Tribalism by dreamtrove

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Tribalism

POSTED BY: DREAMTROVE
UPDATED: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 17:59
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Sunday, June 12, 2011 6:40 PM

The board is getting tribal again. Folks attacking have themselves posted far worse on the criticisms than than they are now attacking me for making, on the same topics, from the same angles.

A balkanization into a perceived self-grouping fear-based tribal units is re-forming, as if something terrible will happen if one bureaucrat or another gets replaced with an identical one wearing a different color tie.

When this has happened in the past it's been just a tremendous waste of time for everyone involved. I have stuff to do, and this is getting us nowhere.

I'll probably check back in, but I think it's time for me to take time off from RWED. I wanted to post a pic of zombies, but when I searched on zombies I got this. It seems very appropriate.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Sunday, June 12, 2011 7:58 PM

FREMDFIRMA

How convenient, this preventing the need to justify certain claims or explain oneself, heh.

-F

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Sunday, June 12, 2011 8:57 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I understand DT's frustration, but the problem here is delusion, not tribalism. Reality is reality, but some people refuse to make its acquaintance.

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Monday, June 13, 2011 5:31 AM

DREAMTROVE

Quote:
Originally posted by Fremdfirma:

How convenient, this preventing the need to justify certain claims or explain oneself, heh.

-F

Frem,

No, It's me being fed up. I"ll answer your reagan water question:

Water is clean, until contaminated. Then, it's contaminated, and it continues to be contaminated. Contamination increases until someone stops the contamination.

The water. It was clean. Now it's not, and it's getting worse. Here there were three major incidents of contamination from Penn Nat'l Gas companies disposing of large amounts of CFC nerve agents In Watertown, Pultney and Bath, NY. One of these is responsible for my sister's cancer, from which she is not expected to survive. All were in the last year, due to policies started by Bush/Cheney in 2005, and continued under Obama. The current administration not only did nothing to change these policies, it continues to issue new permits, and the admin's oil price boosting policies giving strong economic support to the Nat'l Gas Fracking and Mountaintop Removal industries.

I'm not defending Reagan, just pointing out that Mike's statement was idiotic. Your pushing this into a defense of Reagan is a strawman. I said in my first post "the so-so Reagan" and I meant it. Yes, he funded some bad regimes. Many presidents do, OTOH, he didn't get us into a new major war, that's not something any of his successors can say.

In the end, people are judged not by what they say, but what they do. Reagan was no environmentalist, but he didn't wreck the country.

Under Nixon's Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and EPA, things in America stopped getting worse as rapidly as they had been before them.

The only real change under Reagan. IIRC. was the Water Quality act, and a couple smaller bills adding changes in PH and O2 levels to the concept of water contamination, and a couple of clean up bills. (My basic understanding was that the Water Quality Act's major implication was that if your toxic goop got into the water supply because of a flood or storm that you would be responsible for it as if you had poured it in the water yourself.)

All of these regulations went away under Bush/Cheney, and so far, they have stayed gone, despite numerous attempts to put them back.

I know Obama has said that he is green, but he has also said that he opposes military action and excessive spending, and yet he had radically upscaled both other those activities. He has said a lot of things. I don't care what he says, I care what he does. Right now, he's on course to upscale dangerous mining activity in the US by a factor of 10. That's very noteworthy.

Reagan was a bad president. Bush was a total disaster. Obama is more Bush. So far, he has yet to demonstrate anything else.

Also, why the sudden partisanship? I thought you hated both these guys. I mean, we have yet to even mention Clinton in terms of unholy disaster. (On wars, meddling etc. I think he takes the cake. On the environment he was bad, but I think Bush was worse.)

Reality is, this country has had two environmentalist presidents: Teddy Roosevelt and Nixon. It's also had some doozies of anti-environment presidents. At the moment, Obama appears to be "continuation of bad policy" but his stance on oil has cause a fierce acceleration of bad policy.

So, yeah, this may be a NIMBY argument, but it is a reality: I didn't used to know anyone dying from water contamination. Now I know 4. (3, one died).

Also, taxes in my back yard were low. Now they are high, so high, it may not be possible to be in business.

I've posted many times that each president is worse than the last because they build on the evils of their predecessor and then add new evils to them.

Very few presidents actually turn back the tide of creeping evil. Those that ended wars: Adams, Andrew Johnson*(had his own problems, but ended the Sioux War, even if you don't give him credit for ending the Civil War), Harding and Eisenhower (both declared a cessation of hostilities (Russia, Korea) upon coming in to office; and those who passed environmental reform. Presidents that did things that were fiscally responsible often had other very serious flaws: Jackson, Truman, Clinton. It's hard to justify balancing the checkbook while killing millions of people.

Some presidents were unmitigated disasters: Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Bush. Those who start major wars, and generally have very serious other problems, like no respect for the constitution, the bill of rights, Geneva conventions or any international law. LBJ arguably belongs here.

