Re: OT: Finesse contest finalists - thanks to all!
- From: Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 23:54:29 -0400
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 11:44:48 -0500, "Carl" <cengman7@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
"Josh Hill" <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:qvb533tshri8kmk4402r72bv5llnh8fvnl@xxxxxxxxxx
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 19:59:57 -0500, "Carl" <cengman7@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
FDR
I felt bad about leaving the way that I did. These days I'm addressing
other issues that take a great deal out of me and I feel like I don't have
enough in me to do this very well.
I will say a few things though...
Hi, Carl -- don't know if you saw my previous message, but I wasn't
able to respond to this when you posted it because it was too late and
I didn't have time. Anyways:
1) Whenever you dismiss someone else's statistics or articles as biases
propaganda out of hand, that's not fair. I'm sure you believe it, but your
belief doesn't make it so. You always tend to dismiss any statistic or
conclusion you don't agree with as propaganda, yet refer to articles that
you agree with as making your point.
I didn't refer to /your/ arguments as propaganda: I think much better
of you than that. Rather, I was referring to the information upon
which you appeared to be relying.
I never dismiss something out-of-hand as biased or propagandistic.
Rather, I apply the same critical process to it that I try to apply to
any assertion with which I'm not familiar. Among other things, I ask
myself whether the information is presented in a tendentious or
one-side manner, whether it's logically consistent and down-to-earth,
whether it corresponds with my own general knowledge, whether the
facts and statistics are "spun" or whether they're straightforward.
And I've found that spin has characteristic signatures, just as
computer viruses do.
You're setting things on their head when you say that I dismiss
statistics with which I disagree. One can't disagree with statistics,
insofar as they're correct. Rather, my conclusions, are based on the
evidence. What I do dismiss are cherry-picked statistics that are
clearly designed to fool the general public, e.g., essentially
meaningless but statements along the lines of the average poor family
has two color TV's and is served by 81 social programs.
That doesn't cut it.
Likewise, in the conversation about global warming you dismissed anyone that
disagreed with you as being paid by oil companies. Even if it's true, so
what? What matters is whether the information in a study is accurate and
stands up to scrutiny, not who paid for the study. Personally, I hope there
are a lot of studies that are funded by oil companies and that they find a
lot of information that may have been missed by the people that are trying
to prove various aspects of GW. That doesn't mean I don't believe that
there is GW, but both sides should be forced to prove their results rather
than just taking them for granted. If there is a side that has an interest
in proving the contrary, let them pay as much as they can to prove it... and
consider the results with *exactly* the same discipline and scrutiny you
give to those on your side.
Carl, there /is/ no science on the oil company's side.
'All that changed in the early 1950s, when the causal relationship
between smoking and lung cancer was finally ?proven,? in scientific
terms, and more formally ?alleged,? in tobacco industry parlance.
Faced with damning evidence, the industry devised a cagey defense:
rather than denying the harms of smoking, it insisted there were ?two
sides? to the story, and corralled skeptical scientists ? perennially
available on any subject ? to rebut or at least cast doubt upon the
medical consensus. Journalists were urged to consider ?fairness? and
?balance? in covering the invented ?controversy.? The industry?s
public relations arm, Brandt writes, was ?adept at taking a single
dissenter and assuring widespread media coverage of his views.? This
purposeful agnosticism, which served the tobacco industry well, will
sound eerily familiar to anyone following the global warming ?debate?
? another case in which a few pedigreed skeptics, whose views align
with those of a powerful industry, are framing consensus as
controversy. ?The industry,? Brandt writes, ?insisted on scientific
criteria that it knew full well could not be attained then, or ever?.'
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/books/review/Miles.t.html?ref=review
Anything else is intellectual dishonesty.
If the other side has some valid information, then either your position can
adapt to incorporate it or it's wrong. Possibly both sides are wrong. With
any luck, some sort of Hegelian synthesis may occur.
But the other side doesn't have valid information, or any other kind
of information. They're merely lying through their teeth.
You dismissed anything negative about FDR out of hand. There was a lot that
I didn't write about FDR. History has decided to treat him kindly..
including giving him credit for things that he didn't do. That's not
unusual, but underneath it all he was human and had at least his share of
failures and weaknesses too.
You referred to propaganda yourself, when you implied that what we
learn about FDR was propaganda. Which suggested to me right at the top
that something was suspect about your information, because what I know
of FDR comes from a multitude of sources -- respected mainstream
historians, reporters, family members who remembered the great
depression and even FDR himself.
I mentioned spin signatures above. One of these signatures -- it's
been heavily favored by the American right in recent years -- is the
attempt to discredit mainstream scholarly or reportorial work by
claiming falsely that it's slanted. That triggered my alarm right
away. Some errors in what you said reinforced that impression, e.g.,
the implication that mainstream historians had suppressed facts that
are reported in just about every history of the FDR Administration,
e.g., his unsuccessful attempt to pack the Supreme Court.
