Thanks Bush

[Anonymouse]

Once again, loser goes into the argument of trying to put evasion on me when it was he who showed lack of knowledge regarding economics and he carefully maneuvered to tilt away from his blunder, now throwing vague questions, which have already been answered. Just which questions need further clarification?

[clubbin714]

Bush has certainly done a lot in his first years in office, but that doesn't mean any of it is good for us as common citizens. I contend that he has done more damage to the principles that I believe define what the American democratic experiment stands for.

I believe in an America that tells its citizens that they can do anything, not in an America that tells them they can't. We should seek more freedom, and not to restrict anyone's choices.

This administration has done more to restrict personal and civil liberties than any other in modern history. They have done it in the name of patriotism, which disgusts me. They have gotten away with it by exploiting our deepest fears, and the only people who have benefited are the corporations that have contributed to the Bush campaign. American taxpayers bought the bombs, and we're footing the entire bill for the reconstruction and we are in more danger now than we have ever been. It infuriates me that Americans (who are so pathetic in their knowledge of world geography that 80% of our school children don't even know that the Tigris is a river, much less where it is) would seek to dictate terms of existence to any culture at gunpoint because we do it better than they do.

The America of 8 years ago was a role model to the world of an open economy and free mindset that was emulated by western nations. Today those nations fear us instead of respect us because our foreign policy is that of a bully instead of a champion.

I like republicans. I like republicans who stand for small government and do not seek to legislate morality. I like republicans that believe in the concept of the republic and let state governments operate in confederation with the federal government. When you start thinking about what the republican party is supposed to stand for, and then you see what the republican party is really standing for, all you registered republicans out there should really questioning your party hard. Today's republicans aren't representing the true ideology of the party in any sense. They are representing the ideology of fascist oligarchy, and the Bush dynasty is evidence of a modified form of hereditary assumption of power. That's right; they are actively recreating the exact form of government that we revolted against more than 200 years ago. And without appropriate checks and balances from the other two branches of government, they disturbingly begin to resemble the regimes we have helped to dismantle in the past 50 years.

Some say that the democrats or Nader would not defend the nation as well as Bush. Charles Krautheimer, a noted conservative columnist who actually thinks and reasons rather than March in lock step with the PR machine like so many other pundits, beautifully explains away this fallacy: Everyone believes in use of force for self defense - liberal, conservative, democrat or republican. Liberals, however, balk at any armed intervention that seeks to promote the national interest because they equate the national interest with the self interest of the administration that is in power. They do however support armed intervention for humanitarian reasons, which explains the many military actions of the Clinton administration. Liberals are tolerant of forms of government other than American democracy, but conservatives find them a threat and seek to supplant regimes with those they can control.

Consider all of this in light of the War on Terror, which like the war on drugs is really only a war on American taxpayers. It was sold to us as critical for our national defense, and when that turned out to be untrue, it was retouched as a humanitarian intervention. But it was too late to sway anyone but the most fanatical supporters of the administration.

And why do those people support the administration? Because your taxes went down? Unless you make in the neighborhood of $250,000 a year, your taxes did not go down, and if you think they did, you are not paying attention to the details. Your taxes have been restructured, and the middle class is actually shouldering more burden than ever and getting less service for their money. Where are all those tax dollars going? Into non competitive contracts for companies that are mired in the CEO and tax accounting scandals.

It was said by Hermann Goering during his trial at Nuremberg. The angriest person is the one who suddenly realizes that they have been taken advantage of. If you are a republican and you aren't pissed as hell, you have no idea of what a republican really is.

[loseyourname]

Originally posted by Anonymouse Once again, loser goes into the argument of trying to put evasion on me when it was he who showed lack of knowledge regarding economics and he carefully maneuvered to tilt away from his blunder, now throwing vague questions, which have already been answered. Just which questions need further clarification?

Can you not see that my economic opinion is exactly the same as yours? Are you really that dense? You're like a broken record come to life and given a megaphone. Maybe if I say this a little louder you will hear it: GOVERNMENT IS NECESSARY FOR NON-ECONOMIC REASONS.

You have not answered this: Why should we live under no central government when all people who have historically done so have either been victim to lawlessness (old west, for example) or have been conquered by those who were under a central government?

Now please detach your lips from the base of your own penis and rejoin the human race.

[dusken]

Originally posted by loseyourname Now please detach your lips from the base of your own penis and rejoin the human race.

Anonymouse: You lucky bastard. Why do you even bother foruming?

[Anonymouse]

Originally posted by loseyourname Can you not see that my economic opinion is exactly the same as yours? Are you really that dense? You're like a broken record come to life and given a megaphone. Maybe if I say this a little louder you will hear it: GOVERNMENT IS NECESSARY FOR NON-ECONOMIC REASONS.

