Education Has Gone Astray
To get to a certain point we all need some basic instruction, how to read, how to write/type, and basic math. Once we have those skills we can quite easily take over the course of our own education, tailored to our interests and our strengths.
Nothing is more demotivating to a child than having to learn something they are absolutely not interested in and yet are forced to learn. Then why do it?
Why do we have mandated by law instruction until the age 16, when by the age of at least 7 they have acquired the rudimentary skills to continue down the path that they choose and at their own pace?
Think about why our education system is like it is. It is shaped by corporations, curated by government, and mandated by law to produce a particular subset of workers (not thinkers) that fit into the current economic and cultural milieu.
This would be acceptable except for the fact that the system is now failing our children. If the free market guaranteed some form of employment for the time spent in school it would be an equitable trade off.
However, what is happening is that the level of education required by today's corporations is insufficient, the governments are too broke to provide more subsidies and corporations will not step in unless there is a profit to be had.
Hence all further education investments are coming from private individuals to get their children a degree from a university. The result: a hoard of over-educated mail-room clerks.
The over production of young adults with degrees has raised the bar for those seeking employment. Why hire a high school grad, when you can get a University grad for the same price? All this on the dime of the private individual.
Student loans? One of the hardest loans to discharge through bankruptcy, essentially creating a self-reinforcing loop that requires young adults to:
1. Get a degree
2. Take on massive amounts of debt
3. Take the first job offered to allow them to pay that debt
Which drives down the ratio of labour cost to the level of education a company gets.
So why pay for the privilege of having a degree or a diploma when the same education can be had for the price of a library card and a good computer?
Some of the greatest innovators (see links) in history share a common trait, either they were self-taught, or they were kicked/dropped out of school and then self-taught. Schools, as configured, squash innovation and encourage conformity.
http://www.autodidactic.com/profiles/profiles.htm
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_autodidacts
Grades are degrading.
Grades are a shorthand that teachers and employers can use evaluate the quality of conformity attained by the pupil. A student that receives mostly A's and B's is praised while another student that receives mostly C's and D's is looked at as performing at an unacceptable level. Grades are little more than branding, establishing social hierarchies before they are let out into the "real" world.
Creating a situation of scarcity, for example, grading on the curve, creates an environment of competition which discourages information sharing (often referred to as "cheating") which in turn creates an atmosphere of fear of being wrong. The result: a roomful of mediocre students who end up being mediocre adults who take no risks, stand for nothing, all for fear of being wrong.
Children are natural collaborators. Don't believe me? Watch them at play in pre-school environments, you will see them learn about games, structures, songs, in groups and often spontaneously. Ironically this behaviour is one of the first the education system tries to snuff out with rigid formations (desks in a row), rigid schedules (class time length, recess length, occurrence of lunchtime), no talking, and repeated discipline for the offenders (non-conformists) that do not fall within the range of "acceptable" behaviour.
What does a diploma tell you? Or a degree or designation? All it says is that the student knew the material well enough to pass a standardized test. It does not demonstrate or illuminate the passion or adeptness the student possesses with the material. The only way to know how well someone knows their field is to talk to them and better yet to have them talk to others that share their passion and expertise, thus both at once demonstration their ability and maybe learning something more about what they love.
The Way Forward
Provide the basics for our children: reading, writing, and math, which are the bare essentials that provide a platform to acquire more knowledge on their own. In short, once the children are able to absorb and choose the knowledge they want to acquire, then we allow them to do so. No grades are to be given, no diplomas earned, instead the child is allowed to pursue an education path as far as his or her ability allows them to progress.
Initially knowledge would be acquired through a Khan Academy-like environment (http://www.khanacademy.org) where the child watches/reads a section, then answers a number of questions at the end of the chapter, if they are right, then the child progresses to the next level. At some point when the child exhausts a particular path in Khan Academy then he or she "graduates" to partaking in discussion circles/forums where others share the same interest in furthering on the same educational pathway.
As they demonstrate a firmer grasp on the material, the collaborative environment of the discussion circles/forums will stimulate new theories, new material, and new ideas to pursue. As their knowledge increases they in turn reinforce or increase the knowledge of others. The one truth that they will hold is that novelty can come from anywhere and from anyone.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Z-Day 2012: A Review
Post Z-day 2012.
So I've had some time to let the speakers words sink in. I didn't stay for the main event as I had my brother-in-laws B-Day to attend to and to be frank I had more fun at because I found talking to normal people about the worlds events refreshing.
Regular joes, like my brother-in-law, do not, in fact, have their heads buried in the sand. They are usually fairly knowledgeable about politics and economics and the environment and are open to hearing different perspectives.
But I digress, I saw most of the speakers with the exception of dear leader. I figured I could catch that later on YouTube. Actually I could have caught the whole thing on YouTube and saved myself the venue money and parking/transit. But I felt I should at least see them in person once.
So where to begin? I'll start with a list of offenses:
1. Material abundance = misnomer
Let's call a spade a spade. Stop sugar coating this. What you are referring to is material sufficiency not material abundance. Enough to feed everyone? Yes, only if the Earth is managed carefully and at present rates of depletion and regeneration, but most importantly reduces levels of consumption. You allude that no one can have a 40 room mansion, but in truth no one can have a 2500sq ft house either. They are both unsustainable. I know why you frame it like this, because it is scary. But scarier is what happens if we don't rein it in.
2. Technology, although cool, is not energy.
It takes energy to make and energy to maintain.
3. Energy is certainly abundant but...it has to be available to do useful work.
I get into this more later.
4. Complexity
Refer to the Law of Diminishing Returns or as I like to call it the Law of Getting Thoroughly Crushed by Complexity. It trumps the Law of Accelerating Change.
As societies become more complex more energy is required to sustain that complexity. The reason why most great civilizations of the past collapsed? Too much complexity and insufficient energy.
5. Population
Let's have a frank conversation about the population. You've glossed this over with the twin tenets of abundant energy and technology, when that is really not the case. There are three ways to reduce the impact of the human ecological footprint, one is to vastly increase the land, energy and resources available, this is one of the least likely scenarios. Another option is to let the population crash, not a great solution, but doesn't require much planning. The third is to reduce individual consumption, this choice is by far the hardest and the second most unlikely because it requires that people understand the global ecology and that every choice they make has an impact.
So unless Doug manages to find us another handful of planets and truly doesn't believe in annihilation, then the third option is the way to go. Is it a tough sell? Sure it is, but do it consistently and do it softly. Live it if you can.
6. Wealth. (the resources/currency)
Also while we are at it let's have a frank conversation about wealth redistribution. It's not going to be voluntary. See point 7.
7. The rich. (people)
You can rarely educate away privilege and entitlements. Maybe try peer pressure. But seriously how are you going to deal with the gatekeepers who currently control the majority of the resources? Guilt? Puppy dog eyes? The current system works for them. If we enter collapse, it won't be them or their children dying. They don't have a dog in this fight.
8. The Viking.
Whom I thought might have been VTV with dyed hair.
9. PJ's vocabulary. (CFOX)
I get it, you need to project the intelligence, literally oozing out of your orifices, but let's be honest, it comes off sounding a wee bit douchey.
You want to be accessible, dipshit, not wall yourself off with words. You can say profound things using words of just a few syllables.
I am well read. This is not me bragging, I have a 4 fucking hour commute daily so I have time to kill by attempting to make myself smarter. It hasn't worked yet, but I am hoping for an osmosis type reaction.
But I digress, you will not hear me talking like I'm smarter than I am for the following reasons:
1. No one likes a smartass.
2. For fear I would trip myself up
trying to enunciate some of that
shit. For example, I avoid saying the
word "enunciate". I also avoid the
word "Kunstler" but for different
reasons.
Mark my words, this word salad will come back to bite you. Perhaps it already has in the legions who attempt to emulate you and piss people off with some regularity I.e. VOR. You've got nothing to prove, just be yourself. Unless of course that is "yourself" in which case just pretend I didn't say anything.
10. Freemasons.
If you have a conflict of interest allegation then make it. Something I've learned in my travels is that you don't need a nefarious conspiracy if everyones goal happens to be the same. Your movements premise is that there are systematic irregularities that generate scarcity and inequality, so WHERE exactly do Freemasons play into that analysis?
11. End of work.
Quit selling the "no more work" angle. You will be working, not for money, but because you want to and your community expects you to contribute. And you will be working damn hard at what you do.
When you say no more work or end of work as you know it, it makes the hard core anti-welfare, Ayn Randians and libertarians hate you a little bit. Instead focus on the hard work that volunteers do and just how rewarding it feels.
12. No more cars.
Holy Jesus you might as well say no more hockey. I get it, cars are big resource hogs that sit around 80% of the day, but in people's minds they see endless waiting at bus stops, crowding into a smelly cramped bus (which I currently do so I know). Lead with a palpable alternative first, if you can. Cars epitomize freedom and the first world living. You need to do a better sell job on this.
13. EROEI. Nuff said.
Ok maybe not...because the concept of abundant energy seems to be a non sequitur for your movement. "We can build wonderful things, don't worry, energy is plentiful". Yes, logically you can build wonderful things and yes logically energy is all around. But one does not follow the other logically because you need energy accessible to do the work and you need energy and material inputs to build the toys, neither of which is plentiful or accessible.
You are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics, and thus constrained by EROEI, when it take 1 barrel of oil to extract 1 barrel of oil (or whatever energy equivalent you'd like to use) it is game over.
Oil is the most flexible, energy dense substance we've ever discovered. There is not another energy source that has all three attributes that made our current society possible, scalability, energy density, and flexibility. Some may have one element or two but not all three.
14. Playing to the singularitarians.
Yes technology is growing exponentially, but so is everything else, resource depletion, population, ecological destruction, extinction. Seems to me we are putting our foot on the gas, headed for a cliff, with the hopes of catching the singularity as we fall off, like in an action movie, and rise like the Phoenix.
15. You call us techno skeptics but you haven't given us skeptics anything other than to poo-poo our apparent lack of common sense. You have shiny new toys, but these have to come from somewhere and that takes energy.
You got boundless enthusiasm in your hand, I see that and raise you some realism.
16. Marahall (even my iPhone autocorrects to Marshall)
Take some time with your editing. I was sitting watching Moritz's speech and he had on the big screen spelled "Marshall" as "Marahall" not once but twice. It is one thing to have something spelled wrong but when it is a name it is worse. Of course the irony is not lost on me that this was during the "Competent Communications" section. It comes off as lazy and sloppy.
17. Canadian stereotypes.
I realize this was played for humor, but the underlying subtext is that people are generally fearful and ignorant, and are fearful because they are ignorant. True or not, this approach lacks tact. If you are going to use humor, self-deprecation holds the audience and those external to your tenets, harmless. If you are going to hold the system accountable, don't make fun of people's ignorance. These are the people you want to reach.
Conclusion:
In the final analysis I was heartened that people showed up, even if not in overwhelming numbers, because it shows that these people are looking for a better way. I suspect, however, there are far more people out there like myself, who have grown disillusioned with magical thinking and have move on, looking for more realistic solutions.
So I've had some time to let the speakers words sink in. I didn't stay for the main event as I had my brother-in-laws B-Day to attend to and to be frank I had more fun at because I found talking to normal people about the worlds events refreshing.
Regular joes, like my brother-in-law, do not, in fact, have their heads buried in the sand. They are usually fairly knowledgeable about politics and economics and the environment and are open to hearing different perspectives.
But I digress, I saw most of the speakers with the exception of dear leader. I figured I could catch that later on YouTube. Actually I could have caught the whole thing on YouTube and saved myself the venue money and parking/transit. But I felt I should at least see them in person once.
So where to begin? I'll start with a list of offenses:
1. Material abundance = misnomer
Let's call a spade a spade. Stop sugar coating this. What you are referring to is material sufficiency not material abundance. Enough to feed everyone? Yes, only if the Earth is managed carefully and at present rates of depletion and regeneration, but most importantly reduces levels of consumption. You allude that no one can have a 40 room mansion, but in truth no one can have a 2500sq ft house either. They are both unsustainable. I know why you frame it like this, because it is scary. But scarier is what happens if we don't rein it in.
2. Technology, although cool, is not energy.
It takes energy to make and energy to maintain.
3. Energy is certainly abundant but...it has to be available to do useful work.
I get into this more later.
4. Complexity
Refer to the Law of Diminishing Returns or as I like to call it the Law of Getting Thoroughly Crushed by Complexity. It trumps the Law of Accelerating Change.
As societies become more complex more energy is required to sustain that complexity. The reason why most great civilizations of the past collapsed? Too much complexity and insufficient energy.
5. Population
Let's have a frank conversation about the population. You've glossed this over with the twin tenets of abundant energy and technology, when that is really not the case. There are three ways to reduce the impact of the human ecological footprint, one is to vastly increase the land, energy and resources available, this is one of the least likely scenarios. Another option is to let the population crash, not a great solution, but doesn't require much planning. The third is to reduce individual consumption, this choice is by far the hardest and the second most unlikely because it requires that people understand the global ecology and that every choice they make has an impact.
So unless Doug manages to find us another handful of planets and truly doesn't believe in annihilation, then the third option is the way to go. Is it a tough sell? Sure it is, but do it consistently and do it softly. Live it if you can.
6. Wealth. (the resources/currency)
Also while we are at it let's have a frank conversation about wealth redistribution. It's not going to be voluntary. See point 7.
7. The rich. (people)
You can rarely educate away privilege and entitlements. Maybe try peer pressure. But seriously how are you going to deal with the gatekeepers who currently control the majority of the resources? Guilt? Puppy dog eyes? The current system works for them. If we enter collapse, it won't be them or their children dying. They don't have a dog in this fight.
8. The Viking.
Whom I thought might have been VTV with dyed hair.
9. PJ's vocabulary. (CFOX)
I get it, you need to project the intelligence, literally oozing out of your orifices, but let's be honest, it comes off sounding a wee bit douchey.
You want to be accessible, dipshit, not wall yourself off with words. You can say profound things using words of just a few syllables.
I am well read. This is not me bragging, I have a 4 fucking hour commute daily so I have time to kill by attempting to make myself smarter. It hasn't worked yet, but I am hoping for an osmosis type reaction.
But I digress, you will not hear me talking like I'm smarter than I am for the following reasons:
1. No one likes a smartass.
2. For fear I would trip myself up
trying to enunciate some of that
shit. For example, I avoid saying the
word "enunciate". I also avoid the
word "Kunstler" but for different
reasons.
Mark my words, this word salad will come back to bite you. Perhaps it already has in the legions who attempt to emulate you and piss people off with some regularity I.e. VOR. You've got nothing to prove, just be yourself. Unless of course that is "yourself" in which case just pretend I didn't say anything.
10. Freemasons.
If you have a conflict of interest allegation then make it. Something I've learned in my travels is that you don't need a nefarious conspiracy if everyones goal happens to be the same. Your movements premise is that there are systematic irregularities that generate scarcity and inequality, so WHERE exactly do Freemasons play into that analysis?
11. End of work.
Quit selling the "no more work" angle. You will be working, not for money, but because you want to and your community expects you to contribute. And you will be working damn hard at what you do.
When you say no more work or end of work as you know it, it makes the hard core anti-welfare, Ayn Randians and libertarians hate you a little bit. Instead focus on the hard work that volunteers do and just how rewarding it feels.
12. No more cars.
Holy Jesus you might as well say no more hockey. I get it, cars are big resource hogs that sit around 80% of the day, but in people's minds they see endless waiting at bus stops, crowding into a smelly cramped bus (which I currently do so I know). Lead with a palpable alternative first, if you can. Cars epitomize freedom and the first world living. You need to do a better sell job on this.
13. EROEI. Nuff said.
Ok maybe not...because the concept of abundant energy seems to be a non sequitur for your movement. "We can build wonderful things, don't worry, energy is plentiful". Yes, logically you can build wonderful things and yes logically energy is all around. But one does not follow the other logically because you need energy accessible to do the work and you need energy and material inputs to build the toys, neither of which is plentiful or accessible.
You are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics, and thus constrained by EROEI, when it take 1 barrel of oil to extract 1 barrel of oil (or whatever energy equivalent you'd like to use) it is game over.
Oil is the most flexible, energy dense substance we've ever discovered. There is not another energy source that has all three attributes that made our current society possible, scalability, energy density, and flexibility. Some may have one element or two but not all three.
14. Playing to the singularitarians.
Yes technology is growing exponentially, but so is everything else, resource depletion, population, ecological destruction, extinction. Seems to me we are putting our foot on the gas, headed for a cliff, with the hopes of catching the singularity as we fall off, like in an action movie, and rise like the Phoenix.
15. You call us techno skeptics but you haven't given us skeptics anything other than to poo-poo our apparent lack of common sense. You have shiny new toys, but these have to come from somewhere and that takes energy.
You got boundless enthusiasm in your hand, I see that and raise you some realism.
16. Marahall (even my iPhone autocorrects to Marshall)
Take some time with your editing. I was sitting watching Moritz's speech and he had on the big screen spelled "Marshall" as "Marahall" not once but twice. It is one thing to have something spelled wrong but when it is a name it is worse. Of course the irony is not lost on me that this was during the "Competent Communications" section. It comes off as lazy and sloppy.
