A former 40 year Atheist analyzes Atheism, without resorting to theism, deism, or fantasy. *** If You Don't Value Truth, Then What DO You Value? *** If we say that the sane can be coaxed and persuaded to rationality, and we say that rationality presupposes logic, then what can we say of those who actively reject logic? *** Atheists have an obligation to give reasons in the form of logic and evidence for rejecting Theist theories.
Occupy Wall Street is not about attacking the wealthy, it’s about tearing down the barriers that some of the rich and powerful have lobbied for to protect their wealth. It's not about attacking the American Dream, it's about attacking the rules and practices that have barred the 99% from the opportunity to achieve that dream. It's not about attacking large corporations, it's about attacking the practice of privatizing profits while socializing risks. The 99% don't want to steal from the 1%, they want the 1% to STOP stealing from the 99%.
Crapping on police cars is juvenile stupidity. Trying to influence by doing so is fruitless. And saying that you don't want to steal from the rich is obviously bogus; it's why they're out there. They are not the 99% (they are liars); they are socialists who want to start the process of destruction to get equalization... those who have a clue as to why they are there - which apparently most do not.
By breaking laws and defouling public property they are tempting violent reprisals, and that is what they wish for, instigating a revolution (a la Frances Fox Pivien & Saul Alinsky and approved by Noam Chomsky,et.al.) in which the infrastructure of the USA, which they hate, is destroyed and the elite (them) can take over and create heaven on earth by what ever means is necessary.
The only problems are that they do not understand politics, they are unarmed, and they are not in the majority. So they will have no influence, but they will stink the place up anyway.
In the meantime, President Barack Goldman-Sachs will profit greatly while praising the fools out of the appearance of caring.
If these people want revolution like their T-shirts say, then I say bring it on; most of the actual 53% is well armed, and trained.
Ridicule is not humor; It’s funny because its unexpected absurdity is made to look as if it contains truth. And it is only funny to a certain class of people.
;)
I think the media is focusing on the protesters who look like they just arrived from Burning Man and largely ignoring the more articulate speakers. Granted I'm sure there is a percentage who couldn't articulate why they are they with any intelligibility.
The top 20% hold 93% of the financial wealth in the States. Near half of that is in the hands of the top 1%.
The American taxpayer bailed out that top 1% when the markets crashed. The top 1% went straight back to gambling with the stock markets and awarding themselves multi-million dollar bonuses. Meanwhile millions are left to choose between shelter and food, are absent medical care and are increasingly being made aware that Wall Street runs America.
Your taxes bailed out the people that gambled your money away. Now you are either homeless, starving or otherwise struggling to get by while they go straight back to gambling.
How people can argue that the top 1% of people legitimately earn near half the wealth generated by an entire country is quite confusing.
"The top 20% hold 93% of the financial wealth in the States. Near half of that is in the hands of the top 1%."
And that is unfair under whose rules?
"The American taxpayer bailed out..."
Hold the phone! The Government bailed out these creeps, and still wants to give them more. The money has been confiscated from our children, by the fools in the government who could have done otherwise. The creeps in the banks have bought the creeps in the government; the government had the power and responsibility to correct the situation and it is the government's fault.
"Meanwhile millions are left to choose between shelter and food, are absent medical care and are increasingly being made aware that Wall Street runs America."
Appeal to emotion.
"Your taxes bailed out the people that gambled your money away. Now you are either homeless, starving or otherwise struggling to get by while they go straight back to gambling."
The future was mortgaged by the government. Those in government had the responsibility and they shrugged it off for cash in their pockets and their campaign funds.
"How people can argue that the top 1% of people legitimately earn near half the wealth generated by an entire country is quite confusing."
Ask the government. They are the 1% who could have stopped this, but abdicated in favor of greed.
"The creeps in the banks have bought the creeps in the government; the government had the power and responsibility to correct the situation and it is the government's fault."
YES! And that is exactly what they are protesting. That Wall Street is running the White House!
Stan, you seem angry at the government but you haven't thought deeply enough. Who owns the government?