Reagan was very ho hum, but Mike's claim doesn't hold water. So to speak.

Does Obama's massive military expansion, curtailment of human rights, police state and incredible soaring deficit not concern you?

Oh, the point about debt is simple: If you are in debt, your creditors can tell you what to do. Of all the issues, the acceptance of the mortgage bonds, which every previous president had refused to do, as they grew and grew, as in fact govt. backed bonds, under Obama, is noteworthy: It adds $8 trillion to the debt of actual debt which actually had to be paid, not implied liabilities, which are through the roof, but could be abandoned. That, and the current budget allotments for new debt, put that debt at over 25 trillion.

This is why China is building a city in Idaho, because they can, because they have the power to demand it. It's also why so many foreign companies and foreign investors of US companies are pushing for radical environmentally destructive policies to get at our resources. Because they can. And why we are invading every muslim nation, because the radical globalist zionist and fascist gnomes alike at the FED want us to, and they have the power to tell us what to do.

When you're a fiscally irresponsible idiot like the current and last president, you create this situation for yourself.

Think about it. It would be like you borrowing money from a drug dealer on the grounds you'd make some delivery deal, then using that down payment for a subprime mortgage on a McMansion, had some wild parties, and then when the cops and the bank came to your door saying "Damn coppers and bankers. They're ruining my life" without any recognition that you might have dug that hole yourself., and that perhaps you should've picked up a hammer, a board and some nails, and started building.

*This* is the essence of conservative thought. I don't mean capitalist pro-business free market free trade libertarian laissez faire thought. Just basic conservatism.

Looked at in this light, does the idea that Obama, who in the senate, supported a $350 billion bailout, and then went to Bush to plead for the next $350 billion, and then passed his own $900 billion bailout, and then another $450 billion, and then expanded the Afghan conflict to, by his own words "three times the area for the arena of conflict" then invaded pakistan, yemen, lybia, and syria, with more military spending, wartime supplementals, and massive handouts in drug company subsidies, energy subsidies, while lowering taxes on the rich, and effectively strongly raising taxes on the poor with his expansion of FICA, to say nothing of Obamacare and its penalty, which is an unconstitutional direct tax... is "more conservative that Reagan"?

It's not a defense of Reagan to say that's not true. It's just a completely nonsensical statement.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Monday, June 13, 2011 11:49 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Yeah, but trying to push the notion of Reagan being environmentally friendly pisses me off, as does all the idolization of him coming from conservatives who conveniently ignore what a total cretin he was.

Ironic that a bastard like Nixon winds up by default one of the more ecologically conscious presidents, innit - given what a fuckhead he was about every bloody thing else.

And I ain't partisan - shit man, I'd drag Obama to the ICC just as fast as Bush, meet the new boss same as the old boss, cause no matter what comes out of his mouth, the policies are just continuation of the same fucking agenda as the last shithead - but for some odd reason, whenever I *say* this, is goes right by you, like a gap in the tape, right through the blind spot, unseen, unheard, unacknowledged - and it ain't just me, it's any of the liberal leanin folk around here, no matter what their criticisms of the Prez, they fall on deaf ears and then get followed by flaming for supposed sycophantic worship ?

When it comes to that particular GAPING, GINORNIMOUS BLIND SPOT in your own consciousness, I think you need to re-evaluate your perceptions of partisanship, since you're seeing what you want to, fear, or expect to see - instead of what is actually present, and that kind of blindess can, and will bite you on the ass ever so hard.

Also, if you keep showing up, dumping a load of crap which often makes folk wonder what yer smokin, and then flying off when called on it, imma start calling you Seagull... seriously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagull_manager

And boy howdy, I got nothin nice to say about Clinton either, especially as his CALEA-mandated backdoors have finally come back to haunt us, as this is the vector for all these recent hacks like Playstation Network, several banks, including ShittyBank (aka CitiBank) who by borg-like domination controls far too much financial info for anyones good, and several E-mail services as well... plus the ones which aren't admitted as the company sticks both fingers in its ears and screams BLAME THE CUSTOMER over and over and over....
Lookin at YOU Square-Enix and Blizzard!

Let's not pretend we haven't noticed, cause we all have, haven't we ?
Hell, this very morning I got a malware spam from a close friends Hotmail account which hasn't been used in YEARS, is on none of his current computers, and had been forgotten - no way in hell they can blame that shit on a trojan, especially since I just got done going through his laptop with a fine tooth comb and it's clean.
(other than the porn he failed to hide well enough, which I mocked for it's poor quality and offered suggestions as to where to find better content, to his shocked hilarity since most folk think imma prude.)

And man, LBJ ? he's up there with Wilson in my catalogue of shitheels, sure.