17. Canadian stereotypes.
I realize this was played for humor, but the underlying subtext is that people are generally fearful and ignorant, and are fearful because they are ignorant. True or not, this approach lacks tact. If you are going to use humor, self-deprecation holds the audience and those external to your tenets, harmless. If you are going to hold the system accountable, don't make fun of people's ignorance. These are the people you want to reach.
Conclusion:
In the final analysis I was heartened that people showed up, even if not in overwhelming numbers, because it shows that these people are looking for a better way. I suspect, however, there are far more people out there like myself, who have grown disillusioned with magical thinking and have move on, looking for more realistic solutions.
Monday, March 05, 2012
Limits to Growth
This problem is not a liberal or conservative problem, it is not a republican or democrat problem. I would even go so far as to say this is not even a rich versus poor problem. This problem belongs to all of us.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Last Snapshot to Complete the Picture
So someone else, I think it might be Cran Campbell, as I think he usually posts out of North Van posted the following:
If you don't like what Jamie Scott has to say, then how about some well thought out
political invective of your own. I honestly believe that one day there will be violent
insurrection here. The underclass is being heavily stressed by the current economic
ills. Real estate prices are causing rental rates to rise just as wages are going down.
Something has to break if we keep going like this.
If you have some ideas about this please post them. We need more folks putting blogs
on this site.
To which GF responds:
I have. And Jamie Scott has nothing useful to say. I've said that, too. Now go away, SE. You're a pest.
Of course by this time I have already invited Greg and his hordes to come post on my blog (remember post with a blogger ID and not as an anonymous coward and the comment is instantly posted). But I read that and I was a little miffed that Greg couldn't, after all this time, recognize the flavour of my writing compared to others. Of course it makes sense considering he probably didn't read a fraction of what I said. How else can you argue so hard for so long without willfully ignoring everything else that has been written?
My response:
I sign my posts. And I am somewhat hurt that after all this time, you still don't "recognize" me. Narcissism much?
At this point I'm not going to get drawn into yet another long drawn out debate in which I get flagged off, so I am a bit flippant.
Greg's response is pure old man complete with sitting on the porch and shaking of his little fist:
"Narcissism much?" What kind of English is that.
Again, you go for the unsophisticated, juvenile insult, doubtless because mature, intelligent debate is beyond your meagre talents. You're just a little shill, and always will be.
How nice for you that you have a private place to spew your sycophantic invective.
Now, go play!
Greg Felton, I have most definitely demonstrated I can engage in "mature, intelligent debate", it is you who seem to have a problem with it.
I'm sure you are trying to make yourself feel better about your mostly mediocre career by slumming it in CL, but I have nothing to prove. I've never been a journalist, or an author, nor have I been lambasted for my political positions (well, except by you), so please don't feel humiliated if your sharp biting insults sting much less than you intended. Your words must ring hollow considering how much time you put into the "energy suck" of CL to try to beat me down (words from your WCT interview ring a bell?)
Of course, Greg may or may not realize I have a complete record of our discussion. So after 45 days, CL may wash clear, but this blog will be "at all times, forever."
Update:
Greg updated his last comment by tagging on the following line:
BTW, I recognized you instantly; I chose not to acknowledge you.
Which makes absolutely no sense what-so-ever as he had referred to someone else as me, hence my "hurt" comment. If he recognized me instantly then he wouldn't have referred to me at all. Because a) it wasn't me and b)he chose not to.
Greg Felton is well and truly ridiculous.
If you don't like what Jamie Scott has to say, then how about some well thought out
political invective of your own. I honestly believe that one day there will be violent
insurrection here. The underclass is being heavily stressed by the current economic
ills. Real estate prices are causing rental rates to rise just as wages are going down.
Something has to break if we keep going like this.
If you have some ideas about this please post them. We need more folks putting blogs
on this site.
To which GF responds:
I have. And Jamie Scott has nothing useful to say. I've said that, too. Now go away, SE. You're a pest.
Of course by this time I have already invited Greg and his hordes to come post on my blog (remember post with a blogger ID and not as an anonymous coward and the comment is instantly posted). But I read that and I was a little miffed that Greg couldn't, after all this time, recognize the flavour of my writing compared to others. Of course it makes sense considering he probably didn't read a fraction of what I said. How else can you argue so hard for so long without willfully ignoring everything else that has been written?
My response:
I sign my posts. And I am somewhat hurt that after all this time, you still don't "recognize" me. Narcissism much?
At this point I'm not going to get drawn into yet another long drawn out debate in which I get flagged off, so I am a bit flippant.
Greg's response is pure old man complete with sitting on the porch and shaking of his little fist:
"Narcissism much?" What kind of English is that.
Again, you go for the unsophisticated, juvenile insult, doubtless because mature, intelligent debate is beyond your meagre talents. You're just a little shill, and always will be.
How nice for you that you have a private place to spew your sycophantic invective.
Now, go play!
Greg Felton, I have most definitely demonstrated I can engage in "mature, intelligent debate", it is you who seem to have a problem with it.
I'm sure you are trying to make yourself feel better about your mostly mediocre career by slumming it in CL, but I have nothing to prove. I've never been a journalist, or an author, nor have I been lambasted for my political positions (well, except by you), so please don't feel humiliated if your sharp biting insults sting much less than you intended. Your words must ring hollow considering how much time you put into the "energy suck" of CL to try to beat me down (words from your WCT interview ring a bell?)
Of course, Greg may or may not realize I have a complete record of our discussion. So after 45 days, CL may wash clear, but this blog will be "at all times, forever."
Update:
Greg updated his last comment by tagging on the following line:
BTW, I recognized you instantly; I chose not to acknowledge you.
Which makes absolutely no sense what-so-ever as he had referred to someone else as me, hence my "hurt" comment. If he recognized me instantly then he wouldn't have referred to me at all. Because a) it wasn't me and b)he chose not to.
Greg Felton is well and truly ridiculous.
Be Suspicious of those that Quell dissent
I think the major reason Greg Felton and I clash so often other than his disagreeable nature is that I think he can't keep up mentally and rather than admit ignorance he hides behind the facade of a peevish curmudgeon and tries to intimidate his challengers by insulting them and denigrating their intellect.
When that doesn't work he coordinates with his fans (he is an author after all) who flock to protect their idols honor and flags down those that disagree. And if your a careful observer it is not just people that disagree that get flagged but it is specifically people who disagree and launch a great defense of their premise.
Take for example, Slavery Boy, none of his rebuttals were ever flagged down, later the discussion on religion which became quite heated, no flags. Why? Because none of the rebuttals came close to touching Greg's analysis, which was spot on. I've been flagged a few times now, not for being overly insulting (which I have never instigated), but because I am of equal if not superior standing in the argument and often leaving Greg looking foolish. I am not a lazy debater, I do the legwork whereas Greg is either lazy or incompetent (relatively speaking) that after he exhausts knowledge of his specialities (i.e. Russian history, Israel, Zionism etc) he relies heavily on what amounts to bluster.
I have in the past invited Greg to debate in a forum where our answers are permanent and no one can get flagged due to the fact that the other side is losing. He has consistently declined. You have to be suspicious of someone who consistently chooses a forum that allows for the silence of dissent and erases all humiliations after 45 days.
For someone who trumpets the absolute nature of the right to privacy he certainly is no defender of the right to free speech. I suspect he employs his methods learned from others who have censored him in the past.
Is it that he is getting too old for this game? Is he losing his edge? He parrots his points over and over again like he is the only one talking, not dissimilar from a patient suffering from dementia.
I think it is time that Felton acknowledges his shortcomings and sticks to what he knows and leaves politics and political discussion to those that can.
Look at his last post in response to someone who commented on the downfall of a political forum when one person tries to dominate through insults. At first glance it could be construed as directed at me:
So true!
We need some Jamie Scott/SE repellant. SE's infantile behaviour has turned me right off.
"This place can get infested
Date: 2012-02-18, 2:06PM PST
This place can get infested with insulting and condescending commentary. It's the cesspool of political discussion on the web because you get the same person or persons that are hell-bent on dominating the discussion by means of personal insults and name-calling."
But look at the all important second paragraph that Greg Felton left off conveniently:
"I call it verbal violence. . . it's used by the cowardly because they only use verbal violence while safely hiding behind anonymity. They would never debate face-to-face using verbal violence because in a face-to-face setting verbal violence almost always leads to physical violence. In short. . . they're a bunch of chicken neck cowards best to be ignored. "
Look at the line "safely hiding behind anonymity". Then look at Greg's reply "We need some Jamie Scott/SE repellant."
I am not anonymous because I sign my posts. Jamie Scott always identifies himself. Greg, although I know who you are from your unique use of the language, you never sign your posts and try to hide behind your anonymity.
The post was directed at you, not unsurprisingly, you attempt to co-opt it for your purposes.
When that doesn't work he coordinates with his fans (he is an author after all) who flock to protect their idols honor and flags down those that disagree. And if your a careful observer it is not just people that disagree that get flagged but it is specifically people who disagree and launch a great defense of their premise.
Take for example, Slavery Boy, none of his rebuttals were ever flagged down, later the discussion on religion which became quite heated, no flags. Why? Because none of the rebuttals came close to touching Greg's analysis, which was spot on. I've been flagged a few times now, not for being overly insulting (which I have never instigated), but because I am of equal if not superior standing in the argument and often leaving Greg looking foolish. I am not a lazy debater, I do the legwork whereas Greg is either lazy or incompetent (relatively speaking) that after he exhausts knowledge of his specialities (i.e. Russian history, Israel, Zionism etc) he relies heavily on what amounts to bluster.
I have in the past invited Greg to debate in a forum where our answers are permanent and no one can get flagged due to the fact that the other side is losing. He has consistently declined. You have to be suspicious of someone who consistently chooses a forum that allows for the silence of dissent and erases all humiliations after 45 days.
For someone who trumpets the absolute nature of the right to privacy he certainly is no defender of the right to free speech. I suspect he employs his methods learned from others who have censored him in the past.
Is it that he is getting too old for this game? Is he losing his edge? He parrots his points over and over again like he is the only one talking, not dissimilar from a patient suffering from dementia.
I think it is time that Felton acknowledges his shortcomings and sticks to what he knows and leaves politics and political discussion to those that can.
Look at his last post in response to someone who commented on the downfall of a political forum when one person tries to dominate through insults. At first glance it could be construed as directed at me:
So true!
We need some Jamie Scott/SE repellant. SE's infantile behaviour has turned me right off.
"This place can get infested
Date: 2012-02-18, 2:06PM PST
This place can get infested with insulting and condescending commentary. It's the cesspool of political discussion on the web because you get the same person or persons that are hell-bent on dominating the discussion by means of personal insults and name-calling."
But look at the all important second paragraph that Greg Felton left off conveniently:
"I call it verbal violence. . . it's used by the cowardly because they only use verbal violence while safely hiding behind anonymity. They would never debate face-to-face using verbal violence because in a face-to-face setting verbal violence almost always leads to physical violence. In short. . . they're a bunch of chicken neck cowards best to be ignored. "
Look at the line "safely hiding behind anonymity". Then look at Greg's reply "We need some Jamie Scott/SE repellant."
I am not anonymous because I sign my posts. Jamie Scott always identifies himself. Greg, although I know who you are from your unique use of the language, you never sign your posts and try to hide behind your anonymity.
The post was directed at you, not unsurprisingly, you attempt to co-opt it for your purposes.
The Battle Continues: Greg Felton's Revenge
This was an attack piece posted in response to a news article of an ex-cop that got three years for raping a teenager that Mr. Scott had posted to illustrate the outrage at our justice system.
GF:
Anyone who thinks Jamie Scott is some sort of crimefighting saviour, should think carefully.
"Jamie Scott's plan holds that guy until he is corrected, rehabilitated and ready for re-integration into society."
A. Jamie Scott's "plan" amounts to round-the-clock surveillance for life. Not much thought needed here.
B. Jamie Scott has no criteria for determining if a person is "corrected, rehabilitated and ready for re-integration into society."
C. This shameful, manipulative plug for Jamie Scott plays on our revulsion at a too-light sentence to stampede us into supporting a fascist-style surveillance society.
D. Plenty of intelligent people can argue for stiffer sentences for serious crimes without eviscerating our civil liberties.
E. Anyone who believes that criminals reoffend with "the aid and consent" of the sitting government, commits a crime against honesty and reasoned language, and betrays the dangerous irresponsibility behind Jamie Scott's New Truth Order.
Just say no to the NTO!
Ex-Cop who raped teen boy gets 3 years (Let's compare plans...)
Date: 2012-02-13, 11:35PM PST
My Response:
A.When dealing with habitual dangerous offenders, what are our choices? Lock them up permanently, or try to rehabilitate and release and observe. The current model is let them serve a sentence then sets them loose and warns the public, putting the onus ON the public. Hardly sounds like justice to me.
We need to stop employing binary thinking when addressing problems as it leads to solutions that result in more problems. Example; time based sentencing that doesn't allow for officials to determine whether or not an offender is rehabilitated upon release but instead releases them anyway and waits for them to reoffend. The binary thinking is that x amount of time away from society with optional programs is enough to fix behaviour y. This is a one size fits all solution with the only variables being the amount of time sentence, which once set, is fixed for that crime.
B. Let us manage your expectations here. No one man is omniscient. So your expectation that Mr. Scott himself must know and design the criteria is, quite frankly, ridiculous. It is enough to know that the system is broken and that others have the knowledge and experience to fix it.
Mr. Scott would do what any good politician would do, consult the experts. Dr. James Gilligan is such an expert who could help determine such criteria. Also we could draw on other examples of rehabilitation system that work better than ours.
C. Mr. Scott is illustrating that the current correctional system is broken. You don't like the examples? That is on the system, not on Mr. Scott.
D. Stiffer sentencing is not necessarily required, the right treatment is what is required. Does it make sense to give stiffer sentences to pot growers than to murderers? This is what Harper's crime omnibus bill accomplishes.
You mention other intelligent people can argue for stiffer sentences without eviscerating civil liberties, so why are you not arguing that? Do you not consider yourself one of those "intelligent" people. It is easy to argue against something, much harder to stand for something.
E. Now who is spreading propaganda? "New Truth Order" did you come up with that all by yourself? Ridiculous fear mongering.
What do you call it when those holding the office of protecting the public know with reasonable certainty that someone is likely to reoffend and is unrepentant, but releases them anyway because their time has been served? I call it negligence. At least admit that the system needs to be fixed.
GF (Mr. Broken Record):
Great! Jamie Scott declares our correctional system to be broken. Let's pin a medal on him! Better yet, let's not!
Just because something is "broken" doesn't mean Jamie Scott can call himself a repairman.
The dangers of Jamie Scott's New Truth Order are real, but his spokesmouth SE is determined to sabotage any criticism of them.
Here are my criticisms:
"Jamie Scott's plan holds that guy until he is corrected, rehabilitated and ready for re-integration into society."
A. Jamie Scott's "plan" amounts to round-the-clock surveillance for life. Not much thought needed here.
B. Jamie Scott has no criteria for determining if a person is "corrected, rehabilitated and ready for re-integration into society."
C. This shameful, manipulative plug for Jamie Scott plays on our revulsion at a too-light sentence to stampede us into supporting a fascist-style surveillance society.
D. Plenty of intelligent people can argue for stiffer sentences for serious crimes without eviscerating our civil liberties.
E. Anyone who believes that criminals reoffend with "the aid and consent" of the sitting government, commits a crime against honesty and reasoned language, and betrays the dangerous irresponsibility behind Jamie Scott's New Truth Order.
SE does little more than but regurgitate Scott's position and hurl unsophisticated insults. Also, notice how he ducks ANY question where he night have to explain Jamie Scott's qualifications or competence.
His entire defence amounts to:
Jamie Scott says the system is broken;
Jamie Scott says we should do such and such;
But Jamie Scott is not responsible for defending the specifics of his position. . .
Vote for Sideshow Bob, er,...Jamie Scott.
I'm starting to think SE really is a clown.
(Just say NO to Jamie's NTO)
This is where it gets dirty. I repond to him and he flags my response down. Pay careful attention to how he responds to my response:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date:2012-02-18 07:49:18
PostID:2857805720
Title:(politics) Re:re:re Ex-Cop who raped...
-Just because something is "broken" doesn't mean Jamie Scott can call himself a repairman.
Here is the thing, if you can point out for me ANY other politician who does not espouse that the root cause of crime is drugs and alcohol I think both Jamie and I would gladly put down our arms and rally round.
Even Zbigniew Brzezinski in the book "America and the World" stated on page 2 that the root cause of most trouble is "poverty and injustice". Yet Mayor Watts, Christy Clark, Stephen Harper operate on the premise that the recipe for crime is drugs and alcohol and the solution is more police, more (private) prisons.
If any other politician was thinking about these issues in terms of asking why people commit crimes and why people are violent and recognizing that drugs and alcohol abuse are symptoms and not causes we would still be having this argument but you would be calling Jamie and I someone else's front-man.
-The dangers of Jamie Scott's New Truth Order are real, but his spokesmouth SE is determined to sabotage any criticism of them.
