Conservative Think Tank? Isn't that an oxymoron?

But in all seriousness. I'd be making fun of a liberal think tank too. Logic and Truth are not liberal or conservative, they just are. When a organization claims to be a think tank based on "Traditional American Values" Then you've already admitted you're biased and should be disbanned or at the very least, laughed out of the room for calling yourself a think tank.

You don't take an ideology and then try to back it up facts. That's backwards. You learn the facts first, then make policy off that.

Another example of this backwards thinking is Christian Science.

You don't seem to be getting the point. Let me try again.

-My original post was a rebuttal to the contention that ReasonTV is a legitimate media outlet. I provided evidence that it is both a think tank and corporate front group.

Do you understand the difference between a think tank and a media outlet?

-I did not disqualify Reason(sic)TV's arguments out of hand, I rebutted them. You posted an article. I read it. I took it apart.

Do you understand the difference between dismissing an argument out of hand and rebutting one?

If you get sick of arguing about arguing and decide you'd like to talk about the substance of this thread, let me know.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Koch funds many right wing think tanks in addition to the Reason Foundation. It's not a secret. You can find this information on a number of websites. I just picked sourcewatch because it was the first link in my search return. If you have some evidence to suggest that this is incorrect, I'd be more than happy to hear you out.


I'm sure you plucked it randomly from a hat. My mistake.

Koch funds many right wing think tanks in addition to the Reason Foundation. It's not a secret. You can find this information on a number of websites. I just picked sourcewatch because it was the first link in my search return. If you have some evidence to suggest that this is incorrect, I'd be more than happy to hear you out. >> ^blankfist:

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
ReasonTV isn't a news outlet, it's a corporate conservative front group. It's subscription and ad revenue are miniscule, sustaining itself almost entirely by donations from corporate benefactors - most notably war profiteer and Tea Party funder, David Koch.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reason_Foundation>> ^Enzoblue:
Top YT comment: Dear "reason.tv" - Stop hiring reporters based on whether you'd fuck them, and start hiring them based on whether they can perform a coherent interview.


Is sourcewatch.org a fair source? I think so with the news stories that pop up on their homepage. Top stories like "Milton Friedman's Little Shop of Horrors" and "The Koch Connection" I could almost wonder if you could be webmaster.
And let's compare the sourcewatch "wikipages" of Center for American Progress (your Democratic org) vs. Reason Foundation. Read the top summary first: CAP and Reason.
CAP's summary hits all the beats. It's rich with info, points out the things that kind of organization would like as publicity, and even going so far as to pimp their email subscription. Wow. Reason's summary is written like a rap sheet. They're a "self described" think tank instead of "Washington, DC-based" think tank like CAP. They point out some affiliation with a donor like Koch - incrimination by association. And then it finishes by showing their reported income losses for some reason. No mention anywhere of CAP's funding.
No, total credible source you got there. Looks legit. Let's go with your link.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

ReasonTV isn't a news outlet, it's a corporate conservative front group. It's subscription and ad revenue are miniscule, sustaining itself almost entirely by donations from corporate benefactors - most notably war profiteer and Tea Party funder, David Koch.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reason_Foundation>> ^Enzoblue:
Top YT comment: Dear "reason.tv" - Stop hiring reporters based on whether you'd fuck them, and start hiring them based on whether they can perform a coherent interview.



Is sourcewatch.org a fair source? I think so with the news stories that pop up on their homepage. Top stories like "Milton Friedman's Little Shop of Horrors" and "The Koch Connection" I could almost wonder if you could be webmaster.

And let's compare the sourcewatch "wikipages" of Center for American Progress (your Democratic org) vs. Reason Foundation. Read the top summary first: CAP and Reason.

CAP's summary hits all the beats. It's rich with info, points out the things that kind of organization would like as publicity, and even going so far as to pimp their email newsletter. Wow. Reason's summary is written like a rap sheet. They're a "self described" think tank instead of "Washington, DC-based" think tank like CAP. They point out some affiliation with a donor like Koch - incrimination by association. And then it finishes by showing their reported income losses for some reason. No mention anywhere of CAP's funding.

No, total credible source you got there. Looks legit. Let's go with your link.

http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2011/06/09/34042
From Box Turtle:

In this episode, CNN tracks down George Rekers, the therapist who treated four-year-old Kirk Murphy and turned him into Rekers’s poster boy for ex-gay therapy. Here we see Rekers learning about Kirk’s suicide at the age of 38. He responds by saying that there is no evidence that Kirk’s suicide was the result of Kirk’s treatment. He also tries to exonerate himself by saying:

Two independent psychologists of me had evaluated him and said he was better adjusted after treatment. So it wasn’t my opinion.

