quote:Originally posted by Bokonon: Jon, honestly? You make such positions socially unacceptable.
And then you get lambasted for being intolerant. The more you attack those positions, the more their persecution complex sets in.
I wish I could say. I'm currently trying the patient approach with my own extended family, and they seem to ascribe it a weakness. My siblings get me better, my aunts and uncles just laugh uproariously.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:And then you get lambasted for being intolerant.
Proclaim that you're indeed intolerant of lies and liars, and that they should be ashamed if they're not as intolerant of lies as you are.
Embrace your intolerance. Don't tolerate lies and liars. EVER. Not even those liars that happen to be allied with the political causes your favour. Especially not them.
Posts: 676 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
I couldn't agree more. I post more negative comments on my friend's facebook posts (usually huffpo articles or some such) than any conservative stuff.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
I find that when laughed at for questioning an unproven (and even un-evidenced) first principle the best thing to do is frankly and skeptically say something to the effect of, "I'm not actually hearing any kind of answer or evidence. Laughter doesn't count. If it's so obvious, you must be able to point to some things to verify it."
I do wish conservatives didn't hold such a majority on willful ignorance in this country right now, because my examples lately come from one side of the fence, the liberal secular side. For example, when proudly (smugly) told that America is and was meant to be a Christian nation: "C'mon, the Founders were Christians, everyone was more religious then, you just need to read what Barton says on the topic, etc.," I would bluntly ask, "What actual evidence did Barton offer to support that claim?" When and if he actually had an answer, it would be off to the races.
Someone who believes such willfully ignorant things may very well leave a conversation still determined to believe them, but what I can do is make it very clear that the actual facts and evidence on the matter don't support their claim at all. Even if all that happens is that they lose confidence in their certainty, that's a win.
It's not nice, it's not polite, but it *is* a good thing to do, because that sort of willful ignorance doesn't just screw things up for everyone else, it does for the person who believes it, too.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:So there it is: the draft Republican platform says of Medicare and Medicaid,
The first step is to move the two programs away from their current unsustainable defined-benefit entitlement model to a fiscally sound defined-contribution model.
That means that instead of Medicare as we know it, which pays your medical bills, you’d get a lump sum which you can apply to private insurance — they’ll yell when we call it a voucher, but that’s what it is.
No doubt I and others will have much more to say about this, but let’s just ask the question: why is this “fiscally sound”?
Bear in mind that health expenses will still have to be mainly paid for by some kind of insurance; that’s in the nature of medical care, with its high but unpredictable cost. So what we’re doing here is replacing government insurance with a program that gives people money to buy private insurance — that is, adding an extra layer of middlemen. Why would this save money? I guess the answer is supposed to be the magic of the marketplace — but we have the experience of Medicare Advantage, plus studies of Medicaid versus private insurance, plus the raw fact that America relies more on private insurance than any other nation and also has by far the highest costs. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the record suggests that this will do anything other than make health care less efficient.
And for those demanding documentation, it’s coming; too busy today.
So where are the savings? The answer is, it’s basically a way to deny health care to people while denying that you’re doing so. You don’t say, “we won’t pay for this care”, you just hand people a voucher and let them discover that it won’t buy adequate insurance. It’s health-care rationing — but by money instead of deliberate choice.
It would be far more cost-effective, not to say humane, to make actual choices — to decide that Medicare won’t pay for procedures of little or no medical value. (As always, individuals who can afford it can buy whatever care they want). And Obamacare makes a start on that. But hey, that’s death panels.
So instead of making choices, we’ll let people die because of inadequate assets. Fiscal responsibility!
quote:Originally posted by Bokonon: Jon, honestly? You make such positions socially unacceptable.
And then you get lambasted for being intolerant. The more you attack those positions, the more their persecution complex sets in.
Oh don't I know it. I had a long time family friend, about my age, nearly de-friend on facebook, after I gave a vigorous critique of her substance free support of the drug-testing in Florida (which spiralled into a more general discussion of things). We did agree to disagree, and I told her I wouldn't respond to any more of her political posts, because as you note, it can close off any future discussion on anything.
I don't know, in retrospect, if "attack" is necessary. I think firm disagreement and defense, _without compromise_ can be enough. I think moderate liberals in particular have a tendency to compromise to avoid conflict and/or because they believe it somehow builds up brownie points for future compromise.
I don't think that's how it works anymore with the vociferous Right.
Posts: 7021 | Registered: Nov 1999
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posted
When talking to a local crackpot who has run for local school board three times and been crushed all three times (after multiple moves to be eligible for different seats, after losing a lawsuit against the school board, and being what seems to basically blacklisted), I asked him what his actual plan was to enact some of his policies to improve local schools. His response: refuse to discuss anything but spending cuts or firing administrators until the FCAT is removed. I asked him how a junior new school board member would possibly make that a reality, and he had no response. But he still stuck to his no-compromise idea, was in fact proud of it.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
On top of the moral argument, there's a difference between short-term and long term fiscal responsibility. If you fire every teacher in the US, it'll save a lot of money. For a few years.
Posts: 19 | Registered: Apr 2011
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quote:I’ve written about or linked to a great deal here “chronicling Mitt’s mendacity” — to borrow Steven Benen’s phrase.
Mitt Romney says many, many things that are not true. He says this despite being in possession of the correct facts of the matter.
Which is to say that Mitt Romney lies. A lot. He lies more than any other national candidate for office in my lifetime. And I was born before the Nixon administration.
This is documented. Proven. Validated, verified, demonstrated, catalogued and quantified. Mitt Romney lies.
Here are 30 — 30! — of Benen’s weekly “chronicling” posts. These are all backed up and sourced. These are not assertions, interpretations or allegations. These are facts, actual instances.
