and they make fun of libertarians for posting tons of links from mises.org to prove their point.

well done.

yes, continue linking to some clown that makes claims that 'ron paul is in the pocket of the murderous brownshirt fringe and the people responsible for the oklahoma city bombings'. gmafb you muppet

and please enlighten us all regarding your views on the role of the federal reserve and how necessary its existence as opposed to the "loony rants" seeking transparency, a full audit, and an end to open market manipulation

It is a well known fact that Ron Paul's racism is a function of Phone Booth's opinion of the Federal Reserve.

While the article itself is not racist in that it does not use the n-word, only a racist would write it. You have no idea what the League of the South is, right? You don't know who Woods, DiLorenzo, etc. are, right?

Because Phone Booth does have that knowledge. It provides critical context. We can do this dance again, but us "muppets" will eventually make you guys cry.

Though I guess highlighting how stridently naive and terrible at rhetoric Ron Paul supporters are is pretty relevant to why his campaign needs a containment thread and has no chance of acheiving national relevance.

Needs to come up with a srs business big boy campaign like "hope" and "change?"

You really don't think it has any "national relevance?" Really? There is a huge difference between "chance of winning" and "being relevant."

It matters not how we label the sentiment.

In any case, Ron Paul shares your view of racism. One must be careful before accepting Ron Paul's condemnation of racism because the right has co-opted the term racism to use it against their critics - the new definition by the far right relies on selective use of pedantry to disqualify all but liberals who, in their mind, care far too much about the plight of non-whites or black people making an issue out of race and supporters of Affirmative Action but somehow not inclusive of those who incite racial hatred and fear using made up numbers and reminding people of negative stereotypes, nor those who use racial profiling against non-whites. This sort of literal and autistic view of what it means to be racist is designed so that any white supremacist can claim not to be racist, simply by carefully adding the word "culture" to description of every negative stereotype of other races.

And much of this reaction is reasonable. Because it's real - I'm not making stuff up, this is what is happening. One of the causes here is that basic standards for tolerance have run too far ahead of the real level of tolerance we have for others. We then refused to extend tolerance to these instances of intolerance. Here in American, this means many are stuck with beliefs that, in the mainstream view, are racist and homophobic. In some sense, this is quite unfair - being labeled a racist in a world the word "racist" has such dirty political connotations, when you yourself are quite harmless to those you may have some prejudice towards. So quite understandably, they go into the closet, associate with like-minded people with whom they can share the truth, relabel the word to shoot back at those who refuse to tolerate them, while relying on literalism and pedantry to explain how the dirty labels don't fit their rhetoric, but fit others'. This is how supporters of Ron Paul (among whom are actual Neo-Nazis) liken liberals (or other non-supporters of Ron Paul) to Nazis.

The problem with this picture is that shaming bigotry out of bigots doesn't work any better than shaming homosexuality out of homosexuals. Shaming can only repress and drive it underground, where it can grow and morph into new forms the public isn't yet innoculated. To the extent that bigotry is caused by discontent, real or imagined threats and hurt feelings, it represents something that must (and will) be addressed. We can't simply ignore actual feelings, just because those feelings are expressed in an extremely incoherent way, especially if the incoherence itself is driven by strong emotional needs. By repressing and ignoring, we risk increasing the level of discontent and ending up ruled by incoherence. Attacking its incoherence is fun, but it fuels the underlying emotions. I've addressed some of those in earlier posts before.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/41...litics-873483/

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=306

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=314

Though I do find it hilarious that the same far-right movement that was attacked by Krugman for being anti free-trade back in the days is now blaming Krugman for being anti free-market.

I would but this is off-topic and would be far too embarrassing for you. I've written more actual content on the topic of money than probably any 2p2 poster ever so it's not gonna be hard for you to dig up posts on this topic.

Google:

site:forumserver.twoplustwo.com phone booth federal reserve money

also:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/11...regime-397397/

also (edit) this post doesn't directly address the federal reserve, but follow the subsequent discussion in the thread:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=593

before I read the article from DiLorenzo, no i didn't have any idea.

I know of both Woods and DiLorenzo and admire them greatly.

You are the guys continually calling RPs real policy stances "loony" without providing any sort of counter argument, instead content to cry "racist" even though nobody here seems to actually think RP is racist.

The question, as has been pointed out over and over again, concerns actual policies. Are his policies racist compared to the competition?

PB thinks RPs Federal Reserve position is loony...would you care to actually address this? Just calling it loony and leaving it alone isn't very convincing... if anything it just shows that you are able to parrot whatever CNBC tells you.

I just don't get where you guys are coming from. There are real problems in the world today but you guys want to slag someone based on their opinion of Abraham Lincoln???

Until you guys start actually challenging RPs positions with reasonable and informed analysis you guys are going to keep being accused of trolling.

come again? and i remember that first thread you linked. you made multiple false assumptions and mistakes in a number of your posts and failed to address them properly when they were pointed out to you. but please, lets not let that interfere with you trying to blow yourself

as suggested to you earlier in this thread, i recommend turning your "analysis" on people's motives and beliefs on yourself and maybe try figuring out why you are such a douche. hint: a lot of people with your demeanor stem from an inferiority complex resulting from failures with women or not having many good friends

back to ron paul though!:

i think he has a decent chance of winning the ames straw poll. bachman is at 70% on intrade and paul only at 13% or so. but that market is thin so those numbers dont mean much

i booked a bit of action against a friend at +500 (paul 16.7%, i think it is decently higher though)

Supporting a candidate doesn't happen in a vaccum I should add, it happens against the backdrop of what the competition is like. So to truly judge whether RP is the right guy to support it should be done as a comparison.