You have not answered this: Why should we live under no central government when all people who have historically done so have either been victim to lawlessness (old west, for example) or have been conquered by those who were under a central government?

Now please detach your lips from the base of your own penis and rejoin the human race.

This is a misconception of the Old West. I refer you to the article. However you should read the entire thing which is a little lengthy, so you can see McMaken dispell many myths about the West. And loser, the more you name call, the more your frustration and desperation seap:

The American West: A Heritage of Peace

By Ryan McMaken

century ago, the American West, and the process of homesteading and Americanization that took place in the lands West of the Mississippi River was seen as a triumph of American drive, ingenuity, and courage; a sheer act of will that required hard work, perseverance, and above all, a spirit of independence and individualism.

In the decades following the closing of the Frontier (as pronounced by Frederick Turner in 1890), this perception of the West changed dramatically. The old view of a divinely inspired spread of Americanism changed to a more ambivalent view by mid-century, and finally, to an openly hostile view today that Western society was (and is) violent, murderous, and chaotic. We are now told that the West, after the coming of the white man, was a land of sadistic Indian murderers, psychopathic outlaws, and misfits who had abandoned the more peaceful life back in the good ol' civilized U.S. of A.

Whether promoting or condemning the West, though, novelists, filmmakers, and even historians never shied away from giving us many images of murdering Indians, or roaming outlaws, or crazy misfits, but what in an earlier era would have been abnormal behavior in films and images of the West, became standard behavior for denizens of the West in later times.

Much of this revolves around the treatment of Native Americans (and other currently popular minority groups) in film, and with the coming of films like Little Big Man (1970) and Dances with Wolves (1990). Americans have been treated to images of a bucolic, ideal world disrupted by barbaric Americans who stripped the land and all of its people of everything that was good and decent, destroying not only the Native peoples, but also themselves in the process.

There is certainly no doubt that Native American tribes suffered greatly at the hands of government and quasi-government operations aimed at "civilizing" the West, but the unrelenting focus in recent years of these murderous exploits illustrates for us a larger agenda surrounding how we acquire modern perceptions of the American West. This agenda is one of convincing Americans that the American West was inherently violent, unusually unjust, and generally unfit for civilized human habitation. And this indictment now extends not merely to bands of conquering soldiers, but to the common settlers, fathers, husbands, and pretty much everybody else.

Consider the 1992 film Unforgiven. Sometimes called the "unwestern," this film portrays the West as a place of capricious violence and chaos where law and order is regularly undone by crooked sheriffs, vengeful bounty hunters, and abusive cowpokes.

In recent years, this image of the West as the home of unusually sadistic and frequent violence has been an ever more popular topic of research on the West, with typical additions being Glenda Riley's A Place to Grow: Women in the American West and Clare V. McKanna's Homicide, Race, And Justice in the American West, 1880–1920. Both of these works build on the violent image of the West already provided in Hollywood movies while providing a realistic revisionist picture of nonheroic violence perpetuated by drunks and the "gun culture."

The Myth of the Brutal Frontier

The assumption that violence has more often than not been a central reality about Frontier life has long been popular. How we see the violence, though, and whether or not the violence is heroic or just meaningless and tragic has depended on just who is writing the screenplays or doing the research.

This latter point was made recently by William Handley in his book Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West. Handley notes that violence has always been an inherent part of literature and film about the West. The difference between the modern variety of violence, and the older variety, however, is that while newer descriptions of violence in the West are intended to highlight the victimization of a wide variety of groups, the violence of earlier authors like Willa Cather and Zane Grey was intended to illustrate the necessity of violence in establishing civilization in a wild and untamed land.

Of course, with the rise of Post-modernism in the 1960's, traditional rationales for the settlement of the West lost almost all of their defenders. The last thirty years or so have been bad decades for the reputation of the West.

Thus, while the explanations for the violence changes over the decades, the assumption that violence was the general modus operandi of settlers on the Frontier remained in full force. Yet, since at least the 1970's, research has indicated that both camps may have been wrong about violence in the West. Excluding the Indian wars of the mid to late 19th century which were lopsided affairs conducted by the United States government, we find that the allegedly inherent violence of the West was not noticeably any greater than that of points east. Historian Richard Shenkman largely attributes this to the legacy of those reliably-violent Western films. "Many more people have died in Hollywood Westerns than ever died on the real Frontier…[i]n the real Dodge City, for example, there were just five killings in 1878, the most homicidal year in the little town's Frontier history: scarcely enough to sustain a typical two-hour movie."

