Ever notice how those afflicted with such derangement — as I am now said to be — are seldom lauded by the left for their good sense and comity, or for their brave willingness to affect what the left has decided is bien pensant (an affectation that allows for inclusion among those select “fair” wingnut HATERS who shan’t as yet be entirely marginalized)?
Personally, if I found that I was being defended for the rigor of my thinking by “progressives” — and that defense essentially congratulated me on my willingness to overlook or dismiss evidence in order to avoid being labeled “deranged” by those whose chosen ideology necessitates the destruction of classically liberal ideals and individual autonomy as a precursor for centralized government control, a faux-egalitarianism that spreads but misery “fairly”, and the soft tyranny of liberal fascism the precedes the move to (transnational) socialism — I would check my own arguments to see where I’d gone astray.
But then that’s me. I know what I know and I’m comfortable that I know it, having spent so many years here doing the hard work of rigorously analyzing the “progressive” left, down to and including the linguistic imperatives that shape what I’ve shown to be the inevitable trajectory of their ideology, and so their policies. The kernel assumptions of progressivism lead directly to a subsuming of the individual into competing tribes, the tribes themselves being nothing more than a cultural construct developed around the idea of power; these assumptions, I’ve demonstrated time and again, lead to a worldview that adopts collectivism and eschews all but the most superficial individual autonomy — a peculiarity of leftism that manifests itself at the epistemological level, where “authenticity” grants each tribe control over its own narrative, with “truth” then determined by narrative ascendancy (and dissenters branded heretics, or Uncle Toms, or sufferers from false consciousness, etc.).
To those of you who’ve followed my work on language, you’ll recognize that this idea that “truths” are determined by narrative control — that is, by pure will to power — is just another iteration of the linguistic move that grants receivers of messages control over “meaning” solely by dint of their insistence that it somehow belongs to them, and by the power they wield in numbers.
So when I wrote of Ayers and other leftists, “It’s who he is. It’s who they all are,” that was not, as Rick Moran or Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi would have it, some throwaway line that exposes the shallowness of my thinking. Quite the contrary, it simply shows that, because I’ve broken down the progressive ideology to its basic linguistic seeds, I no longer feel the need to pretend that these people are good faith actors in the maintenance of a classically liberal civil society. They are petty despots. And their essential worldview is, of necessity, extra-Constitutional — and so anathema to my liberty.
This is who they all are.
If GOP pragmatists wish to have such people pat them on the head and be kept around as convenient rhetorical foils, that’s up to them. Me, I know who these people are. And what’s more, they know I know.
And so they need me demonized and marginalized. They need me seen as “deranged” and “extreme.” What I don’t understand is why so many on my own ostensible “side” seem so willing to support them in their efforts.
[h/t to Silver Whistle]
Oh. I’d thought that was just an early April Fool’s prank. I’d thought the dead giveaway was his (sic)-ing you instead of [sic]-ing you, plus him correcting a perfectly acceptable “counseling”.
There’s nothing so face-plantish as a spelling flame in which the flamer fucks up. That couldn’t possibly have been an accident.
Well said.
Yeah, Slart. Not sure what he sees wrong with the word “counseling.”
So, he’s got you on “setee”. High fives!
I don’t think he’s been paying attention. This is really rather unimpressive stuff.
Obscurity through obfuscation: progressives unite!
[…] to Protein Wisdom homepage « In re: “the derangement afflicting rightwing blogs” | Home | Redefining the terms, cont. » April 1, […]
Somehow that phrase makes me think of “Triumph des Willens”.
I find this very comparable to history revisionism. Like intent, history just is at the moment it happens. You may be able to teach a generation an alternate version that comes from your own perception, you may even believe the alternate version, but the truth is still what actually happened, when it happened.
For example, the USA is widely regarded the most guilty participant of slavery, and republicans as the most guilty in the USA. The true is, despite the indoctrination and consensus, the USA was one of the biggest battlegrounds to end slavery, and the Republican party was formed on that plank. Unfortunately, the truth is unhelpful in the subsuming of the individual into competing tribes.
Like history, intent is what it is, regardless any reader polls.
Why would some ally support rhetoric defining you as deranged?
Sen 1: What barb do you have up your ass?
Sen 2: Fuck You. I’m not putting up with your moronic shit anymore.
Sen 1: *
Sen 2: Lunch?
Sen 1: Sure. The usual place?
Do a site search for Hayden White, in re: history and historicity / language / truth claims.
Masthead at Harry’s Place: Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.
Harry’s Place Guest post, Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi: The derangement afflicting right-wing blogs
Assignment: Explain the pw theory of language and power using these two lines as a new classic example.
Re: Hayden White
Some roads are better left untravelled.
I’d sooner waste my time trying to spell “Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi” in a bowl of Alpha Bits than respond to the preening letter hog. But maybe that’s just me. There’s just something unceasingly odd about this sort of flapdoodle emanating from people who can’t help but nakedly reveal their own circuitry while blindly attempting to discern the wiring in others. He has no capacity for differentiating between informed ideological struggle and the follies of human nature as they reveal themselves in people across the political spectrum. So in that respect, like all the others who play this game, he’s infinitely closer than Jeff is to what he claims to despise.
Well, Abe, Silver Whistle suggested I respond. I don’t know much about the writer or the site, but responding gave me the opportunity to expand on a line both this dude and Moran singled out to suggest the relative simplicity of my thinking.
Thing is, Moran knows I’ve done all that previous work. So like a few other right-side blogs, his attempt to cast me in a particular light is rather instructive, I think. To me, at least.
al-Tamimi, in the comments:
1. It can’t be true, because I said so!
2. Even if it is, why would anyone care that the first memoir of the President of the United States of America was actually written by a self-admitted domestic terrorist? Haterz!
Oh, btw… ** Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University.
Look out, boys! We’ve got ourselves a thinker here.
Well, Abe, Silver Whistle suggested I respond.
I didn’t actually mean anything by the comment. For no other reason than to amuse myself, I chose to express my dismissiveness in the rather witless way that people like SEK do.
I seem to recall it being reasonably lefty back in the day. Hadn’t been there in years, though.
What’s funny, Pablo, is that I’d already argued why we should give a damn. I guess he missed it. Probably because I deviously provided the links in orange.
Either that, or his answer to my argument about why it matters is, “okay. But why does it even matter?”
I do so love when these would-be intellectuals feel the time is ripe to strike out on their own — only to show themselves up as the pedestrian thinkers they are.
Oh dear. Do you suppose my having responded such will damage his self-esteem? Or does he have enough fluffers to help him continue his self delusion, do you think?
Ok…again… my pet peeve
Again… this weird coupling of the truly silly (O is a muslim) with other things that are a matter of debate. Certainly, Obama isn’t a “Marxist” in the sense that, say, Van Jones is. But to attempt to shoehorn as indicative of ODS “Obama stands for weakness” (strange phrase, that) or “Obama is a radical socialist” (why the “radical”?) is again trying to control the debate by setting out what is/is not proper things to consider.
And if we cannot look at Obama’s antipathy towards the US military and allies while snuggling up to worldwide dictators as “weak” or look at his “trans-formative” policies wherein the government both grows in size and its mission to micromanage everyone’s life as “socialist” then those terms mean nothing at all.
This is soooooo SOP for leftists. Left-feminists have made an art of redefining “sexual harassment” that even the “male gaze” is included in the list of stuff just as bad as rape.
You’d think, as Jeff mentioned in this post, that some of the righty bloggers would be motivated to pause and re-think their characterization when they seem to be in such complete alignment with their ideological opponents on the left and given their knowledge of Jeff’s well defined POV over the years.
But, as they say in the middle east, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And we all know how well that time-tested rationale works out…
What I’ll never understand, though, is how calling a spade, a spade, so to speak, or openly hoping that a politician’s agenda to transform America into, at the very least, a Euro-socialist-lite nation-into an entity that is the antithesis of the nation as founded, fails automatically transform that person into a violent hating extremist. It all seems very Alinsky-esque.
And “John McCain would have lost even moreso if he’d been ‘mean’ towards the Chosen One, and actually tried to win his election and all that.” Everyone knows that, and it’s true because… hello! “everyone”. Duh!
Completely failing to understand the counter-argument “Fine, so he lost because he’s fucking John McCain, and nobody wanted to vote for him, not even the 47% who did so. Short term battle lost no matter what. How’s about thinking long-term for a change, you ignorant, unprincipled pigfuckers?”
(What can I say, I’m a people-person.)
I’m betting this would-be intellectual dismissed Stanley Kurtz’s book as so much extremist hater conspiracy mongering, as well.
Me, I read the thing.
Which just proves how CRAZY AND DERANGED is I.
What I don’t understand is why so many on my own ostensible “side” seem so willing to support them in their efforts.
They also welcome their new socialist overlords. Better red than dead. Or worse: ostracized.
That Harry’s Place post is troubling to me for only one reason: the author clearly didn’t intend it to be an April Fool’s joke, and yet that’s what it turned out to be.
Somebody Up There™ is obviously starting to get involved, and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the way He’s starting to direct the Story.
He’s getting slapped around quite a bit in the comments, FWIW.
Darleen,
I don’t consider “Obama stands for weakness” to be a silly caricature.
Obama’s weakness is a serious issue and to have it summarily dismissed is rather shocking.
I notice Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi uses David Horowitz to try and bolster his case for conservatives not to make such charges against President Obama.
Mr. Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi conveniently ignores that David Horowitz cautioned against such attacks in 2008 and early 2009. It looks to me like Horowitz was adopting a wait and see approach.
Obviously, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi didn’t bother to think through what he wrote, because he’s the one who clearly states that “..influential right-winger David Horowitz, who initially cautioned conservatives…”
I guess one shouldn’t change one’s stance even though facts and circumstances have changed.
Laments Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi in the comments:
Huh uh. Beck is always going on about what a commie Eisenhower was. NOT!
I’m pretty sure however, you would characterize JFK as an extreme right wing radical were he around today.
Dipshit.
They seem to think that conservatism is made illegitimate by the lack of pristineness with which ideas filter through a mass movement. In other words, rather than expressing gratitude the way someone like WFB would that, say, a carnival geek like Beck serves to popularize heady ideas, they’re more comfortable being uncomfortable that the rabble has perhaps not internalized everything in the same manner in which it was initially delivered by thoughtful thinkers of thoughts.
But, seriously, who of rational mind can conflate the occasionally heated expressions of displeasure which result from this massification of ideology with the sausage-making on the left which has deception in the aid of their ends embedded in its DNA?
The irony, ultimately, is that these pseudo-intellectuals not only have a weaker grasp of the intellectual basis of conservatism, but, more importantly, the intellectual basis of leftism than do the hateful right wingers whom they so despise. So, naturally, it’s rather effortless for them to conflate whatever someone like Jeff writes (and our responses) with an “Obamunist” sign carried by some dishevelled fat dude in ten-years-old K-Mart pants at a rally.
I don’t consider “Obama stands for weakness” to be a silly caricature.
Neither do I, though I find the wording strange. Have you ever heard someone say that? I’ve heard all sort of “projects weakness” “is weak on [fill in blank]” “demonstrates a weakness on …”
but “stands for weakness”??? WTH?
English as a second language?
You’re right, it is oddly worded.
Given that this guy has written a number of recent articles for American Thinker, it’s really sort of odd that he’s squirreled this post over at Harry’s place.
That’s an interesting pair of exemplars Mr. Al-Tamimi tossed out. On the one hand we have a non ideological Republican whose presidency more or less affirmed the political paradigm we’re still stuck with (Democrats as the party of Big Ideas, Republicans as the party of managerial competence at executing the other party’s Big Ideas) And an Ideological dilettante who spent his whole career trying to find a wave of the future! that he could both predict and lead intellectually.
In other words, the 1950s versions of Jeb Romney, or Mitch Christie, or Daniel Pawlenty (whatever the hell his name is) and David Brooks.
We go forward, we go back.
History, a sandpiper walked down this beach recently leaving tracks which have a resemblance to letters.
Historicity, the sandpiper wrote me a message in English inviting me to a party tonight.
@Blake:-
‘Mr. Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi conveniently ignores that David Horowitz cautioned against such attacks in 2008 and early 2009. It looks to me like Horowitz was adopting a wait and see approach.’
