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keane
Joined: 09 Jul 2007
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 Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 6:15 am Post subject: |
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I do believe Spinoza's got you by the ear, Gopher.
And please note he didn't call you goopher or goober or guppy... gosh... he just used your handle. All adult-like.
Your friend,
keane, a.k.a.b.g., BLT |
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Capo
Joined: 09 Sep 2007
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| Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 7:15 am Post subject: |
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america gives free medical to south americans why not its own citizens!
however i dopn't like the nhs the labour govewrnment has trippled spending on it and service has been cut regardless of spin politicians put on it, we need to semi privitise it - i think a subsidised system is best coupled with a safety net for those who can't pay for what they really need |
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stevemcgarrett
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
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| Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 8:12 am Post subject: |
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Michael, are you there?
Pronto, help your amigo, keane, who's crying out for help from another thread, posted on the only Internet connected computer in Havana where he's now stranded, delirious in his feeble attempt to decipher Spanish... |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 12:23 pm Post subject: |
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| keane wrote: |
I do believe Spinoza's got you by the ear, Gopher.
And please note he didn't call you goopher or goober or guppy... gosh... he just used your handle. All adult-like.
Your friend,
keane, a.k.a.b.g., BLT |
keane, this is not exactly exemplary behaviour (and yes I know I'm not one to talk!  ). But Gopher and Spinoza have been somewhat reconciliatory of late, and seem to enjoy having discussions. I know you and Gopher have a bit of 'a history' but maybe it's time for you to try a new tact with him? This must be tiring for both of you. Perhaps it's time for a fresh start? You both have a lot to disagree about, but perhaps it's best done in a less combative fashion. Goading him on a thread he had already decided to put behind him, does not seem very fruitful.
Last edited by Big_Bird on Wed Sep 26, 2007 2:01 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 12:44 pm Post subject: |
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| SPINOZA wrote: |
| Er, not really. In this thread, you've made 3 claims which by themselves are crackers but together are the weirdest reasoning I've encountered for some time... |
Have no idea what this means. I understand "cracker" means "nigger" for whites. But that does not seem right. Also sorry to hear you have chosen to assert that my reasoning strikes you as "weird."
In any case, my position seems easy and not complicated: people with political axes to grind on left and right intentionally manipulate their audiences by distorting facts, by suppressing and overstating strategically-valuable information, and by resorting to emotional appeals -- in a word, "propaganda."
I object to this.
But at least two posters on this thread indeed enthusiastically endorse and thus confirm this. Step back for a moment, look at the doom-and-gloom rhetoric that invevitably accompanies the global warming and "Peak Oil" discourses, to cite but two high-profile examples that move beyond the obvious Michael Moore ones already cited, above, and expand your horizons.
By the way, do you have access to Environmental History? I am going to cite James C. McCann, "The Plow and the Forest: Narratives of Deforestation in Ethiopia, 1840-1992," Environmental History 2 (1997): 138-159. Want to allow you to read it first...
Last edited by Gopher on Wed Sep 26, 2007 3:23 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 12:57 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
Have no idea what this means. I understood "cracker" means "*beep*" for whites. |
In British slang, cracker means splendid. If something is a 'cracker' it means it is something good. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 1:18 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| [At least two posters on this thread indeed enthusiastically endorse and thus confirm this. Step back for a moment, look at the doom-and-gloom rhetoric that invevitably accompanies the global warming and "Peak Oil" discourses, to cite but two high-profile examples that move beyond the obvious Michael Moore ones, and expand your horizons. |
No Gopher. That makes me want to smack your nasty little gopher's bottom. It's very simplistic to say I 'enthusiastically endorse' the use of propaganda. I've have stated that I do not care for it.
However, I have pointed out that it exists, whether I want it to or not, and so it makes sense for someone, seeking to effect change, to make use of it. |
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SPINOZA
Joined: 10 Jun 2005
Location: $eoul
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| Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 4:51 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| SPINOZA wrote: |
| Er, not really. In this thread, you've made 3 claims which by themselves are crackers but together are the weirdest reasoning I've encountered for some time... |
Have no idea what this means. I understand "cracker" means "*beep*" for whites. But that does not seem right. Also sorry to hear you have chosen to assert that my reasoning strikes you as "weird." |
'crackers' means 'nuts', 'barmy'. 
| Quote: |
In any case, my position seems easy and not complicated: people with political axes to grind on left and right intentionally manipulate their audiences by distorting facts, by suppressing and overstating strategically-valuable information, and by resorting to emotional appeals -- in a word, "propaganda."
I object to this. |
You object to it yet do it yourself. Rather than state precisely what facts have been distorted, what information has been suppressed and over-stated, you merely assure the reader that this has happened and make an essentially synonymous post to your previous posts. Having a good vocabulary (the ability to make the same points with entirely different expressions) and access to phrases that might impress a reader like suppressing and overstating strategically-valuable information is assertion and repetition - not evidence for your claims.
