Information control, or, How to get to Orwellian governance

Cycloptichorn: The question came up a few pages ago how long state funding for elections has been around, and what exactly the experiences were. Since you had brought up this topic in the first place, could you expand on it a little?

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thomas mentions "unintended consequences". But they might reside, and do reside, everywhere. I wonder if there isn't a bit of self-deceit in here. thomas is a german, after all.

Let me give an example. Two people standing side by side each with a deck of cards. The first says, "I will throw these cards into the air and I have the intention that the ace of diamonds will land so as to be fully visible on the top of the pile as it is spread out on the hardwood floor." The second fellow says something different, "I will throw these cards in the air but I have no intention regarding the final position of those cards." They both throw the cards and they mix in the air and swirl about and one version of the three of hearts swings wildly and takes out the eye of a bystander.

I confess I do not understand how the second card thrower deserves any special respect merely because he specified no intent.

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There's another practical matter regarding the increasing costs of electioneering...the time and resources required to play the game of getting oneself elected and keeping oneself electable rather than doing anything for the constituents. When I land in the emergency room, I'd really hope that the attending physician doesn't spend half or more of his time and energies on the phone trying to further his standing in the hospital hierarchy.

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blatham wrote:

I confess I do not understand how the second card thrower deserves any special respect merely because he specified no intent.

I'm not saying he does. My point goes the other way round: Do you understand that the Patriot Act has consequences no patriot would intend? Do you understand that the "leave no child behind act" has consequences that nobody wants except if they do want to leave children behind? Do you understand that the "Defense of Marriage Act" prevents people from marrying, and shows no signs of actually defending heterosexual marriages? Do you understand that the "war on drugs" has eroded many a civil right without actually curtailing illicit drug use much? All these initiative passed Congress with broad bi-partisan support, and not all Congressmen who voted for them were shills of the Republican noise machine. And for all these laws, the major consequences, most of which happen to be bad, were not intended by any of the good guys who signed it.

I expect Cycloptichorn's "Equal voting act of 2008" to suffer a similar fate if passed. And even though George probably disagrees with my choice of legislation in the last paragraph, he probably agrees with my paranoia about the unintended consequences of meddlesome, bipartisan, do-gooder initiatives.

***

Correction: A couple of posts ago, I mentioned "501(c)(4) organizations like the Swift Boat veterans". What I actually meant were 527 groups like the Swift Boat veterans". I mixed up different ways to charter a tax-exempt organization.

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Thomas wrote:

blatham wrote:
I confess I do not understand how the second card thrower deserves any special respect merely because he specified no intent.

I'm not saying he does. My point goes the other way round: Do you understand that the Patriot Act has consequences no patriot would intend? Do you understand that the "leave no child behind act" has consequences that nobody wants except if they do want to leave children? Do you understand that the "Defense of Marriage Act" prevents people from marrying, and shows no signs of actually defending heterosexual marriages? Do you understand that the "war on drugs" has eroded many a civil right without actually curtailing illicit drug use much? All these initiative passed Congress with broad bi-partisan support, and not all Congressmen who voted for them were shills of the Republican noise machine. And for all these laws, the major consequences, most of which happen to be bad, were not intended by any of the good guys who signed it.

I expect Cycloptichorn's "Equal voting act of 2008" to suffer a similar fate if passed. And even though George probably disagrees with my choice of legislation in the last paragraph, he probably agrees with my paranoia about the unintended consequences of meddlesome, bipartisan, do-gooder initiatives.

***

Correction: A couple of posts ago, I mentioned "501(c)(4) organizations like the Swift Boat veterans". What I actually meant were 527 groups like the Swift Boat veterans". I mixed up different ways to charter a tax-exempt organization.

Of course, failure to take action for fear of unspecified 'unintended consequences' is a sure recipie for... nothing happening at all.

When you percieve there to be a problem with the current system, that isn't an acceptable solution.

If perhaps you could enumerate the problems that you forsee with Public Financing, maybe we could have a more productive discussion about why it would be a bad idea.

Quote:

Equality of outcome isn't your system's concern. If you want to make it its concern, you have to change the system.

I'm not proposing equality of outcome; there is no guarantee that anyone will be listened to or respected any more than anyone else. I'm proposing a change in the regulations of the system itself.

I'm hunting down info on the state public financing, but it is also interesting to note that Presidential Public Financing exists here in America, and has for some time... but it is an optional program...