Guess you didn’t read the whole article. Observe:-
‘ODS has even come to afflict conservative bloggers who, in the early days of the Obama presidency, were warning against the very sort of madness from which they are now suffering. Consider the case of influential right-winger David Horowitz, who initially cautioned conservatives against resorting to such silly caricatures as ‘Obama is a Marxist’, ‘Obama is a radical socialist’, ‘Obama is a Muslim’, ‘Obama stands for weakness’ etc. Yet as a subscription to his mailing list and quick glance over his writings now show, he has fallen into repeating those same smears he rightly derided back in late 2008 and early 2009.’
Pay attention to the last sentence. And yes, English as a second language.
ad complures homines:-
By the way, the gerund and participle form of ‘counsel’ should strictly be spelt with a double ‘l’ in order to keep the ‘e’ vowel in ‘counsel’ short. Howbeit, none of you has explained how Ayers’ communist views from the 1960s and 1970s inform Obama’s policies today:- that is why the conspiracy theory that Ayers wrote Obama’s first memoir does not matter even if it were plausible.
Jeff, I think you responded to al-Tamimi in a manner entirely at odds with his drive-by. It’s an unequal contest. al-Tamimi is a lazy, uncritical thinker with poor reading skills, and completely imbued with the stereotypes of and prejudices against the right. Argument by assertion seems to be his stock in trade; never a good sign that discussion will be forthcoming.
I’m sorry I didn’t pick up the piece earlier. With term time and project deadlines, I don’t get as much blogtime as I’d like.
Aymenn eats boogerz. Good Allah, he is fundamentally mendoucheous at a very base level.
Aymenn
How about you explain why calling Obama (or contemporary Democrats or “Progressives”) “socialist” is a sign of derangement?
Please point out one economic policy that Obama promotes that is fundamentally different than the policies of Europe’s Democratic Socialist parties.
When the American government under Obama has increased its control of the American economy from about 33% to 45%, I’m safe in saying Obama’s policies are socialist as a totally appropriate label.
How amusing that Silver Whistle cannot respond with reasoned argument. He just echoes the baseless assertions of his mentor.
JD,I see, like some of the fellows at Jihad Watch, promotes the ‘Aymenn is a Muslim’ conspiracy theory.
Is it derangement if his policies,(Obamas) are hurtful to the country or just plain wrong headed? Read socialist-walks like a duck,etc.
I’m wrong to call him on it?
Just like to know where your’re moving the goal posts is all.
How amusing that Silver Whistle cannot respond with reasoned argument.
Amusing how you think SW was talking to you.
@Darleen:-
‘Socialism’ in the real sense of the word does not exist. Obama and the social democrats of Europe clearly acknowledge no viable alternative to the market. ‘Modern social democrat’ would be much a more appropriate term.
none of you has explained how Ayers’ communist views from the 1960s and 1970s inform Obama’s policies today:- that is why the conspiracy theory that Ayers wrote Obama’s first memoir does not matter even if it were plausible.
So much for intellectual rigor.
‘Amusing how you think SW was talking to you.’
I never said he was talking to me. I just noted that in the comment following mine own he gave no worthwhile response to me.
My mentor, al-Tamimi, has been retired these many years, although Jeff is a close second when it comes to language and laying out an argument (see your non sequitur @35 above). Your drive-by did nothing but assert, whether with respect to Jeff’s original piece, or your gibberish about global warming.
Not only is Aymenn dummerer than a sack of Carics, but he is dishonest too. Do you often just make things up, Aymenn, or is that a symptom of being a thinker, such as you claim to be?
Any “worthwhile response” to you begins and ends with bugger off, or, step away from the goat.
‘Socialism’ in the real sense of the word does not exist.
:::sigh:::
There is a huge difference between a free market where capital is in private hands and where the State controls more than half the capital in the market and its policy decisions have an inordinate affect on that market.
Not even to mention that such “crony capitalism” — an unholy marriage between favored Big Businesses and Big Government — is about the State picking winners and losers, rather than the free market.
When the State controls the capital that is socialism, regardless of the semantic games you attempt to play and the sneers of derangement you wish to display at anyone that points this out.
he gave no
worthwhileresponse to me.Fixed that for you, Aymenn. SW is under no obligations to respond to you at all.
There you go. Who can argue with that?
Assertion, “no true Scotsman” and non sequitur, all in one paragraph. Shall we go on?
Yet again, assertion. No attempt to argue Cashill’s thesis. No attempt to address Jeff’s post. Lazy, as I said.
Do share with us your mind reading powers, Aymenn. You know this how? Why, by the stereotypes that live inside your little head.
I would say this was a lie, but then I’m pretty sure you actually believe it, so I’m going to go with plain ignorant.
Sorry, I’ve been out for a few hours. Lunch with my wife. What did I miss?
I see Aymenn made the mistake of trotting out his half-reasoned assertions over here. Amazing how different is the reaction once you venture from the safety of sites that will fluff you for a bunch of nonsense, provided you’ve attacked the right people (no pun intended). First, let me take this:
I assume here Mr Al-Tamimi means I didn’t explain in the post he responded to how Ayers’ views are tied to Obama’s. Which is why I linked that particular post to past posts on the subject. And why today I linked to past posts in which I go into quite a bit of detail about the left, identity politics, linguistic assumptions, leftist hermeneutics, manufacturing consent, et al.
Also, I noted — yet again — that I read Kurtz’s book on the subject of Obama’s socialist training. I’m familiar with the thinkers and thinking that went into the making of candidate “Barack Obama.” And in fact, some might argue that my entire blog — from its inception — has dealt with such questions as the social construction of identity through language and the various assumptions we make about it.
Has Mr Al-Tamimi read Kurtz? Given that he has labeled me, a former university teacher with training from Hopkins, Cornell, and U of D, “deranged,” one wonders what he makes of Kurtz and his Harvard background. Are Kurtz’s facts “deranged” or extreme? And how does that work, exactly?
Too, I see that Mr Al-Tamimi is playing the semantic game in which the shorthand “socialist” we often use can’t be deployed because no pure “socialism” exists. Therefore, Obama, it follows, can’t be a “socialist.” In the same way self-professed socialists can’t be “socialist,” I suppose — thought that naturally follow-on is almost always bracketed. It’s a fundamentally disingenuous argument, and inasmuch as it serves only as a debating gimmick is useless to those of us who have long since move past such sophomoric tactics. Obama believes in spreading wealth. He believes in big centralized government and a command and control economy. He defines “social justice” as a kind of equity of outcome. He believes in a direction of history, moving “progressively” toward some material endpoint.
I don’t know when Mr Al-Tamimi last read the Communist Manifesto, but I suggest he revisit it.
Speaking of sophomoric tactics, in re: the spelling of setee and counseling, both of which are acceptable usages, let me just note that people who colour [sic] their arguments through with such petty behaviours [sic] are likely looking to marginalise [sic] rather than consider positions on the merits.
See what I did there?
Were Mr Al-Tamimi truly interested in having a discussion, he’d spend less time defending his demonstrably ludicrous assertion that I haven’t been rigorous in my analyses and more time rebutting those analyses. Which I will once again note, for his convenience, I leave written in orange and hyperlinked.
Compare:
Contrast:
Maybe the better question to be asking Jeff is, “how do you hold it together as well as you do, Mr. Angry?”
“There is currently a viral video circulating on right-wing blogs, in which Bill Ayers purportedly admits to having been the ghostwriter of Barack Obama’s book ‘Dreams from my Father’. ”
link
Since you want to play that game, Mr. Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, let me point out just how obtuse you are. And that you probably didn’t bother to read the whole sentence I wrote.
See? Two can play that game.
I made it pretty clear I think Mr. Horowitz held back from such accusations, taking a wait and see approach.
However, once it became clear President Obama was going full on statism, Mr. Horowitz changed his stance.
Something you, Mr. Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi allude to but obviously were unable to grasp when you wrote your piece.
Instead of the reasonable conclusion, which can have been inferred from your writing, that Mr. Horowitz changed his mind after it became obvious the direction of President Obama, you instead conclude Mr. Horowitz “fell back.”
President Obama, Mr. Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, is quite obviously weak. That is not a smear, that is observable fact. I can easily list the places where President Obama has shown weakness.
Also, Mr. Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, you obviously are using a very old trick. Whenever someone says something about President Obama you don’t like, you call it a “smear” rather than addressing the charge.
And take your condescending attitude elsewhere, Mr. Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi. I don’t mind engaging people. However, I will not be talked down to by a progressive such as yourself.
Someone just made this Aymenn character up, right? This is just bad performance art. Nobody can be that pig ignert and mendoucheous at the same time. So, fess up. Who created this clown?
@Silver Whistle:-
‘Yet again, assertion. No attempt to argue Cashill’s thesis. No attempt to address Jeff’s post. Lazy, as I said.’
Fine:- see e.g. http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/03/jack-cashill-still-fails.
http://washingtonindependent.com/49012/ayers-played-cyrano-to-obamas-christian
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/184032/unconvinced/jonah-goldberg
I am not interested in reiterating what critics have already said, but what you are promoting here is a conspiracy theory.
‘Do share with us your mind reading powers, Aymenn. You know this how? Why, by the stereotypes that live inside your little head.’
Eisenhower and Burnham were Keynesians on economics. For hard-right fellows like Glenn Beck and Alan Keyes,this equates to radical socialism/communism.
‘I would say this was a lie, but then I’m pretty sure you actually believe it, so I’m going to go with plain ignorant.’
Oh,do tell me your wonderful arguments debunking the massive conspiracy of tens of thousands of scientists that is anthropogenic global warming. All your arguments debunked at
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php
Also,see Monbiot’s debate with Plimer at http://www.monbiot.com/2009/09/14/correspondence-with-ian-plimer/ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBQCsMJm3Zg (latter in 3 parts).
And do read those links thoroughly before coming back to me on this issue. Plimer the denialist cannot answer basic questions about his methodology and assertions.
Okay, so you are going with dishonest pedantic sophist. Good Allah, your type is tiresome. The idea that you are anything but hackneyed and played and a useful imbecile is laughable. Now, step away from the goat.
‘Someone just made this Aymenn character up, right? This is just bad performance art. Nobody can be that pig ignert and mendoucheous at the same time. So, fess up. Who created this clown?’
All good questions. Some have said I am Robert Spencer in disguise, others that I am an Israeli settler posing as an ‘Arab’, yet a minority opinion holds that I am a jihadist and secret Muslim masquerading as a leftist.
Okay, normally when we get progressives, they have no sense of humor whatsoever.
That’s pretty good, Mr. Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi. (I admit, I use copy and paste with your name. I’m too lazy to type it every single time.)
Can someone point me to a difference in Barack Obama’s voting record as a US Senator and that of Socialist Bernie Sanders? The ratings given by both left and right had Obama just a skosh to the left of Sanders. And if Sanders CALLS HIMSELF “Socialist”, then it’s hardly disingenuous to go along with him on that.
I think you are a stupid pig ignert dishonest goat fucker. Occam, and all that.
And do read those links thoroughly before coming back to me on this issue. Plimer the denialist cannot answer basic questions about his methodology and assertions.
Plimer, in case you are not aware, is not the repository of scientific disagreement with AGW. And all arguments are not debunked at scienceblogs.com. They are usually conducted in journals. Refereed by scientists. Sometimes competently.
That’s not the way science works, you know. It’s not even the way an argument is structured. If you want to contend that anthropogenic CO2 is causing a rise in global temperature, I’d be obliged if you can explain to me the method by which it does so. And then explain the way you would go about testing your hypothesis. And then show me the data you gathered to support your hypothesis. Waving your hand in George Monbiot’s general direction just ain’t going to cut it. As an appeal to authority, it’s pretty thin gruel. You know, I’m getting the impression you’re not really an atmospheric physicist.
“Oh,do tell me your wonderful arguments debunking the massive conspiracy of tens of thousands of scientists that is anthropogenic global warming. ”
no conspiracy. it was a lucrative scam that those emails showed it to be.
also when baracky’s hand picked biographer says ayers wrote dreams it pretty much demolishes your argument that ayers didn’t write dreams.
You know that Asawhwan Gobbledygook al-Diphthong is in trouble when newrouter deigns to write in complete sentences.
