Sunday, November 27, 2011

Magic vs Elbow Grease

It started with a post on Facebook referencing a story about complaints that the President's Thanksgiving radio message didn't mention a magical deity.

Obama Thanksgiving Speech Didn't Mention God
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President Obama drew heat from critics for who he didn't thank during his Thanksgiving speech. The Las Vegas Review Journal reports that the Presidient didn't mention God in his address and that's not sitting well with some conservative pundits, as seen in the video above.

To which I responded:
Nathan Garcia I dunno, but you gotta hand it to a guy who finds equal worth, under intense pressure to the contrary, in freedom FROM religion. I'm pretty damned thankful for that.


The deterioration of the thread lead to this:


M****** E L**** S*.[...] Remember, Jesus said the things HE could do, his followers could do, and greater. He was spiritually developed to the point of being able to control the weather, walk on water, and rasie the dead to life. What the people are being fed as Chrisitanity is OBVIOUSLY not the true teachings of Christ, since not one person has raised anyone fron death back to life so far. Ressurecting the dead, by the way, did not originate with the advent of Jesus into the world. Several of the prophets of Israel were recorde as having deone so. Therefore I must cocnclude there is some spritual methoddology, missing in the teachings we currently have available to us. Jesus indicated we are to primarily seek the Kingdom of God within ourselves, and NOT from the sky. Therefore as long as we continue to concieve as God as some being outside ourselves, we are looking in the wrong direction. Naturally your prayers weren't answered, you were sending them in the wrong direction. But you must acknowlege there was some kind of spiritual connection…however weak and misdirected, that was actualized in the fact that you survived.



Nathan Garcia It is recorded that I have raised the dead by the simple fact that I just wrote it down. It means nothing. The deity within ourselves is what we make of it; there is no supernatural anything going for us. Assertions that it's within and we just don't have control of the magic is wishful thinking. Hocus pocus. Superstition. Old wives' tales. It takes a special kind of antisocial pathology to deny our intrinsic, psychological interdependence on each other. We are social animals, and are genetically and psychologically bound to help each other in order to help ourselves overall. Rejection of that fact undermines the fabric of a functional society. Sociopaths such as Ayn Rand and her Objectivist philosophy, followed by Alan Greenspan, Ronald Reagan both Georges Bush, Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia and the entire neo-con, right wing, religious/Tea Party/Republican collective are exactly what brought our planet and our country to the sad state we're in. It's all based on discredited, reality disproven magical thinking, hocus pocus, wishful assertions that claim we just don't believe the lies stongly enough and that's why they don't work. In reality, religion, unregulated free markets and the rest of Reaganomics/trickle down economics don't work because they're false, antisocial and intrinsically self destructive.

J*** J***** ‎@Nathan. " Unregulated free markets." Is that a new, left wing, oxymoron, talking point or what? LMFAO!

And, immediately:

J*** J***** Two words you'll never hear from the left are, personal responsibility. It's there belief that only a nanny state, federal government, can take care of you because you're to stupid to do it yourself. Now, don't you feel insulted?

I know, I know. But, I just couldn't let it go.

Nathan Garcia @J*** J*****: Nearly unregulated free markets are what let investment banks take investor money to gamble away, destroying by as yet uncompensated fraud countless mutual funds and individual retirement savings accounts. Millions of seniors are suddenly without the retirement they saved all their lives to provide themselves (aka personal responsiblity), some of them slipping into poverty so severe they must choose between eating and rent, paying for medical care or paying for heating oil. The term is not a buzz word, left wing talking point or anything close to an oxymoron. Unregulated free markets are exactly the goal corporate oligarchs wish to achieve, and have been very nearly successful in getting for themselves since the 1980s neo-con grip on policy. The Glass-Steagal Act, enacted in June, 1933, specifically to avoid the large banking practices that led to both the Great Depression in 1929 and the current too-big-to-fail bank failures and bailouts. Credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and the other fraudulent financial instruments that sank Bear Stearns, Leman Bros, Citibank, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Washington Mutual to name but a few could not have happened without rampant deregulation at the hands of Reaganomics, neo-con policies. Good gaud, man, pay attention!