Shenkman was basing this comment on Historian W. Eugene Hollon's research in which he notes that in many places like Dodge City, tales of violence were actually accentuated to appeal to the tourist trade in the latter years of the Frontier. This is not difficult to understand considering the movement made popular by promoters of the "West cure," a fad (much promoted by proto-yuppie Theodore Roosevelt) that claimed that a period of hunting and tough travel out West would make men more masculine....

http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1449

[loseyourname]

Post another one, Mouse. If you honestly think history can be re-written in such a way that the strong do not inherently conquer or exploit the weak if given the opportunity, you're not the student you claim to be. I can guarantee you that if I had a gun, and I knew where you lived, and there existed no laws or police forces, you would be dead by morning. If you feel your freedom is being infringed upon and you are being put in so much danger by the US government, you are free to relocate to Borneo.

On second thought, maybe we should have no government. Then I could run around and do whatever I pleased. I wouldn't work. I'd just steal what I needed from small children and old ladies. I wouldn't need a degree. I could get a better education at the public library anyway. Legalize rape and burglary and murder.

This is boring. I'll read anything more you post in here, because I always give the courtesy of at least reading whatever is posted in threads I've been in, but don't bother arguing with me further. The simple fact is, we have no idea what this land would be like without laws or regulation or government. It's nothing like the old west. As much as I'd hate to see the Crips take over the city, maybe they wouldn't. Maybe they'd become legitimate businessmen and all crime would disappear and terrorists would cease to hate us and we wouldn't need public highways or railroads or buses or anything like that. Heck, corporations would probably start to voluntarily respect the environment and not cheat stockholders. Child molestors that were released from prison would be miraculously reformed.

Oh well. I'm out.

[patlajan]

Come to think of it, a good anarchist is also a good satanist. Oooh I bet that hurt.

[Anonymouse]

Originally posted by loseyourname Post another one, Mouse. If you honestly think history can be re-written in such a way that the strong do not inherently conquer or exploit the weak if given the opportunity, you're not the student you claim to be. I can guarantee you that if I had a gun, and I knew where you lived, and there existed no laws or police forces, you would be dead by morning. If you feel your freedom is being infringed upon and you are being put in so much danger by the US government, you are free to relocate to Borneo.

This is perhaps the most ignorant paragraph I've heard from you yet. I've actually expected more substance from you, but oh well. First off, I have never once stated that the strong do not conquer the weak. Can you point to a time when I said otherwise? I have always maintained might is right, and that is the rule. As far as having a gun and no laws, this assumes that all morality is somehow based on statute law. That to assume if there are no police forces one will kill another is silly and childish. Currently there are many many laws and police forces and people still kill people. Moreoever, no one ever said we would have a utopia or there won't be murder. In fact, the old West, proves that a society without a central government is often more peaceful, and less violence. That to assume no laws mean I will kill you ultimatley insinuates that our morality and our 'guilt' is based on some human statute law, and not our conscience. What reason would I pose for you to kill me, other than the missing laws? Moreoever, let me ask you a question on morality. If there were no police forces, would you kill someone because there are no laws, or would you not kill someone because you have a sense of 'morality' that doesn't emanate from human statute law, but from within yourself?

Originally posted by loseyourname On second thought, maybe we should have no government. Then I could run around and do whatever I pleased. I wouldn't work. I'd just steal what I needed from small children and old ladies. I wouldn't need a degree. I could get a better education at the public library anyway. Legalize rape and burglary and murder.

This is about a central omnipotent government, not any government. I have already conceded that government is a part of man, since an individual technically speaking is itself a government, as well as a family entity.

Originally posted by loseyourname This is boring. I'll read anything more you post in here, because I always give the courtesy of at least reading whatever is posted in threads I've been in, but don't bother arguing with me further. The simple fact is, we have no idea what this land would be like without laws or regulation or government. It's nothing like the old west. As much as I'd hate to see the Crips take over the city, maybe they wouldn't. Maybe they'd become legitimate businessmen and all crime would disappear and terrorists would cease to hate us and we wouldn't need public highways or railroads or buses or anything like that. Heck, corporations would probably start to voluntarily respect the environment and not cheat stockholders. Child molestors that were released from prison would be miraculously reformed.

Oh well. I'm out.

You believe that I am speaking of some utopia. I am not. Violence is violence it is part of man, but the degree to which we will have death and suffering would not be as high as this, since the State literally creates offenders, by creating so many statute laws that one cannot not do anything without being a criminal, e.g., marijuana since halfour jails are filled with people for possession of this.

[jilbagh]

President Bush has frozen funding for student aid. This is in addition to cutting Federal educational loans and grants in 2002, 2003 and now 2004. And now he's hitting young people up for a massive loan. His new budget will increase the national debt by a half-trillion dollars this year alone. Of course, young people are the ones who will have to pay down Bush's debt through higher taxes and cuts to vital services.

Students, send this message to Bush: LOAN DENIED!

President Bush has asked all Americans to go into further debt, not for priorities such as education but for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and our war with Iraq. Bush, in his most recent budget, has asked all of us for a 4,500 dollar loan against our future earnings. This is in addition to the 13,000 dollars each of us already owes for the national debt, now totaling more than seven trillion dollars.