You know what really grinds my gears?

[hatzel]

Just thought I'd go on a little rant...decided OI would be better, because the inmates always seem to be more critical of leftist turns of phrase. So! Here are my ideas for things that should be outlawed. Preferably punishable by death or something less mean, whatever:



Chronic overuse of the word 'fascist' - have you ever been a German vegan and chained yourself to a Burger King and started calling the guy sitting outside Burger King with all his Turkish friends a fascist because he tells you you're stupid for chaining yourself to the door? Or was your response to the student protests here in England something along the lines of 'fucking fascist Cameron fascist'? Then you're overusing the word fascist. Last time I checked fascism involved something other than just eating meat or having a police force...
Use of the word 'reactionary' to mean 'conservative' - why must we still insist on doing that? Considering we seem to get so annoyed if anybody dares to some Social Democrat or Labour party as socialist, as this is misusing the term, why is it then okay for us to do away with the term 'conservative' and just use 'reactionary' for all non-revolutionary positions? Sure, I know it's tradition, but isn't tradition inherently reactionary? I mean conservative...or whatever...?
Playing the evolution card - I don't really understand why almost any topic on the religion board, no matter what the subject, will inevitably result in somebody coming out with something along the lines of 'there's evolution, thus there is no god', as if it had anything to do with the topic, or as if it went without saying that evolution and a deity are two mutually exclusive concepts. Really, please, I'm getting a little bored of this card. Not because it's indisputable evidence which cannot be disproved, but because it's a non-argument in the truest sense.
'A fact is only true if it agrees with my viewpoint' - in other words, just because something was said by a reactionary (or conservative, whatever), doesn't make it false, doesn't make it a conspiracy, doesn't make it anything. So no more of this automatic 'I don't trust these dozen newspapers citing this same story, show me this story in the leftist press'. There's a reason it's not in the leftist press, and that's because the leftist press, like all media agencies world wide, refuses to print anything which doesn't support it's viewpoint and political slant. I'm sure we all realise this, so just stop denying outright the possibility of anything that's absent from your preferred news hub being true.
I can't actually think of a fifth one at the moment, but five seems like a round number. Four rules sounds weird. Three, five, ten, something like that. So I heartily invite the inmates and others to give us all one (or six) more. Tell us...what really grinds your gears? :rolleyes:

[RGacky3]

I could add a couple rules to that such as.
1, Thats just the way it is argument, thats not an argument, thats a cop out, unless its a law of nature and can be proved to be such, then thats not an argument.

2. Unless an argument is about the topic being talked about, make a new thread, the way discussions work is you need a subject, so stay on the subject rather than trying to change it when you realized you can't win it.

3. Liberal does'nt mean anything, stop calling people liberals thinking its an argument.

4. Facts, statistics, outweight stuff you've seen. ALWAYS.

[hatzel]

Oh, another one:

No matter who it is who said the witty little quote on somebody's signature, if it's nothing to do with politics, it doesn't make the blindest bit of difference, so trying to discredit somebody's argument with a line like "that coming from somebody with a [insert name] quote" is kind of pathetic...so don't do that...

[ComradeMan]

Oh, another one:

No matter who it is who said the witty little quote on somebody's signature, if it's nothing to do with politics, it doesn't make the blindest bit of difference, so trying to discredit somebody's argument with a line like "that coming from somebody with a [insert name] quote" is kind of pathetic...so don't do that...

It's called a genetic fallacy!

I agree.

:cool:

[Blackscare]

Use of the word 'reactionary' to mean 'conservative' - why must we still insist on doing that? Considering we seem to get so annoyed if anybody dares to some Social Democrat or Labour party as socialist, as this is misusing the term, why is it then okay for us to do away with the term 'conservative' and just use 'reactionary' for all non-revolutionary positions? Sure, I know it's tradition, but isn't tradition inherently reactionary? I mean conservative...or whatever...?

Ok, think for a moment about what "reactionary" means. It means any force that reacts against a genuine socialist movement.

Social democrats can certainly be reactionary, take the practically sanctioned killing of Rosa Luxemburg by Friekorps the SDP allowed to operate.

"Convservatives", well, do I really need to state that they would most certainly play the role of reaction?


Reactionary is one of the few words on this site that I think is usually used correctly.

Now, of course, there is the problem of people referring to this or that tactic as "reactionary" within the radical left itself, because regardless of your view of Unions, for example, it's hard to actually illustrate how those among us in the movement that do work with unions are "reacting" against a socialist cause. Maoists seem to be really fond of this sort of misuse of the term, or so it seems.

[RGacky3]

THats not what reactionary means, reactionary means you want to go back to something in the past.