 Personal responsibility extends beyond an individual's well being into supporting the very society from which one derives benefit. Denigrating and dismissing one's social responsibilities is antisocial. The extent to which the right has abdicated responsibility for society at large in their quest of abject selfishness is pathological. Ask any qualifed psychology professional about the parallels of what is termed corporate feduciary responsibility and sociopathic behavior and you'll get an accurate, one-to-one correlation. It is willful ignorance to deny the fact that, as a society, everybody shares a responsibility to the extent of one's ability to contribute, especially in proportion to the benefit one derives from that society, to uphold the welfare of each and every individual in that society. For instance, corporations that benefit from publicly educated workers are responsible for contributing forward into the next generation of worker's educations. Corporate taxes to pay for schools, colleges and trade schools is the appropiately right and responsible thing to do. There are, indeed, degrees of responsibility dependant on the benefit a person or organization recieves from that society. Gouging the public without compensation is destructive, perverse and doomed to failure. History has unequivocally proved that time and again. Randian Objectivist selfishness is proven false in practice and is a thoroughly failed ideology. In other words, Reaganomics is a very well orchestrated hoax that got the entire world economy in the fine mess we're in.

 What psychological needs are filled for the likes of John Jensen in undermining even his own wellbeing in service of sick, universally destructive ideas that have been completely proven false? What drives one to ignore the proof of reality staring him or her in the face? You may claim whatever your convictions are, but there's nothing in your freedom of speech that obliges others to enable your delusions or behave as if you even have a point. You may continue ignoring reality, but don't expect the resto of society to agree, much less follow you in cutting your own throat.


Later on in the thread, I recieved some compliments on the last post and I suggested I'd repeated these points enough that the thoughts should at least, by now, be conherent, and I should perhaps post the thoughts to my blog and just link to it in future. So, here it is. 

Then, these came across


J*** J*****
‎@Nathan " The government dosen't solve problems, it subsidizes them." Ronald Reagan

J*** J*****
‎" You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build charactor and courage by taking away a men's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves." Abraham Lincoln


Nathan Garcia
J*** J*****: Oh, yeah, the guy who ran on balancing the budget and improving Social Security, but spent so much on military boondoggles he raided the Social Security fund to cover his tracks and then claimed Social Security was a financial failure. Quoting the President that started the raid on the middle class as some kind of metric for virtue is the same kind of appeal-to-authority logical fallacy as quoting a book of ancient myths about a despotic, pernitiously cruel deity as a model of kindness and mercy. It's absurd and willfully ignorant in the face of proof to the contrary. That's hold-in-your-hand, unequivocal, indisputable proof, and not just contrary opinion, hyperbole or bloviation.

Applying the Lincoln quote to critique redress of the vast inequities of Reaganomics and the neo-con policies of the past thirty years is nothing more than an absurd list of false equivalencies. It's odd, don't you thnk, how the country prospered when the progressive tax rate was up to 70% above $2 million and 90% above $10M -- you know, during those idyllic 50s of unprecedented prosperity Republicans and right wing ideologues keep wanting us to return to socially but not fiscally -- and the country has faltered into despair since Reagan gratuitously declared governement as the problem as an excuse to dismantle public policy safeguards to the benefit of corporate interests. No one is suggesting, nor has there been any time in American history, a destruction of the rich to aid the poor. The proposed three percent raises in taxes, or even a return to the 35% top tier would ruin nobody. Claiming it would is fantasy, disingenuous, outright fallacy. Nobody is suggesting indescriminate waste, and every person in Congress agrees waste must be eliminated. It's just that the New Deal and the Great Society programs are not waste and even strengthen the country. And, any study not paid for by the Hoover Institute, Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise institute or the Chamber of Commerce -- that is, independant without a preordained agenda -- bears that out. Are you really suggesting the wage payer will be crippled by hoarding only a few percent less among their billions or even millions, or better yet, paying the same percentage of all their income as the salaried and minimum wage earner? It is the upper class, led by Richard Nixon (Southern Strategy) Ronald Reagan (Trickle down economics) GHW Bush (Wllie Horton), the Republican Party and billionaire funded, propagandaizing think tanks that have engaged in class warfare, and then hypocritically use the term on their economic victims when those so effected call them on it. No where and at no time have social programs removed individuals' initiative and independence as proven countless times by the millions of American of all ethnicities, races and creeds who have pulled themselves out of poverty, each to his own abilities, after recovery from rough times. The whole point of the social safety net is to provide help for those who are physically, mentally, emotionall unable to help themselves.

The brush with which you paint is as wide as it is false. Not one single one of your points is applicable to the real world. Every comparison you make is itself an indictment of your own brand of class warefare, attempts at underemining the dignity of those whom you label as other than yourself. History has already proven your positions false, unworkable and unsustainable. The vast majority of the population, worldwide and domestic, are on to the distortions, mischaracterizations, fallacies, magical thinking absurdity that are instrinsic to right wing propaganda which right wing despots and ideologues have been spouting so effectively these recent thirty years. Empty, corrupt, unsustainable, self-destructive. Say as you wish in whatever terms you care to use. Just understand you are exposed as one who substitutes conviction for reality, assertions for fact, and opinion for truth.







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