I've addressed your criticism. All of them and in detail, you are just regurgitating the same objections over again. This is akin to asking a question and then sticking your fingers in your ears whilst screaming "la-la-la" when anyone attempts to answer. I have answered your points, if you have further questions then frame them based on my answers and we'll continue the discussion, but don't pretend they have gone unaddressed.
-Also, notice how he ducks ANY question where he night have to explain Jamie Scott's qualifications or competence.
Let's be clear here for the record as there is nothing to hide like you are insinuating. I don't address it because I do not know the full answer, only Jamie himself can answer it. I can say that Jamie is not an economist, a doctor, a professor, an author, or a lawyer. His job is not all that glamorous. As to higher education at college or university I don't know.
Here is what I do know, he speaks to the issues that matter and he doesn't have an agenda. I have watched politicians with ivy league school educations and high powered careers screw the people over and I've argued with sycophants who possess multiple degrees in history and economics who have shown that they really don't know anything about either.
I've yet, in my life, to meet anyone with the "qualifications" to lead, do so.
GF's response after flagging my original:
You really are a joke, aren't you?
You think you and your idol Jamie Scott are special??
I GUARANTEE that other people have argued that drugs and alcohol are behind a lot of crime. Your baldly written response implies that these causes are behind ALL crime, since you do not qualify it in any way.
Give it up, SE! You're out of your depth and Jamie Scott is drowning in his own ego.
Jamie Scott's New Truth Order:
JUST SAY "NO" TO THE NTO.
My Note: He willfully misconstrues what I said when I clearly stated that drugs and alcohol are SYMPTOMS and not CAUSES.
He goes and does it again here:
GF initial post where he praises another poster who advocates permanent detention:
Very nice!
You distinguish between petty crime and serious crime. You also recognize the pervasive threat that the indiscriminate use of GPS tracking poses. I wonder why Jamie Scott and his frontman SE can't come up with such clarity. Here's an idea--why don't you tell Jamie Scott to go have a rest and that you'll run in his place.
Works for me!
re: One Stanley Cup Rioter (Two Systems)
Date: 2012-02-14, 1:56PM PST
Only the most dangerous offenders should be subject to GPS tracking surveillance. And then. . . maybe those types should not be let out at all.
My response that was also flagged:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date:2012-02-18 08:05:06
PostID:2857832674
Title:(politics) Re: Re: re: One Stanley Cup Rioter
Interesting, you support indefinite detention.
I would ask you to point out where Mr. Scott supported the use of indiscriminate GPS tracking? Also I suspect you are a raving Luddite. Perhaps you can comment on that.
In my previous post I did distinguish between petty and serious crime, I think I did a better job of it than Harper (ie pot smokers vs murders).
Although Jamie does not support the "indiscriminate" use of surveillance based on the crime, here is where I differ.
I understand that you can't take a non-violent person and lock them up with violent people and expect them to come out "rehabilitated". Your short-sightedness would have us make hardcore criminals where none existed before. For petty crimes it would be infinitely better to release said criminals, under surveillance, to learn how to reintegrate into society. Those that cannot or refuse to learn can then quickly be picked up and isolated as deemed necessary.
People tend to view prisons as one would view union workers, where one accrues benefit depending on the time invested, the other is deemed "rehabilitated" based on time served. Little has to do with actual merit or maturity. People should view prisons like schools where you get to progress to the next level only after you've demonstrated the mental and emotional maturity to progress.
The problem with violent offenders as illustrated by Dr. James Gilligan (author of Violence), is that these people have grown up with no concept of self-worth therefore they project this outwards onto their environment and conclude that no one else has any worth either. Their inability to love themselves prevents their empathy with others. This is ego-destroying and their last defense against total ego dissolution is holding on to their sense of honor and respect. For being disrespected, for someone who has not been loved and nurtured their entire lives, is worse than death and they will kill to protect it/save face.
Every violent act has, at it's root, a perceived disrespect.
So to incarcerate these men indefinitely with other violent men makes their state worse and leaves the problem unaddressed.
GF's Response after my original was flagged down:
"I would ask you to point out where Mr. Scott supported the use of indiscriminate GPS tracking? Also I suspect you are a raving Luddite. Perhaps you can comment on that. "
_______________
Oh, indeed I would:
To the charge that you and Jamie Scott support indiscriminate GPS tracking:
"Jamie Scott's plan holds that guy until he is corrected, re-habilitated and ready for re-integration into society. For the deteriorating deranged, like above, re-integration is not likely to be successful, so therefore it is reckless to release those individuals at all, regardless of time served, unless you have a 24-hour GPS tracking system in place, continent wide. His whereabouts should now be known, at all times, forever."
Anybody who puts "at all times, forever" into a policy thinks like a child and deserves to be treated like one.
So I'm a raving Luddite, am I?
This umpteenth lame attempt to insult me makes you look even more unsophisticated, uneducated and desperate, as if that were possible. By the way, do a bit of research on "King Ludd." He is not the fool that history has made him out to be. He led a principled attack on the mechanization that destroyed small-scale industries of England.
But what do the Luddites have to do with my attack on Jamie Scott's police-state mentality? Do you even READ your posts? Do you not TRY to make sense?
You CANNOT offer an intelligent defence of Jamie Scott. You duck questions, make excuses and spout irrelevent generica--You have NOTHING useful to say.
You're whipped!
ME:
Since this is my platform and no one can flag and twist my words here let me begin with a definition:
Indiscriminate:
1. Done at random or without careful judgment: "indiscriminate killing".
2. (of a person) Not using or exercising discrimination, thoughtless, haphazard
3. Not kept apart or divided, thrown together, jumbled.
Tracking will be used on criminals out on parole, bail and criminals deemed to be a permanent risk. We already have the concept of parole and bail and we register our sex offenders. This technology is complementary to processes already in place. In no way what you described above qualifies as indiscriminate.
Unless of course you are making the argument that parole, bail and a sex offender registry are somehow indiscriminate?
What are you an English major? The Grammar police? The fact that you object to the phrase "at all times, forever" really reveals you for what you are. Petty. And I think that qualifies for ad hominem, attacking the man and not the idea. And his diction no less, a new low, even for you.
You are a Luddite because you cannot understand the implications of technology much like Ned Ludd could not. He was only concerned with the short-term and immediate impact much like yourself. You cannot see the positive and beneficial applications of high technology. We've had this argument before and you've stated we should in fact look backwards (Greg Round 6 post) for technology and not forwards. So yes, you are a Luddite.
Umpteenth eh? Maybe. Lame, only to you and your anti-Zionist fans.
Greg, I read your posts with painstaking caution AND compose my replies with due care. Of course I wonder why I bother because when I refute you, you resort to the same tactics, flag and retort when the other party has been silenced by your mob.
You can't silence me here though. And to be fair I won't silence you if you choose to respond here, because I'm not you. I'm open to being wrong if I learn something from it.
I think, in the final analysis, the reason that you strive so hard to refute me is because you know that if I am allowed a platform people might see the sense in what I am writing about.
If I had as you say "nothing" useful to say, then why would you spend so much time trying to silence me? It would seem that the best medicine would be to ignore me and hope I go away.
So who is whipped?
GF:
Anyone who thinks Jamie Scott is some sort of crimefighting saviour, should think carefully.
"Jamie Scott's plan holds that guy until he is corrected, rehabilitated and ready for re-integration into society."
A. Jamie Scott's "plan" amounts to round-the-clock surveillance for life. Not much thought needed here.
B. Jamie Scott has no criteria for determining if a person is "corrected, rehabilitated and ready for re-integration into society."
C. This shameful, manipulative plug for Jamie Scott plays on our revulsion at a too-light sentence to stampede us into supporting a fascist-style surveillance society.
D. Plenty of intelligent people can argue for stiffer sentences for serious crimes without eviscerating our civil liberties.
E. Anyone who believes that criminals reoffend with "the aid and consent" of the sitting government, commits a crime against honesty and reasoned language, and betrays the dangerous irresponsibility behind Jamie Scott's New Truth Order.
Just say no to the NTO!
Ex-Cop who raped teen boy gets 3 years (Let's compare plans...)
Date: 2012-02-13, 11:35PM PST
My Response:
A.When dealing with habitual dangerous offenders, what are our choices? Lock them up permanently, or try to rehabilitate and release and observe. The current model is let them serve a sentence then sets them loose and warns the public, putting the onus ON the public. Hardly sounds like justice to me.
We need to stop employing binary thinking when addressing problems as it leads to solutions that result in more problems. Example; time based sentencing that doesn't allow for officials to determine whether or not an offender is rehabilitated upon release but instead releases them anyway and waits for them to reoffend. The binary thinking is that x amount of time away from society with optional programs is enough to fix behaviour y. This is a one size fits all solution with the only variables being the amount of time sentence, which once set, is fixed for that crime.
B. Let us manage your expectations here. No one man is omniscient. So your expectation that Mr. Scott himself must know and design the criteria is, quite frankly, ridiculous. It is enough to know that the system is broken and that others have the knowledge and experience to fix it.
Mr. Scott would do what any good politician would do, consult the experts. Dr. James Gilligan is such an expert who could help determine such criteria. Also we could draw on other examples of rehabilitation system that work better than ours.
C. Mr. Scott is illustrating that the current correctional system is broken. You don't like the examples? That is on the system, not on Mr. Scott.
D. Stiffer sentencing is not necessarily required, the right treatment is what is required. Does it make sense to give stiffer sentences to pot growers than to murderers? This is what Harper's crime omnibus bill accomplishes.
You mention other intelligent people can argue for stiffer sentences without eviscerating civil liberties, so why are you not arguing that? Do you not consider yourself one of those "intelligent" people. It is easy to argue against something, much harder to stand for something.
E. Now who is spreading propaganda? "New Truth Order" did you come up with that all by yourself? Ridiculous fear mongering.
What do you call it when those holding the office of protecting the public know with reasonable certainty that someone is likely to reoffend and is unrepentant, but releases them anyway because their time has been served? I call it negligence. At least admit that the system needs to be fixed.
GF (Mr. Broken Record):
Great! Jamie Scott declares our correctional system to be broken. Let's pin a medal on him! Better yet, let's not!
Just because something is "broken" doesn't mean Jamie Scott can call himself a repairman.
The dangers of Jamie Scott's New Truth Order are real, but his spokesmouth SE is determined to sabotage any criticism of them.
Here are my criticisms:
"Jamie Scott's plan holds that guy until he is corrected, rehabilitated and ready for re-integration into society."
A. Jamie Scott's "plan" amounts to round-the-clock surveillance for life. Not much thought needed here.
B. Jamie Scott has no criteria for determining if a person is "corrected, rehabilitated and ready for re-integration into society."
C. This shameful, manipulative plug for Jamie Scott plays on our revulsion at a too-light sentence to stampede us into supporting a fascist-style surveillance society.
D. Plenty of intelligent people can argue for stiffer sentences for serious crimes without eviscerating our civil liberties.
E. Anyone who believes that criminals reoffend with "the aid and consent" of the sitting government, commits a crime against honesty and reasoned language, and betrays the dangerous irresponsibility behind Jamie Scott's New Truth Order.
SE does little more than but regurgitate Scott's position and hurl unsophisticated insults. Also, notice how he ducks ANY question where he night have to explain Jamie Scott's qualifications or competence.
His entire defence amounts to:
Jamie Scott says the system is broken;
Jamie Scott says we should do such and such;
But Jamie Scott is not responsible for defending the specifics of his position. . .
Vote for Sideshow Bob, er,...Jamie Scott.
I'm starting to think SE really is a clown.
(Just say NO to Jamie's NTO)
This is where it gets dirty. I repond to him and he flags my response down. Pay careful attention to how he responds to my response:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date:2012-02-18 07:49:18
PostID:2857805720
Title:(politics) Re:re:re Ex-Cop who raped...
-Just because something is "broken" doesn't mean Jamie Scott can call himself a repairman.
Here is the thing, if you can point out for me ANY other politician who does not espouse that the root cause of crime is drugs and alcohol I think both Jamie and I would gladly put down our arms and rally round.
Even Zbigniew Brzezinski in the book "America and the World" stated on page 2 that the root cause of most trouble is "poverty and injustice". Yet Mayor Watts, Christy Clark, Stephen Harper operate on the premise that the recipe for crime is drugs and alcohol and the solution is more police, more (private) prisons.
If any other politician was thinking about these issues in terms of asking why people commit crimes and why people are violent and recognizing that drugs and alcohol abuse are symptoms and not causes we would still be having this argument but you would be calling Jamie and I someone else's front-man.
-The dangers of Jamie Scott's New Truth Order are real, but his spokesmouth SE is determined to sabotage any criticism of them.
I've addressed your criticism. All of them and in detail, you are just regurgitating the same objections over again. This is akin to asking a question and then sticking your fingers in your ears whilst screaming "la-la-la" when anyone attempts to answer. I have answered your points, if you have further questions then frame them based on my answers and we'll continue the discussion, but don't pretend they have gone unaddressed.
-Also, notice how he ducks ANY question where he night have to explain Jamie Scott's qualifications or competence.
Let's be clear here for the record as there is nothing to hide like you are insinuating. I don't address it because I do not know the full answer, only Jamie himself can answer it. I can say that Jamie is not an economist, a doctor, a professor, an author, or a lawyer. His job is not all that glamorous. As to higher education at college or university I don't know.
Here is what I do know, he speaks to the issues that matter and he doesn't have an agenda. I have watched politicians with ivy league school educations and high powered careers screw the people over and I've argued with sycophants who possess multiple degrees in history and economics who have shown that they really don't know anything about either.
I've yet, in my life, to meet anyone with the "qualifications" to lead, do so.
GF's response after flagging my original:
You really are a joke, aren't you?
You think you and your idol Jamie Scott are special??
I GUARANTEE that other people have argued that drugs and alcohol are behind a lot of crime. Your baldly written response implies that these causes are behind ALL crime, since you do not qualify it in any way.
Give it up, SE! You're out of your depth and Jamie Scott is drowning in his own ego.
Jamie Scott's New Truth Order:
JUST SAY "NO" TO THE NTO.
My Note: He willfully misconstrues what I said when I clearly stated that drugs and alcohol are SYMPTOMS and not CAUSES.
He goes and does it again here:
GF initial post where he praises another poster who advocates permanent detention:
Very nice!
You distinguish between petty crime and serious crime. You also recognize the pervasive threat that the indiscriminate use of GPS tracking poses. I wonder why Jamie Scott and his frontman SE can't come up with such clarity. Here's an idea--why don't you tell Jamie Scott to go have a rest and that you'll run in his place.
Works for me!
re: One Stanley Cup Rioter (Two Systems)
Date: 2012-02-14, 1:56PM PST
Only the most dangerous offenders should be subject to GPS tracking surveillance. And then. . . maybe those types should not be let out at all.
My response that was also flagged:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date:2012-02-18 08:05:06
PostID:2857832674
Title:(politics) Re: Re: re: One Stanley Cup Rioter
Interesting, you support indefinite detention.
I would ask you to point out where Mr. Scott supported the use of indiscriminate GPS tracking? Also I suspect you are a raving Luddite. Perhaps you can comment on that.
In my previous post I did distinguish between petty and serious crime, I think I did a better job of it than Harper (ie pot smokers vs murders).
Although Jamie does not support the "indiscriminate" use of surveillance based on the crime, here is where I differ.
I understand that you can't take a non-violent person and lock them up with violent people and expect them to come out "rehabilitated". Your short-sightedness would have us make hardcore criminals where none existed before. For petty crimes it would be infinitely better to release said criminals, under surveillance, to learn how to reintegrate into society. Those that cannot or refuse to learn can then quickly be picked up and isolated as deemed necessary.
People tend to view prisons as one would view union workers, where one accrues benefit depending on the time invested, the other is deemed "rehabilitated" based on time served. Little has to do with actual merit or maturity. People should view prisons like schools where you get to progress to the next level only after you've demonstrated the mental and emotional maturity to progress.
The problem with violent offenders as illustrated by Dr. James Gilligan (author of Violence), is that these people have grown up with no concept of self-worth therefore they project this outwards onto their environment and conclude that no one else has any worth either. Their inability to love themselves prevents their empathy with others. This is ego-destroying and their last defense against total ego dissolution is holding on to their sense of honor and respect. For being disrespected, for someone who has not been loved and nurtured their entire lives, is worse than death and they will kill to protect it/save face.
Every violent act has, at it's root, a perceived disrespect.
So to incarcerate these men indefinitely with other violent men makes their state worse and leaves the problem unaddressed.
GF's Response after my original was flagged down:
"I would ask you to point out where Mr. Scott supported the use of indiscriminate GPS tracking? Also I suspect you are a raving Luddite. Perhaps you can comment on that. "
_______________
Oh, indeed I would:
To the charge that you and Jamie Scott support indiscriminate GPS tracking:
"Jamie Scott's plan holds that guy until he is corrected, re-habilitated and ready for re-integration into society. For the deteriorating deranged, like above, re-integration is not likely to be successful, so therefore it is reckless to release those individuals at all, regardless of time served, unless you have a 24-hour GPS tracking system in place, continent wide. His whereabouts should now be known, at all times, forever."
Anybody who puts "at all times, forever" into a policy thinks like a child and deserves to be treated like one.