According to Rekers’s writings, two psychologists followed up with Kirk when Kirk was fifteen. As I wrote in our newest epilogue, The Doctor’s Word:

Buried in a footnote, Rekers wrote, “I express my appreciation to Drs. Larry N. Ferguson and Alexander C. Rosen for their independent evaluations.” By 1979, Ferguson was working as a research psychologist at Logos Research Institute, a conservative religious-based think tank that Rekers had founded in 1975. With Rekers as his employer, Ferguson’s participation in such an evaluation could not be seen as independent. As for Rosen, he had been Rekers’s longstanding colleague at UCLA: the two of them co-wrote at least fourteen papers — including three defending the kind of treatment Kirk received at UCLA against growing criticism. Rosen may not have been as personally invested in Kirk’s reported outcome as Rekers, but he was certainly invested in UCLA’s reputation.

Rosen has since passed away. Ferguson told CNN that the family was well-adjusted and he didn’t see any “red flags” with Kirk. But when Kirk was fifteen, the family was falling apart, with Kirk’s father was drinking heavily and leaving the family — hardly the picture of a well-adjusted family. As for not seeing any red flags with Kirk, his sister Maris had a ready answer: “He was conditioned to say what he thought they wanted to hear.”

But there was one set of independent evaluations that Rekers wasn’t a part of. Those occurred when Dr. Richard Green interviewed Kirk at the age of seventeen and eighteen for his 1987 book, The Sissy Boy Syndrome. That’s where we learn that at Kirk was still attracted to men, was deeply conflicted over those attractions, had engaged in an anonymous sexual encounter with a man, and tried to commit suicide because of it. For the remainder of Rekers’s career, he would never acknowledge what was uncovered in the The Sissy Boy Syndrome interviews. As far as Rekers was concerned, those interviews never happened and “Kraig”, his pseudonym for Kirk, remained a success story.

That wasn't a joke. I'm not interested in the opinions of corporate think tanks or PR outfits.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Your one go-to joke.

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
Thanks for thinking of me. If I want David Koch's opinion on politics, I'll just email him directly.


In reply to this comment by blankfist:

Why do markets allow people to suffer?

1. Better system than capitalism would be a balanced hybrid system of capitalism and socialism controlled by people in a true democracy - as opposed to the plutocratic charade we live under now. Think Finland, Switzerland, Nordic Slavic type social democracies. These systems are infinitely better than our capitalist nightmare by any metric.

2. All the think tanks that tell you what to think are funded by deep corporate pockets. Your guru milton Friedman was chummmy with all the neocons - Reagan, Rummy and some pretty nasty dictators. David Koch was even on the libertarian ticket. Open your eyes to reality, friend.

3. Feudalism is only freedom for the wealthy elite. You don't seem to understand that you have a very subjective and limited concept of 'liberty'.

7. Free market reforms are terrible to labor, as we are seeing right now, where libertarians are calling on American labor to 'get competitive' with Chinese slaves. No fucking thank you.

8. There's no shortage of excuses for your belief system, and never any empirical data. This is why I deride your political beliefs as religious beliefs.

9. It's nice that you used 'Corporatist America' as a way of refuting my contention that European social democracies are superior.

It's amazing to me that someone with such a tenuous grasp on reality could call anyone else ignorant. Time and time again your politics are debunked on this site, only for you to redouble your efforts. I hope one day you are able to overcome your indoctrination.


In reply to this comment by blankfist:
I'm an atheist. When I attribute things to God and say things like, "Why does God allow the his devout followers to suffer?" I don't mean, "Why does the ancient fictional religious construct that you based your life around allow his devout followers to suffer?" What I do mean is, "Why does your personal god that you believe in allow his devout followers to suffer?"

Most atheists, I think, tend to use God in this way, not because they believe in the existence of a personal god, but because it's the widely held understanding of God (if not the original definition). It's irrelevant to our conversation, so I'm not sure why you keep bringing it up. Your analogy is bad, IMO.

And you and I will continue to disagree what free markets are, and that's something I cannot change.

1. The claim was "[A free market] states that altruism and empathy are bad; greed and selfishness are good." That's what I was responding to. Still ridiculous. I've said constant that if you could find a better system than Capitalism, I'd be on board, but there IS NONE. All of this tap dancing around definitions is obfuscation.

2. Patently false. An absolutely disingenuous and false statement. What's pathetic about this comment is how you continue to twist this bastardized government legitimized entity back on free exchanges when we've covered this a billion times. Again, corporations are antithetical to free markets, because they enjoy a government created reduction of competition, government subsidies, corporate welfare, and so on. In short, they enjoy intervention in the marketplace, which is what YOU'RE touting, not me. So, it's YOUR concepts of government that have been and continues to be shaped by corporations?