Whether you like it or not we are both members of the 99%. And might I add that frankly it disturbs me that your response to this is to state you are armed and "ready". Ready to defend multi-billionaires? They already own enough people with guns. They don't need your help.
Jeremy, Please explain then why they are not protesting the government.
Three dashes, I am not a member of the 99%. I am a member of the class who understood up front what Obama stood for, and I voted against him and his dishonesty. I am a member of what is being called the 53% (don't know the source of that number) which did our due diligence and voted not for or against a specious black man, but against a man who believes in positive liberties (only those which are allowed by the gov't), a man who taught Alinsky, a man with a secret life and no documentation.
Along with Frances Fox Piven, this crew is fomenting unrest with the objective of violent encounters. Piven wants a revolution by force; these protesters either are ignorant of what they are doing, or are Alinsky-Piven-union thugs: they do not represent me and I reject being included in their membership. This crew is talking beheadings, murder and sedition. And you are worried about me? But in reality they are just the useful idiots who will fade when the backstage crew takes over, just as with Lenin et.al. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, and all.
The economy has been corrupted to the point that it will get much worse before better. That will give more ammunition to these know-nothings, and gas will be poured on the fire.
The idea is that the nation must be brought down completely before a one world gov't under businessman Soros or whoever can be accomplished. It's on its way. Everything Obama stands for goes in that direction. If you did not know that and voted in this government, then you are part of the problem.
If you fear my arms then you should not interfere in my life. It disturbs me that you are disturbed. But not much.
I never thought I'd be posting comments on a blog before but here I go.
It's like you're all at a bad movie and 3 dashes and Jeromy are blaming the people that made the movie and Stan is blaming the usher.
If you look at the keywords in Stan's comments it looks like he's suckling at the teat of far-right propaganda and doesn't actually understand what you lot are talking about. Which makes his "useful idiots" crack more ironic. That Stan is willing to kill to protect the super-rich shows the depth of how divorced he is from reality and how much of a useful idiot he is.
Both parties are bought and paid for. That's the problem.
Quentin, Are you sure you even read what I wrote? When these false 99% claims come to blows, it is the idiots in the streets, in the front yards, and where ever they choose to wander or be bused who are protesting in complete error and ignorance who will be the problem, not the millionaires or billionaires. These protesters aren't protesting the government, and Obama is backing them. Apparently, the government is sacrosanct to these people, when in fact it is the one place that guilt is most obvious because the government had the power and obligation to stop the bubbles and not to reward the economic criminals. That the government abdicated is the one place where blame should fall.
The millionaires and politicians (of both parties) cannot change the tracks they have laid, nor do they seem to want to; they have allowed themselves to perpetuate corruption. The voters will not affect a regime change with the courage to do what's necessary to prevent the upcoming unrest. After all they put Obama and the accompanying corruption in place in the first place. To cap it off, the two party system has drifted into corruption at all points.
Whether the unrest is justified or not is not the point. It will be a problem. That's the point.
Stan, have you ever heard the phrase "inverted totalitarianism" before?
It's not just the government, it is, in fact, the corporations and upper-class citizens who run it. "Capitalism" is a socioeconomic hierachy carried over from feudalism. From the very drafting of the Constitution, when only white male property owners could vote, the government has an inherent biased-tilted towards aristocracy, and the American people have being managed and manipulated for the interests of the upper-class, especially by corporations this late in the game. This is antithetical to true freedom, and people will naturally revolt against this every now and then.
I know you're a staunch conservative, with libertarian-leanings, and I respect your opinions, but you really should read some more liberal and left-wing thought once and a while. Even the infamous Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital that capitalists have to continually revolutionize society from above to maintain power. Think: Television and pornography for fun and profits.
Of course, if Marx is too far-left for you, I would point out that Edmund Burke - the father of conservatism - did believe that the French Revolution was a paid conspiracy. We could actually be seeing parallels now.
