Skip to main content

Home/ Politically Minded/ Group items tagged hysteria

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
thinkahol *

Fallout of Hate Is Spreading Across America from "Ground Zero" | Civil Liberties | Alte... - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...america_from_%22ground_zero%22

ground zero mosque hate islamic community center

shared by thinkahol * on 27 Aug 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 27 Aug 10
     
    The hysteria over a planned Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan is only the tip of the iceberg.
thinkahol *

Obama Doesn't Want a Progressive Deficit Deal - 0 views

readersupportednews.org/...ant-a-progressive-deficit-deal

Obama Doesn't Want a Progressive Deficit Deal

shared by thinkahol * on 12 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 12 Jul 11
     
    One expects the debt-ceiling mess to involve a lot of ostentatious chest-pounding on both sides, for despite the fact that this is a deadly serious issue - the fact that we're even considering incurring an intentional catastrophe via a default is incredible, a testament to the bottomless stupidity inherent in our political climate - this whole debate is primarily an exercise in political posturing. That Republicans are holding up what should be a routine, if unpleasant, decision to raise the debt ceiling in order to portray themselves as the uncompromising defenders of the budget-balancing faith (a howling idiocy in itself, given what went on during the Bush years) is obvious to most rational observers. It's the obvious play for the lame-duck party entering an election year, and they're playing it, with the requisite hysteria. But what is becoming equally obvious, to both sides, is that the Obama White House is using this same artificial calamity to pitch its own increasingly rightward tilt to voters in advance of the 2012 elections.
thinkahol *

Philly Sacrifices 26 School Kitchens to the Austerity Gods | Mother Jones - 0 views

motherjones.com/...school-kitchens-austerity-gods

Philly Sacrifices 26 School Kitchens to the Austerity Gods | Mother Jones

shared by thinkahol * on 07 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 07 Jul 11
     
    As the "debt ceiling" fight drags on, the true costs of deficit hysteria are coming due.
thinkahol *

Five myths about the debt ceiling - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQANwF01H_story.html

Five myths about debt ceiling - The Washington Post

shared by thinkahol * on 08 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 08 Jul 11
     
    In recent months, the federal debt ceiling - last increased in February 2010 and now standing at $14.3 trillion - has become a matter of national debate and political hysteria. The ceiling must be raised by Aug. 2, Treasury says, or the government will run out of cash. Congressional Republicans counter that they won't raise the debt limit unless Democrats agree to large budget cuts with no tax increases. President Obama insists that closing tax loopholes must be part of the package. Whom and what to believe in the great debt-limit debate? Here are some misconceptions that get to the heart of the battle.
Bakari Chavanu

Amazon.com: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free eBook:... - 0 views

www.amazon.com/...ref=pd_sim_kinc_6

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 03 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America? Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise.
  • Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect? Charles P. Pierce: I don't know if there's one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion—often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense—has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.”
  • Question: What is the most dangerous aspect of Idiot America? Charles P. Pierce: The most dangerous aspect of Idiot America is that it encourages us to abandon our birthright to be informed citizens of a self-governing republic. America cannot function on automatic pilot, and, too often, we don't notice that it has been until the damage has already been done.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • To this day, we have a political party—the Republicans—who, because it embraced a “movement of Conservatism” that celebrated anti-intellectualism is now incapable of conducting itself in any other way. That has profound political and cultural consequences, and the truly foul part about it was that so many people engaged in it knowing full well they were peddling poison.
  • Charles P. Pierce: Look at the political opposition to President Obama. “Socialist!” “Fascist!” “Coming to get your guns.” Hysteria from the hucksters of Idiot America is still at high-tide. People are killing other people and specifically attributing their action to imaginary oppression stoked by radio talk-show stars and television pundits. That Glenn Beck has achieved the prominence he has makes me wonder if there is a just god in heaven.
  • "Idiot America" is great, informative book about concepts we see everyday. Also, many of the 1-star reviews are likely biased because of some of the political and religious topics noted. I think this book is definitely a full, 5-star book.
  • The author notes "The 3 Great Premises: and applies them to many instances in this book: 1. Any theory is valid if it moves units (rating, and making money). 2. Anything can be true if it is said loudly enough. 3. Fact is what enough people believe (the Truth is what you believe).
  • POLITICAL TALK RADIO: One set of rules noted by a professor studying radio discourse: *Never Be Dull *Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity *The American public is stupid; treat them that way *Always ignore the fact and the public record when it's convenient
  • TELEVISION: "Television is an emotional medium. It's entertainment, not analysis or reasoned discourse."
  • But to someone willing to take the time to read it, this book tells people what practically everyone should know about American politics -- that the American people are being sold a sob story about how experts are an elite that is keeping them from being The Best Damn Nation In The World. (In that regard, one should definitely read "The Paranoid Style In American Politics" by Richard Hofstadter -- it's over four decades old, but saw from the very beginning what has come into full bloom now with the barking lunacy of the American Right.)
  • The main problem with this book is this: the people who are likely to read it already know most of the story, and are mostly getting background information, and the people who won't read it are like the six reviewers I mentioned in my intro -- determined to ignore its stories and insights as "bias" because their politics and faith won't let them look outside the cloister.
  • He lays the blame at the feet of various ideology-driven entities, with special attention given to the same corporate-media war cheerleaders who happily passed on Bush's lies about Iraqi weaponry to a somnolent public, and who, in the name of putting "balance" over reality, treat specious creationist nonsense and hard scientific fact as if both had equal validity. Highly recommended!
Skeptical Debunker

