safest form of energy we have.” His voting record has done nothing in favor of environmental protection or sustainability, either, voting “no” on just about any legislation that would have federally regulated or put a stop on corporate pollution. Ron Paul has been quoted as saying that global warming is, “the greatest hoax that has been around in many, many years.” http://www.ronpaul2012.com/the-issues/energy/
An earmark is funding from a bill that is allocated toward a specific project or cause. Even though Ron Paul vocally opposes federal spending on most things, he has had no issue in his career as a politician of requesting earmarks to fund things, even the arbitrary (such as for a Texas shrimp company and the renovation of an old movie theater). In 2007 alone, he requested $400 million in earmarks, some of it from bills he voted against. Now, my problem isn’t with his government spending, it’s with his hypocrisy. Based on the staunch standards of Ron Paul, Ron Paul would likely not support what Ron Paul has done with earmarks if he wasn’t Ron Paul. He voted in favor of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, which also permitted electronic surveillance of Americans without a warrant. http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2007_4483248
He opposes the idea of separation of church and state, even going as far as stating that it isn’t in the Constitution and that the Founding Fathers wrote it with deep inspiration from their faith. He also believes that prayer in public school should be allowed, albeit not mandatory. In a column he wrote, he was quoted as saying, “[T]he secularists wage an ongoing war against religion, chipping away bit by bit at our nation’s Christian heritage. Christmas itself may soon be a casualty of that war.” The fact that he believes that our nation wasn’t built on secularism is scary in and of itself. Ron Paul also does not believe in evolution. I personally cannot trust someone who, as a grown man, trusts a vague notion of a Creator over years upon years of scientific research. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/ron-paul-the-religious/2011/10/14/gIQAPdUFkL_blog.html
He supports strengthened border security and opposes any and all welfare and support of gradual citizenship for those who have already entered the borders of our country illegally, even if the illegal immigrants in question are children born after the crossing. He voted for the infamous Secure Fence Act of 2006, which lead to over 700 miles of physical barriers and security along the U.S.-Mexico border. Just the fence cost over $1.2 billion in government spending. He also believes that we should completely end emergency hospital treatment of illegal aliens and that they should seek help from charities. On top of this total lack of sympathy for illegal aliens, he does not support birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants. http://www.ronpaulforcongress.com/html/bordersecurity.html
He does not believe in universal health care, something almost the entire industrialized world offers their citizens. The minimization of income tax under his presidency, he theorizes, will shrink the cost and hence increase the affordability of individual health care. This is all well and good, but medical treatment and mere survival should not be just another privilege we must earn through hard work and wage slavery. That is, after all, why we’re a minority in the industrialized world: because other nations understand this. Ron Paul loves guns and wants everyone to be able to have them. TheGun Owners of America gave him their A+ rating. Of course, he has the Second Amendment to cite for being so romantic about the right to bear arms. He doesn’t even care if they’re machine guns. According to him, “[T]he assault weapons ban does nothing to make us safer.” Um, neither does owning a gun, as statistics have proven. He believes that it is our individual duties as American citizens to own guns as a means of protecting ourselves from school shootings, terrorists, and violent criminals. I don’t disagree with that, as I do not condone in the calling of cops, but the idea that we are all somehow responsible for being able to protect ourselves implies that teachers, students, and bystanders should all be carrying guns. While this stamps out a heavy reliance on government legislation, it also places a huge emphasis on the need for guns, which have one purpose: to harm and/or kill people. “People don’t kill people, guns kill people.” No, people with guns kill people! He supports the death penalty, another outdated methodology protected by our outdated Constitution, but no longer used in most of the industrialized world due to the progression abroad while America stays the same. That’s what Ron Paul, appropriately as a conservative, will do: keep us where we are. He will conserve outdated traditions, even those that kill people, despite the fact that capital punishment does not and has not ever verifiably deterred crime and has been shown time and time again to kill innocent people. According to Paul, “capital punishment is a deserving penalty for those who commit crime.” http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul105.html
Oh, and one more thing, guys: Ron Paul will not legalize weed. He’ll make it so individual states can. And very few will. THIS PARTS MINE - I agree with all of this, but I think it STILL misses the point. When people like this talk about limited government, they put forth the argument that “The Markets” will take care of the poor, abused, sick, bottom 1/3rd, etc etc. But, and I know I sound like a broken record at this point, how little we forget that Medicare, Medicaid, Social Seucirty, Unemployment, Housing programs, EBT/SNAP, The Civil Rights Act, Employment regulation, food regulation, pollution regulation, The Clean Air Act, Roe V. Wade, and shit, even School Lunch Programs were enacted due to direct FAILURES of “the markets”. I saw a thing with him once that said that Government has no right to tell a business that they can’t bar blacks from their business. That the store owner has every right to block blacks from his business. Now, Ron Paul wouldn’t shop there and hopefully “the markets” would correct the problem and he’d go out of business for being racist. Here is how that turned out. Not in theory, but in real actual life -
I wish to god I could convince people that Ron Paul, and Libertarianism as a whole, is just Uber Capitalism in Disguise.