So for example, the issues that are most important to me are:

War/Imperialism
The Drug War
The Environment
Civil Liberties
Corporatism

And for each issue the job is to compare RP to his competition, ie. Romney, Obama, Bachman, etc.

Now taking the war/imperialism issue, it is clear that no one except Gary Johnson can come close on this. If you are against the murder of middle easterners in a never ending resource war on terror, RP necessarily is already leagues against the rest of the pack, and if you accept that war is evil, the burden is on a supporter of a war monger like Obama to justify what good they are expecting in return, to off balance his slavish devotion to the Military Industrial Complex.

Part of me believes that I wasn't doing a a good job of explaining, but maddog2030 seems to have understood the gist of it without the benefit of my painfully detailed explanations and answering of questions later in the thread. So part of me also has to accept that something that is reasonably complicated will not ever be made understandable to those with an emotional stake in not understanding it. You're quite unfairly trashing the unbelievable amount of effort I put into making my simple theory understandable to laymen, despite hostile and bad-faith questioning from others.


I've done this, of course.


No doubt.


But not this.

Again, I'd rather talk about myself too, but this is way off-topic and you guys don't have sufficient information, expertise, interest, human experience, or capacity for self-reflection to make informed guesses. I completely concede that a careful reading of my posting history reveals a host of emotional issues, especially during the time that a lot of those posts were written. As does yours or anyone else's. I've written a lot of posts alluding to this as well - without any problem whatsoever, why would I post on 2p2 in the first place? It's a given. It's how those emotions are ultimately channeled that matters.

As much as I'd like to engage you guys in "I feel attacked so I'm gonna attack the messenger using what I perceive as his tactics" this is not an appropriate venue (and you guys are lightweight - FlyWf is much more skilled at this, for instance). You're also not reading what I've written. I'm somewhat more sympathetic to garden-variety racists than those who genuinely espouse Rothbardian libertarian/Austrian-economic theories. Ron Paul the racist is somewhat preferable to to Ron Paul the Rothbardian-Anarchist, because the former requires less distortion of reality for coherence and also is a closer reflection of potentially genuine feelings. And obviously I do think a lot of liberals, especially in the past, are guilty of not being sufficiently sympathetic to the real feelings behind the far right.

And my personal incredulity aside, I believe we should be tolerant of all those belief clusters, because feelings behind them are quite real. I'm not sure what to do about the fact that some of those belief clusters lead to strange world views, clashes with other belief clusters, even those that they are related to, and denial. But from a cognitive standpoint, it's necessary that fringe beliefs exist and that they seem strange to those who don't understand.

Successful governance entails aligning these belief clusters such that their concerns properly flow upward and keep them balanced. When this becomes no longer possible, you get political instability, which ironically punishes those on the political fringe much harsher than those in the middle. Many fringe groups unfortunately overplay their hand during these times because the period of instability was part of their vision makes them overconfident in the rest of their vision, not understanding the power of other fringe segments, some of whom are diametrically opposed, who also predicted this period, with religious conviction in their vision. All but the eventual winner (most often political realists, as opposed to purists) are crushed or purged in one form or another.

Phone Booth just so happens to be the one and only capable of psycho-analyzing their opponents effectively. everyone else, except Phone Booth, is just grasping at straws.

plausible?

I have one question from this:
The drug war is a liberal thing?
Prisons are a liberal thing?
Liberals endorse sending blacks to die in crazy foreign adventures?

I just find it odd that he classifies these as liberal. I'm fairly liberal, have a number of self-identifying liberal colleagues, most of who are against the drug war, think the prison population is ridiculous large, etc.

(maybe cruise missle liberal is a special kind of liberal that I'm not aware of?)

I agree with you that calling it 'liberal' is silly. I think it more refers to the fact that the liberals are the latest to not end it while in complete control and only republican candidates (be it few) speak about it.

Phone Booth you're just a big 'ol box of unfounded assumptions.

New York Times: "Iowa Polling to Test Paul’s Move to Mainstream"

RP has done hundreds of hours of TV interviews, voted on many bills, and interacted with many people in his long career as a politician. Where is his racist voting record?
Where has he slipped up and said racist things on TV? Where is the anecdotal evidence of people meeting RP and thinking that he is racist? Do the things that you actually do make you who you are, or is it the things that you think?

It's what you think. Tons of racist engineers have managed to go an entire career without producing a huge file of racist engineering.

I took "cruise missile liberal" to mean nominal liberals who meanwhile support status quo vested interests, military industrial complex, war on drugs, etc, whether they are "liberal" causes or not, ie Hope and Change Obomba.

Could you give an example of a bill where there was a racist and a not racist side?

The things send out as fundraising newsletters would seem to qualify. There's this weird subtext here that nobody is a racist unless they spend all day every day lynching black people you can't possibly be racist, and actually people who call you racist are the real racists, blah blah blah.


Seriously, both PB and I linked to a pretty indepth response to 26 common Ron Paul newsletter arguments. You, err, haven't read that article, have you? In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess you haven't read the newsletter articles, either.

Is he the first member of government to suggest that there will be blood in the streets?

(oops, meant to post this in the r.p thread.)

I question if there are any true liberal politicians these days.

Youtube link doesn't work. The URL contained a malformed video ID.

I'm sure some politician has used that phrase in the post 9/11 world by saying if we don't go to iraq they could come to us and there would be blood in the streets. The same for both world wars, vietnam. I have no objection to someone using "blood in the streets" in a truthful manner like RP has.