And you still fail to justify (1) the similarity between Moore, global warming and Nazi propaganda, (2) why it follows that propaganda (assuming what you cite is actually propaganda) necessitates the dubiousness of cognitive content, (3) (a) why we should be scepitcal about the scientific concensus (and side with a few individual scientists who express scepticism towards) global warming, yet at the same time (b) swallow your points in (1) and (2) and (3a).
| Quote: |
| But at least two posters on this thread indeed enthusiastically endorse and thus confirm this. |
The fact that others believe a claim does not, in general, serve as evidence that the claim is true.
| Quote: |
| Step back for a moment, look at the doom-and-gloom rhetoric that invevitably accompanies the global warming and "Peak Oil" discourses, to cite but two high-profile examples that move beyond the obvious Michael Moore ones already cited, above, and expand your horizons. |
Doom and gloom rhetoric like climate change will have serious consequences for the environment is based on scientific data. If you want to dispute the claim, you have to dispute the data. You can't just say "it's doom and gloom and must therefore be dubious". Michael Moore's points about healthcare in the US are, presumably, based on data and some kind of empirical observation. If you want to dispute Moore, you have to dispute the data. Otherwise it's all just meaningless twaddle.
| Quote: |
| By the way, do you have access to Environmental History? I am going to cite James C. McCann, "The Plow and the Forest: Narratives of Deforestation in Ethiopia, 1840-1992," Environmental History 2 (1997): 138-159. Want to allow you to read it first... |
Never heard of it - and maybe my bad. Mind you, does it have anything to do with this discussion? It's far from obvious that it does from the title.... |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 10:54 pm Post subject: |
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| SPINOZA wrote: |
| Gopher wrote: |
| SPINOZA wrote: |
| Er, not really. In this thread, you've made 3 claims which by themselves are crackers but together are the weirdest reasoning I've encountered for some time... |
Have no idea what this means. I understand "cracker" means "*beep*" for whites. But that does not seem right. Also sorry to hear you have chosen to assert that my reasoning strikes you as "weird." |
'crackers' means 'nuts', 'barmy'. |
Just reading your sentence again. First time I read it I saw it as each (of the 3) claim was a cracker. A cracker being something good.
But now I see 'crackers' was not a plural noun but an adjective.
Sorry. In that case crackers does mean crazy.
Explanation to Gopher:
example of noun: SPINOZA is a cracker. => SPINOZA is a hot (girl - usually).
example of adjective: SPINOZA is crackers. => SPINOZA is completely mad!
Both can be true simultaneously (and probably are!)
If I have something good, like say a cool new mobile phone, I might say "This phone is a cracker!" |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 11:51 pm Post subject: |
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Spinoza: now that I understand "crackers," I think you are here to display British slang, trade insults, assert far-leftist politics, and defend Michael Moore to the death.
Probably would not be profitable to continue at this point. Especially where you have too casually dismissed a cite I offered you in advance in good-faith merely because you do not find its title relevant to what you think this discussion is about.
Call me "crackers" and whatever else you like. I find you about as reasonable as a burro.
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 12:39 am Post subject: |
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Big_Bird: let us return to this moment in this exchange:
| Gopher wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| I think he serves a purpose. While there are plenty of thoughtful people who are able to 'see through' his tactics, there are so many other people who need things put to them in simple and sensational terms before they will begin to demand any action, or even consider the issue at all... |
Sounds like Goebbels.
I would rather cultivate and nurture an informed, reasonable republican democracy than one that relies on mass-oriented propaganda campaigns. |
I recall your arguing that this was very necessary, all for the greater good, of course. But at the end of the day, it remains propagandistic and manipulative.
We know that Moore chronically does this. Your original post lists quite a few British who easily recognize Moore in fact did this in SiCKO via ridiculously-biased data selection.
I mentioned some of us seeing similar issues in the global-warming debate. Thus our skepticism about at least some of its claims.
The author of the article I cited above, for example, takes Al Gore to task for his manipulative claims on the environment -- in this case, deforestation.
| Al Gore wrote: |
| One tragic example of the loss of forests and then water is found in Ethiopia. The amount of its forested land has decreased from 40 to 1 percent in the last four decades...The effects of the prolonged drought that have resulted have combined with the incompetence of its government to produce an epic tragedy, famine, civil war, and economic turmoil have wreaked havoc on an ancient and once-proud nation. |
| James C. McCann wrote: |
Is there an empirical foundation for the precise, didactic deforestation figures offered by Gore? From where do those deforestation statistics derive...?
Gore's comments...rested upon a thirty-year history of involuted citations of unsubstantiated "fact" in the absence of field evidence...These statistics on Ethiopia's twentieth-century deforestation have been repeated in meetings, in policy briefings, and in university lectures on several continents, always without a foundation in evidence from Ethiopia's actual landscapes...
Ethiopia's forest degredation narrative...asserts a historical baseline...when no systematic survey data was available...[it] makes a specific argument that degredation is cumulative and has its origins in human mismanagement...it makes an apocalyptic forecast. |
Candace Slater did the same thing in the Amazon and with its Indian peoples and cultures in her article "Amazonia as Edenic Narrative." She cites and documents very thoroughly, among other things, people referring to Amazonian tree-types that unfortunately have never appeared on the South-American continent in the first place...