Did Mr Al-Tamimi just link to a blog post from the LGM crew?
Here. Mr Al-Tamimi isn’t going to click the links I provided, so I’m going to quote myself to him:
In my recent post on the subject, I noted that the fact of Ayers’ sarcasm — which I noted seemed forced and planned — doesn’t in itself determine the veracity of his admission. And I pointed out that, as the circumstantial evidence grows, it is becoming more the mark of “kooks” to studiously ignore such evidence than it is to consider it.
Ghostwritten political memoirs are common, though often times it takes years for the truth of their authorship to come out (see, eg., Profiles in Courage). Christopher Anderson, no right winger, he, reported that Obama had help on the manuscript from Ayers. Ayers helped launch Obama’s political career. The books share a number of now well-documented similarities, both in style and trope. Ignoring such things so that shallow thinkers like Mr Al-Tamimi won’t label you “deranged” is, to my way of thinking, just plain cowardly. And needy.
Now, as to why anyone should give a damn — another question Mr Al-Tamimi pretends to pose — I answer, why do you keep posing the question, rather than addressing the answer I gave to that question over two years ago?
I believe if Mr Al-Tamimi wants to present my position as “deranged,” he should be focusing on what I actually wrote, rather than what a couple of dishonest bloggers told him I wrote.
And honestly: referencing Monbiot — the man who gave the blogosphere the derivative “moonbat”? Please.
Do note here that I am offering real arguments — the kinds of arguments that academics routinely undertake — and that dismissing them as “deranged” is itself a sign of rather remarkable intellectual laziness.
In a sense, I don’t blame Mr Al-Tamimi. He clearly hadn’t been to my site or known a thing about me, but rather took his cues from people like Scott Lemieux or SEK who routinely misrepresent my arguments. I’m sure he thought he’d find an easy mark — just another anti-intellectual wingnut clinging to his Bible, his Browning, and his homemade bourbon.
He was wrong. Like many of those he cites for support, he launches his arguments from false premises, hasn’t done the requisite research to know his would-be opponent, and — when pressured — is left clinging idiotically to the tattered remains of what has always been a paper-thin argument. But like a good ideologue, he remains to fight over certain scraps.
He’s well out of his weight class here. I say we let him wander on off home while he still has a bit of dignity.
@ Goldstein:-
‘I assume here Mr Al-Tamimi means I didn’t explain in the post he responded to how Ayers’ views are tied to Obama’s’
When Obama is plotting to send Special Forces to take out capitalist entrepreneurs across the globe and implements a centralised command economy similar to that of Saddam Hussein and his legacy in my homeland, I may just find it plausible that ‘Ayers’ views are tied to Obama’s’. Get over it, Obama’s not a radical socialist or communist, but a pragmatic social democrat.
‘Has Mr Al-Tamimi read Kurtz?’
Yes,and I do not care if Kurtz went to Harvard, just as the fact that I am a student at Oxford does not automatically enhance my arguments. argumentum ad verecundiam est vitium putandi.
‘He believes in big centralized government and a command and control economy.’
Again,I suggest you come with me for a visit to my homeland and then you can tell me if Obama even thinks of implementing anything like a ‘command and control economy’ in the US. Read up on Saddam’s economic policies too.
Like I said, Jeff. Lazy. With poor reading comprehension. A failure to read the words written, and respond to their meaning.
Obama’s not a Socialist! He just wants to give you all the good things that the Socialists are always promising, not the bad things that they actually deliver. He’s different. Just like all the other Socialists before him.
A failure to read the words written, and respond to their meaning.
Their meaning? The one that was intended by the writer or decided by the reader?
Because if it’s the latter, we’ve got ourselves a performative on the thesis of this very blog.
Which, not the first time.
“Get over it, Obama’s not a radical socialist or communist, but a pragmatic social democrat. ”
i think knucklehead works better.
Assertion: Obama is not a socialist. Proof: he isn’t using special forces to take out capitalists.
Why, it’s almost as if the entirety of the New Left’s playbook hadn’t been written!
So you read Kurtz. What evidence that he gave of Obama’s training as a socialist do you dispute?
Is Kurtz “deranged”?
Assertion: Obama isn’t a socialist interested in implementing a command and control enconomy. Proof: Others who didn’t have to start with a thriving capitalist economy were able to do it faster.
Mr Al-Tamimi, you are punching way above your weight class here. And you are making a fool of yourself in the process.
FU, Amen. You have been given way more consideration than you deserve.
Well, di, there are an awful lot of those words. Perhaps Oxbridge students aren’t what they once were.
‘Plimer, in case you are not aware, is not the repository of scientific disagreement with AGW. And all arguments are not debunked at scienceblogs.com. They are usually conducted in journals. Refereed by scientists. Sometimes competently.’
You evidently did not bother to read the links I gave. I never said Plimer was ‘the repository of scientific disagreement with AGW’, but he is widely cited by ‘sceptics’, and his book ‘Heaven and Earth’ regurgitates most of the commonly debunked sceptic arguments (and it’s a book full of fabrications, as the debate with Monbiot shows*). If you wish to point me to scientific journals, they merely vindicate the consensus:- present increases in global temperatures are beyond all reasonable doubt the result of man-made CO2 emissions. What I suspect you have in mind is the debate over the effects of current AGW:- there is a lot of debate on possible consequences, but that is precisely the point. One should not gamble on the future habitability of much of the planet.
* Amusing to see Goldstein invoke argumentum ad verecundiam. Monbiot has many silly views (e.g. on Israel), but he happens to be right on AGW.
I would love to stay and strip this poor bastard’s arguments to their frail little bones in real time, but alas, I am trying to watch opening day baseball. Back later.
Someone please inform our friend that I taught courses on fallacies of argument. My reason for invoking Kurtz’s specific academic training was to prompt Mr Al-Tamimi into answering this question: is Harvard-trained academic Stanley Kurtz “deranged” for writing an entire book positing that Barack Obama as a political animal sprung from a cauldron of socialist thought? Or does he get a pass because he’s an academic and is credentialed?
Thanks to Amen, Oxford’s stature is diminishing in real time.
There’s a distinct virgin describing sex quality to his understanding of ideology in an American political context. I imagine we would sound equally foolish to him were the subject camel grooming or goat buggery.
You evidently did not bother to read the links I gave.
Oh yes, I have read them. I follow the scientific literature on the subject. I understand the issues. I’m absolutely certain you haven’t a scooby doo what the evidence is pro or contra, or you would lay out for me right here what the arguments are. You asserted the evidence is identical to the causal nature of smoking being responsible for lung cancer. Wheen pressed for evidence, you squeal “Monbiot”.
You’re a fraud. You’re lazy. You haven’t got an argument of your own.
The science is settled, bitches. Amen said so. Now leave the esteemed Oxfordian poofter alone so he can bugger his underage goat in peace. Moonibat! ZOMFG Monibot.
He has plenty of assertions, SW, and that is apparently enough in the circles he runs in.
‘Assertion: Obama is not a socialist. Proof: he isn’t using special forces to take out capitalists.’
Actually, I was debunking your ludicrous notion that ‘Ayers’ views are tied to Obama’s’. Obama has never espoused radical socialism or communism. Just look at his track record (see e.g. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/06/08/obama_myths).
‘Is Kurtz “deranged”?’
Yes, on that viewpoint at least. See
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/01/why-is-stanley-kurtz-calling-obama-a-socialist/68798/
‘Assertion: Obama isn’t a socialist interested in implementing a command and control enconomy. Proof: Others who didn’t have to start with a thriving capitalist economy were able to do it faster.’
Actually, Saddam completely overhauled the economic system in Iraq towards a Stalinist economy, beginning from 1968 (true, he was not president of Iraq then, but he was the giventhe role of working on shifting the economy when the Baathists came to power).
I think it’s about time for him to declare victory and leave our little “cesspool of ignorance” or whatever people who cannot reason call this place.
This is really getting embarrassing.
‘You’re a fraud. You’re lazy. You haven’t got an argument of your own.’
Did I ever make a pretence to originality on AGW science? No, because the evidence and arguments have been laid out innumerable times. I suggest you read the rebuttals to the ‘sceptic’ objections and then tell me why said responses are flawed if you are so certain that AGW is a hoax.
Another useful link:- http://www.realclimate.org/wiki/index.php?title=RC_Wiki#By_Myth
Oh good lord, because Saddam was a totalitarian kook, anyone (on the Left) who isn’t absolutely exactly the same cannot be a “socialist”
So I guess we can’t call “Jack the Ripper” a “real” serial killer cuz he “only” killed 5 people, whereas Ted Bundy murdered 35.
But Scott Walker = Hitler because “Hitler banned unions, too”
Al-Tamimi’s proof that Obama is not a socialist?
That’s some heavy duty debunking, there. Gotta say I’m convinced. Stanley, stick to anthropology, they’ve got your number.
Aymenn
Your “tens of thousands of scientists” argument holds no water —
a podiatrist is a medical doctor, but I wouldn’t consult him/her on brain cancer.
Amen has links, links to Teh Narrative. Take that, you hilljack retard racists. Plus, quit accusing Amen of being a Muslim, racists.
He wants to use competition to universalize healthcare.
Are you kidding me??? You can’t believe that. Really.
Is this the “baffle with bullshit” part of the comment thread??
Maybe Señor AGW Amen the Brilliant could tell us what the idea temperature is for Mother Gaia. Do we need to increase or decrease the earth’s temperature to get to that magical figure? How would Amen the Magnificent set about raising or lowering said temperature?
Did I ever make a pretence to originality on AGW science? No, because the evidence and arguments have been laid out innumerable times. I suggest you read the rebuttals to the ‘sceptic’ objections and then tell me why said responses are flawed if you are so certain that AGW is a hoax.
Ah, here we get to the nub of it. Your assertion, old chap. You back it up. What’s that, you’re not an expert, you say? Just relying on stuff that’s far to tiresome to dredge up yourself? Not interested in your original work on AGW. Just your admission that you assert. No knowledge of anything. Just the smell of arse all over your ‘arguments’.
Have fun with out latest pinata, kids.
Salon and the Atlantic are definitive proof, wingnutz. Sarah Palin’s uterus is quite used to the folks at the Atlantic.
You mean the fact that he just cited Salon and the Atlantic, Abe? As PROOF of, uh, something?
Kurtz’s book is filled with fact after fact. Hell, many of the facts aren’t even in dispute.
And?
Honestly. Dude. Save yourself.
Thank God I’m deranged. Who would want to share a reality with that bloke?
And, even if it did turn out that Ayers was the ghostwriter of Obama’s memoir (practically zero chance, because it’s a deranged conspiracy theory)
I found this kooky bullshit on some schizophrenic’s website, right inbetween their mock encyclopaedia articles luridly detailing how Elvis Presley shot JFK and some nutjob claim that that the Illinois Department of Transportation is a front group for a bunch of unreconstructed Italian fascists attempting to brainwash our children into huffing glue until they’re sterile with subliminal messaging encooded into our fried chicken.
It’s just fucking sick.
Celebrities, executives, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, magazine articles, or other written material.
Seriously you people need medication.
I thought Oxford was an esteemed institution of higher learning. Who knew it was a reform school for delusional lying goat fuckers that argue with voices in their heads.
Hi Darleen:-
‘Your “tens of thousands of scientists” argument holds no water –’
I did not mean scientists from all fields of study. I was referencing climate scientists. Some climate research institutions that back the sane scientific consensus on AGW:-
Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, L’Academie des Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the US National Academy of Sciences, the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, the UK’s Royal Society, the Academia Brasileira de Ciencias, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the US Environmental Protection Agency…
@JD:-
‘Maybe Señor AGW Amen [sic] the Brilliant could tell us what the idea temperature is for Mother Gaia
Funny how you cannot spell my name. Global mean temperatures now are high enough:- raising them more than two degrees beyond present levels could well be disastrous. If we listen to the likes of Jeff Goldstein and Silver Whistle, catastrophe for humanity is a very real possibility.
Funny how you cannot spell my name.
It is funny. Just not for the reason you think.
Care to substantiate that asspull, Aymenn the Brilliant?
‘Not interested in your original work on AGW. Just your admission that you assert. No knowledge of anything. Just the smell of arse all over your ‘arguments’.’