Cycloptichorn

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Here we go, from wikipedia:

Quote:

Another method, generally called Clean Money, Clean Elections, gives each candidate who chooses to participate a certain, set amount of money. In order to qualify for this money, the candidates must show a broad base of support by collecting a specified number of signatures and small (usually $5) contributions. The candidates are NOT allowed to accept outside donations or to use their own personal money if they receive this public funding. This procedure has been in place in races for all statewide and legislative offices in Arizona and Maine since 2000. Connecticut joined them by passing a Clean Elections law in 2005, along with the cities of Portland, Oregon and Albuquerque, New Mexico. 69% of the voters in Albuquerque voted Yes to Clean Elections.

Now, to start hunting down articles

Cycloptichorn

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That describes exactly what i was attempting to describe. George is ranting very disingenuously about labor unions and funds which are collected by employers for labor unions. I've been a union steward in the past, and no monies which are collected from non-union members can be used for any other purpose than collective bargaining. Union campaign contributions can only come from the funds which derive from union dues in excess of collective bargaining funds and from invidivual donations by union members. While George rants about that, he ignores people who are members of labor unions are not the affluent sorts who can afford to give $2,000 to a political campaign, and then to give several thousands more in the names of their children and grandchildren. He ignores that both outside observers of corporate bundled contributions, as well as corporate insiders, have long alleged that corporations re-imburse management employees who contribute through "performance bonuses" which appear suspiciously in campaiging seasons, but not at other times of the year. Everyone has a dodge to get around campaign financing laws, and certainly both parties indulge in those scams. That's why i mentioned political action committees--i didn't specifically mention the 527 organizations because they are not the lone culprits.

People who whine about high tax rates for the rich are often not the people who actually earn the money through hard work and funds management--they are the incidental later benefiticiaries. Investment bankers know damned well that when governments run large deficits, a great deal of available investment capital gets tied up in government borrowing and bond issues. When government is the largest debtor on the block, precious little money is left over for venture capital investments, and the available capital to re-tool, expand and otherwise compete more effectively is not as readily available to corporations. Corporate managers (who aren't simple looters such as were seen at Enron) know this, even if those who live off investment income without actually managing corporate funds do not.

But those wealthy would-be tax dodgers employ tax lawyers who devote their lives to finding loopholes, and other lawyers write the tax legislation--whether because they are the legistlators or because they advise the legislators. Campaign finance law is no different. It is proposed to make the politicians who advance the bills look good, but even as it is being hammered out in committee, smart boys and girls are looking at the legislation and finding ways to get around it. When it comes to taxing the rich, or writing campaign financing law, we leave the fox to guard the hen house.

We have the best money government can buy, but it ain't the people who can afford to buy it. Whether it is Ken Delay or George Soros, a handful of influential men and women have the money to buy that government, and that won't change as long as people disingenuously tout free speech issues and advance the argument which Cyclo has so often disparaged in this discussion--to the effect that if you can't provide a perfectly-functioning alternative, you ought not to try at all.

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I personally find it problematic that they can buy our government representatives while working against their constituencies and all Americans in general.

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Quote:

ABC VP presented with "Freedom of Expression Award" at right-wing film festival for her role in pushing The Path to 9/11

Summary: The Liberty Film Festival, "a forum for conservative thought on film," recently awarded ABC Vice President Judith Tukich, a right-wing evangelical who has described her mission as "evangeliz[ing] the world ... through the media," the festival's "Freedom of Expression Award" for her role in assisting the production and promotion of The Path to 9/11.

On November 10 at the Liberty Film Festival, "a forum for conservative thought on film," ABC Vice President of Synergy and Special Projects Judith Tukich was presented with the festival's "Freedom of Expression Award" for her role in assisting the production and promotion of the factually challenged "docudrama" The Path to 9/11. Tukich is a right-wing evangelical who has described her mission as "evangeliz[ing] the world ... through the media."

The screenwriter of The Path to 9/11, Cyrus Nowrasteh, an outspoken conservative, was also given a "Freedom of Expression Award." In introducing the award ceremony at Hollywood's Pacific Design Center, festival co-founder and co-director Jason Apuzzo declared: "Personally, I think [the airing of The Path to 9/11] was a big victory for us, for ABC, for Cyrus, and we're going to be celebrating tonight."