But you have to understand, with Reagan it's fucking PERSONAL, him, Ollie and Caspar were the prime movers behind that bullshit, and what *makes* it intensely personal is what happened to the bastards who didn't bail out when the gettin was good.

Okay, yeah, sure, they were scum - but they were MY SCUM, and being sent to their doom as a political expedient to "Insulate Superior Asses" (a running joke about our purpose) was something imma hold a goddamn *grudge* about, you understand ?

-Frem

I do not serve the Blind God.

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Monday, June 13, 2011 1:46 PM

KWICKO

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

DT's still got his panties in a bunch because I quipped that Obama is a better conservative than Reagan. That's not an endorsement of Obama, but rather an indictment of Reagan.

Obama's a warmonger? Really? How many shooting wars did Reagan have us wrapped up in? Afghanistan (which led directly to THIS mess), Nicauragua, El Salvador, Grenada, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and that doesn't even mention the African continent!

Taxes were higher under Reagan, he raised taxes more, and more often, and the list goes on. Don't forget Iran-Contra, which was Reagan trying to set up a "shadow government" within the government, answerable to nobody, accountable only to him.

To have fond memories of Reagan is to be either blindly partisan, or woefully ignorant of reality.

By the way, what's the conservative stance on marriage? "'Til death do us part," and all that, right?

So how many wives did "conservative" Reagan have?

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill

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Monday, June 13, 2011 3:09 PM

DREAMTROVE

Wasn't intending to push Reagan as an environmentalist. I think that idea is absurd. So is pushing Obama as a fiscal conservative. My point wqs that *my* water wasn't contaminated *yet* (though I'll concede the safe drinking water act was a good idea,)

Quote:
idolization of him coming from conservatives who conveniently ignore what a total cretin he was.

On this point we're in complete agreement. The media is responsible. He is the first conservative to whom the MSM was "friendly" because he was really our first neocon president. Nixon was, quite frankly, a much better conservative, but the media hated him, and that more than anything else caused his bad image. Carter suffers the same problem. Carter was really a much better liberal than Clinton, but the media hated Carter, and so he's remembered as "the Dem's disaster."

On fiscal issues, Reagan was just a bad Thatcherite. The 1984 tax reform was progressive in very much the way the new tax changes are not, in fact, they're quite regressive. Each president has their quirks. Bush's taxcuts were very "rich friendly" and had little effect on the poor. Obama's are just kind of tax payer unfriendly, but I see the rich are keeping their Bush taxcuts.. Sorry, correction, high wage earners. If they were really rich they wouldn't have wages, they'd have money, inherited, and wouldn't pay anything, because it would all be in tax free bonds or offshore or something. Frankly, I would have rather had Thatcher, but this is America and corrupt elitists are what you can get. We might look to change that.

Quote:
I'd drag Obama to the ICC just as fast as Bush, meet the new boss same as the old boss

Thank you. Yes, IIRC, that was my exact 18 month assessment (I give everyone 18 months because when they first walk in they're running on the last guys policy for a year.

The reason it came across as partisan is that you haven't been attacking Clinton for the exact same nonsense that these other guys are pulling. Heck, he, Bush and Obama have pulled much more of the international meddling monkey business (prop up a dictator or revolutionary) than reagan. Reagan's worst that I recall was Saddam and the Contras. Agreed, overall evil, but it's not like his successors look good by comparison, which is all I was saying, comparison to Obama.

i know you know very well that Obama os propping up terrorist groups all over central asia, and revolutionaries across north africa and the middle east, outside of his war, and that he's propping up a truly terrible regime in Pakistan right now.

Quote:
it ain't just me, it's any of the liberal leanin folk around here, no matter what their criticisms of the Prez, they fall on deaf ears

Nah, it's the same for everyone here. It's hard to remember who said what. You've defended Obama to me, but that wasn't my point.

If you think about it, Mikey has been *far* rougher on Obama than I have ever been, which is sort of why I was making the point: he doesn't defend Obama because he likes Obama, he does it for somme psychological reason, which I'm gonna a guess out of the blue might be because he feels threatened, and that this is a political trick pulled by TPTB on both sides to make the people cower and cling to their partisan pillars of BS because a boogeyman of liberal/conservative is going to come and get them, which allows said towers of BS to spoon feed them whatever cr@p they're selling this week.

This is what happens to the whole dman country every four years, and its starting early, which is why people are clinging to the nonsense and hurling insults at, not the other side, but anyone who *doesn't* buy the BS, as witness Mikey just calling me a dishonest republican, and a number of other insults I see flying every which way as people migrate towards their partisan battlestations. It ain't me. I'm the stationary object, reporting whats happening around me, moving tide, don't get swept up in it. Think about it. Lots of people criticized Obama, past tense. Starting with that Osama job, how mamy people here actually bought that, defended it, and then took up those partisan banners again. I mean, frankly, politically, i prefer wiener to most of the politicians, but the guy is pretty sick, and Queens ain't going to replace him with some right wing nutjob because it's Queens. I mean. Be real.