So I'm a raving Luddite, am I?
This umpteenth lame attempt to insult me makes you look even more unsophisticated, uneducated and desperate, as if that were possible. By the way, do a bit of research on "King Ludd." He is not the fool that history has made him out to be. He led a principled attack on the mechanization that destroyed small-scale industries of England.
But what do the Luddites have to do with my attack on Jamie Scott's police-state mentality? Do you even READ your posts? Do you not TRY to make sense?
You CANNOT offer an intelligent defence of Jamie Scott. You duck questions, make excuses and spout irrelevent generica--You have NOTHING useful to say.
You're whipped!
ME:
Since this is my platform and no one can flag and twist my words here let me begin with a definition:
Indiscriminate:
1. Done at random or without careful judgment: "indiscriminate killing".
2. (of a person) Not using or exercising discrimination, thoughtless, haphazard
3. Not kept apart or divided, thrown together, jumbled.
Tracking will be used on criminals out on parole, bail and criminals deemed to be a permanent risk. We already have the concept of parole and bail and we register our sex offenders. This technology is complementary to processes already in place. In no way what you described above qualifies as indiscriminate.
Unless of course you are making the argument that parole, bail and a sex offender registry are somehow indiscriminate?
What are you an English major? The Grammar police? The fact that you object to the phrase "at all times, forever" really reveals you for what you are. Petty. And I think that qualifies for ad hominem, attacking the man and not the idea. And his diction no less, a new low, even for you.
You are a Luddite because you cannot understand the implications of technology much like Ned Ludd could not. He was only concerned with the short-term and immediate impact much like yourself. You cannot see the positive and beneficial applications of high technology. We've had this argument before and you've stated we should in fact look backwards (Greg Round 6 post) for technology and not forwards. So yes, you are a Luddite.
Umpteenth eh? Maybe. Lame, only to you and your anti-Zionist fans.
Greg, I read your posts with painstaking caution AND compose my replies with due care. Of course I wonder why I bother because when I refute you, you resort to the same tactics, flag and retort when the other party has been silenced by your mob.
You can't silence me here though. And to be fair I won't silence you if you choose to respond here, because I'm not you. I'm open to being wrong if I learn something from it.
I think, in the final analysis, the reason that you strive so hard to refute me is because you know that if I am allowed a platform people might see the sense in what I am writing about.
If I had as you say "nothing" useful to say, then why would you spend so much time trying to silence me? It would seem that the best medicine would be to ignore me and hope I go away.
So who is whipped?
Greg's Continuous Cretinous Tirade
And now the continuation:
GF:
You've become tedious. I have made the distinction between CCTC and direct link police-state surveillance.
Your inability to comprehend is not my fault.
Also, your tedious quibbling about CCTV does not address Jamie Scott's endorsement of increased police-state surveillance. You MUST be cognitively impaired.
How can Jamie Scott be an anti-statist AND a fascist? Simple: pander to the fear and vanity of the masses by attacking the state and then substitute your new order based on your definition of "truth." Study the history of the demagogue.
You really aren't much of a challenge. Witness your inane attempt at wit: "As you keep moving the goalposts, I still keep making touchdowns."
What "goalposts" are you talking about?! Go on and praise yourself all you want: nobody else will.
My Response:
-What "goalposts" are you talking about?!
Culled from your previous posts:
You start with the vague assertion that Mr. Scott does "endorse police-state surveillance", with no definition or detail.
In your next post, you flesh it out more by equating police state status to "a live link between store cameras to police departments" and then go on to establish what weight it should have without qualifying it by stating "Robberies are one thing, but police-state surveillance is infinite;y worse". Then you expand your accusation without supporting detail to say "Jamie Scott is dangerous and undemocratic."
In response to the to the fact that is requires willing participation (business owners) and is confined in scope (to the place of business) you said "Optional, shmoptional!" Ignoring that in a true police state, surveillance is mandatory and controlled by the state.
The live link is controlled by the business owner, from page 7 "If there is a hold up, then a button on the floor triggers a red screen at the detachment and the crime is recorded while the units are dispatched." Not only is this surveillance not mandatory, the control resides with the citizen, not the state.
You then make a superfluous negation of the equivalence of CCTV and live links with "CCTV is not directly hooked up to police stations", when the only significant difference is the "when", not the who(is being filmed), what(actions are filmed), where(is the filming taking place), why(are we doing it) and how(is it being accomplished).
You then go on to give detail as to why one's ability to commit a crime should have more weight than one's ability to deter it by saying "I value my privacy and civil rights".
You then accuse Mr. Scott of hating government and politicians by saying "Scott builds a political platform around hatred of government and the demonization of politicians."
-"The issue is not CCTV,... INSTANT connections to the police... Jamie Scott endorses a police state".
You again reiterate that it is the live link that gives the camera's it's police state status then 'ipso facto', Jamie Scott endorses a police state, when it had already been demonstrated that there is no qualitative difference between CCTV and a live link, the thing that you are predicating your entire argument on.
-"This IS a black-and-white issue: the POLICE have no right to spy on me ANYWHERE."
You then make the absolute statement that this is a black and white issue. Police are also citizens, any right extended to a citizen is automatically extended to the police. The right does not disappear because he represents a government authority. Also any right granted is not unlimited, you have no absolute right to privacy, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy (for instance, in your home, on your property, in the bathroom).
-"You've become tedious."
So now I've become tedious. Whereas you are arguing absolutes and wishful thinking, I am arguing reality, which you have little defense. I've given you every opportunity to prove that the law surrounding the issue is 1) non-existent 2) incorrect and you have done neither. I suspect you find it tedious because you might have to do some work, rather than fend off these arguments with your usual diet of insults and disdain.
Look how you've changed what I asked in this last statement:
"How can Jamie Scott be an anti-statist AND a fascist? Simple: pander to the fear and vanity of the..."
When I clearly asked how can one endorse a police state and be anti-statist? How can one endorse a state, but oppose the idea of a state? You went ahead and substituted "fascist" for "police state" so you could answer the question without looking like a fool for saying what amounts to an oxymoron. Even you acknowledge in your answer that it amounts to replacing one state with another state, not no state.
In Summary:
You accuse Mr. Scott of endorsing a police state, hating government, being undemocratic and being an anti-statist.
You base this accusation solely on the live link between business owners and local police detachments, control of which rests with the business owners.
You failed to show a significant qualitative difference in the live link vs. CCTV (refer to the who, what, when, where, why, and how), but you continued to hold on to this notion till the end ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
You failed to show how a voluntary agreement entered into by two parties advances the police state, as no additional powers are granted to the police, nor are any additional rights restricted for the citizens.
You attempt to bolster support by declaring your right to privacy as absolute, which does not exist in law.
You ignore the law surrounding the matter.
GF:
Have you noticed that the more you write the more ridiculous you look? Obviously not.
You spend far too much time puffing yourself up and manufacturing credibility for your buddy Jamie.
Anyone reading this exchange knows what a frothing loon you are.
I have shown time and again that Jamie Scott endorses police-state security.
You think it's no big deal. The rest of us beg to differ.
Yawwwwwwwn! I have better things to do than teach you lessons in honesty and logic.
My Response (which was flagged probably because I hurt his ego):
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date:2012-02-13 16:29:54
PostID:2850236178
Title:(politics) Rex9: Jamie Scott
-Have you noticed that the more you write the more ridiculous you look?
Says the failure.
-You spend far too much time puffing yourself up and manufacturing credibility for your buddy Jamie.
I don't need to puff myself up, you do a wonderful job for me.
-Anyone reading this exchange knows what a frothing loon you are.
I'm quite confident that isn't the case and will stand by this exchange.
-I have shown time and again that Jamie Scott endorses police-state security.
You did no such thing and that is your problem. Talk about a frothing loon!
-You think it's no big deal. The rest of us beg to differ.
Who is the "rest of us"? The silent majority? I've only heard from you and Mr. All Caps. He was about as convincing as you are and he wrote waaay less.
-Yaaaaawn! I have better things to do than teach you lessons in honesty and logic.
Of course you do. Par for the course; you offer nothing and when challenged you then run away. Perhaps if you read more from the library and read less of your own hype we could someday have an interesting discussion. Until that day.
GF (does he sound alittle hurt? Also notice how he truncated the entire message except for the first part, this becomes a tactic he employs later):
Rex9: Jamie Scott
Date: 2012-02-13, 4:29PM PST
-Have you noticed that the more you write the more ridiculous you look?
Says the failure.
------
Really? This is the level of your ability to argue?! Wow! You and Jamie Scott deserve each other.
I'll let others on this forum put you in your place. You clearly have conceded defeat, and I have better things to do.
My Response:
-Really? This is the level of your ability to argue?! Wow! You and Jamie Scott deserve each other.
I find that with you it doesn't matter what level one argues, you respond the same way, with patronism and disdain. My plan, as always, is to expose the flaws in your argument then wait for the eventual tirade in which you throw a tantrum. Mission accomplished.
-I'll let others on this forum put you in your place. You clearly have conceded defeat, and I have better things to do.
I am willing to discuss with anyone. You are more interested in trading bon mots than discussion which I am game for as well, but you have clearly given up. Declaring victory and running away doesn't make it so.
This ends our first exchange, but it starts up again shortly.
GF:
You've become tedious. I have made the distinction between CCTC and direct link police-state surveillance.
Your inability to comprehend is not my fault.
Also, your tedious quibbling about CCTV does not address Jamie Scott's endorsement of increased police-state surveillance. You MUST be cognitively impaired.
How can Jamie Scott be an anti-statist AND a fascist? Simple: pander to the fear and vanity of the masses by attacking the state and then substitute your new order based on your definition of "truth." Study the history of the demagogue.
You really aren't much of a challenge. Witness your inane attempt at wit: "As you keep moving the goalposts, I still keep making touchdowns."
What "goalposts" are you talking about?! Go on and praise yourself all you want: nobody else will.
My Response:
-What "goalposts" are you talking about?!
Culled from your previous posts:
You start with the vague assertion that Mr. Scott does "endorse police-state surveillance", with no definition or detail.
In your next post, you flesh it out more by equating police state status to "a live link between store cameras to police departments" and then go on to establish what weight it should have without qualifying it by stating "Robberies are one thing, but police-state surveillance is infinite;y worse". Then you expand your accusation without supporting detail to say "Jamie Scott is dangerous and undemocratic."
In response to the to the fact that is requires willing participation (business owners) and is confined in scope (to the place of business) you said "Optional, shmoptional!" Ignoring that in a true police state, surveillance is mandatory and controlled by the state.
The live link is controlled by the business owner, from page 7 "If there is a hold up, then a button on the floor triggers a red screen at the detachment and the crime is recorded while the units are dispatched." Not only is this surveillance not mandatory, the control resides with the citizen, not the state.
You then make a superfluous negation of the equivalence of CCTV and live links with "CCTV is not directly hooked up to police stations", when the only significant difference is the "when", not the who(is being filmed), what(actions are filmed), where(is the filming taking place), why(are we doing it) and how(is it being accomplished).
You then go on to give detail as to why one's ability to commit a crime should have more weight than one's ability to deter it by saying "I value my privacy and civil rights".
You then accuse Mr. Scott of hating government and politicians by saying "Scott builds a political platform around hatred of government and the demonization of politicians."
-"The issue is not CCTV,... INSTANT connections to the police... Jamie Scott endorses a police state".
You again reiterate that it is the live link that gives the camera's it's police state status then 'ipso facto', Jamie Scott endorses a police state, when it had already been demonstrated that there is no qualitative difference between CCTV and a live link, the thing that you are predicating your entire argument on.
-"This IS a black-and-white issue: the POLICE have no right to spy on me ANYWHERE."
You then make the absolute statement that this is a black and white issue. Police are also citizens, any right extended to a citizen is automatically extended to the police. The right does not disappear because he represents a government authority. Also any right granted is not unlimited, you have no absolute right to privacy, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy (for instance, in your home, on your property, in the bathroom).
-"You've become tedious."
So now I've become tedious. Whereas you are arguing absolutes and wishful thinking, I am arguing reality, which you have little defense. I've given you every opportunity to prove that the law surrounding the issue is 1) non-existent 2) incorrect and you have done neither. I suspect you find it tedious because you might have to do some work, rather than fend off these arguments with your usual diet of insults and disdain.
Look how you've changed what I asked in this last statement:
"How can Jamie Scott be an anti-statist AND a fascist? Simple: pander to the fear and vanity of the..."
When I clearly asked how can one endorse a police state and be anti-statist? How can one endorse a state, but oppose the idea of a state? You went ahead and substituted "fascist" for "police state" so you could answer the question without looking like a fool for saying what amounts to an oxymoron. Even you acknowledge in your answer that it amounts to replacing one state with another state, not no state.
In Summary:
You accuse Mr. Scott of endorsing a police state, hating government, being undemocratic and being an anti-statist.
You base this accusation solely on the live link between business owners and local police detachments, control of which rests with the business owners.
You failed to show a significant qualitative difference in the live link vs. CCTV (refer to the who, what, when, where, why, and how), but you continued to hold on to this notion till the end ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
You failed to show how a voluntary agreement entered into by two parties advances the police state, as no additional powers are granted to the police, nor are any additional rights restricted for the citizens.
You attempt to bolster support by declaring your right to privacy as absolute, which does not exist in law.
You ignore the law surrounding the matter.
GF:
Have you noticed that the more you write the more ridiculous you look? Obviously not.
You spend far too much time puffing yourself up and manufacturing credibility for your buddy Jamie.
Anyone reading this exchange knows what a frothing loon you are.
I have shown time and again that Jamie Scott endorses police-state security.
You think it's no big deal. The rest of us beg to differ.
Yawwwwwwwn! I have better things to do than teach you lessons in honesty and logic.
My Response (which was flagged probably because I hurt his ego):
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date:2012-02-13 16:29:54
PostID:2850236178
Title:(politics) Rex9: Jamie Scott
-Have you noticed that the more you write the more ridiculous you look?
Says the failure.
-You spend far too much time puffing yourself up and manufacturing credibility for your buddy Jamie.
I don't need to puff myself up, you do a wonderful job for me.
-Anyone reading this exchange knows what a frothing loon you are.
I'm quite confident that isn't the case and will stand by this exchange.
-I have shown time and again that Jamie Scott endorses police-state security.
You did no such thing and that is your problem. Talk about a frothing loon!
-You think it's no big deal. The rest of us beg to differ.
Who is the "rest of us"? The silent majority? I've only heard from you and Mr. All Caps. He was about as convincing as you are and he wrote waaay less.
-Yaaaaawn! I have better things to do than teach you lessons in honesty and logic.
Of course you do. Par for the course; you offer nothing and when challenged you then run away. Perhaps if you read more from the library and read less of your own hype we could someday have an interesting discussion. Until that day.
GF (does he sound alittle hurt? Also notice how he truncated the entire message except for the first part, this becomes a tactic he employs later):
Rex9: Jamie Scott
Date: 2012-02-13, 4:29PM PST
-Have you noticed that the more you write the more ridiculous you look?
Says the failure.
------
Really? This is the level of your ability to argue?! Wow! You and Jamie Scott deserve each other.
I'll let others on this forum put you in your place. You clearly have conceded defeat, and I have better things to do.
My Response:
-Really? This is the level of your ability to argue?! Wow! You and Jamie Scott deserve each other.
I find that with you it doesn't matter what level one argues, you respond the same way, with patronism and disdain. My plan, as always, is to expose the flaws in your argument then wait for the eventual tirade in which you throw a tantrum. Mission accomplished.
-I'll let others on this forum put you in your place. You clearly have conceded defeat, and I have better things to do.
I am willing to discuss with anyone. You are more interested in trading bon mots than discussion which I am game for as well, but you have clearly given up. Declaring victory and running away doesn't make it so.
This ends our first exchange, but it starts up again shortly.
Greg Felton's ax to grind.
You think I would have learned my lesson, never, never try to engaged in serious debate on Craigslist. When the other side is clearly losing they get desperate and gather their anti-Zionist buddies and flag your posts down, copy a segment of your original then proceed to misconstrue what you said and declare victory.
You are a coward and an intellectual nothing, Greg Felton.
Here is round 1 in response to a post by the WCT on Jamie Scott's anti-crime plan where an illiterate called Jamie Scott "a" idiot.
GF:
You said it!!
This pseudo-reformer endorse police-state surveillance and expects people to vote for him.
What a moron!
My Response:
To the cheerleader of All CAPS - where exactly did he propose police state surveillance? In the proposal he in fact called on entities like Translink to stop recording conversations of ordinary passengers. If you do not like the idea of tracking of parolee's then state why. The idea that we rely on time based sentencing to figure out when a criminal has paid his debt and is ready to reintegrate into society is ridiculous and does not work.
The idea that to suppress crime by paying for more police, build more prisons, legislate more laws and hire more judges has failed. The measure of success of solving a problem should result in the opposite (i.e. less police, less legislation, decommission prisons, less judges). All the current model does is illustrate that we are dealing with the symptoms of crime and not the root causes of crime.
GF:
If you want to see what kind of loon Jamie Scott is, turn to page 7 of his crime-fighting manifesto----a live link between store cameras to police departments. Did this man never read Orwell? Robberies are one thing, but police-state surveillance is infinite;y worse.