The Path to 9/11 aired on ABC for two nights during the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks. ABC received withering criticism from leading congressional Democrats, former President Bill Clinton, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and others, including Media Matters for America, asserting that the film was rife with fabricated stories and scenes designed to smear the Clinton administration's record on fighting terror. In a September 5 press release, ABC conceded that The Path to 9/11 was indeed a fantasy version of history, calling the film "a dramatization, not a documentary."

Prior to the airing of The Path to 9/11, Nowrasteh foreshadowed his film's attacks on the Clinton administration's record. In an interview with right-wing activist David Horowitz's FrontPageMag.com, a month prior to the airing of The Path to 9/11, Nowrasteh claimed that Clinton's "lack of response" to terrorism "emboldened [Osama] Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests."

Even as ABC denied requests for advance copies of The Path to 9/11 from Clinton's office and former members of the Clinton administration, Liberty Film Festival co-founder and co-director Govindini Murty was given an advance screening of the film and wrote the first review of it a week before critics from The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were able to view it. (" 'The Path to 9/11' is one of the best, most intelligent, most pro-American miniseries I've ever seen on TV, and conservatives should support it and promote it as vigorously as possible," Murty wrote in FrontPageMag.com in August.)

Apuzzo announced his close relationship with Nowrasteh at the festival's opening night. "Cyrus is such a friend to this festival and to so many conservatives in Hollywood," he said.

Standing beside Nowrasteh to accept her award, Tukich expressed her gratitude. "It was really an honor to work on such an important project," she declared.

In 2000, Tukich told the newsletter of the National Religious Broadcasters, the media lobby of the Christian right, "The single greatest way to evangelize the world is through the media." Indeed, in referring to ABC's broadcast of the 2000 animated film, The Miracle Maker: The Story of Jesus, Tukich also said: "We send our kids off to Borneo and New Guinea, but I reached more people that night than probably every church on the Pacific Coast. This is the reality of it; this is where the power lies. Clearly we touched a lot of people that night." In a newsletter for the fundamentalist Foursquare Church, Tukich is described as "radical about reforming political endeavors ... especially in television and other areas of popular culture. She believes it is the grace of God that has allowed her as a conservative Christian Evangelical in the television and film industry, to influence projects that are released on the air today." Tukich donated $1,000 to President Bush in August 2004.

This year, Horowitz absorbed the festival into his political mini-empire, promoting and producing it through the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

http://mediamatters.org/items/printable/200611160009

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It's not just the best government money can buy but the government that is bought over and over again.

Government is bought when candidates pay millions of dollars out of their pockets for their posts. Why not simply make direct contributions to whatever and make yourself so heroic that people demand you run for office?

Government is bought again when lobbyists or whatever spend money treating representatives to golf junkets in Scotland or mink coats or whatever.

Government is bought again when bad science and silly causes put forth ideas -- in forms ranging from tv ads to written legislation -- that are downright harmful to everyone, then accompany those ideas with crack pot philosophies, like family values. The left's family values in the 1960s included both mom and dad working part-time and splitting child rearing and housekeeping chores while maintaining the same life style granma and granpa had. Hellsbells! I would love to have the life style my working class family had in the 1960s and early 1970s: it was better than the one I have now!

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plainoldme wrote:

It's not just the best government money can buy but the government that is bought over and over again.

Government is bought when candidates pay millions of dollars out of their pockets for their posts. Why not simply make direct contributions to whatever and make yourself so heroic that people demand you run for office?

Government is bought again when lobbyists or whatever spend money treating representatives to golf junkets in Scotland or mink coats or whatever.

Government is bought again when bad science and silly causes put forth ideas -- in forms ranging from tv ads to written legislation -- that are downright harmful to everyone, then accompany those ideas with crack pot philosophies, like family values. The left's family values in the 1960s included both mom and dad working part-time and splitting child rearing and housekeeping chores while maintaining the same life style granma and granpa had. Hellsbells! I would love to have the life style my working class family had in the 1960s and early 1970s: it was better than the one I have now!

Every thread I look at, there you are again, complaining as usual, pom. Did your parents have a computer, pom? Maybe you should consider the possibility that the "good ole days" were not necessarily any better than now? You say "family values" is a crack pot philosophy, while at the same time you yearn for the good ole days of mom and dad, granma and granpa, etc. Sounds like you would like some of those old crack pot family values again?

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okie -- Complaining? Should I do what you do and surrender to the void, sigh and say, that's reality! Listen, Republicans are destructive beasts. This whole family values thing is a sham. Most Republican women can hardly wait to get their kids out of the house. They don't care about the family at all and those paeons to family value are about as genuine as wooden nickles.

