Blind adherence to the cult of personality.

Why do liberals love Obama?

1. he's black (not really...he's half white) so...white guilt
2. big choom smoker back in the day
3. has a great smile
4. young, so he's cool
5. trying to lessen the impact of America in the world, because they believe America is the root of all evil
6. supports abortion

How Obama gets away with it:
1. No one wants to be the person in the history books who 'brought down' Obama.

But don't give up hope, people, his chickens will come home to roost.

Worked a catering gig at the senior Bush's "presidential" libarry at A&M, it's a big building without books, dedicated to the cult of personality of his legacy. Also met colonel in the Kuwaiti military-She looked like Diana Verona in the remake of "The Jackal."

They needed to give the younger Bush for his Presidential tenure and legacy, a library CARD!

The Bushes' (includes all living or dead by blood and all their offspring for eternity, Amen) were perhaps the most glaring example prior to Obama of so-called leaders fucking the world in the ass without chagrin and that also without lube or permission.

Stalin and Mao? Please don't pull out that old chestnut. Claiming to be an atheist does not make you one. Stalin and Mao were the godheads of their own cults of personality with followers(read worshipers ) no different than the fanatical followers of many religions. Are they really so different from Jim Jones or David Koresh?

@VoodooV
while i totally agree that one cannot discern the intent of the person who cast the downvote,i feel @shinyblurry makes a valid point concerning his own experiences.
while circumstantial,18 scrubbed videos is not a normal,nor average,number.

i think i could make a case that those scrubbed videos (due to downvotes) directly correlate to a time on the sift when many were viewing shiny's comments and posts as trollish and confrontational.
and lets be honest...sometimes they were.

but there were a few posts of shiny's that were genuinely of good quality and thought-provoking and they too..were scrubbed.i even promoted a few even though i totally disagreed with the content.

which ties in to the point in which @ZappaDanMan is trying to make.some people vote more on how they feel about the person rather than the content of the video.he also alludes to a cult of personality and its a valid observation.

so while i agree with you that we cannot discern intent and i also agree with shiny that downvotes are more an irrational,emotional response,rather than a logical and thought-out vote but at the end of the day it does not matter.
why?
because they are votes and we all tend to vote with our hearts rather than our heads.

here is a small observation i have made over the years here on the sift.
totally non-scientific.just an observation:
ever notice when somebody posts a horrid,or venomous comment?
and it will have ZERO votes.neither UP nor DOWN.
until it receives ONE downvote and then what seems like minutes the downvotes start coming.like a torrent.

the same will happen with videos.
there is a reason for that.

speaking only for myself i rarely downvote a video and choose to abstain rather than downvote but i will downvote a comment if i find it offensive or un-necessarily attacking another sifter.(which i have been guilty of from time to time).

my videos have garnered more than their fair share of downvotes.
sometimes i understood why and othertimes i did not and i have never been shy in PMing that person to inquire why they downvoted and,to those peoples credit,they always responded.
that was very gracious of them to explain the thinking behind their downvote and i always appreciated the time they took to share their reasoning with me.

so in conclusion to my point (do i even have a point?).
even when we consider that some (or many) use downvoting as a passive-aggressive way to punish those they may deem unworthy or simply because they disagree.
the downvoting system is just as vital as the up-voting because it can promote discussion and interaction and that is always a good thing.
the positives far outweigh the negatives.

@shinyblurry is a perfect example of how interactions and attitudes can change on both sides of the spectrum.

if we do not interact with those we disagree with then we will be doomed to hold pre-conceptions and presumptions as inviolate and stagnate on our own hubris.

there are so many here on the sift that have surprised and delighted me by shattering my assumptions about them.
oftentimes it was the downvoting that sparked that interaction.

i think we all felt that sting that @Boise_Lib speaks of concerning our first downvote but if we can get past that initial slap in the face we can explore a whole new range of interaction and discussion in which we all can benefit and garner a much more dynamic understanding of people whom we may disagree with.

now that this rant has come to its conclusion i shall remind my gentle and kind readers that i shall be here all week and to not forget to tip their bartenders and waitresses.

thank you wisconsin!!
and good night!