You might remember when all the righties here on the forum were defending Bush, and I said "what are y'all so afraid of, damn it, impeach him yourself, all you'd do is make McCain president which would be better for you anyway." so, no, it's not one sided, and so no, it's ot one sided, Nd it ain't me doing it. I'm pointing it out, and I'm getting out of the way because I don't want to be a part of this sh*t slinging, especially if it's going to go on until Nov. 2012 which I kinda suspect it is.

Quote:
I got nothin nice to say about Clinton either

Yeah, i know, but the subject comes up a lot, and ti seems like it's just me pointing it out, and all i see is a lot of partisan defenders.

Let me make my point real clear on this: this is the threat to actual liberals. It's not the right, it's the democratic party. As long as they stand blindly by and defend their party right or wrong, and do not take them to task, they get rat bastards like Clinton, who half of them have paid so little actual attention to that they think that he was "eight years of peace" no, we were at war for all eight of those years. Iirc, 7000 americans lost their lives in those wars. But that was a drop in the bucket for clinton.

Here the same problem, part 2: they pour their energy into attacking Sarah Palin, who is never going to be president of anything. And it wouldn't matter if she was, because no conservative is going to alter the nature and behavior of the liberal soul. The nation is always going to be half lefties and half righties because it always has.

Now, back to your "people are basically good." i agree. Also, i discard the "people are morons" so i have to conclude that liberal and conservative are two equally valid points of view.

That's not the problem. And you're never going to turn liberals into conservatives or conservatives into liberals, so don't waste time trying. That very thread was started by Niki in response to me saying just that, and you can see she missed the point because I said it was the job of conservatives to get better conservatives and the job of liberals to get better liberals, whereupon she immediately starts a thread about how conservatives need to get better conservative. As a ledtie liberal, she might wanna clean house on her side, because we're looking at four more years of Obama, and you can't do nothing about that, but he seems a pliable guy, the left might be able to get him to adopt some more actually dcent liberal policies.

If they tried.

Which they won't.

Because they'll pour all of their energy into trying to convince people on the far rit that they should blindly support democrats, and argument which they open with lines like "hey morons" (which is not to say that the right doesn't do the same damn thing.)

Point being: that don't work.

And that's just how the party leaders want it, because they don't want to have to compromise with its own base and as long as they can keep them distracted by fearing and attacking the other side, or the perceived other sided, then they're not going to be asking for any actual concession to the actual base fromm the actual leaders.

And being in the center, I get it from both sides. This is going to be another 17 months of mud slinging and I don't see any reason to stand in the middle of it.

CALEA is such a blatant violation of the 4th a. (oh, and I call them SaudiBank)

Quote:
Lookin at YOU Square-Enix and Blizzard!

You know these guys are just studying those rat psychology studies 24/7 to try to get the customer zoned out and staring at the screen.

Also, let's not forget, snooper in chief, on every damn webpage now, including this one: Facebook. "Don't use facebook, they're evil. They'll sell everything they can get on you" - Christina Hendricks.

Quote:
But you have to understand, with Reagan it's fucking PERSONAL, him, Ollie and Caspar ... Okay, yeah, sure, they were scum - but they were MY SCUM, and being sent to their doom as a political expedient to "Insulate Superior Asses"

Oh, sorry, i forgot.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Tuesday, June 14, 2011 3:39 PM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

GETTING tribal? You must be kidding. Surely you've been here long enough to know that it IS tribal--it has been since I arrived at least, and shown no signs of stopping.

Quote:
Yeah, but trying to push the notion of Reagan being environmentally friendly pisses me off, as does all the idolization of him coming from conservatives who conveniently ignore what a total cretin he was.

Ironic that a bastard like Nixon winds up by default one of the more ecologically conscious presidents, innit - given what a fuckhead he was about every bloody thing else.

I'm with Frem, and I, too, feel rather personally about Reagan. I probably wouldn't if I didn't hear so MUCH crap spouted about him which is completely false and idolatristic (izzat a word?). When you keep getting your nose rubbed in shit, eventually it starts to reeeely piss you off. Actually, that's probably partly why I dislike the Republican "line" so much, as it's got an awful lot of ReaganShit in it and it keeps coming back, despite history, despite facts. Having lived through him in California, it gets personal, sooner or later, when people keep saying what a god he was.

By the way, LBJ did a lot of conservation stuff, and tho' I disliked him on almost everything else, I gotta give him cred for that.

Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off

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Tuesday, June 14, 2011 5:59 PM

FREMDFIRMA

The word you're lookin for, m'darlin, is hagiography.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hagiography

Yes folks, that's the WORD OF THE DAY - educate yourselves!

-Frem

I do not serve the Blind God.

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