I would consider myself a philosophical anarchist/left-libertarian, but I do believe Judeo-Christians like youurself have things to offer, since Western Civilization is deeply rooted in religious idealism, and I think you should look into anarcho-pacifists like Leo Tolstoy. You'll love the fact that he was promoting moral social reform before the Russian communist revolution, and was, in fact, one of the traditional anarchists Lenin called "juvenile deluded left-wing communists". Tolstoy's idea of the Kingdom of God manifested on Earth was based on a literal intepretation of the Gospels, and it influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King. That's a far cry from the "useful idiots" that you think make up the entire range of left-wing thought.
-It's also ironic that the ethics of American capitalism were rooted in Calvinist thought, and now it's being justified by those of Ayn Rand, a Jewish atheist women raised in Leninist schools. Compare that to the neo-conservatism of the Bush administration, which had Trotskyite DNA. We might actually be quasi-Stalinist after all!
Meanwhile, what we're seeing is a breakdown of a corrupt system, and I hope true reform and democracy will come.
Then they should protest the people who own the corporations: the retirement funds and the stockholders, the owners of mutual funds, and most of the 99%.
I've just finished John Locke's "Two Treatises on government", which outlines natural rights first, then how that relates to natural law.
According to Locke, government is the agreement between individuals to allocate power to a group which will protect the interests of the people. The people cede some of their natural rights (such as the right to kill thieves) to the central group in return for the protection offered by that group.
When the central group fails in its duty to protect the interests of the people, the people have a natural right to disband the central group, and to form a new group which will protect their interests.
What Locke failed to anticipate is the rise of non-producers as a large class who vote themselves entitlements, and the governing class which promotes that in symbiosis. Also not anticipated is the rise of corporatism, another symbiotic parasite.
So the remainder of the diminishing producing class is shut out of the governing class. Government revision cannot be accomplished without leverage.
But the leverage of the OWS protesters is nil. They are not an admirable force to the producers and will likely morph into something much different as they are infused with unions and Leftists. That's why I think they are useful idiots. They don't understand leverage and power, and they are vulnerable to those who do.
The Tea Party at least had focus and cohesion. Their leverage was wide-spread voting ability. They appeal to the producing class (except the entitled unions) and they don't defile everything they touch.
Sorry about that near incoherent rambling above. I was a little dizzy on seroquel. XD
Isn't the collapse of the United States government exciting!
In all seriousness now...
Stan, here are some charts being passed around frequently in OWS circles about the infamous "1%" that I think are very useful:
http://inequality.org/income-inequality/
Now, let's think this through. The Depression gave us FDR, so the growing levels of economic inequality in the United States could give rise to a 'Messianic leader' in the near future more powerful than Bush or Obama to save us from our democratic woahs. It does give credit to the idea that true political liberty/freedom requires a degree of equality.
(For the record, I don't support either trade unions or corporations, although I am a member of the I.W.W.)
I've linked you this before, and I'll do it again since it's topical. Holistic politics:
http://holisticpolitics.org
It's from my nerdy little friend Dr. Carl Milsted, a theoretical physicist, former Libertarian Party activist, and now he's actually a practicing Sabbatarian Christian. When he wrote this, he was pandering to the more hippie left that usually votes Green Party, but now he's working on some websites for conservative Republican types on the debt and our foreign policy problems.
The general consensus around in academic circles that there are no such things as "natural rights", but that government is only legitamized by social contract theories. Fortunately, if you do advocate natural rights theories, Milsted has expanded them to include other important political values in this day and age - even to the most extreme of enviromentalists: anarcho-primitivists - that are consistent with Western traditions.
(You'll note that he also makes a progressive argument against income taxes, so that's appealing for the "56%" that make up the Tea Party movement.)
Whether we like it or not, the future of mankind depends on our ability to cooperate. That was the original message behind OWS.
