This video has been seconded as a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof seconded with isdupe by Tymbrwulf.

"I'd give $100 for one that didn't say "in god we trust".

What the fuck do you cae gwhix, yer Icebound-You just can't stand the the ruse ya heathen fucktard!
But f YOOOOOD thought of it...well, wag a Krugerand under his nose and he'll suck yer member, kosher or otherwise!

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by burdturgler. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

thank god none of you have your own "dog whisperer" shows on NatGeo because you couldn't tell apart a dog from a bench.

scared dogs wimper, lower their body and tuck their tails under their body.

this dog was excited as can be blatantly see from his raised, wagging tail.

>> ^NetRunner:
>> ^chilaxe:
I could get behind liberalism if there was a movement within it to hold accountable those fellow liberals who sabotage the cause.
Liberals have plenty of sites like 'Crooks and Liars" or Mediawatch to keep an eye on the excesses of conservatives... why can't they do the same to keep an eye on the excesses of fellow liberals?
Such a movement is certainly under way. I think Chris Dodd would have been primaried if he didn't resign (incidentally, you should rent Michael Moore's Capitalism -- he trashes Dodd pretty nicely in there and raises more than a few doubts about Democratic resolve). Charlie Rangel is a popular target too. Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, etc.
If you want a liberal taking Democrats to task with no holds barred, try Glenn Greenwald's blog. I read it occasionally, but most of the time I find him far too depressing.
I don't read Firedoglake anymore, because they've, IMO, gone off the deep end (Jane Hamsher was pushing people to work together with the tea parties to kill HCR once the public option got stripped), but if you're looking for progressives critical of Democrats, they're another good resource.
Personally, I'm a big fan of DailyKos. It's probably the biggest progressive community on the net, so often it's the battleground upon which most left vs. left fights are played out. The main content is geared towards organizing activism and electoral strategy, and commentary on the day's political events, but the Diaries are usually a grab-bag of all kinds of interesting topics, not all of which are political.
They're starting to shift from a focus on "more Democrats" to "better Democrats", but I'm not sure how many opportunities we'll have for that in 2010. Most of those that they've talked about are House races, or Arlen Specter's ongoing primary.


That's good to hear that there are left vs. left debates. However, are these mostly just folks on the far-left of the political bell curve 'pushing harder even if it means we lose'? As long as that's the dominant liberal paradigm, they don't seem to me to be reliable societal partners who can be reasoned with.

That might sound very uninvolved, but I think any intellectuals who go into politics (i.e. not Moore, Olbermann, Huffington etc.) will find that the tail wags the dog: if intellectual figures don't tell the liberal masses what they want to hear, the masses will just find figures who will. Olbermann saying "I'm not a liberal; I'm an American" seems to be a good example of that kind of permanent intellectual simplicity.

I suppose this is an inevitable macrohistorical problem... perhaps any intelligent species on any planet would face it... the necessary legacy of human evolution is that the kind of interest in cognitive complexity that's advantageous in a complex modern society wasn't sufficiently advantageous during the last 10,000 or 100,000 years to be widespread today. In other words, any collection of social norms that must appeal to 50% of the population can only achieve a limited level of intellectual accuracy.

The take-home lesson for me is: that means an individual with a greater level of intellectual accuracy can out-predict them, and thus position themselves in the right place at the right time (for whatever opportunity is targeted).

^ I feel the same way, but you've got to understand there are still plenty of people who think what Fox is doing is journalism, and a lot of them run media outlets themselves.

Having the White House speak the truth about Fox will get tongues wagging about whether he's right or wrong, and it gives progressives an opportunity to present our evidence to a wider audience.

It's good stuff, even if it's old news to anyone with a brain.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
Do we need to make the correlating list of Muslim leaders who demonstrate just as much racism, and far more willingness to kill? As I said before - this is not a one sided issue. People like AL wouldn't be voted into power if Isreal wasn't being forced to discuss "peace" terms with guys like Arafat, Abbas, & other terrorists masquarading as politicians.

Agreed, not a one sided issue at all. Still talking with the butcher Sharon might not have been much fun for them either.