Jamie Scott is dangerous and undemocratic, and must not be taken seriously.
My Response:
I did turn to page 7 and nowhere did I see that live feed cameras were mandatory. Indeed he used the words "interested" and "sign up" indicating that it was entirely optional. Police are good for solving crimes after the fact so it makes sense to aid them in doing that job until the root causes of crime are dealt with. I ask, do you have issue with closed circuit cameras being used on private commercial and residential property? Do you boycott stores that make use of CCTV's? What Mr. Scott proposed is no different, it just cuts out the time lapse between when the crime is committed and when the police have access to the video.
GF:
Er, no sale!
Optional, shmoptional! The fact that he endorses store-police links tells us all we need to know about Jamie Scott's respect for privacy and civil liberties.
Your feeble attempt to mask this is pathetic. Also, your equation with closed-circuit TV is FALSE!!!!
CCTV is not directly hooked up to police stations. Just how STUPID are you?!
Your excuse-making is so inept that you end up ENDORSING at least the principle of a police-state surveillance society.
I value my privacy and civil rights more than the need to exterminate petty crime.
Jamie Scott is a demagogue and a loon, and you are no better.
My Response:
It is strange how you ask how stupid I am when it is patently obvious that you are either too lazy or too stupid yourself to read. I clearly imply the difference between CCTV and live feed is the time lapse (ie immediate versus handing it over to the police at a later time). Was that perhaps too subtle for you to grasp?
And as for your insinuation that Mr. Scott has no respect for privacy and civil liberties, it is false. Your understanding of privacy law in relation to being photographed and/or videotaped is lacking. When in public you have no reasonable right to privacy unless it is a special area that you would ordinarily assume to be private (ie public washrooms) or unless the photography/videotape is to be distributed for commercial purposes in which case they require consent. On private property you can photograph/videotape whomever you want as long as you obtain their consent which can be implied (ie a sign that says "Smile you're on camera" is sufficient).
The law is already clearly established. Mr. Scott does not have to bend or break the law, nor create a new law to make this happen. So in principle your objection should lie with the current political and legal establishment and not with Mr. Scott.
If you'd like to debate the basis of the legality of having a live link in places of commerce that are open to the public we can certainly do that, but the case law precedents are already established.
GF:
Again, you fail to address the main point. The issue is not CCTV, which is a problem in itself and should be limited or removed from most areas, but rather Jamie Scott's notion that there should be INSTANT connections to the police. Jamie Scott endorses a police state. I oppose a police state; hence, I oppose Jamie Scott. You, on the other hand, have no problem with it, and are an apologist for Jamie Scott.
My response:
As I've learned from a poster on here (my note: that would be Greg Felton himself, his original accusation being that no one can make an absolute claim to the Truth, ironic that he changes his argument to suite what agenda he currently needs to push I.e. Privacy rights are absolute), there is no such thing as absolutes, hence no such thing as an absolute right to privacy. You go on about respect for individual liberties but I know you also realize that with this respect comes the recognition that liberties are not unlimited and are necessarily reigned in otherwise society could not function. You seek to frame this as black and white issue when it is not and you seek to paint those you disagree with as advocates of a police state, when in fact Mr. Scott is pointing the police in the direction they should be going, preventing and deterring crime in co-operation with the citizenry, rather than pointing them at law abiding citizens without the consent of the people.
So you may oppose Mr. Scott, but if you're honest and not a hypocrite about it, the reason you oppose him is NOT based on the flimsiest of notions that the speed of connection to the police somehow makes him a fascist. Especially when we are talking about voluntarily entering into contracts, be it with government bodies or with private individuals, which every libertarian would support and protect, the right to enter into contract.
GF:
You really are dense, aren't you. Jamie Scott clearly endorses police-state surveillance, yet, as a hypocrite, you deliberately gloss over it to make excuses for it. This IS a black-and-white issue: the POLICE have no right to spy on me ANYWHERE. If you cannot understand this, you are cognitively impaired.
Your last paragraph is simply inane. I oppose police state surveillance and that makes ME a fascist? Puhleeeeeeze!! Also, neither you nor Jamie Scott has the least understanding of the law of contracts, or what does or does not constitute unwarranted intrusions of privacy. You both are simply undereducated, anti-statist radicals masquerading as democratic reformers.
Keep on posting: the more you do the more ridiculous you look, and the more insane Jamie Scott looks.
My Response:
-If you cannot understand this, you are cognitively impaired.
If you are looking for cognitively impaired just grab the nearest mirror.
Let me state this more clearly and simply so you can understand. If you are in public, you can be filmed by anyone as long as it is not for commercial purposes. I can take my iPhone out and record your image and you cannot stop me. However what I do with it afterwards may expose me to certain tort liability. If you step onto my private property, as long as I made you aware the cameras exist, I can record your image.
Your rights consist of avoiding areas with cameras in public and you have the right to refuse to do business with shops that have cameras, you also have the right to sue if someone uses your image in a way that makes it a tort offense.
These laws and the interpretations apply to everyone, including police, who are both authorities of the state but are also citizens at the same time. So you may not like that they can film you at a demonstrations (which they frequently do), but as an activist you legally have the right to film them as well, in public.
There is currently a push to make the filming of politicians and police illegal. THIS is what should concern you, the unequal playing field. THIS would be an example of the police state, increasing police powers or restricting citizen rights.
What you fail to grasp is that if you are against the state having the right to film you in public or having access to commercial establishments at the behest of the owners, then you have to change the law for everyone, not just the state authorities. The same legal basis that seeks to prevent laws being passed that target specific groups unfairly also in this case protects the states right to film it citizens in public. So you have to repeal it for citizens as well. Which is certainly a conversation that can be had, but will no doubt have a host of unintended consequences. So you still think it is a black and white issue?
-Your last paragraph is simply inane. I oppose police state surveillance and that makes ME a fascist?
An unfortunate phrasing that sounded better out loud than in writing. I've corrected it. To clarify, the speed of which one can contact the police does not make one a fascist. I wouldn't classify you as a fascist, fascists actually do something.
-Also, neither you nor Jamie Scott has the least understanding of the law of contracts...
Then please enlighten the rest of us with your deep knowledge of contract and privacy law. I would enjoy responding to something other than your petulant rants. You can start by presenting case law that says you cannot film someone in public for non-commercial purposes. Good luck finding that.
-Keep on posting: the more you do the more ridiculous you look, and the more insane Jamie Scott looks.
As you keep moving the goalposts, I still keep making touchdowns.
PS. Please also tell the audience how one can endorse a police state but be an anti-statist at the same time? Inquiring minds and all that.
This post is getting long so I'll end this section here and start a new one with Felton's always hilarious response.
You are a coward and an intellectual nothing, Greg Felton.
Here is round 1 in response to a post by the WCT on Jamie Scott's anti-crime plan where an illiterate called Jamie Scott "a" idiot.
GF:
You said it!!
This pseudo-reformer endorse police-state surveillance and expects people to vote for him.
What a moron!
My Response:
To the cheerleader of All CAPS - where exactly did he propose police state surveillance? In the proposal he in fact called on entities like Translink to stop recording conversations of ordinary passengers. If you do not like the idea of tracking of parolee's then state why. The idea that we rely on time based sentencing to figure out when a criminal has paid his debt and is ready to reintegrate into society is ridiculous and does not work.
The idea that to suppress crime by paying for more police, build more prisons, legislate more laws and hire more judges has failed. The measure of success of solving a problem should result in the opposite (i.e. less police, less legislation, decommission prisons, less judges). All the current model does is illustrate that we are dealing with the symptoms of crime and not the root causes of crime.
GF:
If you want to see what kind of loon Jamie Scott is, turn to page 7 of his crime-fighting manifesto----a live link between store cameras to police departments. Did this man never read Orwell? Robberies are one thing, but police-state surveillance is infinite;y worse.
Jamie Scott is dangerous and undemocratic, and must not be taken seriously.
My Response:
I did turn to page 7 and nowhere did I see that live feed cameras were mandatory. Indeed he used the words "interested" and "sign up" indicating that it was entirely optional. Police are good for solving crimes after the fact so it makes sense to aid them in doing that job until the root causes of crime are dealt with. I ask, do you have issue with closed circuit cameras being used on private commercial and residential property? Do you boycott stores that make use of CCTV's? What Mr. Scott proposed is no different, it just cuts out the time lapse between when the crime is committed and when the police have access to the video.
GF:
Er, no sale!
Optional, shmoptional! The fact that he endorses store-police links tells us all we need to know about Jamie Scott's respect for privacy and civil liberties.
Your feeble attempt to mask this is pathetic. Also, your equation with closed-circuit TV is FALSE!!!!
CCTV is not directly hooked up to police stations. Just how STUPID are you?!
Your excuse-making is so inept that you end up ENDORSING at least the principle of a police-state surveillance society.
I value my privacy and civil rights more than the need to exterminate petty crime.
Jamie Scott is a demagogue and a loon, and you are no better.
My Response:
It is strange how you ask how stupid I am when it is patently obvious that you are either too lazy or too stupid yourself to read. I clearly imply the difference between CCTV and live feed is the time lapse (ie immediate versus handing it over to the police at a later time). Was that perhaps too subtle for you to grasp?
And as for your insinuation that Mr. Scott has no respect for privacy and civil liberties, it is false. Your understanding of privacy law in relation to being photographed and/or videotaped is lacking. When in public you have no reasonable right to privacy unless it is a special area that you would ordinarily assume to be private (ie public washrooms) or unless the photography/videotape is to be distributed for commercial purposes in which case they require consent. On private property you can photograph/videotape whomever you want as long as you obtain their consent which can be implied (ie a sign that says "Smile you're on camera" is sufficient).
The law is already clearly established. Mr. Scott does not have to bend or break the law, nor create a new law to make this happen. So in principle your objection should lie with the current political and legal establishment and not with Mr. Scott.
If you'd like to debate the basis of the legality of having a live link in places of commerce that are open to the public we can certainly do that, but the case law precedents are already established.
GF:
Again, you fail to address the main point. The issue is not CCTV, which is a problem in itself and should be limited or removed from most areas, but rather Jamie Scott's notion that there should be INSTANT connections to the police. Jamie Scott endorses a police state. I oppose a police state; hence, I oppose Jamie Scott. You, on the other hand, have no problem with it, and are an apologist for Jamie Scott.
My response:
As I've learned from a poster on here (my note: that would be Greg Felton himself, his original accusation being that no one can make an absolute claim to the Truth, ironic that he changes his argument to suite what agenda he currently needs to push I.e. Privacy rights are absolute), there is no such thing as absolutes, hence no such thing as an absolute right to privacy. You go on about respect for individual liberties but I know you also realize that with this respect comes the recognition that liberties are not unlimited and are necessarily reigned in otherwise society could not function. You seek to frame this as black and white issue when it is not and you seek to paint those you disagree with as advocates of a police state, when in fact Mr. Scott is pointing the police in the direction they should be going, preventing and deterring crime in co-operation with the citizenry, rather than pointing them at law abiding citizens without the consent of the people.
So you may oppose Mr. Scott, but if you're honest and not a hypocrite about it, the reason you oppose him is NOT based on the flimsiest of notions that the speed of connection to the police somehow makes him a fascist. Especially when we are talking about voluntarily entering into contracts, be it with government bodies or with private individuals, which every libertarian would support and protect, the right to enter into contract.
GF:
You really are dense, aren't you. Jamie Scott clearly endorses police-state surveillance, yet, as a hypocrite, you deliberately gloss over it to make excuses for it. This IS a black-and-white issue: the POLICE have no right to spy on me ANYWHERE. If you cannot understand this, you are cognitively impaired.
Your last paragraph is simply inane. I oppose police state surveillance and that makes ME a fascist? Puhleeeeeeze!! Also, neither you nor Jamie Scott has the least understanding of the law of contracts, or what does or does not constitute unwarranted intrusions of privacy. You both are simply undereducated, anti-statist radicals masquerading as democratic reformers.
Keep on posting: the more you do the more ridiculous you look, and the more insane Jamie Scott looks.
My Response:
-If you cannot understand this, you are cognitively impaired.
If you are looking for cognitively impaired just grab the nearest mirror.
Let me state this more clearly and simply so you can understand. If you are in public, you can be filmed by anyone as long as it is not for commercial purposes. I can take my iPhone out and record your image and you cannot stop me. However what I do with it afterwards may expose me to certain tort liability. If you step onto my private property, as long as I made you aware the cameras exist, I can record your image.
Your rights consist of avoiding areas with cameras in public and you have the right to refuse to do business with shops that have cameras, you also have the right to sue if someone uses your image in a way that makes it a tort offense.
These laws and the interpretations apply to everyone, including police, who are both authorities of the state but are also citizens at the same time. So you may not like that they can film you at a demonstrations (which they frequently do), but as an activist you legally have the right to film them as well, in public.
There is currently a push to make the filming of politicians and police illegal. THIS is what should concern you, the unequal playing field. THIS would be an example of the police state, increasing police powers or restricting citizen rights.
What you fail to grasp is that if you are against the state having the right to film you in public or having access to commercial establishments at the behest of the owners, then you have to change the law for everyone, not just the state authorities. The same legal basis that seeks to prevent laws being passed that target specific groups unfairly also in this case protects the states right to film it citizens in public. So you have to repeal it for citizens as well. Which is certainly a conversation that can be had, but will no doubt have a host of unintended consequences. So you still think it is a black and white issue?
-Your last paragraph is simply inane. I oppose police state surveillance and that makes ME a fascist?
An unfortunate phrasing that sounded better out loud than in writing. I've corrected it. To clarify, the speed of which one can contact the police does not make one a fascist. I wouldn't classify you as a fascist, fascists actually do something.
-Also, neither you nor Jamie Scott has the least understanding of the law of contracts...
Then please enlighten the rest of us with your deep knowledge of contract and privacy law. I would enjoy responding to something other than your petulant rants. You can start by presenting case law that says you cannot film someone in public for non-commercial purposes. Good luck finding that.
-Keep on posting: the more you do the more ridiculous you look, and the more insane Jamie Scott looks.
As you keep moving the goalposts, I still keep making touchdowns.
PS. Please also tell the audience how one can endorse a police state but be an anti-statist at the same time? Inquiring minds and all that.
This post is getting long so I'll end this section here and start a new one with Felton's always hilarious response.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Prop 8 Struck Down
Every once in awhile I'll run across an article that will irritate me to no end.
I belong to a group called GOOD which sends out daily e-mails that update me on what good things are happening in the world.
One was about Prop 8 and how it got repealed.
Some well meaning person no doubt sought to then educate us on why homosexuality is wrong by posting this link.
Always up for a laugh I gave the article by Dennis Prager a read. I had figured I'd be reading an article about how being gay offends JHVH blah blah blah... And I got that but so much more. It was the so much more that I found irritating.
You can't really argue the premise that the bible/Torah is the divinely inspired word of God. It is not subject to falsifiability so it is a waste of time to argue as we cannot prove empirically that God did inspire the word or if it was just the creation of man.
I would begin be arguing that every single behavior that he lists in his fourth paragraph could be attributed to the fact that society actively sublimates their sexual behavior by making sex scarce and making people ashamed of their impulses. Anthropologists would tend to agree that natives that lived mostly naked were less prone to fetishistic behavior.
I'm also sure the gay community will fully appreciate how Mr. Prager blurs the line between pedophilia, rape, and homosexuality. And how he characterizes the male homosexual as incapable of establishing meaningful long-term relationships by painting them as serial monogamist-polygamists. Mr. Prager is mostly silent on the subject of lesbianism as the bible is mostly silent on the subject showing that like most guys God likes to watch two chicks get tender with one another or as Mr. Prager justifies it, lesbians have far fewer partners than their gay male compadres. Could it be that there is nothing more destructive in the universe than unrestrained cocks? To paraphrase CK Louis; do two guys touching dicks as God eats his breakfast cereal ruin His entire day?
Which also begs the question of why Judaism, Christianity and Islam became so popular. I would hazard to guess that through sexual repression it makes men channel there sexual frustrations into other less satisfying pursuits. By confining sexual release to within the bounds of holy matrimony you are setting up for a situation where men have to "prove" themselves worthy of the sacrament of marriage (ie distinguish themselves through riches, fame, glory). This tactic is no different than the first of Porter's five forces, raising the barrier to new entrants, in this case the barrier is marriage, and the new entrants are all of this men not worthy of marriage.
So where to stick these frustrated men who cannot find legitimate release that is acceptable to Muslim, Christian, and Jewish society? On the front lines of course. Hence the rapid an sustained growth of all the Abrahamic religions. You have available a legion of pissed off men looking for glory and to blow off a little bit of steam. 70 virgins in the afterlife for martyrdom? Sounds like good motivation to wage war to me. It is supremely ironic when Mr. Prager says that Judaism is adamant that men should get married and is equally worried when men do not channel their passions into marriage. Judeo-Christian religion is set up, by accident or design, to create these tensions and pressures and as the old saying goes, misery loves company. Nothing pisses off a culture more than all the sex it isn't having and could be having and it is being had by someone else (i.e. godless pagans aka the North American Indian anyone?)