[#FF0000]

I don't think I see much abuse of the word "Fascist" around here, to be fair. And I think the word reactionary is more often than not used correctly. But I always figured that was a word that you applied to things in certain circumstances, you know? Like something is reactionary or revolutionary in regard to something else like feudalism to capitalism.

[hatzel]

Oh, I admit, they're not all actually about RevLeft itself :rolleyes: Really I'm just griping at comments I read on Facebook, for instance, and amongst...types who say stuff like that...

Generally, though, I'm not complaining with the use of this or that term here just...in general...

[Dean]

1. Chronic overuse of the word 'fascist' - have you ever been a German vegan and chained yourself to a Burger King and started calling the guy sitting outside Burger King with all his Turkish friends a fascist because he tells you you're stupid for chaining yourself to the door? Or was your response to the student protests here in England something along the lines of 'fucking fascist Cameron fascist'? Then you're overusing the word fascist. Last time I checked fascism involved something other than just eating meat or having a police force...

Fascist has a legitimate meaning, and it is the fusing of corporate and governmental institutions in the furtherance of the "national" interest, and against the interests of the majority in the nation, while outright competing with the interests of other nations. Most nations follow this model closely.


2. Use of the word 'reactionary' to mean 'conservative' - why must we still insist on doing that? Considering we seem to get so annoyed if anybody dares to some Social Democrat or Labour party as socialist, as this is misusing the term, why is it then okay for us to do away with the term 'conservative' and just use 'reactionary' for all non-revolutionary positions? Sure, I know it's tradition, but isn't tradition inherently reactionary? I mean conservative...or whatever...?

Liberalism today is reactionary. Conservatism today is reactionary. The meaning of this is that the expansion of power by a minority is reactionary (since we had been progressing to a more egalitarian arrangement of assets between 1930s-1970s).

The Democrats and other "liberal" parties are the closest we have to conservative parties.


3. Playing the evolution card - I don't really understand why almost any topic on the religion board, no matter what the subject, will inevitably result in somebody coming out with something along the lines of 'there's evolution, thus there is no god', as if it had anything to do with the topic, or as if it went without saying that evolution and a deity are two mutually exclusive concepts. Really, please, I'm getting a little bored of this card. Not because it's indisputable evidence which cannot be disproved, but because it's a non-argument in the truest sense.

Agreed, its a really asinine kind of argument against religion. Just cite the teapot-satellite and you'll be good :)


4. 'A fact is only true if it agrees with my viewpoint' - in other words, just because something was said by a reactionary (or conservative, whatever), doesn't make it false, doesn't make it a conspiracy, doesn't make it anything. So no more of this automatic 'I don't trust these dozen newspapers citing this same story, show me this story in the leftist press'. There's a reason it's not in the leftist press, and that's because the leftist press, like all media agencies world wide, refuses to print anything which doesn't support it's viewpoint and political slant. I'm sure we all realise this, so just stop denying outright the possibility of anything that's absent from your preferred news hub being true.
Agreed. Keynes and I. Berlin both have great ideas worth exploring, though leftists will disagree on a lot of their policy positions.


5. I can't actually think of a fifth one at the moment, but five seems like a round number. Four rules sounds weird. Three, five, ten, something like that. So I heartily invite the inmates and others to give us all one (or six) more. Tell us...what really grinds your gears? :rolleyes:
I disagree 100%.

[IcarusAngel]

Here are 10 things that Really Grind My Gears:

1. The fact that more than a billion people lack access to basic health care services, while over a billion people - the majority of them women - lack access to a basic education.

2. That tonight, there will be over one billion people on the planet who do not have access to clean, safe drinking water.

3. The fact that two billion people do not have a sanitary sewer system of any kind. About a third of the planet.


"And what is so terribly wrong about this is that we have the money and the know-how already in place to see that each and every one of them can have access to clean water and sanitation. This is not rocket science. This is not some plague for which we have no cure. It is simple, cheap, doable. The ability to do it has been around for decades. Instead, we have let the poor of the earth suffer unnecessarily. Why? How do we answer for this?

"It has been very easy for the bin Ladens of this world to point the finger at us and say, 'Look what they take from us - and look at how we get nothing in return!' America has only 5 percent of the world's population and yet we grab and use 25 percent of its resources. Did we think no one would notice?

"To top it off, we cut deals with many of these countries' leaders who are already oppressing their own people. And the oppressed in these countries know that.

"Enter George W. Bush and his oilmen/henchmen. Mix that in with everything else and it's like we've handed those who would hurt us the best recruitment ad around.

"Our new president, whose family, in part, comes from the Third World, could turn this all around with one simple decree:

'From this point forward, the United States of America is committed to being a good neighbor on this planet. We will prove that by starting with this pledge: We will gurantee that every citizen on earth has access to clean drinking water and sanitation by the year 2020. Your babies will no longer die of dysentery. Your elderly will get to live beyond their current life expectancy of 46. Your life will be better. And this will come to you courtesy of your friends in the USA.'