Yeh, sure, I don't disagree either. But you just don't see N. Korea pointing that discerning eye in their own direction. The cults of personality surrounding Kim Jung Il & Kim Il Sung beat the crap out of any shitty star worship MTV propagates. They just put a teenager in charge of their country because of what his father and grandfather did. Millions of N. Koreans die annually from not having enough to eat. They give any foreign visitor the 'Potemkin Village' treatment. Not to say the points made weren't credible, but showing the worse of American excess doesn't make that America. I don't watch any of the shit that video talked about and neither do you. We can turn it off.

Literally a cult of personality.

@dag @Fletch @LarsaruS

I think you're all forgetting that Hitler was a master of propaganda, and those statements affirming Christianity were just that. Hitler used a facade of piousness to cement his power with a predominantly Christian populace. Feel free to disagree, but then you have to deal with statements which he made to party loyalists, like these:

"National Socialism and religion cannot exist together....
"The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity....
"Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things." (p 6 & 7)

Night of July 11-12th 1941

"Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure." (p 43)

October 10th 1941

"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity."

19th October, 1941, night

Doesn't seem like such a warrior for christ now, does he? The cult of personality that fletch is talking about just makes my point. When man tries to get rid of God, he just replaces God with himself. Human beings have the natural desire to worship, whether it is something like money, or power, or celebrity, or themselves, everyone who doesn't know the true God has at least one idol in their life they pay homage too.

To say there is no connection between atheism and communism is absurd. Atheism was at the roots of it, and that according to the communists themselves:

"Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism"

"Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism"

Lenin

“With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the fact of the world and see the collapse of this pygmy giant. Then will I wander god-like and victorious through the ruins of the world. And giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.”

Karl Marx

“The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion”

Karl Marx

So you see there is a connection between atheism and the atheistic regimes that committed uncounted atrocities. Fletch, you're even denial about the definition of atheism, which is the denial of any deity according to the dictionary. A famous quote says that "without God everything is permissable". And that is the logical connection, that a man unrestrained by any thought of ultimate accountability can justify any kind of moral action to himself. Consider this quote from Joel Marks, the professor of philosophy at the University of New Haven

“This philosopher has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality…I experienced my shocking epiphany that religious fundamentalists are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.

Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as say a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality"

Please note, I am not saying atheists cannot be moral; I am simply saying that an amoral viewpoint can be a causal factor in committing atrocities, just as much as any zealout. Psychopaths suppress what they know is right and wrong, and dictators ordain it.

It goes back to my original point. It is human nature that is the problem, the corruption of which I attribute to sin. A moral person will be moral in every circumstance, whereas an immoral person will be immoral in every circumstance. You cannot chop it up to specific beliefs of methodologies..they only diagnose the symptom and not the cause.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Then, in that same vein - could you make the case that religion is not necessarily the cause of atrocities either. Correlation is not causation. Or in other words - Nutty sociopaths may be religious - but it's not why they commit atrocities - just a side effect.

>> ^Fletch:

^ Not completely true, and I would argue that the cult of personality surrounding Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Mussolini, et al, is at the very root of religion. They may or may not have been atheists, but they were definitely using religion of a sort to gain and keep power. Dogma is dogma, and blind faith in dogma or a leader IS religion, whether that faith is whipped up through nationalist rhetoric or pious devotion to a deity. "Christian" is just a different flavor on the same banana split.
Hirohito was viewed as a living god. Hitler killed Jews because he felt it was god's will. This whole "atheism was responsible for the Holocaust" bullshit is just that... tired bullshit. It's the reactionary mantra and selective parsing of history by blissfully-ignorant religious zealots who can't compute, or, just refuse to accept the utter devastation religion has wreaked on the human species IN THE NAME OF GOD.
Lack of belief is not a belief, and connecting atheism to 20th century atrocities is several logical fallacies all rolled into one dumb assertion. Believing it and saying it over and over doesn't make it true, and just because some murderous bastard was an atheist doesn't mean some nutter's concept of atheism was the cause.
>> ^dag:
^Shiny makes a good point - Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot - the biggest baddies of the 20th, we're all atheists. Might it be that extremist ideologies of any kind are the problem?