Aww…our dear ‘Silver Whistle’ (I rather imagine you to have been forged from lead because you are not all that bright) cannot counter-respond to the rebuttals of ‘sceptic’ arguments?
Do seek some psychiatric help, habibi.
I’m very tempted to edit the thing in an attempt to redefine ‘ghostwriting’, tautologically, as an act commisioned by Sarah Palin.
Of course I will want to have my cake and eat it too, re-applying the old definition of ghostwriting whenever I feel like it even while re-defining it without so much as pausing to note the contradiction.
Such as:
Unless Sarah Palin hired Bill Ayers to write Dreams, then it wasn’t ghostwriting, and if it wasn’t ghostwriting, then that means Obama must have wrote it himself.
QED.
On the flip side, anything that snowbilly has ever written was written by somebody else, even if she did write it herself.
Including on her hand.
Because she’s a fucking illiterate snowbilly who doesn’t know how to write, with nice tits.
Amen, Abe. Amen. This one is aggressively ignorant. I guess when the leftists talk of themselves as being thinkers, they really mean pablum puking sheeple incapable of critical thinking and original thought.
I’m like the Derek Smalls of climate science internalization, Aymenn. When I was a kid I was told we were heading toward a global ice age. As an adult, I was told we would boil the oceans and melt the polar ice caps. So I did nothing and the two canceled each other out. Like lukewarm water.
Or, if you don’t get the reference, try this one: like Goldilocks, I like my climate porridge just right.
@Jeff Goldstein:-
‘And?’
The point being that Saddam DID have a thriving capitalist economy to start off with. Obama has not done anything resembling Saddam’s economic policies. I am explicitly debunking your ridiculous assertion that Obama wants to create a centralised, command economy. You have never lived in one; I have.
Sarah Palin having a ghostwriter?
That’s not a conspiracy theory that’s just common sense, and it’s backed by scientific concensus, by which I mean a concensus of scientists whom I select based on their comportment with my concensus.
Hicks.
@Jeff Goldstein:-
‘When I was a kid I was told we were heading toward a global ice age’
Another ‘sceptic’ myth. All thoroughly debunked at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/
The point being that Saddam DID have a thriving capitalist economy to start off with.
Yeah. I remember my grandfather’s garage being riddled with goods with the “Made in Iraq” label. So sad what happened.
Obama has not done…
your ridiculous assertion that…
Obama wants to create
Temporal tenses are an oppressive lie promogulated by the hegemonic european patriarchy.
There is no meaingful distinction between past, present, or future, wingnuts.
P.S.
QED.
Aymenn
When you put “science” and “consensus” in the same sentence, does that not cause you the least bit of pause?
AGW is a religion. Not to knock religion, it has a purpose. And if the acolytes of AGW want to rail about the sins of human beings exhaling and being a virus ravaging Mother Gaia’s body, knock yourself out.
Just stop trying to give it a “scientific” sheen in order to pretend what it is not.
You might like to look into the etymology of the word “anti-semitism” to see how “science” was used as a fig-leaf for anti-human policies in the past.
This is a piece of performance art proving Jeff’s point, isn’t it? It’s almost too perfect not to be.
Another ‘sceptic’ myth.
Not unlike the medieval warm period or the little ice age or ‘giant lizards’.
All lies.
@Entropy:
Obama has not done…
your ridiculous assertion that…
Obama wants to create
‘There is no meaingful [sic] distinction between past, present, or future, wingnuts.’
In you we have the example of an idiot who doesn’t know that the perfect tense actually refers to a present state.
Another ‘sceptic’ myth.
I guess then my sophomore year in high school “was a myth” because we had speakers come attend the first Earth Day (4/22/1970) to talk about all the man-made particulates in the air which would usher in the new Ice Age.
@Entropy:-
‘medieval warm period’
See http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/medieval-warm-period-was-just-as-warm.php
You are proving to be quite the source of entertainment, habibi.
Actually, Saddam completely overhauled the economic system in Iraq towards a Stalinist economy, beginning from 1968 (true, he was not president of Iraq then, but he was the giventhe role of working on shifting the economy when the Baathists came to power).
What are you trying to tell me, that fascists are socialists or something?
I don’t get it.
What do you mean?
Like… right wing socialists? That doesn’t make any sense dude.
Hi Darleen:-
I suggest you read the link I gave.
You are proving to be quite the source of entertainment, habibi.
Your “reading comprahesion[sic]” is most excellent, kind sir.
The perfect tense, in English at lest, can be past, present, or future.
lest->least
@Entropy:-
‘that fascists are socialists or something?’
No, because fascists generally favour corporatist economies, whereas Saddam was a Stalinist when it came to economics (i.e. centralised, command economy).
Where is the evidence that Obama is setting up a centralised, command economy?
I think the stuffing is coming out of this one, kids.
Obama has had 2 years in office. And we have a written Constitution and rule of law that takes some doing to get around.
Hussein had more time and a completely different climate in which to operate. So again. And?
Really, does this pass for argument at Oxford these days?
By the way: Using words like “ridiculous” doesn’t make your argument for you. You have “debunked” exactly nothing. You have merely re-asserted that those who don’t accept your assertions denying Obama’s socialist bent are deranged. Meanwhile, here in what’s left of a free country, Obama is circumventing the legislature to implement a cap-and-trade structure that would function like Soviet-era industrial policy. The end goal of ObamaCare, as structured, is to make a single-payer system the only workable solution — and he continues to implement it despite the gross public disapproval and a judge’s ruling that scuttled the whole thing. And on and on.
What you wish to see doesn’t much matter to me. The only reason I bothered to engage you was to make evident just how poorly thought-out are your positions.
I guess then my sophomore year in high school “was a myth” because we had speakers come attend the first Earth Day (4/22/1970) to talk about all the man-made particulates in the air which would usher in the new Ice Age.
Darlene that was like over 10 years ago.
Why don’t you go churn some butter and debate the merits of using phrenology to combat phlegmatic humours or something.
No, because fascists generally favour corporatist economies, whereas Saddam was a…
Baathist, right.
Like I said, you’re not making any sense.
‘The perfect tense, in English at lest, can be past, present, or future.’
No, in English the perfect refers to a past action resulting in a present state (i.e. a true perfect). In Latin, by contrast, the perfect can function as a true perfect or an aorist.
There is a past perfect, a present perfect, and a future perfect tense. Wishing it were otherwise won’t make it so.
Again, where’s your evidence that Obama wishes and plans to set up a centralised, command economy? Saddam began very rapidly the nationalisation of various industries. Obama has never indicated he wants to do anything like that.
‘here in what’s left of a free country’
I don’t recall many of your ilk whining over Bush’s excessive government spending and breaches of Constitutional freedoms (e.g. Warrantless Surveillance Act); only when it comes to Obama do you fret over the US becoming a totalitarian dictatorship. Perhaps you are a maverick on this?
I am explicitly debunking your ridiculous assertion that Obama wants to create a centralised, command economy.
Hmmm… federal control of healthcare (17% of the economy) starting with Obamacare
EPA to control through bureaucracy all manner of CO2 emissions (right down to buildings, schools, and homes)
EPA classifying “spilled milk” as “toxic”
The Feds owning a major car manufacturer (and the anti-private property rights policy they pursued to get it)
Fed control of local education (and Obama’s hatred of any move towards vouchers or privatization)
Fed pushing to keep States from doing anything about illegal aliens except give ’em free stuff.
Fed regulations about shower heads, light bulbs, laundry soap, washing machines, dish washers …
Proposed Fed regulations on restaurants displaying calorie counts on menus.
Feds signalling they are going to force people out of their cars and into “public transportation” by any means necessary, including a mileage tax …
Obama lawyers arguing in court that YES, The Commerce Clause does mean that there are no limits on the Federal government (but Trust Us, we won’t abuse it. Pinky Promise!!)
Yep, no command and control here .. nothing to see, move on …
@cranky d:-
I was dealing with the fact that Entropy quoted a remark in which I referred to what Obama ‘has done’. Present of ‘have’ + past participle= perfect tense.
the nationalisation of various industries.
That is NOT an indication of “socialism”. Stop trying to define away Socialism with a transparent and self-serving narrative.
@Darleen:-
By your logic the UK has a centralised, command economy (which is evidently true). Please live in my homeland to understand what a centralised, command economy is actually like.
(which is evidently untrue)*
Really, does this pass for argument at Oxford these days?
Well now Jeff you are not listening to him at all.
In you we have the example of an idiot who doesn’t know that the perfect tense actually refers to a present state.
Which is indistinguishable from a person’s desire. As is aptly demonstrated when he says:
Another ‘sceptic’ myth. All thoroughly debunked
QED.
If you like your Medieval Warm Period, you can keep your Medieval Warm Period. It’s all irrelevant anyway, 10 years ago does not exist except as what you concieve of it. There is no past tense.
Also please note: “the perfect tense”[sic] “actually refers to a present state”.
He’s quite brilliant, really, and very refreshing. And not at all pwning himself.
I like him. May I keep him?
What you wish to see doesn’t much matter to me. The only reason I bothered to engage you was to make evident just how poorly thought-out are your positions.
Well now you’re just being succinct.
I thought you were better than that, honestly.
“Again, where’s your evidence that Obama wishes and plans to set up a centralised, command economy?”
when you are told to buy health insurance by a central authority then you are in a “centralized, command economy”. what’s next breakfast cereal?
I know what you did, but you claimed that the perfect tense was present, when a perfect tense need not be a present tense. You then compounded the error by again asserting that a perfect tense is automatically a present perfect tense, which it is not. If your facts on something this concrete are in error, one wonders about the rest of them.
Well, really, I don’t wonder at all.
There is a past perfect, a present perfect, and a future perfect tense. Wishing it were otherwise won’t make it so.
Where is your evidence?
‘That is NOT an indication of “socialism’
No, nationalisation of various industries IS an indication of ‘socialism’.
“Please live in my homeland to understand what a centralised”
so sorry we blew that place up a few years back.
I think you people are just arguing with him because his name sounds Arab.
He is very brave to put up with this kind of discrimination.
So, our economy isn’t enough of a command economy yet to be called a command economy? So, were in the command economy lite” stage; much like lite beer, it’s close to beer but not as beery. And yet, lite beer is still beer.
That’s some top-shelf thinking.
I don’t recall many of your ilk whining over Bush’s excessive government spending and breaches of Constitutional freedoms (e.g. Warrantless Surveillance Act); only when it comes to Obama do you fret over the US becoming a totalitarian dictatorship.
Who said anything about a totalitarian dictatorship? Keep your eye on the ball in front of you.
“No, nationalisation of various industries IS an indication of ‘socialism’.”
you are right. baracky is a fascist.
I’m very nearly crying right now.
I’m holding back tears. My face is red.
Because of the despicable racism.
Italics FAIL. The quote was supposed to be a close italics html thingy.
We even have a preview and I didn’t use it. I hang my head in shame.
No, because fascists generally favour corporatist economies, whereas Saddam was a Stalinist when it came to economics (i.e. centralised, command economy).
[slap forehead]
AYMENN, pay attention! Whether or not the State controls the economy DIRECTLY or through stooges (corporatists) the fact remains IT IS THE STATE THAT HAS THE MAJOR CONTROL OF THE ECONOMY.
Either the State is ascendent or the individual. Obama favors the former. He is no “free market” guy.
“I don’t recall many of your ilk whining over Bush’s excessive government spending ”
you haven’t been paying attention to what some of us think then.
I was dealing with the fact that Entropy quoted a remark in which I referred to what Obama ‘has done’. Present of ‘have’ + past participle= perfect tense.
= “wants to”.
Uh huh. Exactly.
I dare one one person to show me evidence of where he has wants to, present tense.
Perfect, of course.
you haven’t been paying attention to what some of us think then.
And it’s especially amusing considering the very people this fuckwit calls “deranged” are the sorts who are qually vociferous as regards Bush spending and the timidity of the current Republicans.
@cranky-d:-
‘Past perfect’ is actually known as ‘pluperfect’. In any case, if the perfect tense does not refer to a present state resulting from past action, how do you explain the fact that in all Indo-European languages except Ancient Greek, which follows a ‘sequence of moods’, the perfect is classed together with the present as a primary tense?