Marshall Auerback: Memo to Greece: Make War Not Love with Goldman Sachs - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...reece-make-war-n_b_471902.html

Greece finance crisis suggestion war Goldman Sachs

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 22 Feb 10 - Cached
  • We know that the Obama administration will not go after the banksters that created this global financial calamity. It has been thoroughly co-opted by Wall Street's fifth column, who hold most of the important posts in the administration. Europe has even more at stake and has shown somewhat more willingness to take action. Perhaps our only hope for retribution lies there.
  • Some might believe the term "banksters" is too mean. Surely Wall Street was just doing its job -- providing the financial services wanted by the world. Yes, it all turned out a tad unfortunate but no one could have foreseen that so many of the financial innovations would turn into black swans. And hasn't Wall Street learned its lesson and changed its practices? Fat chance. We know from internal emails that everyone on Wall Street saw this coming -- indeed, they sold trash assets and placed bets that they would crater. The crisis was not a mistake -- it was the foregone conclusion. The FBI warned of an epidemic of fraud back in 2004 -- with 80% of the fraud on the part of lenders. As Bill Black has been warning since the days of the Saving and Loan crisis, the most devastating kind of fraud is the "control fraud," perpetrated by the financial institution's management. Wall Street is, and was, run by control frauds. Not only were they busy defrauding the borrowers, like Greece, but they were simultaneously defrauding the owners of the firms they ran. Now add to that list the taxpayers that bailed out the firms. And Goldman is front and center when it comes to bad apples. Lest anyone believe that Goldman's executives were somehow unaware of bad deals done by rogue traders, William Cohan reports that top management unloaded their Goldman stocks in March 2008 when Bear crashed, and again when Lehman collapsed in September 2008. Why? Quite simple: they knew the firm was full of toxic waste that it would not be able to continue to unload on suckers -- and the only protection it had came from AIG, which it knew to be a bad counterparty. Hence on March 19, Jack Levy (co-chair of M&As) sold over $5 million of Goldman's stock and bet against 60,000 more shares; Gerald Corrigan (former head of the NY Fed who was rewarded for that tenure with a position as managing director of Goldman) sold 15,000 shares in March; Jon Winkelried (Goldman's co-president) sold 20,000 shares. After the Lehman fiasco, Levy sold over $6 million of Goldman shares and Masanori Mochida (head of Goldman in Japan) sold $56 million worth. The bloodletting by top management only stopped when Goldman got Geithner's NYFed to produce a bail-out for AIG, which of course turned around and funneled government money to Goldman. With the government rescue, the control frauds decided it was safe to stop betting against their firm. So much for the "savvy businessmen" that President Obama believes to be in charge of Wall Street firms like Goldman.
  • From 2001 through November 2009 (note the date -- a full year after Lehman) Goldman created financial instruments to hide European government debt, for example through currency trades or by pushing debt into the future. But not only did Goldman and other financial firms help and encourage Greece to take on more debt, they also brokered credit default swaps on Greece's debt-making income on bets that Greece would default. No doubt they also took positions as the financial conditions deteriorated-betting on default and driving up CDS spreads. But it gets even worse: An article by the German newspaper, Handelsblatt, ("Die Fieberkurve der griechischen Schuldenkrise", Feb. 20, 2010) strongly indicates that AIG, everybody's favorite poster boy for financial deviancy, may have been the party which sold the credit default swaps on Greece (English translation here). Generally, speaking, these CDSs lead to credit downgrades by ratings agencies, which drive spreads higher. In other words, Wall Street, led here by Goldman and AIG, helped to create the debt, then helped to create the hysteria about possible defaults. As CDS prices rise and Greece's credit rating collapses, the interest rate it must pay on bonds rises-fueling a death spiral because it cannot cut spending or raise taxes sufficiently to reduce its deficit. Having been bailed out by the Obama Administration, Wall Street firms are already eyeing other victims (and for allowing these kinds of activities to