dagblog - Comments for "Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and His Teabagging Epiphany"

one dot isn't enough data to

Beetlejuice — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 07:29:39 +0000

In reply to Taibbi just now realized that

one dot isn't enough data to make a picture.

Stopping abortions ain't

Austin Train — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 04:26:52 +0000

In reply to Of course it isn't going to

Stopping abortions ain't gonna happen either, but its been used by the right to get the Base out to the polls for 35 years.

Of course not. They always knew that if they outright banned abortion, even with it being upheld by the Supreme Court, their more emotional adherents (more on this below) would then call it victory and go home.

Emotions are the keys to this movement. The reason it's difficult to "understand" is that while it may have principles - in part - it is not a movement based in either principles or reason. "Take our country back" is not a statement of principle, it's a howl of raw emotion.

We cannot reason people out of things they have not been reasoned into.

Taibbi makes that point here:

This, then, is the future of the Republican Party: Angry white voters hovering over their cash-stuffed mattresses with their kerosene lanterns, peering through the blinds at the oncoming hordes of suburban soccer moms they've mistaken for death-panel bureaucrats bent on exterminating anyone who isn't an illegal alien or a Kenyan anti-colonialist.

Where is the reason in that? Who among you can tell me clearly how to reach and persuade those who hold these views to "come around" to anything close to our side?

Where on the graph do people holding such views and "reachable" intersect?

Maybe, just maybe, if we get cynical enough as a party to begin messaging directly targeting people's lizard brains, we can get some of the shock troops the Republicans have come to base their strategies on.

Our question then will become one of how to control them. All that classical business about riding tigers and all, you know.

Of course it isn't going to

NCD — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 03:57:59 +0000

In reply to He goes into other theories

Of course it isn't going to happen. Stopping abortions ain't gonna happen either, but its been used by the right to get the Base out to the polls for 35 years.

What a great thread and to

EmmaZahn — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 00:04:55 +0000

In reply to Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and His Teabagging Epiphany

What a great thread and to think I almost did not read it because of its headline reference to Matt Taibbi / Rolling Stone. Nice to see some of the shiny has worn off that particular darling duo of pseudojournalism.

In fact, it was blog-host Genghis' faintly anti-Taibbi scrolling comment that led me here. Then to have that comment produce its own mini-thread of duelling creationism followed by another on the tobacco wars ... pseudojournalism plus pseudoscience. It just boggles my mind.

I am so looking forward to the rest of the conversation.

The Sapiens employed the old

Elusive Trope — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 18:58:35 +0000

In reply to The latest stuff I read says

The Sapiens employed the old "if you can't beat 'em, genetically swamp 'em."

The latest stuff I read says

Donal — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 18:54:12 +0000

In reply to Read Orlando's scoop on the

The latest stuff I read says that we may have bits of Neandertal and Erectus DNA.

He goes into other theories

cmaukonen — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 16:33:59 +0000

In reply to Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and His Teabagging Epiphany

He goes into other theories of how the Teabaggers want to turn the clock back to the halcyon days of the past where the USA was the top of the heap, and you didn't have the government forcing you to serve everyone, including blacks, in your own restaurant or your business, Rand Paul has criticized that part of the 1964 Bill.

They may as well and try to force the water back into a gushing fire hose. It ain't gonna happen.

Not sure about Whitcomb and

NCD — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 15:53:42 +0000

In reply to Thanks for the correction,

Not sure about Whitcomb and land bridges, but the flood is explained by him as a rising up of the ocean floor, and a relatively flat world (otherwise where would the water come from to inundate it all? and most high mountains were created after the flood). Whitcomb does calculate the exact size of the Ark in railroad boxcars, and the length of the flood, 370 days, and says most animals hibernated on the Ark as feeding them wouldn't be possible. I studied evolution and creationism as a project a few years ago.

Near the end of the book Whitcomb emphasizes the importance of the flood as keeping man in line, man must know that God can punish him if he is naughty, a concept still prevalent on the right in America.

Thanks for the correction,

Michael Wolraich — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 15:32:00 +0000

In reply to Read Orlando's scoop on the

Thanks for the correction, NCD. It's not clear to me whether the evolution confusion was Orlando's error or her reporting of the creationsts' confusion. If the former, we will take severe punitive measures. Actually, we will take severe punitive measures either way just for the hell of it.

I love the kangeroo-hopping detail. It's such a great image. I suppose that there was allegedly a land bridge at that time?

Read Orlando's scoop on the

NCD — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 15:23:23 +0000

In reply to I'm going to hand the

Read Orlando's scoop on the Creation Museum. OK, but he got his evolution mixed up:

'that Homo Sapiens evolved from Homo Erectus, and before them Neanderthals, and before them Apes.'

We did not evolve from Neanderthals, they were on a different branch and died out, and we didn't evolve from apes, both modern humans and apes evolved from a species as yet not known millions of years ago, a species not alive now, not an ape or a human.

According to the Holy Grail of Creationism, Whitcomb's The Great Flood, published in 1960, the kangaroos hopped to the Holy Land to get on the Ark, and then hopped back to Australia afterward. Whitcomb explains every geological feature on earth as being caused by the flood, harking back to the theories of the early 19th century, called 'catastrophism'.

One problem for the creationists is why sea going creatures went extinct, as a flood wouldn't kill them, like ichthyosaurs or trilobites. In the book, Whitcomb states that he believes trilobites are still alive and out there, somewhere. Creationists never go 'out there', they just read other people's work and twist it to fit their own pre-conceived beliefs.