18 comments:
Occupy Wall Street is not about attacking the wealthy, it’s about tearing down the barriers that some of the rich and powerful have lobbied for to protect their wealth. It's not about attacking the American Dream, it's about attacking the rules and practices that have barred the 99% from the opportunity to achieve that dream. It's not about attacking large corporations, it's about attacking the practice of privatizing profits while socializing risks. The 99% don't want to steal from the 1%, they want the 1% to STOP stealing from the 99%.
Crapping on police cars is juvenile stupidity. Trying to influence by doing so is fruitless. And saying that you don't want to steal from the rich is obviously bogus; it's why they're out there. They are not the 99% (they are liars); they are socialists who want to start the process of destruction to get equalization... those who have a clue as to why they are there - which apparently most do not.
By breaking laws and defouling public property they are tempting violent reprisals, and that is what they wish for, instigating a revolution (a la Frances Fox Pivien & Saul Alinsky and approved by Noam Chomsky,et.al.) in which the infrastructure of the USA, which they hate, is destroyed and the elite (them) can take over and create heaven on earth by what ever means is necessary.
The only problems are that they do not understand politics, they are unarmed, and they are not in the majority. So they will have no influence, but they will stink the place up anyway.
In the meantime, President Barack Goldman-Sachs will profit greatly while praising the fools out of the appearance of caring.
If these people want revolution like their T-shirts say, then I say bring it on; most of the actual 53% is well armed, and trained.
Read the book, "One Second After".
We are ready.
Ridicule is not humor; It’s funny because its unexpected absurdity is made to look as if it contains truth. And it is only funny to a certain class of people.
;)
I think the media is focusing on the protesters who look like they just arrived from Burning Man and largely ignoring the more articulate speakers. Granted I'm sure there is a percentage who couldn't articulate why they are they with any intelligibility.
The top 20% hold 93% of the financial wealth in the States. Near half of that is in the hands of the top 1%.
The American taxpayer bailed out that top 1% when the markets crashed. The top 1% went straight back to gambling with the stock markets and awarding themselves multi-million dollar bonuses. Meanwhile millions are left to choose between shelter and food, are absent medical care and are increasingly being made aware that Wall Street runs America.
Your taxes bailed out the people that gambled your money away. Now you are either homeless, starving or otherwise struggling to get by while they go straight back to gambling.
How people can argue that the top 1% of people legitimately earn near half the wealth generated by an entire country is quite confusing.
Disclaimer: Not American.
"The top 20% hold 93% of the financial wealth in the States. Near half of that is in the hands of the top 1%."
And that is unfair under whose rules?
"The American taxpayer bailed out..."
Hold the phone! The Government bailed out these creeps, and still wants to give them more. The money has been confiscated from our children, by the fools in the government who could have done otherwise. The creeps in the banks have bought the creeps in the government; the government had the power and responsibility to correct the situation and it is the government's fault.
"Meanwhile millions are left to choose between shelter and food, are absent medical care and are increasingly being made aware that Wall Street runs America."
Appeal to emotion.
"Your taxes bailed out the people that gambled your money away. Now you are either homeless, starving or otherwise struggling to get by while they go straight back to gambling."
The future was mortgaged by the government. Those in government had the responsibility and they shrugged it off for cash in their pockets and their campaign funds.
"How people can argue that the top 1% of people legitimately earn near half the wealth generated by an entire country is quite confusing."
Ask the government. They are the 1% who could have stopped this, but abdicated in favor of greed.
"The creeps in the banks have bought the creeps in the government; the government had the power and responsibility to correct the situation and it is the government's fault."
YES! And that is exactly what they are protesting. That Wall Street is running the White House!
Stan, you seem angry at the government but you haven't thought deeply enough.
Who owns the government?
Whether you like it or not we are both members of the 99%.
And might I add that frankly it disturbs me that your response to this is to state you are armed and "ready". Ready to defend multi-billionaires? They already own enough people with guns. They don't need your help.
This is more than a left/right issue.
Jeremy,
Please explain then why they are not protesting the government.