Why would Gore and the others do this, Big_Bird -- in Ethiopia, in the Amazon, or in Michael Moore's "America?" We have already answered this, above, no? And you approve, right? You clarify that you dislike it. But, ultimately, you think it is necessary.
But in the meantime, people like Moore, Gore, and those who would follow them uncritically here, have created a series of metaphors and an all-too-familiar discursive trope. One with a moral at the end of the story that almost always features modern capitalism as the villain.
You -- and I am speaking in the plural -- endorse this to further the greater good. People are not intelligent or wise enough to deal with reasonable debate, or at least they will not take the action you want them to take without being manipulated. Yet your metaphors and discursive trope have taken on a life of their own, you yourselves have bought into them as if they represented reality itself, and, like our cracker-eating friend Spinoza, above, you will defend these metaphors and discursive trope to the bitter end because you have invested much if not all of your political capital and emotional involvement into their being "true."
This is why some of us view some of your claims suspiciously. Like Gore's statistics out-of-thin-air or Slater's Amazonian tree-types that never existed in the Amazon (or anywhere else on the South-American continent, for that matter), you are not even discussing issues like "health-care" or "global warming" per se in-as-much as seizing on them as convenient pretexts to further your own radical-leftist, anti-capitalist, and, in Moore's case, antiAmerican political agendas...
This is not to suggest that I reduce the entire issue to this, or say that there is no room for health-care reform or that global-warming does not pose problems that we ought to address. But your manipulative style nevertheless clouds and muddles the debate with, from your point-of-view, I think, things like "baggage" and "resistance" you would be better off without.
Again, why not simply speak plainly and reasonably on these and other issues? Cite data fairly, honestly, and, most of all, non-manipulatively? |
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SPINOZA
Joined: 10 Jun 2005
Location: $eoul
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| Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 1:31 am Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| Spinoza: now that I understand "crackers," I think you are here to display British slang, trade insults, assert far-leftist politics, and defend Michael Moore to the death. |
Displaying one item of British slang, certainly. Trading insults, asserting far-leftist politics, and defending Michael Moore to the death because I asked you to justify the following?
(a) the global warming/Moore association with Nazi propaganda,
(b) asked you to justify why dubious content necessarily follows from propaganda (assuming your description of Moore and climate change as propaganda is valid - you might also want to justify the Moore association with an almost universally-endorsed scientific hypothesis, btw!),
(c) why we should be scepitcal about science yet presumably less sceptical towards your point about propaganda, which you can't even attempt to justify.
| Quote: |
| Probably would not be profitable to continue at this point. Especially where you have too casually dismissed a cite I offered you in advance in good-faith merely because you do not find its title relevant to what you think this discussion is about. |
I asked you what the book had to do with this discussion, as it's pretty far from immediately obvious from the title. That's not a dismissal. It's a question as to relevance. Straying off topic with a red-herring to add to the below.....
I see your debate style is:
(1) make a bunch of completely nonsensical claims,
(2) get asked to justify them,
(3) don't bother justifying them and just obfuscate with verbosity,
(4) as a result of (1), (2) and (3) get called an ass-hat,
(5) claim that because of (4) you were right all along and 'the Left' just want to bully and browbeat rather than debate. |
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keane
Joined: 09 Jul 2007
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| Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 3:10 am Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| maybe it's time for you to try a new tact with him? |
Maybe you should upbraid the one who spittles this and that and can't be bothered to stop using name-calling in every post? Also the one who has responded to not one of my posts since joining with 1. relative content or 2. without insulting.
It is not I who needs a new tack, my dear Ms. Bird. As long as he wishes to be juvenile, I shall make him pay for it. He is welcome any time to start posting like an adult. |
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Pligganease
Joined: 14 Sep 2004
Location: The deep south...
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| Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 3:14 am Post subject: |
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| keane wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| maybe it's time for you to try a new tact with him? |
Maybe you should upbraid the one who spittles this and that and can't be bothered to stop using name-calling in every post? Also the one who has responded to not one of my posts since joining with 1. relative content or 2. without insulting.
It is not I who needs a new tack, my dear Ms. Bird. As long as he wishes to be juvenile, I shall make him pay for it. He is welcome any time to start posting like an adult. |
I'm sure the irony of this post is lost on no one but you. |
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stevemcgarrett
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
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| Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 3:24 am Post subject: |
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Big Bird observed:
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| However, I have pointed out that it exists, whether I want it to or not, and so it makes sense for someone, seeking to effect change, to make use of it. |
I find myself in agreement with you for at least the second time this month. I do believe that we've almost reached are quota for the month on accord. 
What most Westerners do not fully appreciate is that propaganda has a far less negative connotation in many cultures. It is viewed as desirable if not necessary. But it's semantic since what we call political campaigning is arguably just a veneer for propagandizing too. Thomas Paine had a lot to say about this more than two centuries ago. Of course his views were deeply rooted in rationalism.
Plig noted in reference to keane's obtuse response:
| Quote: |
| I'm sure the irony of this post is lost on no one but you. |
Tell me about it.  |
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