In any linguistic discussion, it is obvious that the term ‘perfect tense’ refers to that tense denoting a present state from past action, and does not encompass the future perfect or pluperfect. I was dealing with an assertion in which Entropy deduced a perfect to be equivalent to an aorist.
baracky is a fascist/communist/socialist/national socialist/trotskyist/leninist/maoist statist. say that with a mouthful of jelly beans. i dare you.
NB:- I meant to add that most Indo-European languages with the notable exception of Ancient Greek follow a sequence of tenses, but even in Ancient Greek the perfect is classed as a primary tense and is used to denote present state from past action.
‘so sorry we blew that place up a few years back.’
Is that a sarcastic remark?
AYMENN, pay attention! Whether or not the State controls the economy DIRECTLY or through stooges (corporatists) the fact remains IT IS THE STATE THAT HAS THE MAJOR CONTROL OF THE ECONOMY.
Darleen, that’s very naive.
The government running the corporations is exactly the opposite of having the corporations run the government. They’re polar opposites.
You can tell which is which very easily, just look and see if you have a cabal of of wealthy powerful old dudes running everything.
Then you know you’re living in a fascist corporatist state.
If you were living in a socialist state, there’d be a cabal of old powerful wealthy dudes running everything…
for the people of course.
In any linguistic discussion, it is obvious that the term ‘perfect tense’ refers to that tense denoting a present state from past action, and does not encompass the future perfect or pluperfect. I was dealing with an assertion in which Entropy deduced a perfect to be equivalent to an aorist.
all of which equates to a personal desire. Or else has nothing to do with anything, but it easier to argue than anything that does.
Also… Hippopotomonstrosequippeddaliophobia. Stick that in your pipe, wingnuts.
But please do not smoke it as it causes lung cancer and we are already broke, and cannot afford to liquidate you, on account that we already budgeted and spent your 2042 income taxes.
“Is that a sarcastic remark?”
i’m in “shock and awe” over your question.
[sik].
Sorry.
I has having hiccups.
Oops… has had hiccups. God I don’t care anymore.
What the hell am I suppose to do now? You can’t top that. Just chug Nyquil and pass out maybe. 8:00PM is too early to peak, dammit.
You can’t quit in the middle of this performance art piece. No one can.
Go on, assert something else. You know you want to.
Assertion monkey asserts. Ooop! Ack!
Brett Favre!
david brooks channeling Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
In this decision, one could see the same sensitive, idealistic man who wrote “Dreams From My Father.”
this is a world wide farce no?
Oxford weeps, along with Mother Gaia. Fess up, this is bh playing a joke on all of us.
Wait, I thought you were running the sarcasm detector. What happened?
This is like Fukushima all over again.
WHOOOP WHOOOP WHOOOP BZZZZZZ BZZZZZZ BZZZZZZ WHOOOP WHOOOP WHOOP
THIS IS AN OFFICIAL MAKING SHIT UP ALERT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. REPEAT: THIS IS A MAKING SHIT UP ALERT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
SOMEONE IS MAKING SHIT UP IN YOUR AREA. BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR SOMEONE MAKING SHIT UP. IN YOUR AREA.
Amen the Magnificent should have stuck to buggering underage non-consensual goats.
OH. MY. GAWD.
Look what I has proved. By which I mean RIGHT NOW, BITCHES! BREAKING NEWS!
You can tell it is fact, because it have was a hyperlink.
To like, a blog or something.
And a concensus of scientists actually have supported this, or at least, have completed supporting it in a moment from now, as I am editing the wikipedia pages for every scientist who has one to call them con-artists in the pocket of Big Oil with mail-order diplomas if they do not agree with me.
Among the 3 who are left, I have 100% concensus, which is absolutely nothing like a mutant clone bastard combination of argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam roled into one, by a guy who may or may not toss in est vitium putandi just to be pendantic, which by the way, is the reason I do not support genetic cloning because you should not have combined things that have are an abomination.
Obama brings good things to life. That GE is a willing rapist for this government having ingratiated itself into the very fabric of the government and receiving all favor and service thereof is NO PROOF that Obama is a socialist because GE is a corporation dammit and this is a free market society. :eyeroll:
SOMEONE IS MAKING SHIT UP IN YOUR AREA. BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR SOMEONE MAKING SHIT UP. IN YOUR AREA.
Where is your evidence that someone is making shit up?
Because I lived in a country where people made shit up and you have not.
By the way, don’t think I didn’t notice how someone studiously avoided addressing this.
You should read this, Aymenn. And then tell us what you think about the impact this might have on the scientifically proven (just like smoking and lung cancer) “fact” that CO2 is the cause of increasing temperatures. Or, you could continue to play assertion monkey. That’s entertaining too.
Man, that Melanie Phillips sure is a bigot.
What is real: Far from “completely socializing the American economy,” Obama has shown, repeatedly, and to the consternation of liberals, that he doesn’t want to socialize any of the economy if he can avoid it. His banking plan bends over backward to buy up toxic assets while avoiding buying up whole banks. He wants to use competition to universalize healthcare. Even when vital industries have nowhere else to turn, the administration really doesn’t want to crowd out private capital. As a real socialist puts it, “Barack Obama is not one of us.”
Forrest-trees etc.
In this decision, one could see the same sensitive, idealistic man who wrote “Dreams From My Father.”
Which begs the question…
What evidence do you have that Obama wrote Dreams From My Father?
Everyone wants to know what evidence there is that he didn’t, but I ask, what evidence is there that he did?
If he’s gonna make the claim that he wrote it, isn’t the burden of proof on him?
I’m not saying he didn’t write it.
I’m just asking questions.
Like, what evidence is there that he wasn’t born in Indonesia, or Bosnia, or Herzegovina for that matter?
Does the dude have a publicized US birth certificate or something?
He really seems to hate the British. Maybe he’s Irish and his great-great-grandpappy got ass raped by Oliver Cromwell or something.
Eamonn is so much more of a thinker than ou racists, racists against Muslims. Why must you continue to be racists against Muslims when Amen is just trying to educate you poor unfortunate hicktard cousin fucking redneck cracker asses?
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
So tell me, Aymenn, is the Iraq war was still wrong?
Afghan mob kills at least 12 UN workers in protest over Terry Jones’s Koran-burning
This is supposed to make people stop burning Korans?
What next, an Al-Quaeda hunger strike?
The government running the corporations is exactly the opposite of having the corporations run the government
oh for FUCK’s sake….Where on earth have corporations ever run governments, Aymenn?
Hint….who has the guns?
and you think *I’m* naive!!!
On that count, yes he does.
Pablo, it figures you would believe some kind of bullshit paper asserting that solar activity has something to do with global temperatures. Seriously, that shit is deranged.
Witheld? Is that you, boy? God, I’ve missed you so.
“but I ask, what evidence is there that he did?”
Milli Vanilli
if you have a cabal of of wealthy powerful old dudes running everything.
And Aymenn as the nerve to stand there and assert that pointing out Ayer’s friendship with Obama is CONSPIRACY-MONGERING!!!
can I hear a Dean scream, everyone?
EEEAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!
cranky-d, if not an ignorant, anti-science, anti-intellectual bigot, what am I? A man has to have a reason to live, right?
Pablo, your reason to live is to work and pay taxes, until you’re too old to work. Then, you should die as quietly and cheaply as possible, with your remaining wealth to be confiscated by the state.
I done sunk Darlene’s battleship.
specializing in Latin, Mathematics, Spanish, Physics, Chemistry, and Religious Studies.
I bet he is a hypnotizing polymath too.
Pablo, it figures you would believe some kind of bullshit paper asserting that solar activity has something to do with global temperatures. Seriously, that shit is deranged.
Conspiratorial, even.
Like you expect to me believe there is this an eleventy-bazillion jigawatt space heater hovering in the sky and the entire scientific community has conspired to hide any evidence of it?
Pssh. Right. I don’t think so.
Six. Nine. Seven.
Kinky.
So, how does one spell Arabian limerick in Arabic?
oh for FUCK’s sake….Where on earth have corporations ever run governments, Aymenn?
Well, who runs the corporations in a corrupt crony-capitalist/fascist/socialist economy? The guys who run the government.
And who runs the government? The guys who run the corporations…
Tomato, tomato…
Potato, Winnebago.
En fuego.
Yu say potato, I say, why do you hate brown people and Muslims and think that Boy Wonder Barcky and his sycophant Eamonn are wannabe socialists?
why do you hate brown people and Muslims and think that Boy Wonder Barcky and his sycophant Eamonn are wannabe socialists?
………..
Dago?
That is glaring like a motherfucker, isn’t it?
Policy recommendations. Quagmire. War-as-social-work. [Bombing them with food? – ed] Native Somali forces. Stern Warnings. Severe retribution. [By native Somali forces, apparently – ed.] Containment. Lots of ideas here. Not much coherence. I’d give it a C-, unless that’s racist or something.
Stern warnings are highly effective. Like sternly worded letters.
Chewed up-Alla da-Krill
*urrrrrrrrrp*
The link between current global temperature increases and man-made CO2 emissions has been as firmly established as the science linking smoking and lung cancer.
Do tell. Perhaps you can tell us what the Vostok ice core has to say about such a link, or perhaps you can give us a brief summary of the telecommunications theory of tree-ring-to-temp correspondence, what it means to “hide the decline,” and whether correlation is necessary to establish causation.
Hell, I’d be happy if you coherently refuted just ONE of McIntyre’s objections to the care and feeding of climate data, but I doubt you even know what I’m talking about.
I missed all the fun.
Aymenn is young. There’s still hope for him. Many of his habits of mind are going to continue to work against him though until he finally begins examining them.
It’d be a shame to waste what an Oxford education could be. Really would be.
And thank God Michael Moore has no taste for penguin flesh.
Like, what evidence is there that he wasn’t born in Indonesia, or Bosnia, or Herzegovina for that matter?
He was born in Nova Scotia. As if anyone but a damned Canuk could screw things up this bad.
Although I could live without the couple fourteen penguins down from us.
Notice how Amen and bh have not been seen in the same thread at the same time? Coincidence? I think not.
Eamonn’s blog says Cardiff, not Oxford, FWIW.
At one time, a big name at American Thinker wanted to get together with me and write a book.
Now, I’m a deranged extremist who drops rhetorical stinkbombs and refuses to provide any depth to my arguments, and the American Thinker, helmed by Rick Moran — amid all the good stuff it gives voice to — publishes the pablum of hacks like this Aymenn fellow, who couldn’t be bothered to read my arguments before dismissing them as shallow, or me as “deranged.” And who, in answer to certain assertions, provides links to Salon and the Atlantic!, the implication being that the arguments are now over, resolved in his favor.
That’s just sad.
But hey: he’s authentic.
Christ, it’s like I invented this dude as a bit of playful instruction.
he doesn’t want to socialize any of the economy if he can avoid it.
If by “socialize” you mean the state physically confiscating and owning a company or whatnot, the way the Bolsheviks did, you’re right.
Instead, he and his type for years have avoided that aspect of socialism and have settled for running private companies through regulations (which the big bidnesses write to keep out their smaller, more nimble competitors), subsidies (and hidden kickbacks), bailouts (Gubmint Motors, etc.) and in general blurring the line between the gubmint, big biz, and big labor.
They all put on a big Kabuki show about how the gubmint has to act as the control rods to the free market’s uncontrolled nuclear reaction, and labor always makes out as if it’s saving the little guy from the depredations of both.
When in reality they’re all in bed together, self-dealing and colluding and feathering their own nests at our expense. Been happening for decades; Obama’s just stepped it up so it’s harder to miss.
When in reality they’re all in bed together, self-dealing and colluding and feathering their own nests at our expense.
Oh by the way, this arrangement? Once upon a time a hard-core socialist came to power and struck this kind of deal instead of just confiscating the means of production. Figured it would be easier to let the private owners keep running things as long as they marched to the tune that he called. In turn, the captains of industry were eager to have the gubmint crush their competition and guarantee their markets.
This hard-core socialist? Benito Mussolini.
He doesn’t say the word, dicentra. That’s proof he’s not a socialist.
It really is that simple.
I heard this same argument with respect to “moneygrubbing” and the absence of the word “Jew.” These types of arguments are very popular with those who have adopted leftist ideas of language: penumbras for them, literalism for you. SIT ON IT, POTSY!