Three dashes,
I am not a member of the 99%. I am a member of the class who understood up front what Obama stood for, and I voted against him and his dishonesty. I am a member of what is being called the 53% (don't know the source of that number) which did our due diligence and voted not for or against a specious black man, but against a man who believes in positive liberties (only those which are allowed by the gov't), a man who taught Alinsky, a man with a secret life and no documentation.
Along with Frances Fox Piven, this crew is fomenting unrest with the objective of violent encounters. Piven wants a revolution by force; these protesters either are ignorant of what they are doing, or are Alinsky-Piven-union thugs: they do not represent me and I reject being included in their membership. This crew is talking beheadings, murder and sedition. And you are worried about me? But in reality they are just the useful idiots who will fade when the backstage crew takes over, just as with Lenin et.al. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, and all.
The economy has been corrupted to the point that it will get much worse before better. That will give more ammunition to these know-nothings, and gas will be poured on the fire.
The idea is that the nation must be brought down completely before a one world gov't under businessman Soros or whoever can be accomplished. It's on its way. Everything Obama stands for goes in that direction. If you did not know that and voted in this government, then you are part of the problem.
If you fear my arms then you should not interfere in my life. It disturbs me that you are disturbed. But not much.
I never thought I'd be posting comments on a blog before but here I go.
It's like you're all at a bad movie and 3 dashes and Jeromy are blaming the people that made the movie and Stan is blaming the usher.
If you look at the keywords in Stan's comments it looks like he's suckling at the teat of far-right propaganda and doesn't actually understand what you lot are talking about. Which makes his "useful idiots" crack more ironic. That Stan is willing to kill to protect the super-rich shows the depth of how divorced he is from reality and how much of a useful idiot he is.
Both parties are bought and paid for. That's the problem.
Quentin,
Are you sure you even read what I wrote? When these false 99% claims come to blows, it is the idiots in the streets, in the front yards, and where ever they choose to wander or be bused who are protesting in complete error and ignorance who will be the problem, not the millionaires or billionaires. These protesters aren't protesting the government, and Obama is backing them. Apparently, the government is sacrosanct to these people, when in fact it is the one place that guilt is most obvious because the government had the power and obligation to stop the bubbles and not to reward the economic criminals. That the government abdicated is the one place where blame should fall.
The millionaires and politicians (of both parties) cannot change the tracks they have laid, nor do they seem to want to; they have allowed themselves to perpetuate corruption. The voters will not affect a regime change with the courage to do what's necessary to prevent the upcoming unrest. After all they put Obama and the accompanying corruption in place in the first place. To cap it off, the two party system has drifted into corruption at all points.
Whether the unrest is justified or not is not the point. It will be a problem. That's the point.
If you disagree, then make your point.
Stan, have you ever heard the phrase "inverted totalitarianism" before?
It's not just the government, it is, in fact, the corporations and upper-class citizens who run it. "Capitalism" is a socioeconomic hierachy carried over from feudalism. From the very drafting of the Constitution, when only white male property owners could vote, the government has an inherent biased-tilted towards aristocracy, and the American people have being managed and manipulated for the interests of the upper-class, especially by corporations this late in the game. This is antithetical to true freedom, and people will naturally revolt against this every now and then.
I know you're a staunch conservative, with libertarian-leanings, and I respect your opinions, but you really should read some more liberal and left-wing thought once and a while. Even the infamous Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital that capitalists have to continually revolutionize society from above to maintain power. Think: Television and pornography for fun and profits.
Of course, if Marx is too far-left for you, I would point out that Edmund Burke - the father of conservatism - did believe that the French Revolution was a paid conspiracy. We could actually be seeing parallels now.
I would consider myself a philosophical anarchist/left-libertarian, but I do believe Judeo-Christians like youurself have things to offer, since Western Civilization is deeply rooted in religious idealism, and I think you should look into anarcho-pacifists like Leo Tolstoy. You'll love the fact that he was promoting moral social reform before the Russian communist revolution, and was, in fact, one of the traditional anarchists Lenin called "juvenile deluded left-wing communists". Tolstoy's idea of the Kingdom of God manifested on Earth was based on a literal intepretation of the Gospels, and it influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King. That's a far cry from the "useful idiots" that you think make up the entire range of left-wing thought.