Over the past 30 weeks, Mitt Romney has told lie after lie after lie: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX.
Click those links. Read the lists. List after list of lie after lie. Hundreds of them — 533, to be exact, although Benen does not make any claim to providing a comprehensive chronicle.
This is unprecedented. “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” Romney’s pollster, Neil Newhouse, said.
This has produced what James Fallows calls the “post-truth” age — a relentlessly dishonest onslaught of brazen falsehoods with which the media and the political system are struggling to cope. What do you do when every article, every “fact-check,” every arbiter denounces a lie and corrects it, but then a politician just keeps repeating it?
It’s remarkable to behold.
One of the weirder aspects of this for me is watching this unfold in the politically conservative culture of my evangelical world. The most partisan evangelical conservatives are also those most likely to rant against “relativism” and to trumpet their status as defenders of “absolute truth.” Those same folks will dismiss this post — and all 30 of Benen’s posts above — as mere partisan attacks without ever bothering to examine the 533 factual instances of Mitt’s mendacity, chronicled.
That’s the only cognitive defense they have, I guess. Jam fingers in ears and shout la-la-la-you’re-being-partisan!
Because, you see, the fact that Mitt Romney said something he knew to be false is a partisan fact. And the fact that he has done this at least 533 times in the past 30 weeks is also partisan.
I suppose the other approach for Romney defenders who cannot bear to face the fact of those 533 facts will be to angrily pore over all of Benen’s lists, reading each one with a lawyerly eye.
Have at it. Please. Cherry-pick. Spin. Split hairs. Hand-wave away whichever lies you wish as mere misdemeanors and not full-fledged felonies against honesty.
But how many of those charges do you think you can get dismissed? 10 percent? 20 percent? Maybe, if you’re that sort of person and you work really hard at it — if you’re willing to get even more pedantic and semantic and technical than even you are usually comfortable with — maybe you could half convince yourself that 50 percent of those lies somehow shouldn’t really count against Romney.
That still leaves more than 260 lies. That still leaves Mitt Romney as a convicted liar, 260 times over. And at that point you’ll have to join your friends with their fingers in their ears.
But you’ll still know.
Because everyone knows. Mitt Romney lies. A lot. That is what he does. That is who he is. And friend or foe, he does not care if you know it.
There's about 40 links in the text of the article proper; it made for some good (if baffling) reading.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
Well, Obama hasn't exactly been Mr. Truthful himself lately, though I don't think it's nearly on the Romney scale of falsehood.
I would like to see a similar treatment done to Obama.
I also wonder how much of it is him merely repeating the same lie over and over, and how many distinct lies he actually has.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
I've looked pretty deep at that in advance because you absolutely always know — almost like there's a guarantee — that the equivalence arguments and the "the other side is just as bad" are quick to be the reply.
Even in the depths of my biased favorability (oh no, i'm partisan!) there's just no comparison. Click through the roman numerals. It's not even really that there's no comparison between Obama and Mitt, it's that there's no comparison between Mitt's campaign and any other serious political contender's campaign in living memory. An analyst who's been in the biz, which I quoted earlier, said as much and noted when Mitt's claim about Obama dropping work requirements for welfare came about, it was a radical departure into absolute mendacity.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:We already have the most unequal society of any rich nation, and TPC's 2015 projections imply it will only get worse. Even if the Bush tax cuts expire, our post-tax Gini coefficient will rise to 0.531 from 0.45 in 2007. That would increase to 0.544 under Romney's tax plan, and as much as 0.557 in the $144 billion shortfall case. It's the difference between us merely having Rwandan levels of inequality and having Bolivian levels of inequality. For comparison's sake, remember that Denmark and Japan are the world's most equal societies with 0.25 Gini coefficients.
quote:The upshot is this: Romney's tax plan does not work under remotely plausible growth projections. It either increases middle class taxes or increases the deficit. If Romney is serious about doing neither, then he has to be unserious about his growth projections. The rich have to get almost impossibly rich to make up for the lost revenue in Romney's tax plan. Realistically, their incomes would need to be 7.7 to 11.3 percent higher than TPC predicts -- that is, we should not ignore the corporate income tax cuts. To put that in perspective, that's between $377 and $548 billion additional dollars flowing to the top 5 percent of households.
Romney may not like this, but that just means he does not like his own tax plan. These numbers are the inescapable conclusion of a plan that relies on a giant magic asterisk to add up.
posted
That's ok, I was more thinking along the lines of:
In the case where he actually has a plan and isn't just making stuff up (a small probability maybe), here is a rational way of reconciling everything. It isn't like one can accuse Romney of being against a plan to severely ramp up income inequality and benefit his peers.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
I think that's how it would play-that it was just name-calling-but I also think it would be a true, legitimate charge. There would have to be something pretty incredible and innovative in the great big pile of stuff he hasn't explained about what his actual plans are for it to work without 'widening the tax base'.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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He plans to keep it a secret until he's hashing it out with Congress in the Oval Office.
What don't you get about that? ----
The fact that he sincerely offers that as his plan is both hilarious and depressing. Who seriously thinks that saying "I'll figure it out later" is a good plan? Who thinks that's a plan at all?
The only thing more depressing than watching this election is watching other countries talk about it. We're the laughing stock of the world and yet the candidates STILL unabashedly espouse American Exceptionalism with a straight face.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
There's a very good chance Mitt Romney's tax returns were copied a few days ago.
Again, there's no smoking gun, but I was incredulous that this didn't happen sooner. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if this was in fact a leak.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
I am a bit surprised no leaks on the tax returns have happened before, actually. Publicized claims and denials of theft, anonymous publicized extortion? Wouldn't say I expected that.
I admit it is amusing, though, since it could all have been avoided had Romney actually applied his supposed conservative principles on this matter, or his supporters insisted he do so.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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