continue, the US Treasury remains indirectly complicit, another good reason why one shouldn't expect any action coming out of Washington). Since the economic collapse is causing all Euronations to run larger budget deficits and at the same time is raising CDS prices and interest rates, it is easy to pick off nation after nation. This will not stop with Greece, so it is in the interest of Euroland to stop the vampires now. With Washington unlikely to do anything to constrain Goldman, it looks like the European Union, which is launching a major audit, just might banish the bank from dealing in government debt. The problem is that CDS markets are essentially unregulated so such a ban will not prevent Wall Street from bringing down more countries-because they do not have to hold debt in order to bet against it using CDSs. These kinds of derivatives have already brought down an entire continent -- Asia -- in the late 1990s , and yet authorities are still standing by and basically doing nothing when CDSs are being used again to speculatively attack Euroland. The absence of sanctions last year, when we had a chance to deal with this problem once and for all, has simply induced even more outrageous and fundamentally anti-social behavior. It has pitted neighbor against neighbor -- with, for example, Germany and Greece lobbing insults at one another (Greece has requested reparations for WWII damages; Germany has complained about subsidizing what it perceives to be excessive social spending in Greece). Of course, as far as Greece goes, the claim now is that these types of off balance sheet transactions in which Goldman and others engaged were not strictly "illegal" under EU law. But these are precisely the kinds of "shadow banking transactions" that almost brought down the global financial system 18 months ago. Literally a year after the Lehman bankruptcy -- MONTHS after Goldman itself was saved from total ruin, it was again engaging in these kinds of deals. And it wasn't exactly a low-level functionary or "rogue trader" who was carrying out these transactions on behalf of Goldman. Gary Cohn is Lloyd "We're doing God's work" Blankfein's number 2 man. So it's hard to believe that St. Lloyd did not sanction the activities as well in advance of collecting his "modest" $9m bonus for last year's work.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 22 Feb 10
     
    Ok, if a literal armed attack on Goldman is too far-fetched, then go after the firm using the full force of the regulatory and legal systems. Close the offices and go through the files with a fine-tooth comb. Issue subpoenas to all non-clerical staff for court appearances. Make the internal emails public. Post the names of all managers and traders on Interpol. Arrest anyone who tries to board a plane, train, or boat; confiscate their passports; revoke their visas and work permits; and put a hold on their bank accounts until culpability can be assessed. Make life at least as miserable for them as it now is for Europe's tens of millions of unemployed workers.
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

YouTube - Religious nuts in Texas seek to ban book about book banning! - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

censorship fanaticism religious fanticism fundamentalism hysteria literature

shared by The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy on 29 Mar 09 - Cached
  • The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy on 29 Mar 09
     
    The book is Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451". I wonder if they'll burn it?
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

The War on Brigitte Bardot - 0 views

frontpagemag.com/...Read.aspx

political correctness freedom of speech censorship hysteria

shared by The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy on 01 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy on 01 Apr 09
     
    Front Page Magazine article about the disappearance of free speech rights seen in France, after a certain well known actress criticised a few cultural practices of the incoming Muslim immigrants, eg. ritual slaughter of animals. Support for PETA has now become a criminal act in France, it would seem, made so in the name of tolerance.
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Boston Globe Online / Nation | World / Man detained six hours for carrying blade - 0 views

www.boston.com/...ours_for_carrying_blade+.shtml

human rights detained Sikh bigotry hysteria abuse of power abuse of authority

shared by The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy on 01 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy on 01 Apr 09
     