You dismiss what FDR did to 1 million Russians as a hard necessity. That's
crap. He sold them out and sold out the principles of freedom that were
fought for in WW II.
The Russians had American and British prisoners, the Americans and
British had Russian prisoners, some of whom had sided with the Nazis.
According to the Yalta agreement, they were to be turned over to their
respective governments. It wasn't an arrangement we had the option of
ignoring.
We made much harder compromises than that, Carl. Not least among them,
Churchill handed Stalin a piece of paper that gave him, in essence,
half of Europe. The greatest armies in human history were facing one
another, we still had a war in Japan and were anxious for Russian
help, and it would have been insane to provoke another world war.
There are those who say, with the benefit of hindsight, that Roosvelt
was too sick at Yalta to get the kind of agreement he could have.
Perhaps. But it's a far way from that to suggesting that he's some
kind of monster for making the compromises that were necessary to win
the war.
I passed on any comment of the how the Japanese were treated in this
country. One can draw their own conclusions and given the times you can
come to a forgiving conclusion if you consider that in isolation.
But one can't consider things in isolation.
His
actions weren't isolated though... and history completely whitewashed what
he did to those Russians. History (at least in school) also ignores the
fact that he pretty much forced the Japanese to attack us, and that contrary
to what he repeatedly told the American people about doing everything he
could to stay out of the war, he was doing exactly the opposite.
Contemporary history doesn't ignore that -- it just doesn't treat him
unkindly for it. Roosvelt knew that we would have to go to war with
the Japanese, and with the Germans, and he knew that Britain was a few
months from defeat. But the isolationists were still strong.
Roosvelt's options were limited, the cost of inaction nothing less
than our national survival.
That's not poisonous character assassination. You might not want to hear
the truth, but it's not propaganda.
You can hold to your belief in his greatness, but as with GW, you interpret
all of his actions in a certain light and dismiss anything said to the
contrary as right wing bias. You may conclude that the pluses outweighed
the minuses and choose to overlook his faults, but others may honestly come
to other conclusions that are *equally* valid. You seem to conclude that
anyone that disagrees with you has been brainwashed. Consider the fervor in
which you hold to that belief.
Carl, FDR saved the country, and our way of life, twice, put in place
a system that put the working man in the middle class for the first
time in any nation anywhere, left us institutions like Social Security
that we still treasure today. If that isn't enough to make him a great
president, I don't know what is.
George W. Bush, by way of contrast, is one of the worst presidents in
history.
You seem to think that my assessments, widely shared though they are,
are partisan, but in doing so, you ignore the fact that I've given
praise where I thought praise was due to Republican presidents, and
criticized Democratic ones when I thought /that/ was the right thing
to do.
If I were merely out to smear Republican presidents, why would I have
called Bush's father a master of foreign policy? Why would I have
criticized the Carter Administration? And why, for that matter, would
I have defended Bush himself against what I considered erroneous
allegations, and said -- as I recall, you agreed at the time -- that I
don't consider him an evil man, but rather someone who just isn't
qualified for the job?
I don't doubt your sincerity in everything that you write, but I see you as
just as biased as you see anyone that disagrees with you.
To me it seems to
permeates everything you write. It may just be me though...perhaps just
where we both came from and how we happen to interact.
Part of that I think is just the nature of debate here, e.g., one
tends to focus on counterarguments. This is particularly true when the
occasional position seems to have its roots in extremist literature,
e.g,, the assertion that Roosevelt was a bad or evil president, or
that there isn't a scientific consensus and hasn't been a healthy
scientific debate on global warming.
In general, I try to be empirical. For example, I said some things in
the recent debate that are pro-union, and others that could be
construed as anti-union, because I see the issue as a complex economic
and political one and eschew politically convenient knee-jerk
reactions. I have the sense that you grew up in a region that's
permeated by right-wing ideology, just as I myself grew up with
left-wing ideology. But I've tried separated myself from that to the
extent that it conflicts with observation. And when I point out that
my views aren't ideologically extreme, e.g., when I said that I'm not
in favor of confiscatory taxation of the rich, I get the impression
that you're ignoring me.
In any event, as in
the past... I think we've come to a point in the discussion in which
continuing won't accomplish anything. I can produce books, statistics, etc
that support my view. You'll dismiss them. What's the point?
Let's just move on amicably and every now and then we'll find a topic we
agree on. :)
Sure. You know me: I'll debate anything to tatters. But I'd hate to
see that doggedness lead to animosity with someone I like and respect.
--
Josh
"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths,
and how many, what day it?s going to happen, and
how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean,
it?s, it?s not relevant. So, why should I waste my
beautiful mind on something like that?" - Barbara Bush
.
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