3. I think people claim the free market is "self-correcting" more than "self-regulation", but that's a digression. But listen to what you wrote. "Claims of freedom, liberty" will spring forth in a free market? Yes. Yes very much. Why, you ask? One must only look to the definition of a free market: the voluntary exchange between people without coercion. That is liberty and freedom on its face. The opposite, your idea of regulated and interventionist markets, is coercive and authoritarian. The opposite of free.

5. Good for them.

7. What? No, I'm saying you're associating things like lowering taxes and "taking away power from labor" with free markets, which is ridiculous.

8. Failed states caused by the failure of statism (and the pilfering of government employed opportunists) is not the free market in action. Nice try.

9. Says you. California is a perfect example. It's struggling at the moment to pay for the huge number of government pensions for those unionized "heros" that retired at age 55 and get 90% of their income for the rest of their long lives. But then just recently the LA city council, a haven for modern liberalism and your capitalist/social-democratic utopia, cleared a 1.2 billion dollar construction project to build a fucking luxury hotel. According to this article, "overtime pay for the Los Angeles Fire Department soared 60 percent over the last decade", and "the department's top earner racked up a total of $570,276 in overtime in the last three years, including $206,685 in 2006." And that's just overtime. I could go on, but I've already been over this with NetRunner. Suffice it to say, this is your utopian hybrid in action, and it's a complete failure. And it's slowly going bankrupt. In fact, California has asked the Federal government repeatedly for a bailout.

Do go on, though. I like to watch you dig that grave a little deeper.

Ignorance is not a moral high ground.

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
It's very common in arguments of religion for atheists to attribute things to "God". Why does God cause so much pain and suffering? Why doesn't God heal amputees?, etc. It rolls off the tongue a lot better than 'Why doesn't the ancient fictional religious construct that you based your life around heal amputees.?'

It's not the definition of 'free market' that I question, it's all the wide eyed, miracle elixer promises that are used to entice gullible followers. For instance, there is no evidence that free markets self-regulate. There is no evidence that living under unfettered markets would create a desirable political climate for anyone but the super rich. All that stuff about 'voting with your wallet' is naive.

Free Markets do not equal free people. This is the big lie that gives this ideology its (fake) moral center. Under a free market economy, there would be a huge power imbalance between business and labor, which is why corporations champion (if disengenuously in your eyes) the free market. Deregulation, privatization, gutting social welfare programs and other "Free Market" inspired austerity measures always result in low wages, unemployment, poverty and labor abuse. Free Dumb.

1. Friedman has praised greed. Rand has praised selfishness. You have complained about the dangers of government programs motivated by compassion. Do you dispute this?

2. My point is that corporations, regardless of how you feel about them, are the driving force behind American styled libertarianism. Doesn't it give you a moment of pause that your concept of liberty has been, and continues to be shaped by corporations?

3. Again, it's not the definition I object to, it's the wild ass claims of freedom, liberty, self-regulation and other doctrinal bullshit that is supposed to mysteriously spring forth somehow once a set of arbitrary conditions are met. When I talk about lack of evidence, I'm talking about these pie in the sky promises.

5. It is funny that liberalism and libertarianism have swapped meanings in this country. American libertarians are always so confused when Chomsky calls himself a libertarian.

7. So you are saying that deregulation, privatization and the cutting of social programs would not function as intended if they were implemented by force? Why is that? Can you understand my skepticism when individual elements of free marketism fail on their own, and then I'm told that we need even more elements of free marketism for everything to work correctly? It's like a homeopathic doctor saying "of course these homeopathic remedies are making your cancer worse, you forgot the ginseng. You can't cure cancer without ginseng, silly fool."

8. Failed states with no taxation or government should be free market wonderlands, no? It's a common swipe at free market partisans that never gets addressed. Care to give it a go?

9. The most successful states are currently capitalist/socialist hybrids. We trail behind other states (European states) with a more even balance of state and business. If I believed in utopia, I wouldn't be a liberal, because compassion and empathy would be unnecessary in a true utopia.

http://videosift.com/video/The-evolution-of-empathy

For a rugged individualist, you sure do love your little categories and boxes. Do you ever notice your need to be defined and to define others? I don't share your need for precise definition. I like to keep my options open.

"Ignorance is not a moral high ground." I like this quote, especially when you use it to defend an irrational belief system. I'm stealing this quote.

>> ^quantumushroom:

Zach was mining so much comedy gold in that studio he shoulda been wearing a hardhat with the light on it.
Yes, Bone, she wouldn't qualify as algae on a think tank, but those tanned thighs...