    Stories we shouldn't forget ... a few days after 9/11, a traditional sikh from Virginia is arrested for ... dressing like a traditional sikh. Quoting ... "At the police station, Singh was fingerprinted, strip searched, and photographed, and he said that instead of interrogating him, the police asked him questions like 'Why do you look like this?'" Racism, diluted by little other than cultural intolerance.
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

John Bolton at CPAC: The Benefits of Nuking Chicago | Mother Jones - 0 views

www.motherjones.com/...n-cpac-benefits-nuking-chicago

much ado about nothing Chicago Republicans politics hysteria

shared by The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy on 01 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy on 01 Apr 09
     
    Interesting how the warhead seems to be going off on the campus of Columbia College. I guess the bad guys are going to bring us to out knees by cutting off the supply of fashion illustrators and fiction writers? Those fiends! We would have never seen it coming. If you're read my stuff, you know exactly what I think of the Bush administration and how happy I was to see it leave Washington. I like a good neocon bash maybe even more than the next man. But, while this take on Bolton's remarks has been a popular one, I don't feel it's a reasonable one. As the article itself quotes Mr.Bolton "The fact is on foreign policy I don't think President Obama thinks it's a priority," said Bolton. "He said during the campaign he thought Iran was a tiny threat. Tiny, tiny depending on how many nuclear weapons they are ultimately able to deliver on target. Its, uh, its tiny compared to the Soviet Union, but is the loss of one American city" - here Bolton changes his tone subtly to prepare for the joke - "pick one at random - Chicago - is that a tiny threat?" Yes, there's a joke in that remark, but it's not the one that Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones wants it to be. The point of the joke is that if even one city gets hit, that's somebody's home and to that somebody, the difference between a vast nuclear arsenal and a small one isn't going to matter much. By naming the president's hometown in the hypothetical, he invites the president to put himself in the shoes of that person left facing a detonation close at hand. We don't have to guess how Obama would feel about such a prospect; it's the same way anybody would feel about it. To suggest, as the author does, that the audience validated a hope for mass murder by laughing at the joke is a disingenuous attempt to produce a hysterical response for the political gain of an already victorious faction. It's a cheap shot, and the author should have known better. This makes the Bush Administration and neoconservatism look bett
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Binyam Mohamed: The false martyr - The Long War Journal - 0 views

www.longwarjournal.org/...binyam_mohamed_the_f.php

binyam mohamed human rights torture hysteria absurd

shared by The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy on 01 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy on 01 Apr 09
     
    This link is not an endorsement; the author is writing propaganda. What you should keep in mind as you read this post is precisely what the author would have you forget - that the victim "confessed" to the acts that supposedly justified his torture, as he was being tortured, on behalf of the US government. That part, so far, doesn't really seem to be in dispute. Only the rightness of torturing confessions out of prisoners - and then playing make believe, and pretending that those are real confessions - seems to be, leaving us to ask "didn't the Middle Ages end a few centuries ago". Don't we all basically know what history shouldn't have had to teach our ancestors - that if you inflict enough pain on somebody, he'll say just about anything to make the pain stop? To attach the word "fascism" to a political ideology that supports this sort of thing is in no way excessive, and that's why I'm linking to this article. Watch the way in which the author, with not a single fact in support of his position, blusters his way past reality, treating a torture extracted confession as a source of unimpeachable truth, and gets you to not notice that he has done so. Learn how this creep works his magic, and when the next creep comes along, you'll be less likely to fall under his spell. Oh, and yes - this is the second penis related story to come out of Africa to be seen on this microblog in a row. Nothing deliberate in this; you're just getting the stories as I find them. Wondering if this one is going to be the start of a trend. Remembering Anthropology 100 back in undergrad, and some of its more graphic descriptions of body modification rituals on the continent, I suppose that's a possibility. One I'd really rather not explore more than absolutely necessary, but when somebody ends up being held prisoner and tortured for seven years because he visited a parody site, I think we need to get past our squeamishness and say something about that.
1 - 11 of 11
Showing 20▼ items per page