"Not possible, you say? Too expensive? How much do you think it costs to dig a well in a Third World village? $10 per person. That's right. Ten bucks. Folks, we can do this. As for the labor, it's a much better use of our young people's time than sending them to invade countries for things that don't belong to us.

"And throughout the poorest parts of this planet, where hatred of America is growing, every one of these wells and sewer systems will have the following words inscribed on them.

'Built for the people of this village as a gift from the people of the United States of America.'

If we want, we can add an asterisk: 'Please don't hurt us anymore.'" --Michael moore.

4. The fact that we spend vastly more money on the military fighting imaginary threats than we do on climate change, which is a real threat:

"How are we doing so far? I have measured the balance of what the federal government spends on its military forces and on climate change since 2008. The climate change budget has more than doubled since then, from $7 to $18 billion. During the same period, military spending has also risen, though at a slower rate: from $696 to $739 billion. As a result, we've cut the gap between them in half. We spent $94 on the military for every dollar we spent on the climate in 2008. We'll spend at a ratio of $41 to $1 in 2011."

http://www.commondreams.org/views_articles/2010/11

5. The fact that Obama is continuing American support of right-wing, anti-progress movements in Latin America, calling Chavez a despotic dictator, something even most political scientists would reject since he was a democratically elected leader who has not shutdown the opposition by force, while ignoring that American interventions in Latin America led to far worse crimes (http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/fdtcards/Cards_Index.html) than anything that Chavez has done.

The fact that Obama has been supporting the current Honduran government, which gave reason for the police attack against Correa (who won the election by a wide margin despite the fact that he was regularly attacked in the media) in Ecuador reason to believe their attempted coup against would be backed by the US.

Zelaya was ousted in a military coup, the elections, which were boycotted by most of the population, organized by Micheletti, and put Lobo in power. The Lobo government in Honduras has led to a wave of terror against gays and lesbians, journalists, trade unionists, and others, reminiscent of the types of governments that were put in by Washington during the cold war. Hilary Clinton then welcomed Honduras "back into the inter-American community."

The US is backing right-wing organizations such as USAID (which has given Hondorus millions of dollars for security projects and development programs, and the US has donated trucks and other military equipment to the country) and the NED.

(source: Counterpunch.org)

How the US does it:
The first step is to use the police. They're critical because they can detect discontent early and eliminate it before "major surgery" (as the planning documents call it) is necessary. If major surgery does become necessary, we rely on the army. When we can no longer control the army of a Latin American country-particularly one in the Caribbean-Central American region- it's time to overthrow the government.

Countries that have attempted to reverse the pattern, such as Guatemala under the democratic capitalist governments of Arevalo and Arbenz, or the Dominican Republic under the democratic capitalist regime of Bosch, became the target of US hostility and violence.

The second step is to use the military. The US has always tried to establish relations with the military in foreign countries, because that's one of the ways to overthrow a government that has gotten out of hand. That's how the basis was laid for military coups in Chile in 1973 and in Indonesia in 1965.

Before the coups, we were very hostile to the Chilean and Indonesian governments, but we continued to send them arms. Keep good relations with the right officers and they overthrow the government for you. The same reasoning motivated the flow of US arms to Iran via Israel from the early 1980s, according to the high Israeli officials involved, facts well-known by 1982, long before there were any hostages.

During the Kennedy administration, the mission of the US-dominated Latin American military was shifted from "hemispheric defense" to "internal security" (which basically means war against your own population). That fateful decision led to "direct [US] complicity" in "the methods of Heinrich Himmler's extermination squads," in the retrospective judgment of Charles Maechling, who was in charge of counterinsurgency planning from 1961-66.

The Kennedy Administration prepared the way for the 1964 military coup in Brazil, helping to destroy Brazilian democracy, which was be coming too independent. The US gave enthusiastic support to the coup, while its military leaders instituted a neo-Nazi-style national security state with torture, repression, etc. That inspired a rash of similar developments in Argentina, Chile and all over the hemisphere, from the mid-sixties to the eighties-an extremely bloody period.

(I think, legally speaking, there's a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They've all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes.)

The military typically proceeds to create an economic disaster, often following the prescriptions of US advisers, and then decides to hand the problem over to civilians to administer. Overt military control is no longer necessary as new devices become available-for example, controls exercised through the International Monetary Fund (which, like the World Bank, lends Third World nations funds largely provided by the industrial powers).