The link between current global temperature increases and man-made CO2 emissions has been as firmly established as the science linking smoking and lung cancer.
Do tell. Perhaps you can tell us what the Vostok ice core has to say about such a link, or perhaps you can give us a brief summary of the telecommunications theory of tree-ring-to-temp correspondence, what it means to “hide the decline,” and whether correlation is necessary to establish causation.
Wait a sec…wasn’t that a ‘skeptic’/denier that originally said that up thread?
Cuz that smoke and lung cancer science…. uh… hehehhehe….hehehehee. Well… it’s better than AGW but it ain’t exactly model stuff.
Don’t get me started on 2nd hand. That’s basically anthropogenic global warming in your lungs.
I’m somehow compelled to mention that I saw Black Hawk Down on a first date. It was her idea. I can’t imagine how that didn’t work out.
Also, the defining characteristic of socialism has nothing to do with ownership of stuff but with the idea that an economy ought to be planned: run by a cabal of Extra Smart People who use science and junk to make everything FAIR.
All that supply and demand stuff? Primitive. Just turn the controls over to us and our computer-generated models and we’ll tell you what the public wants and needs.
Wait a sec…wasn’t that a ‘skeptic’/denier that originally said that up thread?
Beats me. I thought I was quoting that Aymenn guy who was quoted by Silver Whistle or summat.
Heh, I wish I could take credit, JD. Wouldn’t be that hard to write him though. Everyone was a bit like Aymenn back when they were too inexperienced to realize that other people aren’t all idiots. Some of us might have been (far, far) better at keeping that unattractive attitude in check though before we outgrew it.
SIT ON IT, POTSY!
You really ought to employ this argument more often, Jeff. It’s got the inexorable force of reason going on.
Bh – I have always assumed that I am an idiot. I still think that Eamonn aka Amen is a literary construct used to bring a rhetorical concept to life.
True idiots like myself need the universe to teach us that, JD.
My idiocy pales in comparison to that displayed by Amen the Magnificent, the verbose tard of thunder.
When I was his (assumed) age, I was carrying an M-60 and babysitting nuclear weapons. And wondering why on God’s Earth we weren’t taking care of our business in Lebanon, to which I was briefly invited, before the party was canceled.
Aside from the rhetorical failures, I think we have a perspective problem. Though I do give the lad credit for showing up to defend himself. It’s a start, kinda.
How sweet.
Okay, later. Work is just kicking my ass lately.
Everyone was a bit like Aymenn back when they were too inexperienced to realize that other people aren’t all idiots. Some of us might have been (far, far) better at keeping that unattractive attitude in check though before we outgrew it.
I was thinking the exact same thing. He sort of reminded me of myself as an arrogant college punk who was in love with his SAT scores and thought everyone else in the world was stupid.
If he is, it’s by accident. Truly, an accidental stumbling-into of things, without the slightest notion of how he got there.
That you want to link to a guy who (you say) is right without understanding the first bit of the subject he’s professing on is…well, it doesn’t give me confidence that you’re someone whose word carries any weight at all on this topic.
BTW, likening the case for AGW to the case for cigarettes causing cancer is deranged. Because I say so.
I’d recommend that you stop listening to the climate modelers, but I think that recommendation would go unheeded.
Or you could tell me right off the top of your head what the margins of error are on how much of the current warming trend is due to human activity, and what the current observed rate of sea level rise is, and while you’re at it tell me whether your understanding of sea level trends is based on tide gauge data, or based on data corrected to some absolute reference (such as WGS-84).
Understanding of these things (as well as many others I have not mentioned) is important when tongue-lashing others as regards AGW. After you’re done answering the above, I’d like you to point out some past warming and cooling trends and tell me how they were correlated to atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Though I do give the lad credit for showing up to defend himself. It’s a start, kinda.
It’s his smugness, coupled with his consistent self-pwnage, that cracks the living hell out of me.
What was it? Assertion monkey has asserted?
LOFL. It’s still funny.
Not least because I doubt he’s any idea what I actually object to about it. And I’ve no intention of tipping him off. If I were to accidentally teach him something, I’d have to go protest Scott Walker and demand better health benefits.
You have perfected the art of talking down, sir.
But most of us have both high school grammar and Wikipedia at our disposal, yes?
Hopefully this is not your hammer.
Hey guys, I’m back WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED HERE!!!??
Oh God there’s progg guts EVERYWHERE! I am NOT cleaning this up!
Self-pwnage? My favorite is this:
which is right below a link to one of Jeff’s post that says this:
I’m starting to suspect that Jeff really did make this guy up.
You just wait until I [sic] some perfectly cromulent words on you, Buster.
SIT ON IT, POTSY!
[sic]
Typical knuckle-dragging wingnut, can’t even correctly spell the names of ancillary characters from dimly-remembered ’70s sitcoms.
And the rest of you… if this is the way you’re going to behave whenever one of our Social Betters deigns to grace us with their most-esteemed presence, well, it’s no wonder we can’t have nice things!
The diminutive habibi was a cute touch too. Too bad Amen is a little sharmuta, our little bint.
Oh, and Never be rude to an Arab.
It’s amazing how a person can talk down from such a low altitude. Well, not really.
JD, I forget sometimes that you sprechen de Arabish. Hater.
So tell me, Aymenn, has Jason’s local fire department endoused him with his spring hosing-down yet?
(once a year, whether he needs it or not)
amen: all hail sharia? guten tag no? mufti of J’town or al Quds for you mo’oids
At long last, someone makes sense.
Why do I suddenly have a hankering for some awesome paella?
I don’t know if we can classify Aymenn as a progressive, McGehee. I think he’s just a guy who has, despite having access to a quality education, elected to let some other folks do his thinking for him.
Who may or may not be doing their own thinking.
It’s a mistake, but easily rectified. Unless he’s not smart enough, and I don’t think that’s the case.
he doesn’t want to socialize any of the economy if he can avoid it.
Now there is one precious statement.
President Obama isn’t a socialist, but, he may have to be a socialist?
I’m getting mental whiplash.
I don’t know if we can classify Aymenn as a progressive
No. He’s clearly one of those weird hybrids who pose as though they’re above it all. Though, curiously, these types invariably save their venom for conservatives.
It would seem that the comments in this thread support the thesis proposed in the paper written about in this post.
In that piece, if you take the outliers to be real data and not an aberration, then one way of reconciling the whole data set is that to make arguments in favor of an ideology that has failed, everywhere and every time it has been tried, in the real world requires the abilities of someone at the far end of the intelligence scale. Say above 4 sigma for instance.
Below that the arguments can be countered and picked apart with ease as the skill set needed to make a convincing, tight case for what is basically a worldview whose underlying premises are lies is more extensive than can be mastered by more than a few.
I still think that Eamonn aka Amen is a literary construct used to bring a rhetorical concept to life.
Anyone clever enough to grok the rhetorical concept well enough to fake it would also be clever enough to make it entertaining. That this latest exemplar is as dull as he is predictable speaks to his authenticity.
I’d like you to point out some past warming and cooling trends and tell me how they were correlated to atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Oooh! Oooh! I know this one!
The Vostok ice core shows a strong correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global temps during the 650,000 years it records.
It shows that rising CO2 levels cause the temps to rise 800 to 1200 years in the past!
THIS COULD ONLY BE THE WORK OF A TIME LORD IN A TARDIS!
Terrible things will happen if temperatures increase to reach the level last obtained around the time that Christ walked the Earth much less if they reach that pre-godly level reached around 1000 BC.
Ah, dicentra beat me. Took me awhile to remember where I saw the graphs.
Setting the record straight on the various Antarctic ice cores:- http://www.grist.org/article/co2-doesnt-lead-it-lags/
@JD:-
I ought to update the biography at my website.
ad Pacem Dei Saxum Aureum:-
I did read your posts. Cashill’s methodology and approach have already been exposed as shoddy at http://washingtonindependent.com/49012/ayers-played-cyrano-to-obamas-christian. You also have to show how Ayers’ views inform Obama’s policies. Does Ayers support Obama’s ‘Afghan surge’? Does he support Obama’s deployment of Special Forces in 75 countries to take out Islamist militants?
Instead of addressing these points, you cry ‘socialist’ at the slightest hint of government intervention in the economy.
You should learn from Daniel Pipes, who does not waste his time over conspiracy theories, but rather offers sensible, compelling critiques of Obama’s policies.
Okay, so just a run-of-the-mill idiot. Gotcha.
You offer crazy conspiracy theories because you are a crazy conspiracy theorist, therefore you are deranged. QE. Fucking D. Amen is every bit the secproggie mental midget the second time around.
Are you fucking kidding me? Dave Weigel says so, and that strikes you as evidentiary? Please.
Uh, why?
Because that is what our dear Jeff Goldstein is claiming, Pablo.
You know what they say;
Lie down with socialists and your bound to get a social disease.
Amen likes to assert shit, Pablo.
Which puts him slightly higher on the evolutionary ladder than a potato.
At least, it does if Ayman can be used to power a clock…
I’m willing to accept that Cashill’s methodology is flawed. I think that SEK has neatly dismantled some of Cashill’s conclusions, much as I dislike SEK’s mocking approach to pretty much everything. Some of Cashill’s assertions seemed to me to be a stretch, taken singly, and to the extent that his conclusion rested on the solidity of those tie-points, I don’t believe it.
But I don’t think that Jeff is making a strong case for Ayers’ ghostwriting of Dreams; he’s saying that Ayers’ influence is clear there whether he had a direct hand in it or not.
I think. As always, Jeff’s point is better made by Jeff.
Also, you have yet to acknowledge that you got Jeff’s position as regards McCain entirely backward. I’d like to hear how much you imagine that does in the way of diminishing your assessment of his derangement. I also think that you haven’t done much to attempt to understand the arguments you are attempting to discount, and so your post amounted to rather more of a style critique/spelling flame than a real treatment. In other words, more of a summary dismissal.
So you can imagine how annoying that might be to a guy who’s written many thousands of words on a topic to have you quote him, and then interpret the quote in a way that gets the meaning not only completely wrong, but also counter to near everything else he’s said on the topic.
As a Grammar Nazi, I simply can’t let this go without a demonstration of its weapons-grade stupidity:
Present Perfect Statement: The University of Kansas Jayhawks’ men’s basketball team has won more NCAA tournament games in the last 10 years than any other school.
Strangely, their present state is as spectators, not participants, in the Final Four™, although the Pres[id]ent had predicted (Past perfect) they’d win it all.
—
There is one specific example of the present perfect being used as if it were a simple present, which annoys me greatly: “America’[ ha]s Got Talent”. First of all, it’s not even a proper present perfect (that would be “has gotten“, but more importantly, it conflates a completed act of gaining possession (the verb “get”) with a present state of possession (“have”). It is entirely possible to “have gotten” something and no longer “have” it, as well as to “have” something without ever “having gotten” it. (I have two arms. I never “got” them; they have always been a part of me.)
It should be “America Has Talent”.
All of this discussion of grammar is completely beside the point, though. Isn’t it?
I’d happily concede that Aymenn has a superior knowledge of the entire English language, if it would mean that we could get back to the point. Spelling and grammar flames are a diversion from the point. I’d say an intentional diversion, but I have no idea what Aymenn’s intentions are, here.
So, please let’s stop comparing spotted dicks.
Aymenn continues to ignore the little fact that President Obama’s Chicago political career started in Bill Ayers living room.
That’s a far cry from Obama’s claim that “Ayers was just a guy in my neighborhood.”
Aymenn is a denier in his own right, because he refuses to admit anything more than just a casual nodding acquaintance between President Obama and Bill Ayers.
Bill Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist who thinks he and his wife didn’t do enough during their days in the Weather Underground.
Whether or not Ayers ghost wrote “Dream” there is far more of a relationship between Ayers and President Obama than Mr. Aymenn is willing to admit.
“I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
-Michael Crichton
I completely agree with Crichton. But I’d caution against rejecting the consensus because it’s consensus. The consensus is sometimes right.
But then again, sometimes it’s completely wrong. Heliocentrism is a relatively recent idea, for instance.
Possibly one day the scientific community will look back on this notion that sometimes trees can be thermometers, but other times not, and laugh.