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In all reality, the politically active “Evangelical Right” is a small minority of the populace who has an over proportioned say in our political discourse. The reason? They are the POLITICALLY ACTIVE “Evangelical Right”.
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We can have high minded discussions about policy and rights and deeds to land and all this all we want. But I, admitidly from the comfort of my apartment in Nashville, TN, feel like this is an ever lasting cycle until this photo can no longer be taken. We can have armchair talks quoting the Bible and talking about 1947 and Iran and The Golan Heights and Egypt all we want, but how do you concievably not pick up a rifle or an rocket in these circumstances? I think one of the things that gets lost in all the news and articles is the sense of anger and helplessness that comes from going back to your middle school and having classmates, friends, family not be there with you. I hear a lot about how in Harlem, East St. Louis, Memphis, etc, how easy it is to pick up a gun, both physically and spiritually. I can’t imagine Palestine is any different. I am fortunate enough to not have had to bury my first friend until well into college. I can’t imagine what that would have had done to me if it was when I was 13, as these children appear to be. And it was from an accident, not a military strike. Not gangs. Not drugs. As I move around these slightly affluent (and sometimes affluent) circles of white, heterosexual christians who speak so eloquently in demonizing the “other”, I don’t understand the lack of compassion for kids burying kids. Not outrage, not revenge, not anger. Just plain and simple compassion. I hope I, nor we, ever understand or lose that.
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http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/17/world/meast/iraq-troops-leave/index.html I’m sure everyone except those living under the biggest of rocks has heard that yesterday was the last day of the Iraq war. Among all the parades and news report, there is also a lot of anger over the fact that the war has ended. A lot of we’re admiting defeat, weakening our position in the world, etc, etc. Even during the debates a few days ago, there was only one candidate, Ron Paul, who didn’t puff their chest at starting yet another war, with Iran, more bombing, more lives lost, and even worse….more nation building. In Baghdad alone, there is an average of like 5 hours a day of electricity, 9 years after we invaded. In 9 years, we built 5 hours a day of electricity in a single city. Just so we know how well the whole nation building thing goes. My father is 68 years old. My step mother is 57. My father graduated high school in 1962. There has been a constant fight over the last week over this whole Iraq thing. The idea of even questioning American military might and intentions is simply beyond my fathers grasp. He even supported Bill Clintons military actions, and according to my father, Bill Clinton can’t even take a piss correctly. My father came of age in the 1950s. World War II. The Marshall Plan. The Cold War and the Castro turning communist. This is the world view of my father. I’m pretty anti military, I promise, but I think WWII, especially the European theater, was a justified and ultimately good action. My father, the republican cadidates and all the St. Reaganites out there view American militarism through this prism. Unquestionable. When push comes to shove, the Army is there to save the world. My step mother graduated college in 1972. Vietnam. An insanely brutal and ultimately futile war. 54,000 Americans and untold amounts of Vietnamese, Laotion, Cambodian and Chinese dead. The anti-war protest. The hippie movement, which despite what you see on TV and in the ignorant ramblings of college students, was less about fashion and slang and more about really and truly questioning tradition, authority and what the real definition of American means. She informed me the other day that it never even dawned on her till she met my father that there was ever a single good aspect of Vietnam, nor, aside from The Gulf War and Sarejavo, a single justified aspect of American militarism. The ultimate cost of