That’s my point. How can you “work with” a bunch of fake, 'roid-ripped WWF “wrestlers”? There’s no working with wrestlers. It would be like trying to moisturize Chewbacca.
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David Koch donated $35 million to the Smithsonian to renovate the Natural History Museum’s dinosaur hall, and has also funded the Smithsonian human origins display and the American Museum of Natural History dinosaur hall. That’s about all that I’m aware of, and it’s a rounding error compared to the political stuff.
I’ll also note that I don’t think my saying “Kochs: only 99% evil!” means that I’m carrying water for them :).
The US response to terrorism has been Brute force, not ‘political correctness’.
First, the US does not just face a threat from Islamic terrorists, until 9/11 the biggest terrorist attack on US soil was committed by Timothy McVeigh, a right wing kook and a member of the people’s militia movement.
But more importantly, the UK and Germany both faced similar emergent terrorist threats at a similar time. In Ireland Iain Paisley and his ulster unionists were making bigoted attacks on Catholics and some were acting on them with bombs (the first death in the troubles was a Protestant who happened to be buying meat in a shop owned by a Catholic that was attacked by Protestants). Meanwhile the RAF ‘Baader-Meinhof gang’ was operating in Germany.
The West German police could not respond with brute force so they applied traditional police methods and treated terrorism just like any other crime. As a result the principals of the Baader-Meinhof gang were in prison in a few years and the movement soon fizzled out. Meanwhile the UK Tory government managed to turn a situation where British troops who had gone into the province to protect Catholics from Protestant terrorists were being fired on by Catholics.
The situation in Northern Ireland was brought under control through the policy of ‘criminalization’. The UK stopped the military tactics and refused to recognize terrorists as political prisoners. The deaths dropped as a result. Even though the 80s were the peak years in the political crisis, the number of deaths due to terrorism were far smaller than during the early years under the brute force approach.
Torture and internment have been shown empirically to fail as counter-terrorist policy. Yet the US is locked into that failed strategy due to idiots like King.
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I seem to recall that the Human Origins donation was a bit controversial since the exhibit that supported the Koch view of global warming. The dinosaur donations seem to be fueled by a childhood love of dinosaurs…
The really interesting discussion here (if it ever comes to pass) would be a Rand versus Hillary matchup. I’ll have popcorn ready.
Sweeping warrantless privileges were granted in the Patriot Act. Not for or against Rand Paul, but can you sue because you don’t like the degree with which a law is being applied? Systemically don’t you just motion for new language in the act, setting limits or standards that weren’t previously specified? The whole sueing route is questionable.
You guys are utterly missing the point here. Sure - Rand’s a Rep. No surprise. He’s a politician, and you can’t get elected, or even get the cash to run a campaign without those creepy-ass major parties.
That’s actually almost irrelevant.
The take-home is, a whole, whole BUNCH of us decided to jump in and sue these unconstitutional bastards together. You don’t have to like Paul, or Clinton, or anybody else. All you have to like is having the US Constitution and your own civil rights under it respected - which the Patriot Act does not do.
Also - the comment about no judge being willing to issue a ruling based on ‘mere’ declaratory claims by an as-yet unspecified class is baloney. Because, even if that were the case? In the meantime, that lawsuit allows plenty of leverage to paper the NSA and the Administration half to death with subpoenas and such, reminding them WTF they are supposed to be working for (and answerable to).
So, don’t EVEN use lame Dem vs. Rep or ‘all politicians suck’ arguments on this one. I am neither - and don’t plan to be in this lifetime. If you want to do something about it? Then DO something about it! Seriously - this is better than marching in the streets. It hits them where they are weakest - their inability to justify their operation under the law. Why do think they argue and preach and PR this thing so damned hard, anyway? If they actually believed they were anywhere near ok, they’d just shut up and go back to work.
And if Paul grabs himself a Prez nomination out of it? So what? You don’t have to vote for him, merely because you agree on this one issue. Funny - you like it when Snowden makes a ballsy, risk-prone move in our favor…but not when we step up to back his play? What is THAT?!
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I get the spirit of what you’re talking about, but it’s not our play. This is a Rand Paul play, like a double-upside-down-spine-tingler-pile-driver-suplex-with-a-half-twist from atop the third buckle.
Our play would be a class action suit by the ACLU, the EFF, a dozen of the best known names from Hollywood, media, publishing, big business and Internet companies, a few Governors from different sides of the aisle, a handful of Senators, Reps, past NSA and CIA employees, a sitting attorney general or three, some high school kids, a dude in a wheelchair, his grandma, a phlebotomist and the Grocery Clerk’s Trade Union. That would be “our” play.
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Who do you think the parties to the class action suit are, anyway? Everybody who is an individual member of that class is just that - people who decided they’d take a stake in that action. t’s not all Tea Partiers, certainly not all elephants…not even close. Just regular people inclined to tell the NSA to go stuff.