“The Nazis did not, as their foreign admirers contend, enforce price control within a market economy. With them price control was only one device within the frame of an all-around system of central planning. In the Nazi economy there was no question of private initiative and free enterprise. All production activities were directed by the Reichswirtschaftsministerium. No enterprise was free to deviate in the conduct of its operations from the orders issued by the government. Price control was only a device in the complex of innumerable decrees and orders regulating the minutest details of every business activity and precisely fixing every individual’s tasks on the one hand and his income and standard of living on the other.
What made it difficult for many people to grasp the very nature of the Nazi economic system was the fact that the Nazis did not expropriate the entrepreneurs and capitalists openly and that they did not adopt the principle of income equality which the Bolshevists espoused in the first years of Soviet rule and discarded only later. Yet the Nazis removed the bourgeois completely from control. Those entrepreneurs who were neither Jewish nor suspect of liberal and pacifist leanings retained their positions in the economic structure. But they were virtually merely salaried civil servants bound to comply unconditionally with the orders of their superiors, the bureaucrats of the Reich and the Nazi party.”
-Ludwig von Mises
“I don’t recall many of your ilk whining over Bush’s excessive government spending and breaches of Constitutional freedoms (e.g. Warrantless Surveillance Act); only when it comes to Obama do you fret over the US becoming a totalitarian dictatorship. Perhaps you are a maverick on this?”
I had to read this far and ignore all sorts of AGW bullshit just for this? He’s a troll. Or he’s been in a coma for ten years. I’m going with troll.
“I don’t recall many of your ilk whining over Bush’s excessive government spending”
Well, you sure missed a lot.
The Bush administration spent money like a drunken sailor.
The Obama regime spends money like a coked up Armada.
You fellows need to rejigger your form letters.
Such facile thinking. And such a transparent attempt to shame me into adopting the rhetorical style you prefer.
Do pay attention to what you are arguing here, Mr Al-Tamimi: to wit, because Obama and Ayers diverge on certain issues (be that divergence tactical or even philosophically) — and this is even leaving aside for the moment their very different positions in front of very different audiences and their being tasked with very different responsibilities — Obama is therefore proven as not influenced by Ayers. Q.E.D.
Really? This is your argument?
I suggest you read Anxiety of Influence.
At any rate, Ayers engaged in domestic terrorism. I have never said Obama would use such tactics. Obama has been influenced by the ideological siren call of socialism; Ayers offered him yet another perspective on how to fight for the cause, and not just any perspective but one that had gone from direct material action to working through the institutions to insinuate socialist building blocks into our very epistemology. I have written on this extensively. Obama is clearly drawn to celebrity. The idea that the same guy who flies in pop stars and comedians to hang at the White House would have missed an opportunity to pick Ayers’ brain — though he was perfectly happy to be put over onto the political stage by Ayers — strikes me as willfully disingenuous.
I find it humorous that your critique is now that, because Obama and Ayers differ in how they go about advocating for (and instituting) socialist building blocks, Obama could not have been influenced by Ayers.
Yours must be a world filled with stasis. How do things advance for you progressives?
I mean, we capitalists and classical liberals disagree on things all the time. And yet we remain what we are!
Barack Hussein Obama is an impure amalgamation of many LeftLibProgg’s favored ideologies; the ‘Reverend’ Wright and Bill (free as a bird!) Ayers being only two of many. BHO has the roots in socialism from his parents, professors and other early associations, as well as roots in Black Liberation Theology from 20 years spent with Wright. BHO’s approach to implementing his agenda is polished and smooth; evidenced by his election: he received votes from millions of stupid, unthinking people (Community Organized ‘moochers’ and easily-fooled ‘intellectuals’, like this Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi creature) who believed the vacuous concepts of ‘HOPE’ and ‘CHANGE’ are all that’s necessary to give their lives fulfillment and turn this nation around. They voted for a messiah. What these ill-informed voters got is a sneaky politician who is on track to fast-track this Republic to ruin with his agenda of ‘designed decline’, as JeffG posted earlier.
Maybe this Republic was already on the skids; what goes up must.. &c., but Barack Hussein Obama isn’t working to stop the decline. He’s not even trying to ‘hide the decline’, as did the subset of LeftLibProggs who are also ‘Global Warmalists’.
If you read my posts you’d realize my take on the story is far different than you’ve presented it and you’d take the honorable road and issue the correction, pointing people to what I actually wrote, letting them decide if I’m deranged.
As for my political analyses, I foresaw the Tea Party and the 2010 mid-terms, which were won by people not trying to tack to the center, but rather by those who espoused fiscally and legally conservative/classically liberal principles. Which is what I said McCain should be doing — and which has long been my critique of the GOP. When NPR interviewed me during primaries I BLASTED McCain.
Moran, whose criticism of me re: McCain you practically repeated word for word, offered the argument that had McCain been more forceful in going after Obama, he would have lost even worse. Meaning, either way he loses. To which I replied, if you are going to lose anyway, why not do it while standing on principle and forcing the press to vet your opponent by pressuring him on his scant resume and history of championing demonstrably leftwing ideas?
I offer in support of MY position November 2010. Rick Moran initially mocked the Tea Party. He is terrified of looking uncouth in the eyes of the left.
Me, I defended BOTH Rush Limbaugh and David Letterman. Which is to say, I look at the evidence before me, formulate my argument, and deliver it — not as a knee-jerk team member but as someone who wants to show his work. The way you’ve portrayed me is decidedly not me. But rather than reluctantly admit that you made a mistake, you will now pick at whatever loose thread you can, hoping to find a point of unraveling.
That’s who you are. That’s who you all are.
Perhaps we need a new term, “No True Socialist”.
‘If you read my posts you’d realize my take on the story is far different than you’ve presented it and you’d take the honorable road and issue the correction, pointing people to what I actually wrote, letting them decide if I’m deranged.’
Except in the original article I never said you endorsed Cashill’s thesis, I merely rebuked you because you castigated Moran for advocating common sense. On the other hand, you asked me to address Cashill’s arguments, and I gave the relevant source material that exposes Cashill’s poor methodology.
‘Obama has been influenced by the ideological siren call of socialism’
Evidence, Goldstein? Those two issues I listed where Obama and Ayers disagree are not the only ones I could point to. Their fundamental outlooks are different. Ayers thinks there is a viable alternative to the market economy, Obama does not. Show me Ayers’ influence on Obama’s policies.
Now, this is the problem with your blog. It is a tragedy that you obsessively focus on Obama’s very minor connection to Ayers, because, from a classical liberal point of view, some reasonable and compelling critiques of the Obama administration can be offered e.g. the financial drain of the war in Afghanistan and the problems of the present strategy. This is really something that would appeal to American voters (opposition to present strategy at around 60%):- instead you ponder over completely pointless conspiracy theories (i.e. Obama is a socialist influenced by Ayers).
Influenced is now a conspiracy theory? I boggle.
You’re going to have to do a great deal of unpacking, here. You can’t just follow argument by assertion with more assertion. I mean: maybe over there, where you’ve posted, that passes, but certainly not over here.
See: Stanly Kurtz, ‘Radical in Chief’, for a new review of BHO’s roots in ‘socialism’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mdxmELQmrE
‘You can’t just follow argument by assertion with more assertion’
I have asked you all, on numerous occasions, to show me how Ayers informs Obama’s outlook and policies. Why is this so difficult for you? And no, pragmatic government intervention in the economy is not ‘socialism’. You all keep claiming that Obama wants to set up a centralised, command economy. I find evidence for this to be sorely wanting.
Perhaps you need a more balanced diet besides protein to inform your ‘wisdom’.
pragmatic government intervention in the economy is not ‘socialism’.
Ok, that’s just sad.
[…] Oh … I guess using the “s” word now marks me as deranged. […]
Oh. As long as it’s pragmatism, it’s not socialism? Interesting theory.
Not all of us. But some of us have noticed that Obama has heavy-handedly put a stop to offshore drilling, while attempting to launch green energy initiatives that are doomed to failure because they can’t possibly meet the demand. And then there’s cash for clunkers, which was just an idiotic waste of money masquerading as environmentalism.
Which Bush was guilty of doing as well. As has been pointed out, you’re not talking to a bunch of blind Bush phanatiques, here.
Finally, mandated healthcare. This is pretty heavy-handed government intervention into the economy, I think. I shouldn’t even have to mention any of this, because you ought to already be aware of these things.
I’ve laid the spelling flame-bait out. Will he take it?
No. You called me “deranged.” What I castigated Moran for was for suggesting I couldn’t recognize sarcasm, and for presuming to tell those of us who prefigured the Tea Party movement how best to frame our arguments so as to win elections and not appear as “kooks.” For which I needn’t point out you rewarded him by then trying to paint me as embodying that very kookiness he pretended to warn against.
As my various posts on the ghostwriting story show, I am not completely sold. But to deny the influence, however it got there, of Ayers’ literary output on Obama’s book is to deny what would be clear to anyone doing side-by-side comparisons. Too, we have the proximity of the two actors, and Christopher Anderson’s recounting, which happened independent of Cashill. You have presented my position in a way that is fundamentally dishonest.
I point you to Stanley Kurtz, pages 1-485 of Radical-In-Chief. Beyond that, I’ve pointed you to the use of bureaucracies, overseen by appointed ideologues, as a way to circumvent legislative rebukes to an attempt to have the EPA and green groups control every aspect of energy use; I’ve pointed to the unpopular attempted takeover of the healthcare system, which is designed to move toward a single payer system. Both Ayers and Obama have taken the socialist movement from something overt to something more covert, working within the present system’s parameters, Ayers through education (as well as through polishing and putting forward particular candidates he’s helped mold), Obama through bureaucratic apparatuses, pressures on the court, support of big labor, “community organizing,” and so on.
If Ayers and Obama differ so, why did Ayers put Obama forward as a candidate? If Ayers and Obama did not share fundamental agreement — at least as regards ideological foundations — why would Ayers support him?
First, I don’t focus “obsessively” on Obama’s very minor connection to Ayers, nor does this site. To argue otherwise is to ignore over 99% of the posts which have nothing to do with the relationship between the two. Again, you can’t seem to characterize without cartooning, and you act as if the hyperbole you offer is dispositive rather than head-scratchingly silly.
I don’t care that Obama was influenced by Ayers in any sense other than socialism as an ideology — or progressivism, or transnational progressivism, what have you — in anathema to classical liberalism. And I’ve repeatedly shown why.
The problem with many blogs is that they play at policy wonk while the real work of anti-individualism and soft tyranny takes place at a level they aren’t taking care to notice. The problem people like you REALLY have with my site, were you to allow yourself an honest insight, is that I see who you are and what you do, and I can articulate how it’s being done and where it will inevitably take us.
That you continue to pretend that I champion some kind of superficial cheerleading camp just shows you to be as universally shallow in your thinking as your original post had only suggested at a particular nodal point.
I’m personally amused by Mr. Al-Tamimi’s assertion that we can’t possibly know what real socialism looks like, because we’ve never lived in a place where socialism was installed; like he did in Iraq. So, in effect, we’re all accused of either mimicing the collective mind of our hive-master, JeffG, or simply mouthing worthless and vapid slogans we’ve been taught to repeat; along the lines of, “Yes We Can!”, “Winning the Future!”, and “Change!”…
I guess then that Vaclev Havel also knows nothing of the methods of totalitarian socialist regimes. I mean, he never lived in Iraq either…Only in Czeckoslovakia…Where the Soviet’s puppets imposed a command-and-control economic and social system on the people…
But what does he know?!? He only lived directly under the Soviet’s boot! How Inauthentic!…
Now, of he’d lived in Iraq…
And, as an aside, he also calls BS on the whole AGW connivance, and outs it for the attempted back-door socialistic liberty-robbing control scheme that it is.
That link above was Chapter 1 of 5; the rest are not on YouTube, but on NRO’s TV site.