The next bit of "evidence" to the supposed superiority of Judaism was the examples of Roman, Greek, Egyptian and Hindu gods being ascribed various sexual roles and how JHVH was in essence asexual. It is no surprise that ancient people's would project some of the same idiosyncratic tendencies that they themselves suffer from. JHVH was envisioned to be above all that and more perfect (debatable). I would also challenge the notion that JHVH was asexual as man was made in His image implying that God resembled a man.
Dennis then makes the leap that the rigid sexual control demonstrated by Judaism allowed society to progress. He takes the progress as proof positive that it was due to restricting sexual access. In science what you would do is a multi-variant linear regression to see if sexually repression was the independent variable that progression was dependent upon. I see no such analysis. I can say that when Rome collapsed it was a Christian empire. The Greeks did great work in mathematics, philosophy and logic back in the butt bandit era, Chinese invented gun powder without having to put their penis' in a vise.
In the next section Mr. Prager gets into the concept of Judaism inventing the concept of homosexuality and he quotes a passage about ancient sexual morality revolving around the penetrator and penetrated and how it conferred status to be the penetrator. Which leads me to the hypothesis that the originators of Judaism were most likely had the tendency to be catchers in the order of the day rather than pitchers. How to fix that? Establish an ideology that confine the pitching to a narrow range of targets during a narrow set of circumstances, shame and punish those that stray. Hence the lower status men remove themselves from whatever humiliation they were experiencing from the same sex interplay. Within Judaism they have changed the rules so they have the power and they will not be punished for their behavior but all others that do not submit and comply will be punished.
And to be fair in any social order it is not unreasonable to assume that not all men want to be catchers but because of the status associated with penetration not all men can be penetrators. Considering the status attachment to penetration it is also not unreasonable to assume that men of high status used the act of penetration as a tool of domination through rape hence it is easy to envision the need for a social order that confined sexual congress between the genders and sought to erase the status entitlements of penetration. You can count it as a partial success although I'm sure Mr. Prager takes little issue with the status entitlements that come from the penetration of the female, indeed it is stipulated that the female should be submissive to the male. Of course the bible does not explicitly OK the domination of the female through penetration and there are certain biological realities to accommodate procreative congress.
Mr. Prager would no doubt argue that as a "fundamental interaction" penetration between man and woman is not an act of domination but rather of love. The blind-spot in his argument that he sees that intercourse other than vaginal and same-sex interactions cannot be similarly driven by love and tenderness and that all such sex is seeking to dominate by default. Indeed he sees all sex that does not result in life or the potential of life, as death.
Where I agree with him is where he says that those that try to reconcile "immoral" sexual behavior with Judaism/Christianity should bear the onus of providing such proof. The Torah/Bible is very clear on where it stands and there is no compromise to be had.
Mr. Prager goes on to make an odd claim that Judaism both liberated people from their unrestrained sexual natures and made women less peripheral to the lives of men. I would argue that it imprisoned their sexuality and made them less happy for it and for women it enshrined their second class citizen status that endured in Judeo-Christian culture to this very day.
Mr. Prager makes the claim that the society most intolerant of homosexuality (Western Civilization) makes the greatest strides in the equality of women. While it is true that western civilization has made great strides in the pursuit of female equality, but if intolerance if homosexuality is the benchmark then you'd be hard pressed to find a more intolerant society than the middle east as no western nation I am aware of has the death penalty for being homosexual. And yet their women are among the most repressed in the world.
I find it laughable in the extreme when Mr. Prager makes the following statement:
"When male sexuality is not controlled, the consequences are considerably more destructive than when female sexuality is not controlled."
I find it laughable for two reasons:
He obviously has no concept of the history of patrilineal subjugation of the female which primarily rests on males controlling female reproductive biology through social and cultural means. Female sexuality has always been more repressed in general and repressed to the extreme in cultures subscribing to Abrahamic religions.
The second reason I find this laughable is one just has to look at the consequences of making sex scarce has on men, the level of unparalleled destruction of the earth and it's people from wars and exploitation. I am not making the case that there was no wars or aggression when sex was more freely available but the scale, scope and willingness to engage in wholesale slaughter has increased significantly. I would also argue that the adherence to an economic model that subscribes to a perpetual growth model is a partial result for the need to demonstrate ones worthiness for marriage and therefore ones worthiness for sex.
Mr. Prager only needs to contemplate that even with the social success of the Abrahamic religious models they have not stamped out homosexual behavior, indeed, even when the penalty is death. Why is that this behavior refuses to die out? Especially with it being self-limiting (i.e. does not generate children)? Of course the easy answer is to blame it on evil or flaws within human nature but there might be something to the comment from Mr. Prager's own words "Or one could argue that people are naturally (i.e., biologically) bisexual (and given the data I have seen on human sexuality, this may well be true)." So if it is true that people have a natural inclination towards bisexual behavior wouldn't that make Judaism prescriptions against homosexual acts counter to normal human behavior and therefore, unnatural?
Mr. Prager goes on to make the slippery slope argument against accepting the moral equivalence of per-marital sex (i.e. If we allow this then we open the door to incest, adultery, etc) thereby preventing any hope of meaningful relationships for those that are homosexual and indeed condemning them to sin by default for even if they remain celibate, that too is a sin in Judaism. A real damned if you do and damned if you don't scenario. Of course the third option is to marry the opposite sex but with that comes the expectations and demands of family and relations of a sexual nature that a homosexual would find abhorrent. How bad could it be? Consider if the roles were reverse and you as a heterosexual had to marry someone of the same sex. You might be persuaded to perform mechanically but there would be no love and you would duck your "marital" duties as often as possible. So perhaps the problem of the Abrahamic prescriptions against homosexuality boils down to the assumptions being made from a position of pure heterosexuality, a profound lack of empathy.
Of course this line of argument presupposes that homosexuality is not a choice and has a basis in biology which Mr. Prager does not recognize even though the literature supports a biological basis for homosexuality. As I have stated before in this blog, if homosexual behavior does not have a biological basis and is a choice, I cannot understand why anyone would choose a lifestyle that western civilization finds so offensive, and indeed puts their very well being in jeopardy when it would be so easy to flip a switch and "conform". Perhaps Mr. Prager could explain that to me.
Mr. Prager then makes the argument that homosexuality is an illness of the mind by first casting doubt on psychiatry's apparent inability to keep homosexuality in the DSM as a deviant illness, writing it off to political pressure (ie. social pressure). I would observe that this wouldn't be an issue if homosexuality was still listed in the DSM, indeed Mr. Prager would probably use that as additional evidence to support his argument, the fact that he doesn't agree that it has been delisted, he attacks psychiatry's morals and judgement history. He doesn't attack the decision, he attacks the institution.
Then he frames the debate by posing the question: Assuming there is such a thing as normal, is it normal for a man to be incapable of making love to a woman (or vice versa)?
He then confines the possible answers to three:
1. Most Homosexuals can make love to a woman, but they find such an act repulsive or simply prefer making love to men.
2. Yes, it is normal.
3. No, it is not normal.
He says that if the first answer is correct then we would have to acknowledge that homosexuality is by and large a choice.
The second answer for Mr. Prager is a non-starter and he rejects it outright.
The third answer is what Mr. Prager subscribes to based on the reasoning that men are designed to make love to women and compares it to an eye. Eyes are designed to see, thus even if the majority were blind, blindness cannot be considered the normal function of the eye. Thus homosexuality is not normal, not based on it's minority status, but based on design, and as such, is unhealthy and should be considered an illness.
Let's examine his question in the context of what he has written on the subject. Normal would encompass a range of sexual behaviour, as he himself has stated that from the data he has observed humans are generally some mixture of bisexual. And there would be a range of behaviors. Of course when he uses "normal" in the question, he is referring to its ordinary meaning in the context of his essay, normal being the equivalent of heterosexual acts. He is clever in his phrasing because for the vast majority of men and women, they could indeed mechanically perform the sexual act. His choice of the phrase "making love" rather than the more proper phrase "engage in sexual intercourse" implies that men and women should be able to ascribe to the Judeo-Christian ideal of sexual interaction. It boils down to a semantic trick. Men generally, no matter what their leaning can engage in sexual congress with females, it is rare the man who cannot perform with women. He is targeting the extremes of homosexuality, of which, are rare, but consider also, pure heterosexuality is equally rare. Thus his question is framed to cast homosexuality as an extreme, or if it is not an extreme then reduces it to a trivial choice.
Reverse the question: Is it normal for a man to be incapable of making love to a man (or a woman to a woman)?
Look at how the first answer changes:
1. Most Heterosexual men(women) can make love to a man(woman), but they find such an act repulsive or simply prefer making love to the opposite sex.
Given that the data Mr. Prager has reviewed that lends creedence to the fact that humans are varying degrees bisexual, gives lie to his original question.
Answer two is still a non-starter because of his implied definition of normal (being equivalent to heterosexual acts).
Answer three is the default because of the implied definition of normal.
With answer one Mr. Prager seems to get the idea of "choice" and "preference" mixed up. Although similar concepts, they are not equivalent. Choice is immediate, preference is long-term and ingrained. You can choose counter to your preference, for a time. A strongly heterosexual man can choose a male relationship, but he will not be happy and eventually his heterosexual nature will reassert itself. Vice versa, a strongly homosexual male can choose a heterosexual relationship but eventually his nature will reassert itself.
With answer three Mr. Prager seems to think that there is only one kind of sexual interaction. Man is designed to procreate with a woman this is true, but Mr. Prager is confusing procreation with sex. As demonstrated throughout history, one can have sex and not procreate. Of course this argument is a non-starter for Mr. Prager as he seems to acknowledge only sex for procreation and only within marriage.
I would finally point out the irony in the aspersions Mr. Prager heaps upon the area of psychiatry accusing them of caving to political and social pressure, when in next section he praises Judaisms counter-culture beginnings when it stood up and told the ancient world that it was wrong in its interpretation of human sexuality. Judiasm started from a minority position (as a religion), but through social and political pressure has managed become the basis of the dominate religions today and has also, as a side "benefit", repressed the homosexual minority. So is it any wonder after 3000 years of persecution by the various Abrahamic religions that LGBT are banding together to exert their own changes through social and political pressure?
I belong to a group called GOOD which sends out daily e-mails that update me on what good things are happening in the world.
One was about Prop 8 and how it got repealed.
Some well meaning person no doubt sought to then educate us on why homosexuality is wrong by posting this link.
Always up for a laugh I gave the article by Dennis Prager a read. I had figured I'd be reading an article about how being gay offends JHVH blah blah blah... And I got that but so much more. It was the so much more that I found irritating.
You can't really argue the premise that the bible/Torah is the divinely inspired word of God. It is not subject to falsifiability so it is a waste of time to argue as we cannot prove empirically that God did inspire the word or if it was just the creation of man.
I would begin be arguing that every single behavior that he lists in his fourth paragraph could be attributed to the fact that society actively sublimates their sexual behavior by making sex scarce and making people ashamed of their impulses. Anthropologists would tend to agree that natives that lived mostly naked were less prone to fetishistic behavior.
I'm also sure the gay community will fully appreciate how Mr. Prager blurs the line between pedophilia, rape, and homosexuality. And how he characterizes the male homosexual as incapable of establishing meaningful long-term relationships by painting them as serial monogamist-polygamists. Mr. Prager is mostly silent on the subject of lesbianism as the bible is mostly silent on the subject showing that like most guys God likes to watch two chicks get tender with one another or as Mr. Prager justifies it, lesbians have far fewer partners than their gay male compadres. Could it be that there is nothing more destructive in the universe than unrestrained cocks? To paraphrase CK Louis; do two guys touching dicks as God eats his breakfast cereal ruin His entire day?
Which also begs the question of why Judaism, Christianity and Islam became so popular. I would hazard to guess that through sexual repression it makes men channel there sexual frustrations into other less satisfying pursuits. By confining sexual release to within the bounds of holy matrimony you are setting up for a situation where men have to "prove" themselves worthy of the sacrament of marriage (ie distinguish themselves through riches, fame, glory). This tactic is no different than the first of Porter's five forces, raising the barrier to new entrants, in this case the barrier is marriage, and the new entrants are all of this men not worthy of marriage.
So where to stick these frustrated men who cannot find legitimate release that is acceptable to Muslim, Christian, and Jewish society? On the front lines of course. Hence the rapid an sustained growth of all the Abrahamic religions. You have available a legion of pissed off men looking for glory and to blow off a little bit of steam. 70 virgins in the afterlife for martyrdom? Sounds like good motivation to wage war to me. It is supremely ironic when Mr. Prager says that Judaism is adamant that men should get married and is equally worried when men do not channel their passions into marriage. Judeo-Christian religion is set up, by accident or design, to create these tensions and pressures and as the old saying goes, misery loves company. Nothing pisses off a culture more than all the sex it isn't having and could be having and it is being had by someone else (i.e. godless pagans aka the North American Indian anyone?)
The next bit of "evidence" to the supposed superiority of Judaism was the examples of Roman, Greek, Egyptian and Hindu gods being ascribed various sexual roles and how JHVH was in essence asexual. It is no surprise that ancient people's would project some of the same idiosyncratic tendencies that they themselves suffer from. JHVH was envisioned to be above all that and more perfect (debatable). I would also challenge the notion that JHVH was asexual as man was made in His image implying that God resembled a man.
Dennis then makes the leap that the rigid sexual control demonstrated by Judaism allowed society to progress. He takes the progress as proof positive that it was due to restricting sexual access. In science what you would do is a multi-variant linear regression to see if sexually repression was the independent variable that progression was dependent upon. I see no such analysis. I can say that when Rome collapsed it was a Christian empire. The Greeks did great work in mathematics, philosophy and logic back in the butt bandit era, Chinese invented gun powder without having to put their penis' in a vise.
In the next section Mr. Prager gets into the concept of Judaism inventing the concept of homosexuality and he quotes a passage about ancient sexual morality revolving around the penetrator and penetrated and how it conferred status to be the penetrator. Which leads me to the hypothesis that the originators of Judaism were most likely had the tendency to be catchers in the order of the day rather than pitchers. How to fix that? Establish an ideology that confine the pitching to a narrow range of targets during a narrow set of circumstances, shame and punish those that stray. Hence the lower status men remove themselves from whatever humiliation they were experiencing from the same sex interplay. Within Judaism they have changed the rules so they have the power and they will not be punished for their behavior but all others that do not submit and comply will be punished.
And to be fair in any social order it is not unreasonable to assume that not all men want to be catchers but because of the status associated with penetration not all men can be penetrators. Considering the status attachment to penetration it is also not unreasonable to assume that men of high status used the act of penetration as a tool of domination through rape hence it is easy to envision the need for a social order that confined sexual congress between the genders and sought to erase the status entitlements of penetration. You can count it as a partial success although I'm sure Mr. Prager takes little issue with the status entitlements that come from the penetration of the female, indeed it is stipulated that the female should be submissive to the male. Of course the bible does not explicitly OK the domination of the female through penetration and there are certain biological realities to accommodate procreative congress.
Mr. Prager would no doubt argue that as a "fundamental interaction" penetration between man and woman is not an act of domination but rather of love. The blind-spot in his argument that he sees that intercourse other than vaginal and same-sex interactions cannot be similarly driven by love and tenderness and that all such sex is seeking to dominate by default. Indeed he sees all sex that does not result in life or the potential of life, as death.
Where I agree with him is where he says that those that try to reconcile "immoral" sexual behavior with Judaism/Christianity should bear the onus of providing such proof. The Torah/Bible is very clear on where it stands and there is no compromise to be had.
Mr. Prager goes on to make an odd claim that Judaism both liberated people from their unrestrained sexual natures and made women less peripheral to the lives of men. I would argue that it imprisoned their sexuality and made them less happy for it and for women it enshrined their second class citizen status that endured in Judeo-Christian culture to this very day.
Mr. Prager makes the claim that the society most intolerant of homosexuality (Western Civilization) makes the greatest strides in the equality of women. While it is true that western civilization has made great strides in the pursuit of female equality, but if intolerance if homosexuality is the benchmark then you'd be hard pressed to find a more intolerant society than the middle east as no western nation I am aware of has the death penalty for being homosexual. And yet their women are among the most repressed in the world.
I find it laughable in the extreme when Mr. Prager makes the following statement:
"When male sexuality is not controlled, the consequences are considerably more destructive than when female sexuality is not controlled."
I find it laughable for two reasons:
He obviously has no concept of the history of patrilineal subjugation of the female which primarily rests on males controlling female reproductive biology through social and cultural means. Female sexuality has always been more repressed in general and repressed to the extreme in cultures subscribing to Abrahamic religions.
The second reason I find this laughable is one just has to look at the consequences of making sex scarce has on men, the level of unparalleled destruction of the earth and it's people from wars and exploitation. I am not making the case that there was no wars or aggression when sex was more freely available but the scale, scope and willingness to engage in wholesale slaughter has increased significantly. I would also argue that the adherence to an economic model that subscribes to a perpetual growth model is a partial result for the need to demonstrate ones worthiness for marriage and therefore ones worthiness for sex.