I get where you’re coming from. And you’re absolutely right. It’s a political show. Rand wants what he wants personally, and we want what we want, collectively as a random dogpile pissed off citizenry. To Rand’s credit, he and his people wigged out a way to create a nice win-win on this one issue. But those other suits you mention are already in play, and yay! But your name is nowhere on any of those, even though they’re ganking your phone records, too. What this one offers us IS that big fat array of regular citizens jumping in.
That’s why I jumped in - because it offered us that. And they can do all the sick-o political posturing and gesturing they like…but in the end? They are not going to be able to ignore this. And the louder they get? The more they’re showing you their fear. Believe me - if a single one of those nasty insults to whores everywhere thinks this could mess with their own ambitions? Whoooo, the spin!? The flag-waving?! It’ll be better than watching Jesse Jackson trying to catch screen time at the '08 announcement coverage, lol.
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This. I know a lot of libertarian leaning folks who are simply folks who are skeptical of government bureaucracy and federal solutions. It isn’t an entirely insane position to have. They are also natural liberal allies because they are rabidly fanatical about social and civil liberty. When given the choice between a democrat who will promote civil liberty by working for something like gay marriage, ending the drug war, or reigning in the NSA; and an American Taliban Republican douche bag who is going to lower their taxes, they happily pick the Democrat, despite Democrats being convinced that a libertarian is a more evil version of a Republican.
Libertarian are not perfect Democrat allies, but they are natural allies. Republicans and libertarians only vaguely have tax policy in common in principle, and nothing at all in practice. A handful of libertarians also might care enough about guns to find Republican gun policy more appealing than Democrats utterly ineffective gun policy Literally everything else about the Republican platform is deeply offensive to a libertarian.
My point is that libertarians come in different flavors. Some are hardcore fanatics and won’t be happy until they have a Randian paradise. Some care almost exclusively about taxes and guns and can overlook other things. Some however care almost exclusively about social and civil liberty. Tossing them all in the same bucket is annoying and tactically stupid. If the Democrats were to field an anti-police state candidate (instead of Hillary, i.e. Bush’s fifth term), they could easily gut the Republican party of much of its libertarian leaning support.
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I’ve seen the exhibit and I didn’t see any particular problem. It could be I’m just oblivious to the climate change messaging.
Yet the fact remains that they have all branded themselves “Libertarian.” This isn’t something imposed on them from outside. This is an internal branding. So, until they can jump out of the bucket they’re in and differentiate effectively, it isn’t ‘annoying and tactically stupid’ - it’s reality because it’s what they’ve done to themselves.
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I just recall some alarmist articles at the time - might have been knee-jerk responses to the Koch funding.
Camacho 2016!!
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I love that movie. It was meant as a spoof, but it’s really a future mockumentary.
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this. my roommate comes from a background of extreme urban poverty (and, like me, he’s still struggling,) used to be a professional rapper, and is currently under-employed in the service industry and he is a pretty active Libertarian of the “social and civil liberty” stripe. The attempts to paint all Libertarians as corn-fed right-wing nuts is a diversionary tactic to subvert the central tenet of the party: that the Bill of Rights is the highest law of the land and Libertarians want that primacy to not be subverted.
Some Libertarians are icky. Same goes for all parties and, indeed, people generally. Doesn’t invalidate the party.
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eh. fair enough. just saying the guys I know aren’t racist shitbags. the type of Libertarian my roommate is does exist, but knowing how many of them there truly are will never be seen because they aren’t the image of the party that gets perpetuated in the media, even within the party’s media itself, I’d wager.
EDIT: for clarity of “type of”
It’s probably the same argument about all political affiliation disagreements. Though I’m also disgusted by Democrats; in that case I see B and lots and lots of people see Democrats as A, ALL of my Republican friends included in that shared vision.
And I see Republicans as A, or worse, while they see themselves as B. Most of them seem to be reasonable people and put the Glenn Becks, Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters into the thin outer ring of ICK in their personal B.
While I put those talking weirdoes and pretty much every Republican politician into the large ICK ring of A, with vanishingly few of them meeting my definition of what is good and therefore core.
It’s simply Tribalism. Why are team sports so HUGE, overwhelmingly disproportionately HUGE in the USA? Sure, the rest of the world has Soccer. But nothing compares to the rah rah rah Baseball/Basketball/Football/Hockey mania that pretty much defines North America.
That’s why I say that politics in the USA is the same as the WWF. People who are INSIDE the sport cannot see that people outside the sport have a valid point of view. “You’re throwing your vote away. You’re not doing your duty as an American.”
Oh yes I am. I am reserving the right not to participate in something I see as an invalid way of running things. That is my right, and I am no less of an American or a person because I have a different point of view on the validity of the system.
So, that’s why I drew the picture. Tribalism. It’s just crazy stuff. Libertarians are THIS. No, they’re THIS. No, THIS! It’s like Punch and Judy, or the WWF. I’ll pile drive you from the third buckle! I will break you like a boy!!!
Etc. Yawn.
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totally. and notice I avoided defining my own political affiliation–it doesn’t exist, and pretty much for the reasons you define.