Chapter 2: http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=Njg1YmEzMDU4Nzk4M2FiMTQ0NTYyZjNhOWIzNDJkZjM=
Chapter 3: http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=NjNlNzNkNmU2NGQyOGY1YjJlZTFjNzY0MGI3ZWExODQ=
Chapter 4: http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=OWQ5ZWI3NzAwNDY3MTc5OGVhMjQzNTU5MWIxOGRhZTk=
Chapter 5: http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=NDRlMTEyN2I5YzkxZTMxYjBmYWQ4ZTQwNmVhYzcxMGE=
html italics closure error in 280! sorry…
Is the site loading slow for anyone else? Maybe the preview?
Stanly Kurtz is correct is describing the USA’s ‘neo-socialism’ as an evolved creature; evolved because classically-defined ‘socialism’ wasn’t working in the US. So, the socialists started working from the bottom up, by ‘community organizing’ the rubes and moochers to take over, Cloward-Piven style.
And don’t get me started on reverend Wright, the filthy marxist. And barrys old man who liked himself some of that sweet sweet wealth redistribution.
Or to earn the appelation-socialist, do you need dead bodies?
Wait: Iraq was socialist?
I mean, who knew? Hussein’s Socialist Baath Party was as socialist as Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei.
Which is to say: not. There was no power-sharing. There was no decision-maker other than Saddam, and the only reduction in beaurocracy was to the end of putting Saddam directly in control of things, as opposed to reducing government.
But it is probably prudent to note that Saddam and the former Soviet Union shared some features of socialism, such as the lure of socialism as a means to put oneself in power. That’s pretty much what Mao did. Socialist on the outside; creamy totalitarian nougat.
Kurtz: “The way to combat a stealth strategy is to ‘explode the stealth’.” JeffG is doing that; the Moran’s and the Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi’s of the soft-bellied ‘Right’ are apologists to the bitter end. Likely they would’ve defended King George; you wouldn’t have found Moran, or any of his wimply ilk, boarding a vessel in the Boston Harbor, I’ll warrant.
IOW: a government is not socialism just because it says so on the label.
This is the kind of thing that would have Confucius spinning in his grave.
More spelling flamebait hung. Come on, you know you want it…
‘I mean, who knew? Hussein’s Socialist Baath Party was as socialist as Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei.’
Sorry, but the Nazi party did not run a Stalinist, centralised command economy as in Saddam’s Iraq. Hitler was broadly a Keynesian, but not a believer in a planned economy. To give an example of the Iraqi centralised command economy, note the massive bureaucracy, unlike anything Goldstein imagines is arising under Obama in the US. To construct one building in Iraq, on average 14 permits are required taking around 214 days. Also, massive government corruption tends to arise with excessive bureaucracy.
I agree. But of course, to follow this out to its logical end, there has never been a socialism. Because socialism is, as I’ve pointed out, always and inevitably moving toward tyranny. Liberal fascism is an apt description of the most common stopping point on the way to socialist Utopia. Because — surprise! — those “idealistic” socialist organizers with all the power and the perks decide that, hey, you know what? This right here is a pretty good place to stop!
‘I’ve pointed to the unpopular attempted takeover of the healthcare system’
Nothing wrong with that. It can exist in a market economy as part of healthy social democracy. Certainly not having to be concomitant with a planned economy.
And so what if Ayers endorsed Obama for president? Many evangelicals endorsed McCain- that does not make McCain a member of the Christian Right.
Orthodox socialists I know have all been sorely disappointed by Obama’s pragmatism, habibi. Just ask Chomsky et al. if Obama is a socialist in their eyes. They can define their ideology for you.
‘First, I don’t focus “obsessively” on Obama’s very minor connection to Ayers, nor does this site. To argue otherwise is to ignore over 99% of the posts which have nothing to do with the relationship between the two’
Yes, you do focus obsessively on Obama and Ayers, because Jack Cashill’s thesis should not be taken seriously.
‘is that I see who you are and what you do’
Go on then:- who am I? And what do I really do?
“because Jack Cashill’s thesis should not be taken seriously.”
says the concerned troll
Again, this thinking is so embarrassingly sleight: because Iraq under Saddam used a command and control economy, and the US is not Iraq, the US can’t be moving toward a kind of command and control economy.
As if there is only one command and control economy, and various differences attributable to other factors — geography, culture, Constitutional pressures, etc. — are to be entirely bracketed!
Obama is growing the bureaucracies by leaps and bounds. Eg., Including stimulus, the EPA budget has gone up 124%. And because Obama is trying to freeze in the stimulus spending as the norm, well, it doesn’t take
an Oxford educationmuch imagination to follow the trajectory.somebody didn’t read the whole comment….
You are a pathetic apologist. You give cover to a stealth administration, by refusing to discover the stealth. I’ve no use for you or Moran. Catch up later, if you can.
and lazy
Assertion monkey asserts. Assert, assertion monkey, and then pretend it’s an argument.
Some oldies but goodies, even if their “sell by” dates are in some cases expired.
Is Obama’s “spread the wealth” statement to Joe The Plumber one of the oldies but goodies?
Sure. How is a government mandate at all at odds with individual choice? How does it bespeak a move toward a centrally-planned economy? So what if the people don’t want it? It’s for their own good, says the Washington progressive caucus. But that doesn’t mean they are planning planning! Why, the whole idea is simply deranged!
He didn’t just endorse him for President. He launched his political career. I take it even you can see the difference.
Socialists and Marxists have a history of disagreeing with other socialists and Marxists. Just as capitalists have a history of disagreeing with other capitalists. Again, Obama is operating from a different set of circumstances — and under different constraints — than Chomsky or Ayers. A point you persistently resist addressing. Habibi.
Again, without disagreement between factions, socialism as an ideology would have remained stagnant.
Okay, I’m just going to let that one stand there on its own, naked in its simplicity and idiocy.
You’re showing us. And you’re doing it.
Please, do continue!
“Go on then:- who am I? And what do I really do?”
Apparently, a guy that believes Obama is just a free market capitalist type, and anyone that says different is “deranged”.
What you do is strain a gnat, and swallow a camel.
Oh, and you haven’t lived in America over the past 50 years to experience first hand the slide from constitutional republic towards European socialism. I have. It’s been huge and dramatic.
It can exist in a market economy
Not a free market economy
as part of healthy social democracy.
You mean a “socialist” democracy? Only “healthy” until people vote themselves the “right” to their neighbors’ earnings and proceed to eat the seed grain (see Greece)
Certainly not having to be concomitant with a planned economy.
Naw … the collective v the individual? Nothing to see, move along.
Sorry, Aymenn, you can keep dancing as fast as you can, but your moves are still transparent.
That would have been a useful counterargument had I equated Hussein’s regime with that of Hitler. But I didn’t do that. Also: Stalinist != socialist. But you undoubtedly knew that.
Of course. The dictation that thou shalt buy health insurance is in no way planned. At least not in the way planned is defined by those who make such judgements. Its form is purely what the market says it will be, dontcha know.
That only means he’s not socialist enough, not that he’s not socialist at all. TFP!
cranky-d, yes, and that one hasn’t expired.
“And no, pragmatic government intervention in the economy is not ‘socialism’.”
Ummm…..ok…….
Let’s think of another name for it then……
I shall call it…….FASCISM!!!!!
Oh. Wait. That’s just another kind of socialism.
Darn.
Let me think about this.
I’m kind of enjoying Aymenn’s sprinkling of various other languages in with his English, as if we aren’t sufficiently cultured to understand, or (alternatively) Google.
Should I start throwing some German into my comments? That’s my only hammer, should I wish to obfuscate. Or ig-Pay atin-Lay.
We could always go Morse on our learned friend. Surely he’s conversant with teh dots-n-dashes.
“Socialists and Marxists have a history of disagreeing with other socialists and Marxists.”
See Trotsky, Leon
and
Pick, Ice
It’s close to 80-degrees here in CO today. I’m going to Subway!
Slart, personally, I revel in my provincialism.
I know I’m just an ill educated déclassé bitter clinger.
Blake! You spoke French!
subway is almost like high speed rail
There’s a simple explaination for the marked similarity between Obama’s writing in Dreams and Ayer’s ouvre, one in keeping with what we know (or rather, what we don’t) about Obama as a thinker and a writer, one that doesn’t involve Ayer’s participation at all:
Obama’s a plagiarist.
Left the e out of oeuvre. Never mind me, I’m just ‘nother ignerant bitter clinger with a grin on my face and a thumb up my ass.
Dreams is an original work reflecting the deep mind of an accomplished intellectual. No wonder Obama always speaks extemporaneously.
Perhaps you need a more balanced diet besides protein to inform your ‘wisdom’.
Question.
Does krill help tip the scales?
Subway, even balanceder.
Yum.
as part of healthy social democracy
Show me one of those, wouldja? Because the social democracies in Europe are teetering on the brink of catastrophic failure, and we’re not strong enough to not fall into the abyss right along after them, we having permitted the termites enough free rein that our beams are plenty honeycombed as well.
Also, please explain to me why the next two degrees rise in global temps will be catastrophic whereas the previous two were not. Or the two before that. Or the two before that. Or the two before that.
I hope you realize that we are still in an ice age, as evidenced by the fact that we have glaciers and ice-capped poles. Our planet has spent more time with ice-free poles than without them.
Furthermore, I live on dry land that 15,000 years ago was an enormous freshwater lake. The land is dry because global temps rose high enough to evaporate that sumbitch right out of existence.
And yet the earth is still habitable. Fancy that.
Furthermore, please point to an epoch in our earth’s history where the climate could be described as “catastrophic.”
Here, I’ll help: Once upon a time, the entire earth was covered by ice, from the poles to the equator. The configuration of the continents at the time prevented the ocean currents from distributing heat the way they do now.
Me, I’m a supporter both of global warming and of increased atmospheric CO2 levels, because I’m a plant fancier, and we’ll finally get some use out of Canada and Siberia. That, and the fact that if the temps aren’t rising, they’re falling.
Which actually would be catastrophic.
Also, I got my first mosquito bite on Thursday, and the Avocets returned to the cloverleaf puddle on Friday. No reason to sit here Arguing with Idiots.
i ponder over
people who ponder over
completely pointless conspiracy theorizers.
And why i didn’t go to Arby’s.
Because I really want some potato cakes.
I guess Vaclev Havel’s insights in lifting the curtain on the tyranny of the AGW crowd and the failure of Euro-socialism on national levels was hard to dispute…
Or Mr. Al-Tamimi obsession with Jack Cashill’s efforts to remove Obama’s mask. I also noted that he didn’t ever address Kurtz’s revelations of Obama’s oast and his string of past mentors/connections.
I’d like him to explain away the revelation in Christopher Andersen’s “Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.” Andersen clearly had no idea what he was wading into in mentioning it. This is what that book is about, and he just happened to stumble onto that little detail while talking to people in the neighborhood, who knew what happened in the neighborhood. Andersen had no agenda, other than writing a solid biographical piece, a form he’s been quite successful with.
Aymenn, is Christopher Andersen deranged, and oblivious to common sense? Or, perhaps, is it you?
Further, “Show me Ayers’ influence on Obama’s policies.” is both a foolish and irrelevant construction. Show me Frank Marshall Davis’ influence on Obama’s policies. Show me Jeremiah Wright’s influence on Obama’s polices. Both are fool’s errands, and yet you can’t possibly believe that both of those men did not influence him.
I, too, am not terribly interested in Obama’s relationship with Ayers, aside from the obvious “You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.” inference. I’m more interested in why people are so invested in hiding things about Barack Obama’s past. Which, for the record, does not include his frigging birth certificate, IMHO.
IMHO
You are such a liar, Pablo. That should be IMAO. Or at least IMNSHO. This is no time for timidity!
But what about the civility, di?
I’d hate to come off as deranged.
What, the old civility, or the new motherfucking civility?
Ah, yes. The perfectly reasonable “Do things my way or I’ll put a nice little bullet in your head” civility. I’d forgotten about that one, as you hardly ever hear of it.
I still wonder why the LA Times sat on Obama’s laudatory introduction of Rashid Khalidi. I’m sure it was perfectly civil. So why hold out? Why is it better that we not see this?
I’m sure the answer to that question is rooted in common sense, and I’m just too deranged to see it. I wonder if someone might be kind enough to help a crazy ass hater out and explain that for me.
I see Boyz in the Hood II here. It looks like Hope. And maybe Change.
Now showing on GSN — “Go on then: Who am I? And what do I really do?”
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contestant number four: Are you bigger than a bread-box?