^ Not completely true, and I would argue that the cult of personality surrounding Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Mussolini, et al, is at the very root of religion. They may or may not have been atheists, but they were definitely using religion of a sort to gain and keep power. Dogma is dogma, and blind faith in dogma or a leader IS religion, whether that faith is whipped up through nationalist rhetoric or pious devotion to a deity. "Christian" is just a different flavor on the same banana split.

Hirohito was viewed as a living god. Hitler killed Jews because he felt it was god's will. This whole "atheism was responsible for the Holocaust" bullshit is just that... tired bullshit. It's the reactionary mantra and selective parsing of history by blissfully-ignorant religious zealots who can't compute, or, just refuse to accept the utter devastation religion has wreaked on the human species IN THE NAME OF GOD.

Lack of belief is not a belief, and connecting atheism to 20th century atrocities is several logical fallacies all rolled into one dumb assertion. Believing it and saying it over and over doesn't make it true, and just because some murderous bastard was an atheist doesn't mean some nutter's concept of atheism was the cause.

>> ^dag:

^Shiny makes a good point - Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot - the biggest baddies of the 20th, we're all atheists. Might it be that extremist ideologies of any kind are the problem?

Woooahhhh the cult of personality, the cult of personality, the cult of personalityyyyyy

The more of Gods laws this country openly flaunts, the more it hastens itself towards destruction. God has richly blessed this nation, and because of that, He requires much of us..

"From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked."

The more this nation becomes like Sodom and Gemorrah, the more we earn its punishment. We have a president that openly mocks the bible, who has a cult of personality that worships him as a secular Messiah..which alone makes this government Satanic. We have a nation filled with apostate Christians and unbelievers. We have a morally bankrupt culture that worships the false idols of money and celebrity. Even our youth have become vain and prideful, and no wonder..because in America it's the united states of me, myself and I. Unless we change our ways, and soon, God is going to change them for us. I doubt anyone is going to be putting on sackcloth and ashes, so it may well be too late:

Matthew 7:26-27

"Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.

"The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell--and great was its fall."

OK, I think I have watched the entire (today) set of videos [last one was 3.3.3 A History of God (Part 1)?]. I thought they were excellently done, and present a path to atheism that was, frankly, more arduous than my own.

I think that by the time I was mature enough to really consider things and run the logic for myself, I had already mostly rejected my Christian upbringing. Having been brought up in it at all made that process of rejecting it slightly difficult, but it seems almost beyond imagining how difficult it would be to be a (functionally) mature yet indoctrinated human being and then to have all of this rushing at you over a short period of time as he did.

At first I was almost offended by his account of the "Professor" trying to delay his further investigation. I have tended to think considering that a key tenet of the religious process seems to be "hook 'em while they're young", any atheist that has even mild "evangelical" tendencies or would like to see atheism or even just greater acceptance of atheists spread to people other than themselves should consider no age "too early" to begin planting seeds of speculation, doubt, and rational thought.

The Professor telling this guy to hold on, live his life and be happy, and don't sweat the details until you are older goes very contrary to that. However, I can see that the sudden vacuum that resulted in this guy's world view from the abrupt loss of his faith could actually have been dangerous; might have pushed him into suicidal depression or even cult-of-personality psychosis resulting from his brief decision that he was the second coming of Christ.

Maybe there are some instances where throttling down and just giving people enough so that they can start down the path of skepticism on their own would be better -- although I bet that this guy is overall glad that he got thrown in to the deep end to sink or swim.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Fallout 2, New Vegas, pip boy, Cult of Personality perk' to 'Fallout 2, New Vegas, pip boy, Cult of Personality perk, Blue Moon' - edited by calvados

I'd rather take a toaster bath than be governed by Apple. That's terrifying. I can't think of any corporation that is more 1984, more cult-of-personality, more we-know-what's-best-for-you, and more style-over-substance. I'd rather be governed by Haliburton (again).

The votes disagree with your assessment. Everyone is not you, everyone is the lowest common denominator.
>> ^choggie:
hmmmm, maybe if you tried to post something that everyone could give a fuck about, like art, good music etc., instead of stooping to the lowest common denominator of voyeurism, finger-pointing, and sensationalist hoo-ha, the dupe factor would be minimal.
Who gives a fiddler's fuck about Pat Robertson anyhow? He's a goddamn snake-oil piece of shit, drunk on his own cult of personality.