In return for its loans, the IMF imposes "liberalization": an economy open to foreign penetration and control, sharp cutbacks in services to the general population, etc. These measures place power even more firmly in the hands of the wealthy classes and foreign investors ("stability") and reinforce the classic two tiered societies of the Third World-the super rich (and a relatively well-off professional class that serves them) and an enormous mass of impoverished, suffering people.

The indebtedness and economic chaos left by the military pretty much ensures that the IMF rules will be followed-unless popular forces attempt to enter the political arena, in which case the military may have to reinstate "stability."

Brazil is an instructive case. It is so well endowed with natural resources that it ought to be one of the richest countries in the world, and it also has high industrial development. But, thanks in good measure to the 1964 coup and the highly praised "economic miracle" that followed (not to speak of the torture, murder and other devices of "population control"), the situation for many Brazilians is now probably on a par with Ethiopia-vastly worse than in Eastern Europe, for example.

The Ministry of Education reports that over a third of the education budget goes to school meals, because most of the students in public schools either eat at school or not at all.

According to South magazine (a business magazine reporting on the Third World), Brazil has a higher infant mortality rate than Sri Lanka. A third of the population lives below the poverty line and "seven million abandoned children beg, steal and sniff glue on the streets. For scores of millions, home is a shack in a slum. . . or increasingly, a patch of ground under a bridge."

That's Brazil, one of the naturally richest countries in the world.

The situation is similar throughout Latin America. Just in Central America, the number of people murdered by US-backed forces since the late 1970s comes to something like 200,000, as popular movements that sought democracy and social reform were decimated. These achievements qualify the US as an "inspiration for the triumph of democracy in our time," in the admiring words of the liberal New Republic. Tom Wolfe tells us the 1980s were "one of the great golden moments that humanity has ever experienced." As Stalin used to say, we're "dizzy with success."

--What Uncle Sam Really Wants

All of this proving a poignant point by William Shier, a journalist who documented Nazi history:

"For the last fifty years we've been supporting right-wing governments, and that is a puzzlement to me...I don't understand what there is in the American character... that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them." - William Shirer

6. That the media isn't covering any of the current events above I just mentioned, using the propaganda model as a mechanism to keep people in line with elite thinking and in the dark.

7. That over 20 million people have died from AIDS.

8. That inequality is getting worse here in the US:
"Nothing! America's top 72 wage earners averaged 84 million dollars each in income last year, according to Social Security Administration data. The richest 1 percent of us earned 24 % of the nation's total income, the highest since 1928, just before the Great Depression. On the other hand, 14.3 % were living in poverty in 2009, according to the U. S Census Bureau. 50 million people from 17.4 million families are so poor they couldn't buy sufficient food last year. About one million children from more than a third of these households missed meals regularly according to a recent study by the Department of Agriculture. At dinner, families gather to share together. But for the children, dinner time can be the cruelest part of the day. Almost 1 in 4 of them doesn't know when they will have their next meal."

9. That inequality is getting worse around the world:

The GDP grew by 40% between the early 1970s and the late 1980s, but the number of poor people increased by about 13%.
But the wealth of only a few individuals in America equals the combined GDP of at least 48 countries, proving that inequality is on the rise.

Although the income dropped "only" for 200 million people between 1965 and 1980, more than 1 BILLION people experienced a drop from '83 to 91.

Thirty years ago people were in rich countries were 30 times better off than in the countries where the bottom 20% live. Today, that number has widened to 82 times better.


"Nearly 90 countries are worse off economically than they were 10 years ago. This year's report looks at the widening gaps between rich and poor within countries and among continents. The report shows that failing to put people at the centre of development puts brakes on everybody's gains, in developing countries as well as industrialized countries. The basic feature of the report, the human development index, ranks countries on the basis of life expectancy, education and basic purchasing power. Specific indexes focus on detailed aspects of development, such as the relationship between wealth, poverty and social investment, employment, and the role of women.

* 89 countries are worse off economically than they were 10

years ago, leading to global polarization between haves and have

nots.

* No country can sustain high levels of economic growth

without a strong foundation of human development.

* Everyday, 6,000 new HIV infections occur, one every 15

seconds, and 90 per cent of those new infections are in

developing countries. HIV/AIDS sets back human development by

years in some countries.

* The very rich are getting richer. The assets of the world's

358 billionaires exceed the combined annual incomes of

countries accounting for nearly half 45 per cent of the world's

people.
"
http://www.un.org/popin/unfpa/dispatches/aug96.html

"This agro-export model of development usually produces an "economic miracle" where GNP goes up while much of the population starves. When you pursue such policies, popular opposition inevitably develops, which you then suppress with terror and torture." -- Noam Chomsky

10. That every day 50,000 people die from the basic essentials of life.

[RGacky3]

^God Damn, best post of the year.