Try to use time logically.

Try to read better.

And, while we are on the subject of reading, if you don't like what I have to say, sign off the thread and don't read it. Good bye, little boy!

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Bye, I guess, if you really must. But why don't you come out to Oklahoma, maybe Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, etc. out to the real world instead of the symphony hall and find out how we folks live and work? You might broaden your thinking a bit beyond the shackles of your uppity liberal surroundings. Get out of academia for a while and get acquainted with reality. Go help milk some cows, load a few bales of hay, plow a field, maybe butcher a beef or two. Come watch them cut wheat during harvest time. Go to a drilling rig and talk to the driller for while. Follow a logger around for a day or two or tour a coal mine in Wyoming. Break out of your liberal ignorance and bigotry concerning what other hard working people do to make your life comfortable.

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I grew up in a small town in the midst of an agricultural region. The region also contained many strip mines, and there were, nearby, factories which qualified, some as light industry, some as heavy industry. From the time when i first earned money picking fruit at age 12, until i left for university at age 17, i earned money by bailing hay, cutting hogs, cutting the corn out of bean fields, and cutting the beans out of corn field, and, of course, picking fruit. I lived among the families of coal miners and factory workers, and i went to school with the children of farmers, miners and factory workers. I long lived in the Midwest, and i also long lived in the rural American South.

I greatly enjoy symphony orchestras, and i know that universities have produced smarter, more productive farmers, and competent engineers who are more efficient at mining, and organizing factories, and building highways. I can think of few things as stupid as thinking that only the rural areas of the nation are where "real life" takes place, unless it were to assert that only cities are where "real life" takes place. Either point of view is stupid and parochial.

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Set, Our backgrounds are similar, except our family always lived in cities. During the summer months, while in grade school, all my brothers and I were required to work on the farms to harvest fruit in northern California until we left home for school or marriage.

I also greatly enjoy symphony orchestra music, and my wife and I traveled to San Francisco on subscription for over 13 years, and listened to great music and musicians. On my recent visit to Europe, I visited the Mozart Museum in Vienna by myself. There were many venues in Prague and Vienna to attend a concert, but with our time constraint was unable to.

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I find it interesting, the Conservative viewpoint that the higher educated one is, the less they understand about 'real life.'

Cycloptichorn

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Cycloptichorn wrote:

I find it interesting, the Conservative viewpoint that the higher educated one is, the less they understand about 'real life.'

Cycloptichorn

cough (Hofstadter) cough cough ("Anti-intellectualism in American Life") cough

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Cycloptichorn wrote:

I find it interesting, the Conservative viewpoint that the higher educated one is, the less they understand about 'real life.'

Cycloptichorn

All of your points well taken, and Setanta, I agree with you that education is integral to society and technological expertise is crucial to our way of life. However, I am simply attempting to bring some balance to the debate here. Otherwise, you educated libs think you have a monopoly on intelligence and the right way of doing things.

My comments to plainoldme were an attempt to point out that education and the world of academia are not a ticket to a superior intellectual level. She continues to turn up her nose at people she considers to be less educated or with whom she disagrees politically.

I am a college graduate myself and have worked in a professional capacity. However, my farming background has influenced my thinking, obviously. And I firmly believe some of the smartest people I've ever known, and to be fair, some of the dumbest too, were uneducated farmers that I've known. My point is that education and enjoying cultural events do not earn you a ticket to superiority.

And Cyclops comment about higher educated people understand less about real life is probably meant as perhaps sarcastic, however I think not only especially academia, but society in general, has lost the intimate connection to reality. I contend that we have lost our sense of how well we live, example being plainoldme, as she continues to bemoan many things, based on what I would consider a rather naive and uneducated sense of economics, etc. We go to the gas station and fill up, not having a clue what is involved in manufacturing the automobile and bringing the fuel to the place where you can purchase it on a routine basis. We push our grocery carts around the store and happily select this and that, yet not having any appreciation whatsoever of what people had to do to bring those products to the neighborhood store in such plentiful and really economical prices. I think our society has lost connection and appreciation for the miracle of all of our creature comforts and lifestyle, and plainoldme is a prime example of such a person. In other words, we are not connected to "reality" as we should be.