Mr. Prager only needs to contemplate that even with the social success of the Abrahamic religious models they have not stamped out homosexual behavior, indeed, even when the penalty is death. Why is that this behavior refuses to die out? Especially with it being self-limiting (i.e. does not generate children)? Of course the easy answer is to blame it on evil or flaws within human nature but there might be something to the comment from Mr. Prager's own words "Or one could argue that people are naturally (i.e., biologically) bisexual (and given the data I have seen on human sexuality, this may well be true)." So if it is true that people have a natural inclination towards bisexual behavior wouldn't that make Judaism prescriptions against homosexual acts counter to normal human behavior and therefore, unnatural?
Mr. Prager goes on to make the slippery slope argument against accepting the moral equivalence of per-marital sex (i.e. If we allow this then we open the door to incest, adultery, etc) thereby preventing any hope of meaningful relationships for those that are homosexual and indeed condemning them to sin by default for even if they remain celibate, that too is a sin in Judaism. A real damned if you do and damned if you don't scenario. Of course the third option is to marry the opposite sex but with that comes the expectations and demands of family and relations of a sexual nature that a homosexual would find abhorrent. How bad could it be? Consider if the roles were reverse and you as a heterosexual had to marry someone of the same sex. You might be persuaded to perform mechanically but there would be no love and you would duck your "marital" duties as often as possible. So perhaps the problem of the Abrahamic prescriptions against homosexuality boils down to the assumptions being made from a position of pure heterosexuality, a profound lack of empathy.
Of course this line of argument presupposes that homosexuality is not a choice and has a basis in biology which Mr. Prager does not recognize even though the literature supports a biological basis for homosexuality. As I have stated before in this blog, if homosexual behavior does not have a biological basis and is a choice, I cannot understand why anyone would choose a lifestyle that western civilization finds so offensive, and indeed puts their very well being in jeopardy when it would be so easy to flip a switch and "conform". Perhaps Mr. Prager could explain that to me.
Mr. Prager then makes the argument that homosexuality is an illness of the mind by first casting doubt on psychiatry's apparent inability to keep homosexuality in the DSM as a deviant illness, writing it off to political pressure (ie. social pressure). I would observe that this wouldn't be an issue if homosexuality was still listed in the DSM, indeed Mr. Prager would probably use that as additional evidence to support his argument, the fact that he doesn't agree that it has been delisted, he attacks psychiatry's morals and judgement history. He doesn't attack the decision, he attacks the institution.
Then he frames the debate by posing the question: Assuming there is such a thing as normal, is it normal for a man to be incapable of making love to a woman (or vice versa)?
He then confines the possible answers to three:
1. Most Homosexuals can make love to a woman, but they find such an act repulsive or simply prefer making love to men.
2. Yes, it is normal.
3. No, it is not normal.
He says that if the first answer is correct then we would have to acknowledge that homosexuality is by and large a choice.
The second answer for Mr. Prager is a non-starter and he rejects it outright.
The third answer is what Mr. Prager subscribes to based on the reasoning that men are designed to make love to women and compares it to an eye. Eyes are designed to see, thus even if the majority were blind, blindness cannot be considered the normal function of the eye. Thus homosexuality is not normal, not based on it's minority status, but based on design, and as such, is unhealthy and should be considered an illness.
Let's examine his question in the context of what he has written on the subject. Normal would encompass a range of sexual behaviour, as he himself has stated that from the data he has observed humans are generally some mixture of bisexual. And there would be a range of behaviors. Of course when he uses "normal" in the question, he is referring to its ordinary meaning in the context of his essay, normal being the equivalent of heterosexual acts. He is clever in his phrasing because for the vast majority of men and women, they could indeed mechanically perform the sexual act. His choice of the phrase "making love" rather than the more proper phrase "engage in sexual intercourse" implies that men and women should be able to ascribe to the Judeo-Christian ideal of sexual interaction. It boils down to a semantic trick. Men generally, no matter what their leaning can engage in sexual congress with females, it is rare the man who cannot perform with women. He is targeting the extremes of homosexuality, of which, are rare, but consider also, pure heterosexuality is equally rare. Thus his question is framed to cast homosexuality as an extreme, or if it is not an extreme then reduces it to a trivial choice.
Reverse the question: Is it normal for a man to be incapable of making love to a man (or a woman to a woman)?
Look at how the first answer changes:
1. Most Heterosexual men(women) can make love to a man(woman), but they find such an act repulsive or simply prefer making love to the opposite sex.
Given that the data Mr. Prager has reviewed that lends creedence to the fact that humans are varying degrees bisexual, gives lie to his original question.
Answer two is still a non-starter because of his implied definition of normal (being equivalent to heterosexual acts).
Answer three is the default because of the implied definition of normal.
With answer one Mr. Prager seems to get the idea of "choice" and "preference" mixed up. Although similar concepts, they are not equivalent. Choice is immediate, preference is long-term and ingrained. You can choose counter to your preference, for a time. A strongly heterosexual man can choose a male relationship, but he will not be happy and eventually his heterosexual nature will reassert itself. Vice versa, a strongly homosexual male can choose a heterosexual relationship but eventually his nature will reassert itself.
With answer three Mr. Prager seems to think that there is only one kind of sexual interaction. Man is designed to procreate with a woman this is true, but Mr. Prager is confusing procreation with sex. As demonstrated throughout history, one can have sex and not procreate. Of course this argument is a non-starter for Mr. Prager as he seems to acknowledge only sex for procreation and only within marriage.
I would finally point out the irony in the aspersions Mr. Prager heaps upon the area of psychiatry accusing them of caving to political and social pressure, when in next section he praises Judaisms counter-culture beginnings when it stood up and told the ancient world that it was wrong in its interpretation of human sexuality. Judiasm started from a minority position (as a religion), but through social and political pressure has managed become the basis of the dominate religions today and has also, as a side "benefit", repressed the homosexual minority. So is it any wonder after 3000 years of persecution by the various Abrahamic religions that LGBT are banding together to exert their own changes through social and political pressure?
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
SOPA - A Threat to On-line Porn
SOPA (a tongue in cheek perspective)
I suspect that most men all over the world are not that fired up over the pending debate over the proposed SOPA in the US. I also suspect that their opinion would rapidly change as their sweaty little hands fervently gripped their fragile plastic mice in a horrifying death grip to learn the terrible truth that something they secretly hold dear is threatened by this very same law: yes that's right, on-line porn.
Putting aside the arguments of how low we have fallen as a society that we willfully debase women so men can debase themselves in private (or in public, but that is another matter entirely eh Mr. Wiener?). My view on the matter is that the porn industry is just a physical expression of the fucking each and everyone of us gets on a mental and emotional level. The porn industry is just much more honest about how many dicks you are getting per day. All very civilized no doubt.
Back to the online porn; as much as no man wants to admit it, porn built the Internet, if Yahoo was honest about the top search terms trending right now it wouldn't be "Peter Dinklage", "TSX", "Kate Beckinsale", "Angelina Jolie", and "Kelsey Grammer" it would be "pussy", "dick", "ass", "blow jobs" and "rash" or "STD" rounding out the top five.
Do not think for a moment that if SOPA passes that your on-line porn will be safe. If political speech can be targeted you can be sure that your days of watching clips of "Debbie Does Dallas...Again" are numbered. Are you going to let some puritanical politician pull the plug on your happy time? If you don't stop them now your going to go back to the days of the lingerie section in the Sears catalogue and believe me friend, after you've had so many good years of porn on demand this is not a path you want to take. It is like exchanging vaseline and kleenex for sandpaper and iodine. Our penis' deserve better.
Write your congressman, senator, mayor, minister , your sixth Grade teacher whom you had many sweaty nights over, the condom industry, the porn industry, the makers of KY, the manufacturers of Valtrex, write to whomever you think will stop this terrible Act from coming to pass. Vote now to stop SOPA. Married men, ugly men, undersexed men, oversexed men of the world unite!
I suspect that most men all over the world are not that fired up over the pending debate over the proposed SOPA in the US. I also suspect that their opinion would rapidly change as their sweaty little hands fervently gripped their fragile plastic mice in a horrifying death grip to learn the terrible truth that something they secretly hold dear is threatened by this very same law: yes that's right, on-line porn.
Putting aside the arguments of how low we have fallen as a society that we willfully debase women so men can debase themselves in private (or in public, but that is another matter entirely eh Mr. Wiener?). My view on the matter is that the porn industry is just a physical expression of the fucking each and everyone of us gets on a mental and emotional level. The porn industry is just much more honest about how many dicks you are getting per day. All very civilized no doubt.
Back to the online porn; as much as no man wants to admit it, porn built the Internet, if Yahoo was honest about the top search terms trending right now it wouldn't be "Peter Dinklage", "TSX", "Kate Beckinsale", "Angelina Jolie", and "Kelsey Grammer" it would be "pussy", "dick", "ass", "blow jobs" and "rash" or "STD" rounding out the top five.
Do not think for a moment that if SOPA passes that your on-line porn will be safe. If political speech can be targeted you can be sure that your days of watching clips of "Debbie Does Dallas...Again" are numbered. Are you going to let some puritanical politician pull the plug on your happy time? If you don't stop them now your going to go back to the days of the lingerie section in the Sears catalogue and believe me friend, after you've had so many good years of porn on demand this is not a path you want to take. It is like exchanging vaseline and kleenex for sandpaper and iodine. Our penis' deserve better.
Write your congressman, senator, mayor, minister , your sixth Grade teacher whom you had many sweaty nights over, the condom industry, the porn industry, the makers of KY, the manufacturers of Valtrex, write to whomever you think will stop this terrible Act from coming to pass. Vote now to stop SOPA. Married men, ugly men, undersexed men, oversexed men of the world unite!
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Greg Felton on the WCT - Craigslist Special
Greg Felton has gotten in the habit of making accusations that I am following him around the internet maligning him. So if he sees someone make a comment that bruises his ego, he immediately jumps on it and pins the comment on me.
Like so:
http://www.westcoasttruth.com/2/post/2011/12/how-do-you-feel-about-greg-felton-being-on-the-west-coast-truth.html
I would be flattered, except that I don't care. It was fun in the beginning, matching wits, exposing to the Craigslist community who was the guy behind the trash talk, it was a piece of investigative work that I was somewhat proud of. Once I realized that Greg is not one to change his stripes and behave in a civil fashion it became pointless, so I moved on to other things.
I still like to read his lacerating commentary directed at others less fortunate as I realized long ago that engaging him in discourse is an absolute waste of time and like any old dog you soon realize that his bark is worse than his bite.
Recently however CL posters were a featured sub-segment of one of Russell Scott's podcasts and he gave Greg Felton about 5 minutes to tear up Jamie Scott.
Transcript of the exchange:
From about 57:40 to 1:02:17
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCkTbW3WoBI
RS:Jamie Scott, You have anything to say about Jamie Scott? I don't think I've seen him on there lately.
GF: Ah, no, lets hope you don't. Huh. Jamie Scott is a bizarre character. I mean he came in the last election with the truth forum...
RS: I think Jamie Scott has some good ideas I am unsure about his motives, I'll just leave it there but I think he has some good ideas I don't think they are all that well formed however...go ahead
GF:Not for...anybody I, I question him yesterday about the Truth Party and how you can't call yourself the Truth Party the truth is not something you can own. The truth is a matter of perception. Once you call yourself the Truth Party then you become little more than a tyrant. Because you have for example pravda, in Russia, means truth, so does istina and um so you have the Russians say this is the truth, the party truth, you read this and well people...I was in Russia and people didn't really believe what they read. So Jamie Scott really is half-baked um I find him quite ridiculous. But he is also rather negative factor because there are some very good people out there who want to reform politics we need reform, we desperately need reform and we can't really respect independent thinkers if they act in such bizarre and totalitarian ways the way Jamie Scott did. When Jamie Scott really had I don't think had much to say. He had maybe a few ideas battling around his head but they were not formed, they were not developed, they were not formed, they weren't really ideas, they were like disembodied notions looking for a home and so I just found him quite ridiculous and I think he is dangerous in many ways, he poisons the political environment for other people who want to start up their own political party. If someone like Jamie Scott can say well this guy is a bit of a crank I mean he got nothing in the last election he made these outrageous statements, why am I going to trust any other independent...candidate, is he typical or what? So I thought it was...I think we'd be better off without him and I hope he sort of...I hope he stays away. I just don't think he ought....
RS: I am hearing more out of Stewart Easton than Jamie Scott these days.
GF: I don't hear much from St...I don't pay much attention to the forum anymore... I found it too much of an energy suck, that's why.
RS:Greg well enough with the politics forum.
GF: Yeah...
RS: I noticed that the politics forum I've noticed is kind of dead these days so...
End of Transcript
So I gotta ask? Is Jamie ridiculous? Or is Jamie dangerous? It doesn't appear to me that he could be both. I suspect you really think he is the latter for you dismiss his "disembodied notions" without addressing what they are and accuse him of being "bizarre" and a "totalitarian" and a "tyrant". Not a bad piece of work, if you worked for FOX news. I expected better from you.
I think Mr. Felton's understanding of our political system works is lacking. He seems to think that if we get a few non-mainstream candidates that don't tote the line then the perception of independents as a whole goes down the drain. I hate to break it to him but our entire political system is set up to favour parties, not independents. If he actually had partaken in the last federal election he would know this.
What Mr. Felton doesn't like is populists. He has said as much. And the list of what he deems as populist encompasses a fair number of parties/movements, well pretty much all of them except the main three parties and perhaps the Greens. What he doesn't acknowledge is even if populist movements don't get the reigns of power (and history says the deck is stacked against them), established parties will adopt populist measures if only to maintain their political legitimacy.
Let's talk about the last federal election.
I find it laughable that Mr. Felton points to the last federal election and makes statements like "he got nothing in the last election". What were you expecting Mr. Felton? Dona Cadman, whom by all accounts was a no-show for the last election, got about 13,181 votes.
All for doing nothing, because she had the backing of money and the momentum of being an incumbent. The winner of that riding Jasbir Sandhu, although not particularly articulate or impressive at the debates he showed up at, won by a over a thousand votes.
Let's look at what was spent. Shinder Purewal spent the most and came in third at $84,753. Dona spent the second most at $78,926. Jasbir spent the 3rd most but came in first, his price tag was $75,464. The range between difference spent the 1st and 3rd candidate is less than 10K, but all outspent the bottom 4 candidates many times over. Money buys elections. You can see some other factors that influence votes, such as name recognition (i.e. Green Party), but ultimately money is what gets you elected.
Jamie's performance wasn't atypical of most independents that ran.
You can see that his performance pretty much played out as was expected. As did all the independents with few exceptions. Not because he is outrageous, not because he is "totalitarian", but because he ran with little money and little support, as most independents do. Noteworthy is that Jamie did beat the Christian Heritage and Libertarian candidate which have traditionally beaten independents and more fringe party candidates like CAP in previous years.
Most astonishing is that at the debates where the Liberal and NDP candidate showed up, no one rebutted Jamie Scott's statement about how private (or chartered) banks are charging the government interest on money that could be issued interest free by the Bank of Canada. I mean, you would think that the other candidates would jump all over him, an opening like that. Not a thing. Except that the Libertarian candidate echoed his statement and the CHP candidate did as well. Response from the mainstream candidates? Zero. So you could draw the conclusion that most politicians do not have any idea how our monetary system works, or if they are in a party they just shut up about it.
I would say that I didn't see neither of you running, so whether Jamie's performance was good or bad is moot. He took a risk and engaged in the process, which is more than I can say for most. This is a great failing in our society, that we raise up our children to be afraid to fail, and by doing so condemn them to a life of mediocrity.
Let's discuss the nature of the name "Truth".
This brings back so many memories, this was the exact same argument you used way back in the day and it holds as much meaning then as it does now. To paint a clear picture, the name is irrelevant. It was something Jamie picked to encapsulate the "idea" that politicians should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us and should be obligated by law to be honest or suffer the consequences. "Truth" seems to capture the essence of that very well, it is a logical connection. What you are accusing him of is engaging in doublespeak without ever having demonstrated that Jamie has any Orwellian intentions what-so-ever. If it helps, lately he has been thinking about "BC United", hopefully that passes your doublespeak filter, oh wait, dammit, "United" he really means "divided". Let us get back to you on this, we might have to go with the "It" party or just The "Party" party, or the "the" party.
Sorry I'm going to segue to Russell for a second, because this fits in with Mr. Felton's accusations of tyranny and totalitarianism. First, you must realize the irony that the same issues Greg takes with Jamie's choice of name also would apply to the West Coast TRUTH. Second, why exactly are you unsure of Jamie's motives? Oligarchy relies on nepotism, trappings of privilege and influence. Jamie is not rich nor does he circulate in professional circles (lawyers, doctors, businessmen, bankers). Of course you could be unsure of other "motives", if so please enlighten me.
Back to the idea that politicians should be obligated to tell the truth. I would say that this is not an isolated feeling that only Jamie Scott harbors.
Is this blogger bizarre?
Perhaps Duff Conacher LL.B in this article for iPolitic.ca is equally "bizarre".
Or maybe it is the seed of an idea that maybe, just maybe, politicians should be held to the same standard of ethics that doctors or certified accountants are held to. If a doctor or accountant lies to their patient/client they are going to lose their job and their license, we don't wait a number of years to elapse then vote them out. Why on earth is it so hard to expect the same treatment for those that make all the important decisions for 4 year blocks of time?