-It's also ironic that the ethics of American capitalism were rooted in Calvinist thought, and now it's being justified by those of Ayn Rand, a Jewish atheist women raised in Leninist schools. Compare that to the neo-conservatism of the Bush administration, which had Trotskyite DNA. We might actually be quasi-Stalinist after all!
Meanwhile, what we're seeing is a breakdown of a corrupt system, and I hope true reform and democracy will come.
Until then, hold on to your hats. Tightly.
Then they should protest the people who own the corporations: the retirement funds and the stockholders, the owners of mutual funds, and most of the 99%.
Statism or economic deism?
Is there a "third way"?
I've just finished John Locke's "Two Treatises on government", which outlines natural rights first, then how that relates to natural law.
According to Locke, government is the agreement between individuals to allocate power to a group which will protect the interests of the people. The people cede some of their natural rights (such as the right to kill thieves) to the central group in return for the protection offered by that group.
When the central group fails in its duty to protect the interests of the people, the people have a natural right to disband the central group, and to form a new group which will protect their interests.
What Locke failed to anticipate is the rise of non-producers as a large class who vote themselves entitlements, and the governing class which promotes that in symbiosis. Also not anticipated is the rise of corporatism, another symbiotic parasite.
So the remainder of the diminishing producing class is shut out of the governing class. Government revision cannot be accomplished without leverage.
But the leverage of the OWS protesters is nil. They are not an admirable force to the producers and will likely morph into something much different as they are infused with unions and Leftists. That's why I think they are useful idiots. They don't understand leverage and power, and they are vulnerable to those who do.
The Tea Party at least had focus and cohesion. Their leverage was wide-spread voting ability. They appeal to the producing class (except the entitled unions) and they don't defile everything they touch.
The Tea Party at least had focus and cohesion.
The Koch brothers, hyper-conservative multi-billionaires, spent hundreds of millions of dollars* to give the Tea Party that focus and cohesion.
they [the Tea Party] don't defile everything they touch.
That's a matter of opinion on which we shall have to disagree.
------
* The Koch family provide funding for Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, Citizens for a Sound Economy, amongst others.
Sorry about that near incoherent rambling above. I was a little dizzy on seroquel. XD
Isn't the collapse of the United States government exciting!
In all seriousness now...
Stan, here are some charts being passed around frequently in OWS circles about the infamous "1%" that I think are very useful:
http://inequality.org/income-inequality/
Now, let's think this through. The Depression gave us FDR, so the growing levels of economic inequality in the United States could give rise to a 'Messianic leader' in the near future more powerful than Bush or Obama to save us from our democratic woahs. It does give credit to the idea that true political liberty/freedom requires a degree of equality.
(For the record, I don't support either trade unions or corporations, although I am a member of the I.W.W.)
I've linked you this before, and I'll do it again since it's topical. Holistic politics:
http://holisticpolitics.org
It's from my nerdy little friend Dr. Carl Milsted, a theoretical physicist, former Libertarian Party activist, and now he's actually a practicing Sabbatarian Christian. When he wrote this, he was pandering to the more hippie left that usually votes Green Party, but now he's working on some websites for conservative Republican types on the debt and our foreign policy problems.
The general consensus around in academic circles that there are no such things as "natural rights", but that government is only legitamized by social contract theories. Fortunately, if you do advocate natural rights theories, Milsted has expanded them to include other important political values in this day and age - even to the most extreme of enviromentalists: anarcho-primitivists - that are consistent with Western traditions.
(You'll note that he also makes a progressive argument against income taxes, so that's appealing for the "56%" that make up the Tea Party movement.)
Whether we like it or not, the future of mankind depends on our ability to cooperate. That was the original message behind OWS.
Mr. Hobo,
Interesting site- holistic politics.
Are you familiar with Ken Wilber's trans partisan integral politics?
I'm not, but I'll look into it. Thanks!
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