RE: Briefly This Will Only Hurt a Bit!

This is my most recent response to a series of posts and replies here at Ad Populum. This is the original article, Fun and Games Fueling Education. My response to it is here. The response to that was Briefly This Will Only Hurt a Bit. My apologies for the redundancy if you are already familiar with the thread.

RE: Briefly This Will Only Hurt a Bit!
If you actually read my response to your original post, you would have the answers to most of the questions that you posed in this stream of consciousness. To be clear, I did not say that you are stupid. That certainly would have been an ad hominem attack. I DID say that your idea was stupid. In small part, I did this because I think it is. In large part, though, I said it that way to illustrate a point–the same point that I’ve mentioned a handful of times already. The point is that I’m tired of reading “potshot” ad hominem attacks against ME (or generalizations and simplifications of those that disagree with you, including me) in your writing. I’m so sick of it, in fact, that it drives me away from my own website for weeks and months at a time.
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Deja Vu All Over Again In the Land of 1.2 Billion

Replace India with the US, America, or Supreme Nation…WHATEVER title you prefer for our “homeland” AND replace parliament with congress. Tell me if this opinion piece doesn’t ring directly true with our current state of affairs? OH YEAH and replace corruption with campaign finance adultery. Democracies always move towards this unavoidable and wealth/power aggregating endpoint with only the good people that creating the fabric able to overcome such endpoints.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/singh12/English

Thanks Bob Herbert!

The New York Times is losing one of its gems on the op-ed page in Bob Herbert who announced at the end of his most recent salvo against the evils of capitalism that he would be leaving The Times after 18 years.

This is a man who attacked with empiricism equally whether it be Dick, Rummy, and W or The Obama Three Musketeers of Summers, Geithner, and Emanuel. Read the rest of this entry »

Inside Job?

I love this movie! Finally, a leveling of the playing field. Not in a, “Look what you’ve done! We’ll get even!” sort of way, but in a, “Now we know everything,” sort of way. I’ve been fleshing out an argument in recent AdPopulum posts that the world we (of a certain generation) grew up in no longer exists. There is no American democracy: we’re not even a country, we’re a corporation. There is no equity: there is only the hot potato exchange of debt. Nobody was even remotely punished for the actions in this film, and the very actions this film examines continue to this day fully unabated.

The world isn’t changing: It’s changed! There is no going back now. Wasting breath on regulation – or whatever else one might propose – seems completely flimsy and futile. The fact of the matter is the masters of the market have rebuilt the markets in their own image, and nothing will ever change that. Organized crime at its finest? You damn sure better believe it! But, notice that your president is in collusion, notice that all of the academic institutions, legislators, regulators, and sundry government agencies are complicit. Notice that we, too, are implicated with our relentless need for credit and consumption.

Inside Job relieves us all of the burden of having to wonder how the system actually works. No more conspiracy theories and elaborate charts of secret societies and obscure organizations (Masons, Bilderberg Group, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, etc.), the banking and MIC cabals have completely taken over society, and there is no longer a need for secrecy on their part.

Where does that leave the rest of us? I propose we take the information presented in this film – whether it be the stunning panoramas of global metropolitan areas or the explanations of derivatives – and figure out how to exploit the system that takes so much joy in exploiting us. Do what the system does: ignore protests and work proactively to build a better life for your share-holders. There’s seven billion hungry mouths to feed on this planet, so let’s hang up the Tea Party, and Liberal Agenda, and Constitutional Republic, and righteous indignation nonsense and get to work.

These are the people that run our lives. How does that make you feel?

Zeitgeist – Moving Forward

WARNING: Challenging Content. Parts of this movie are preposterous, and yet others (such as most of the second half) insufferably boring. Nonetheless, Zeitgeist has presented truthful, compelling, and important information to millions of viewers. As such, it behooves us to attempt to understand the arguments presented here, as these same arguments will – to greater or lesser degrees – ultimately contribute to the development of human civilization. See for yourself, and please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Back Off Westboro Baptist Church

Last year we had a group of visitors here in Burlington from Topeka, Kansas affiliated with Fred Phelps‘ Westboro Baptist Church. For those not familiar this group you may be familiar with some of their pleasant slogans such as “God Hates Fags”, “Thank God For Dead Soldiers”, “Thank God for 9/11″, “Thank God for IEDs”, “Fags are Beasts, “God Hates Jews”, “Fags Doom Nations”, etc, etc. The list is long and oh so thoughtful. When this group came to Burlington they brought with them their signs and their children to protest Vermont being “most ‘gay’ friendly spot in DOOMED america.” This was not the first time they visited little ol’ Vermont they came a couple of years earlier to spew nonsense during the funeral of a Richmond man killed in Iraq by one of those IEDs they like to scream about so much.

During their most recent visit the anti-Westboro contingent was large, persistent, and peaceful following them from Montpelier to Burlington and all around town just letting them know we didn’t agree with their tactics or the hateful rhetoric that came forth from their mouths and those of their children. BUT I don’t know one person involved in the Burlington section of the anti-Westboro crew that thought they didn’t have the right to say what they wanted wherever they wanted. As common defense of Howard Stern goes: If you don’t like him change the station?

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