That is perfect, that made me laugh very hard. algae on a think tank HAH!.

Zach was mining so much comedy gold in that studio he shoulda been wearing a hardhat with the light on it.

Yes, Bone, she wouldn't qualify as algae on a think tank, but those tanned thighs...

Why is it extreme fiction to think that powerful, ambitious men would take advantage of a power vacuum? Free market intervention via the IMF has horror stories far, far worse than this. Real stories, not fiction. Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Bolivia. Powerful people take advantage of the power vacuum in our country too. Deregulation of derivatives caused the current financial crisis. Deregulating the banks caused the mortgage fraud crisis. Deregulating energy caused the Enron crisis. Business has co-opted our relatively powerful government and led us into war and debt. Take away government and the hard fought laws of the last few centuries and the power of wealthy ambitious men would be unbound. Take away government and the hard fought laws of the last few centuries and what you consider to be oppression would be dwarfed.

When states fail, gangs and warlords always immediately rise up to take advantage of the system.

When I say anarchists and conservative libertarians are naive, I'm not trying to be mean. I think they are blind to the historical constant that powerful, ambitious men will always try and game political systems, and that anarchism, by design, would be completely impotent at stopping them. It is no small coincidence that these powerful, ambitious men support many of the institutions and think tanks that inform your politics. The same people that fund Cato and the Reason Institute also fund PNAC and Freedomworks. Does it not disturb you that Neo-Cons fund your institutions? Does it not disturb you that conservative libertarian heroes like Milton Friedman have backed violence and violent dictators in South America to further their cause? To further your cause?

Anyway, this is why I find conservative libertarianism and anarchism so objectionable. I don't think anarchism could ever happen, because of the paradox that in order to achieve and maintain an anti-state, you would need the power of a state. The reason I oppose a movement that could never get off the ground is that its principles (low taxes, deregulation) are being used as justification for the very tyranny it seeks to abolish.

(PS: check out the documentary: GASLAND. My fiction was based on real events.)

@dystopianfuturetoday I think we'd actually gain new people if we had our own Coulters, Becks, and Limbaughs, but they appeal to a demographic that frankly I'd rather see working for the other team.

What we really need is something a bit like the CATO/Reason collective, whose whole purpose is to make radically extreme right-wing viewpoints like libertarianism seem tolerably respectable.

Of course, the left-wing version would be some think tank dedicated to publishing smart articles about the virtue and value of socialism and communism, so people would actually have the ability to see how it differs from mainstream liberalism (and how different they are from the right-wing caricature of them that the left never really challenges).

I also think we could benefit from having some sort of organized effort to point out to people that liberalism is far more compatible with the teachings of Christianity than conservatism.

But then, I'd just settle for having a Democratic party that's willing to make direct emotional and moral arguments for what they're trying to do, rather than framing it as some sort of slightly friendlier version of conservatism...

Lieberman has heavy ties to the Democratic Leadership Council, a corporate/Koch* funded democratic think tank. No surprise that he wants to kill wikileaks. Koch industries seems to be attached to everything that is wrong with American politics.

* http://www.americablog.com/2010/08/koch-industries-gave-funding-to-dlc-and.html

*cringe* whatever campaign advisor/think-tank came up with that deserves a swift kick in the nuts.

snippets from the press release:

[...] "by ideas raised at a grassroots Obama fundraiser" [...] "Parents and older siblings designed and provided the T-Shirts and the banner" [...]

"As Sunday approached, a neighbor volunteered a home. Production wizards got wind of the project and offered their help in recording it. The likes of Jeff Zucker, Holly Schiffer, Peter Rosenfeld, Darin Moran, Jean Martin, Andy Blumenthal, and Nick Phoenix rearranged schedules to participate. Holly Schiffer was able to get three High Definition cameras (Panasonic HVX250's), and an AVID editing facility. When Jeff Zucker went to pick up the camera package, Ted Schilowitz happened to be there and offered a RED camera set up on a Steadi Cam."


... yeah right ;-) Gotta hand it to the republicans- they have got a head-start at camouflaging their campaign efforts - FOX news and the brainwash crowd would be fools not to pick up on that theme.

*edit*

OH, look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAzvVtwsW_8&feature=related, and of course: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSWt7hOYYLY&feature=related

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
American market Libertarians get hand outs as well. Their think tanks are funded by the same people who fund right wing think tanks.


Sadly, tis true. But unlike GOP, we don't believe in contradiction like taxcuts for the wealthy (I.e. kickbacks.) or bailouts (I.e. kickbacks.) There is no "women's" rights issues, or gay rights issues, or all that other crap in a libertarian (I.e. ,assive pot crackdowns!) There are severe limits to a lib, but not like the GOP.