Are we to assume that most of the population of Canada have infantile reasoning? Can I infer that by Greg's comment that a survey said over half of the people voted for Harper so they didn't have to vote again? And from Russell's comment from a previous show that you want only smart people like Jimmy Pattison running the economy?
If that is so then it follows that as children we need to be lied to. It also follows that the current government is a bad parent. As all good parents know, if you want your children to grow up and be responsible adults you need to tell them the truth about things.
Like so:
http://www.westcoasttruth.com/2/post/2011/12/how-do-you-feel-about-greg-felton-being-on-the-west-coast-truth.html
I would be flattered, except that I don't care. It was fun in the beginning, matching wits, exposing to the Craigslist community who was the guy behind the trash talk, it was a piece of investigative work that I was somewhat proud of. Once I realized that Greg is not one to change his stripes and behave in a civil fashion it became pointless, so I moved on to other things.
I still like to read his lacerating commentary directed at others less fortunate as I realized long ago that engaging him in discourse is an absolute waste of time and like any old dog you soon realize that his bark is worse than his bite.
Recently however CL posters were a featured sub-segment of one of Russell Scott's podcasts and he gave Greg Felton about 5 minutes to tear up Jamie Scott.
Transcript of the exchange:
From about 57:40 to 1:02:17
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCkTbW3WoBI
RS:Jamie Scott, You have anything to say about Jamie Scott? I don't think I've seen him on there lately.
GF: Ah, no, lets hope you don't. Huh. Jamie Scott is a bizarre character. I mean he came in the last election with the truth forum...
RS: I think Jamie Scott has some good ideas I am unsure about his motives, I'll just leave it there but I think he has some good ideas I don't think they are all that well formed however...go ahead
GF:Not for...anybody I, I question him yesterday about the Truth Party and how you can't call yourself the Truth Party the truth is not something you can own. The truth is a matter of perception. Once you call yourself the Truth Party then you become little more than a tyrant. Because you have for example pravda, in Russia, means truth, so does istina and um so you have the Russians say this is the truth, the party truth, you read this and well people...I was in Russia and people didn't really believe what they read. So Jamie Scott really is half-baked um I find him quite ridiculous. But he is also rather negative factor because there are some very good people out there who want to reform politics we need reform, we desperately need reform and we can't really respect independent thinkers if they act in such bizarre and totalitarian ways the way Jamie Scott did. When Jamie Scott really had I don't think had much to say. He had maybe a few ideas battling around his head but they were not formed, they were not developed, they were not formed, they weren't really ideas, they were like disembodied notions looking for a home and so I just found him quite ridiculous and I think he is dangerous in many ways, he poisons the political environment for other people who want to start up their own political party. If someone like Jamie Scott can say well this guy is a bit of a crank I mean he got nothing in the last election he made these outrageous statements, why am I going to trust any other independent...candidate, is he typical or what? So I thought it was...I think we'd be better off without him and I hope he sort of...I hope he stays away. I just don't think he ought....
RS: I am hearing more out of Stewart Easton than Jamie Scott these days.
GF: I don't hear much from St...I don't pay much attention to the forum anymore... I found it too much of an energy suck, that's why.
RS:Greg well enough with the politics forum.
GF: Yeah...
RS: I noticed that the politics forum I've noticed is kind of dead these days so...
End of Transcript
So I gotta ask? Is Jamie ridiculous? Or is Jamie dangerous? It doesn't appear to me that he could be both. I suspect you really think he is the latter for you dismiss his "disembodied notions" without addressing what they are and accuse him of being "bizarre" and a "totalitarian" and a "tyrant". Not a bad piece of work, if you worked for FOX news. I expected better from you.
I think Mr. Felton's understanding of our political system works is lacking. He seems to think that if we get a few non-mainstream candidates that don't tote the line then the perception of independents as a whole goes down the drain. I hate to break it to him but our entire political system is set up to favour parties, not independents. If he actually had partaken in the last federal election he would know this.
What Mr. Felton doesn't like is populists. He has said as much. And the list of what he deems as populist encompasses a fair number of parties/movements, well pretty much all of them except the main three parties and perhaps the Greens. What he doesn't acknowledge is even if populist movements don't get the reigns of power (and history says the deck is stacked against them), established parties will adopt populist measures if only to maintain their political legitimacy.
Let's talk about the last federal election.
I find it laughable that Mr. Felton points to the last federal election and makes statements like "he got nothing in the last election". What were you expecting Mr. Felton? Dona Cadman, whom by all accounts was a no-show for the last election, got about 13,181 votes.
All for doing nothing, because she had the backing of money and the momentum of being an incumbent. The winner of that riding Jasbir Sandhu, although not particularly articulate or impressive at the debates he showed up at, won by a over a thousand votes.
Let's look at what was spent. Shinder Purewal spent the most and came in third at $84,753. Dona spent the second most at $78,926. Jasbir spent the 3rd most but came in first, his price tag was $75,464. The range between difference spent the 1st and 3rd candidate is less than 10K, but all outspent the bottom 4 candidates many times over. Money buys elections. You can see some other factors that influence votes, such as name recognition (i.e. Green Party), but ultimately money is what gets you elected.
Jamie's performance wasn't atypical of most independents that ran.
You can see that his performance pretty much played out as was expected. As did all the independents with few exceptions. Not because he is outrageous, not because he is "totalitarian", but because he ran with little money and little support, as most independents do. Noteworthy is that Jamie did beat the Christian Heritage and Libertarian candidate which have traditionally beaten independents and more fringe party candidates like CAP in previous years.
Most astonishing is that at the debates where the Liberal and NDP candidate showed up, no one rebutted Jamie Scott's statement about how private (or chartered) banks are charging the government interest on money that could be issued interest free by the Bank of Canada. I mean, you would think that the other candidates would jump all over him, an opening like that. Not a thing. Except that the Libertarian candidate echoed his statement and the CHP candidate did as well. Response from the mainstream candidates? Zero. So you could draw the conclusion that most politicians do not have any idea how our monetary system works, or if they are in a party they just shut up about it.
I would say that I didn't see neither of you running, so whether Jamie's performance was good or bad is moot. He took a risk and engaged in the process, which is more than I can say for most. This is a great failing in our society, that we raise up our children to be afraid to fail, and by doing so condemn them to a life of mediocrity.
Let's discuss the nature of the name "Truth".
This brings back so many memories, this was the exact same argument you used way back in the day and it holds as much meaning then as it does now. To paint a clear picture, the name is irrelevant. It was something Jamie picked to encapsulate the "idea" that politicians should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us and should be obligated by law to be honest or suffer the consequences. "Truth" seems to capture the essence of that very well, it is a logical connection. What you are accusing him of is engaging in doublespeak without ever having demonstrated that Jamie has any Orwellian intentions what-so-ever. If it helps, lately he has been thinking about "BC United", hopefully that passes your doublespeak filter, oh wait, dammit, "United" he really means "divided". Let us get back to you on this, we might have to go with the "It" party or just The "Party" party, or the "the" party.
Sorry I'm going to segue to Russell for a second, because this fits in with Mr. Felton's accusations of tyranny and totalitarianism. First, you must realize the irony that the same issues Greg takes with Jamie's choice of name also would apply to the West Coast TRUTH. Second, why exactly are you unsure of Jamie's motives? Oligarchy relies on nepotism, trappings of privilege and influence. Jamie is not rich nor does he circulate in professional circles (lawyers, doctors, businessmen, bankers). Of course you could be unsure of other "motives", if so please enlighten me.
Back to the idea that politicians should be obligated to tell the truth. I would say that this is not an isolated feeling that only Jamie Scott harbors.
Is this blogger bizarre?
Perhaps Duff Conacher LL.B in this article for iPolitic.ca is equally "bizarre".
Or maybe it is the seed of an idea that maybe, just maybe, politicians should be held to the same standard of ethics that doctors or certified accountants are held to. If a doctor or accountant lies to their patient/client they are going to lose their job and their license, we don't wait a number of years to elapse then vote them out. Why on earth is it so hard to expect the same treatment for those that make all the important decisions for 4 year blocks of time?
Are we to assume that most of the population of Canada have infantile reasoning? Can I infer that by Greg's comment that a survey said over half of the people voted for Harper so they didn't have to vote again? And from Russell's comment from a previous show that you want only smart people like Jimmy Pattison running the economy?
If that is so then it follows that as children we need to be lied to. It also follows that the current government is a bad parent. As all good parents know, if you want your children to grow up and be responsible adults you need to tell them the truth about things.
Sunday, July 03, 2011
A House Divided...
I have decided to end my association with TZM and TVP. This is a decision that I do not enter into lightly but over the past few months I have endured a few epiphanies that have finally illustrated to me that TZM and TVP in their current configuration are not going to be able to break into the mainstream. The last straw was Douglas Mallette's interview on V-Radio.
I still support the idea of an RBE, it is something that should be explored further, but if TZM wants to take this further they need to get their house in order.
Why I've come to this conclusion is as follows:
1. As an organization you have been too middle of the road in who you let represent these ideas. I understand you want to propagate these ideas far and wide, but you can't let just anyone represent themselves as movement members and then spout off about whatever agenda they see fit. You let people bring in baggage eventually that baggage becomes incorporated in the movement.
I am burned out trying to effect damage control. Although there is truth that the "forum is not the movement" it is public, anyone can read it and anyone can draw all sorts of inappropriate conclusions based on it.
You need more moderation, not less. And you need private forums. Better yet get rid of on-line forums altogether. Conduct town hall meetings and invite the public, this way you know you are putting your best foot forward. Lastly they only people who should be talking about an RBE are people who have explicitly expressed an understanding of it.
2. Drop the Zeitgeist name, distance yourself from the first movie. It is long past due that you do this. The first Zeitgeist is not engineered as a piece that will unify any group of people. It is polarizing and misleading. I am still mystified as to why Peter Joseph paid to have people write a 200pg support document and then released a re-tweak of the original movie, especially at a time when he was distancing himself from 911 Truthers. It is time to accept that conspiracy theory, new age, ufo's, NWO has no place in TZM. These people are not your audience, I cannot grasp how you do not understand that. Repudiate the first movie, and re-brand your group. Take the good ideas and shed the garbage. The fact that some of the more prominent members are afraid to disclose who they represent at conventions for fear of alienating the crowd before thy begin is proof enough that perhaps the Zeitgeist franchise has worn out its welcome.
3. Stop pushing the collapse porn. Waiting around for the collapse to magically usher in the thinking and attitudes necessary to birth a new economic order (oops did I just say that?) is foolhardy and irresponsible. And it won't happen. As I've argued before on the forums you cannot wait for collapse because people are going to rebuild what they know, not something new. Hopefully you are turning a new leaf with the new association with the food drive in September, but what took you so long?
4. TZM is a movement that is based on the scientific method applied to social concern. So bloody well use the scientific method already. If it can't be made falsifiable or replicable and no empirical evidence exists, then stop talking about it. Useless speculation is useless.
You want the mainstream to take you seriously, then start helping, start being part of your community, polish up your image, build your street cred. Start by owning up to past mistakes, rather than plunging headlong at full speed from one disaster to another. Build a respectable foundation around the idea of a sustainable economy/community. That is all you need. Indeed that is all you ever needed.
I still support the idea of an RBE, it is something that should be explored further, but if TZM wants to take this further they need to get their house in order.
Why I've come to this conclusion is as follows:
1. As an organization you have been too middle of the road in who you let represent these ideas. I understand you want to propagate these ideas far and wide, but you can't let just anyone represent themselves as movement members and then spout off about whatever agenda they see fit. You let people bring in baggage eventually that baggage becomes incorporated in the movement.
I am burned out trying to effect damage control. Although there is truth that the "forum is not the movement" it is public, anyone can read it and anyone can draw all sorts of inappropriate conclusions based on it.
You need more moderation, not less. And you need private forums. Better yet get rid of on-line forums altogether. Conduct town hall meetings and invite the public, this way you know you are putting your best foot forward. Lastly they only people who should be talking about an RBE are people who have explicitly expressed an understanding of it.
2. Drop the Zeitgeist name, distance yourself from the first movie. It is long past due that you do this. The first Zeitgeist is not engineered as a piece that will unify any group of people. It is polarizing and misleading. I am still mystified as to why Peter Joseph paid to have people write a 200pg support document and then released a re-tweak of the original movie, especially at a time when he was distancing himself from 911 Truthers. It is time to accept that conspiracy theory, new age, ufo's, NWO has no place in TZM. These people are not your audience, I cannot grasp how you do not understand that. Repudiate the first movie, and re-brand your group. Take the good ideas and shed the garbage. The fact that some of the more prominent members are afraid to disclose who they represent at conventions for fear of alienating the crowd before thy begin is proof enough that perhaps the Zeitgeist franchise has worn out its welcome.
3. Stop pushing the collapse porn. Waiting around for the collapse to magically usher in the thinking and attitudes necessary to birth a new economic order (oops did I just say that?) is foolhardy and irresponsible. And it won't happen. As I've argued before on the forums you cannot wait for collapse because people are going to rebuild what they know, not something new. Hopefully you are turning a new leaf with the new association with the food drive in September, but what took you so long?
4. TZM is a movement that is based on the scientific method applied to social concern. So bloody well use the scientific method already. If it can't be made falsifiable or replicable and no empirical evidence exists, then stop talking about it. Useless speculation is useless.
You want the mainstream to take you seriously, then start helping, start being part of your community, polish up your image, build your street cred. Start by owning up to past mistakes, rather than plunging headlong at full speed from one disaster to another. Build a respectable foundation around the idea of a sustainable economy/community. That is all you need. Indeed that is all you ever needed.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
If you want to have your say just ask
So a curious thing happened when I posted yesterday, I got an anonymous comment from a poster that said the following:
Same day to which is highly unusual considering my little blog hasn’t gotten more than 1000 views in the 6 years it’s been up. People who come to my little humble site are mostly other movement members looking to see if I’ve covered a topic refuting a popular notion regarding TZM.
Then it hit me. Google alerts. By putting “Greg Felton” in the body of my blog of course it would trigger an alert. Given his anti-Zionist literature, no doubt he is very sensitive to the use of his name on the internet. Who else could it be? The question is who else would care enough to post on my backwater little blog?
So Greg, here is what I am going to do. I am going to post your arguments on my blog, unaltered and I am then going to post my rebuttals, compared in chronological sequence perhaps we can figure out if I indeed “bobbed and weaved and changed the subject.”
Some background for those of you coming into this late, I used to post ads on Craigslist in the politics sections advertising our meet and greats at the Vancouver Art Gallery. I stopped doing this however around January of this year because of the toxic environment I saw developing on the forum of certain elements against alternative ideas. Not wishing to offend or get embroiled it yet another debate on a public forum (I get into enough of those elsewhere) I decided to stop posting there. I still continued to read and would from time to time try to make contact with posters that seemed to be in line with our views or seemed to be looking for an alternative.
A couple of weeks ago a on-line publication called the West Coast Truth began advertising itself on Craigslist, nothing offensive or in your face, but they had the misfortune of having an ad for our latest documentary Zeitgeist: Moving Forward on their homepage. One or two posters began to pick on the publication, calling it an “organ” for the Zeitgeist Movement. This went on for awhile until I piped up and asked them what their beef was. And boy did they ever tell me!
“I saw the negative comments about West Coast Truth, and you deserved everything you got.
You didn't even make an attempt to address the points the person you say was "Greg Felton" brought up. You bobbed and weaved and changed the subject.
Also, I am certain there was at least one more voice against WCT, so don't accuse people without proof.”
Same day to which is highly unusual considering my little blog hasn’t gotten more than 1000 views in the 6 years it’s been up. People who come to my little humble site are mostly other movement members looking to see if I’ve covered a topic refuting a popular notion regarding TZM.
Then it hit me. Google alerts. By putting “Greg Felton” in the body of my blog of course it would trigger an alert. Given his anti-Zionist literature, no doubt he is very sensitive to the use of his name on the internet. Who else could it be? The question is who else would care enough to post on my backwater little blog?
So Greg, here is what I am going to do. I am going to post your arguments on my blog, unaltered and I am then going to post my rebuttals, compared in chronological sequence perhaps we can figure out if I indeed “bobbed and weaved and changed the subject.”
Some background for those of you coming into this late, I used to post ads on Craigslist in the politics sections advertising our meet and greats at the Vancouver Art Gallery. I stopped doing this however around January of this year because of the toxic environment I saw developing on the forum of certain elements against alternative ideas. Not wishing to offend or get embroiled it yet another debate on a public forum (I get into enough of those elsewhere) I decided to stop posting there. I still continued to read and would from time to time try to make contact with posters that seemed to be in line with our views or seemed to be looking for an alternative.
A couple of weeks ago a on-line publication called the West Coast Truth began advertising itself on Craigslist, nothing offensive or in your face, but they had the misfortune of having an ad for our latest documentary Zeitgeist: Moving Forward on their homepage. One or two posters began to pick on the publication, calling it an “organ” for the Zeitgeist Movement. This went on for awhile until I piped up and asked them what their beef was. And boy did they ever tell me!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)