war, aside what the bankers and the politicians and the think tanks and the geopolitical strategists may suggest, is human life. Blown to bits, laying in foreign lands without a friend in the world, dying, crying, giving everything they can to be home with their lies. Lying dead in their homes from misplaced bombs dropped from 50,000 feet, shrapnal tearing their children apargt, losing their humanity in the cross fire from two forces trying to “liberate” them by accidently killing them. Themselves losing so much hope for tomorrow that picking up a gun and accepting death not at a moments notice but with no notice at all nover building relationships and working for a brighter tomorrow. It’s not the 866 billion dollars, the containment of Iran, the pipelines, the establishment of democracy, none of that. No matter what the TV machine may tell us. Yet I contend that another huge, insanely damaging and socially costly casualty of needless militarism and war is a populace losing faith in it’s country. I know I’m not the first to say this, but ever wonder why drugs, destruction of family values (and I don’t mean gays, that’s retarded), isolationism, gangs, greed, this insane banking system, high school drop outs, college attendance, teenage pregnancies and millions of kids sitting inside playing Madden instead of playing football in the streets happened at the exact same time as Vietnam? Vietnam in and of itself didn’t demoralize this country. Our leaders, the people we look to for guidence in a world so complex, so difficult to navigate on our own, turning us into the meat grinder, sending thousands off to die to contain what ultimately turned out to be a false ideology while skimming as much capital off the top is what has lead to the lack of confidence in this country, the fact that so few would be willing to sacrafice a single meal to help their fellow man. We went without meat on fridays, grew our own food, stood in protest with people we’d never met, laid down arms, not picked them up, to stand with the under privelaged, electrified the south, started a sociopolitical movement in midwestern farms that culminated in Social Security and Medicare on the simple premise that is was just the right goddamn thing to do for our fellow human beings. When I tell people I follow and study geopolitical/economic sciences, the only response I ever get is “why, they’re just gonig to steal from us or blow us up anyway”. The difference between my fathers unquestioning commitment to our military and ultimately our country and my step mothers unending questioning to our military and ultimately our country was a single unjustified war. I can name 5 more since then off the top of my head since then, easily, culminating in Afghanistan and Iraq. And now they want to add Iran. And we wonder why we’ll sell our fellow countrymen to the highest bidder and could not even fathom giving up our 3rd million dollars of income to taxes for the betterment of this country. What fucking county.
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3pm Eastern on MSNBC. I got into this guy (Dylan Ratigan) while I was in the hospital. The first show I saw actually talked about capital extraction and trade imbalances. During an election season. Fuck. Yes.
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This is an amalgamation of random shit. I do music/art/photography as well as spout armchair opinions on politics, philosophy, Art, and lots of things ending in -isms. Any work that is mine will be clearly marked as mine, anything not clearly marked is safe to assume to not be mine. To be honest, this is a public notebook of run on sentences, fragments of thoughts, distractions and small ideas for big minds. I'm going to try to make this as interactive as possible so I can get others ideas on my ideas and ideas on how to steal from people who are smarter than us. Ready for the pretentious quote at the end of the intro that is so cleverly designed to be intriguing and mysterious, yet thoughtful and engaging at the same time; some cute way of summing up myself in the words of some fuckwad Ive never met? "The only real peanut butter is Skippy Super Chunk. Everything else is just shit in jar."
theme by Robin Wragg
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