Taking the oil business as an example, professors could teach and write papers for professional journals, but geologists and engineers actually applying their skills in the trade knew their understanding of the science and the industry was more realistic and applicable. The best professors had practical experience in the industry. I am not saying the other ones were incompetent, only that the realities of the world surpass that of what academia can accomplish in and of itself.

The reason I have picked on plainoldme quite a bit is because I see her as an example of the naivity of modern society. She loves to criticize corporations, yet those same corporations have brought her the nice lifestyle she surely enjoys. Plainoldme, I think you are a very nice person, based on your posts, but we simply disagree politically. We have different viewpoints, but yours is not superior to mine, or to people you might consider to be hicks living in hicksville, and you are not smarter or superior in intellect compared to other people because you live in a nice area or because you attend the symphony or because you have advanced degrees.

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okie wrote:

All of your points well taken, and Setanta, I agree with you that education is integral to society and technological expertise is crucial to our way of life. However, I am simply attempting to bring some balance to the debate here. Otherwise, you educated libs think you have a monopoly on intelligence and the right way of doing things.

So, you think that i may have a point, but probably not, because i'm an "educated lib." Nice slur there, and quite the strawman, too. I'm am only considered "liberal" by American reactionaries, who think anyone to the left of Ghengis Khan is a liberal.

You've got a big chip on your shoulder, but that's not my fault, so i won't be bandying idiotic generalizations with you. As i pointed out, claiming either that only people in rural areas know what real life is, or that only people in urban areas know what real life is--either one is a stupid and parochial point of view.

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Good post Okie.

Quote:

And Cyclops comment about higher educated people understand less about real life is probably meant as perhaps sarcastic, however I think not only especially academia, but society in general, has lost the intimate connection to reality. I contend that we have lost our sense of how well we live, example being plainoldme, as she continues to bemoan many things, based on what I would consider a rather naive and uneducated sense of economics, etc. We go to the gas station and fill up, not having a clue what is involved in manufacturing the automobile and bringing the fuel to the place where you can purchase it on a routine basis. We push our grocery carts around the store and happily select this and that, yet not having any appreciation whatsoever of what people had to do to bring those products to the neighborhood store in such plentiful and really economical prices. I think our society has lost connection and appreciation for the miracle of all of our creature comforts and lifestyle, and plainoldme is a prime example of such a person. In other words, we are not connected to "reality" as we should be.

Well, here's the thing: I do realize all that goes into manufacturing the fuel for my (theoretical, because I don't own one) autmobile. I do know what has to be done to get cheap plentiful food at the corner store.

The reasons that I know these things - that I took the time to educate myself about Total Costs and Systems, is because I participated in the process of Higher Education. College didn't further me from the reality of my lifestyle, it gave me the tools that I needed to look critically at the world around me, and to come to my own decisions about what is right and wrong in life, and never mind what the advertisers or politicians say.

Plainolme makes some excellent points that the 'progress' we have in America has lead to some increases in the quality of life, but also some decreases. The fact that each family now has to put in roughly twice the work they used to to make ends meet is a definate decrease in the quality of life. The fact that people eat foods which, while cheap, are unhealthy, decreases the quality of life. The fact that people rely upon automobiles for every action they wish to take, while it seems conveinent, decreases the quality of life overall. The fact that individual craftsmanship is being lost here in America, while replacable by store-bought goods, decreases the overall quality of life.

Naturally these are all opinions but they are not without merit. I think that many of them are actually somewhat Conservative; they rely upon the idea that the process is at least as important as the outcome of said process in any given endeavor. I don't think that's a Liberal idea at all.

Creature comforts are nice, but they aren't really what life is about. I've always thought that Comfort inevitably leads to Complacence, and that's why I've tried not to get too comfortable with my life; it stymies my personal growth, economically, physically, intellectually and spiritually.

As for your other points: I agree that classroom experience is no substitute for real-world work and experience. I agree that Corporations have provided some good things for America (though they have some bad things as well). In particular, I found this sentence striking:

Quote:

My point is that education and enjoying cultural events do not earn you a ticket to superiority.

No, they do not. What education does do is allow those who have innate intelligence to learn to utilize their talents to the fullest extent possible to them. It gives them the tools to harness their smarts and will and make amazing things happen. I agree with you that college and schooling are not indicative of intelligence; I know plenty of people who graduated college who are fools. But even those fools benefitted from the process of learning and education.

Cheers

Cycloptichorn

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Information control, or, How to get to Orwellian governance

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