The Isreali's elected a guy do deal with the situation as it exists. I don't applaud it, but I can at least intellectually understand it and even sympathize to a degree. Isreal's security has improved tremendously by adopting hard-line positions. Before they were getting bombings regularly. Once they built walls and established buffer zones in Gaza, the Palestinians were reduced to blindly lobbing rockets at random. From the point of view of the average Isreali, the increase in security would be well worth it.

Is it possible these hardline policies have made Israel less safe in the long run?


Other nations take that kind of security for granted. Once it is obtained, then a society has the luxury of generating citizens who are safe enough to have the liesure and idleness required to stew in their own guilty consciences over the 'price' of security. What we have here are a bunch of buttinskys wagging their fingers at Isreal from the safety of their armchairs.

Ummm... more Americans have died in terrorist attacks in the last decade than Israelis.


The Palestinians have it tough - no question. Isreal is really turning the screws and it makes life hard for them. What are Isreal's options? 1. They can give the Palestinians what they want (which is never enough parenthetically) and go back to daily bombings.

To be fair, they never tried option 1. It's not that those mean palestinians always want more, Israel never conceded anything. Even when they did on paper, they never actually did it. They continually built more settlements, and annexed more territory. In fact your wall may just be the most egregious example.


2. They can maintain their stance and keep thier people safe. Hmmm - agree with the people who want to KILL us or defend ourselves...? Not a very tough choice really.

There were more attacks on Israeli soil under Sharon than under Rabin. Who's policies kept Israel safer?

The false premise here is that for some reason Isreal is always held 100% 'responsible' for the Palestinian plight. Uh uh. There are at least three seats at the table. The Pals need to be far more aggressive at stomping out their extremist factions and behaving like a peace-seeking people. Then Isreal will have cause to believe that providing them territory will not result in security comprimises.

So instead you are suggesting that the Palestinians are 100% responsible. Why are the Palestinians the only ones who need to show good faith here? The problem is that neither side trusts the other side to follow through on their promises... both with good reason. Hamas receives support because it is the only organization that actually provides infrastructure to the Palestinians. They are the only ones building roads, schools, hospitals, providing aid, etc... Perhaps if Israel showed some good faith by doing those things, Hamas would struggle to recruit.


And (most critically) the REST OF THE FREAKING ARAB WORLD needs to stop pretending they are innocent bystanders in all this mess. Yeah - it sucked that the Palestinians got shafted after WW2. But the Pals wouldn't be in so much trouble if guys like Egypt, Syria, Lybia, and everyone else was willing to cut them some slack as opposed to expecting Isreal to just go away.

Well, I'd just as soon the rest of the Arab world quit pursuing their present course of action, which is less innocent bystander, and more aspiring nuclear annihilator. I don't think the little border wall is going to protect anyone from that.

Do we need to make the correlating list of Muslim leaders who demonstrate just as much racism, and far more willingness to kill? As I said before - this is not a one sided issue. People like AL wouldn't be voted into power if Isreal wasn't being forced to discuss "peace" terms with guys like Arafat, Abbas, & other terrorists masquarading as politicians.

The Isreali's elected a guy do deal with the situation as it exists. I don't applaud it, but I can at least intellectually understand it and even sympathize to a degree. Isreal's security has improved tremendously by adopting hard-line positions. Before they were getting bombings regularly. Once they built walls and established buffer zones in Gaza, the Palestinians were reduced to blindly lobbing rockets at random. From the point of view of the average Isreali, the increase in security would be well worth it.

Other nations take that kind of security for granted. Once it is obtained, then a society has the luxury of generating citizens who are safe enough to have the liesure and idleness required to stew in their own guilty consciences over the 'price' of security. What we have here are a bunch of buttinskys wagging their fingers at Isreal from the safety of their armchairs.

The Palestinians have it tough - no question. Isreal is really turning the screws and it makes life hard for them. What are Isreal's options? 1. They can give the Palestinians what they want (which is never enough parenthetically) and go back to daily bombings. 2. They can maintain their stance and keep thier people safe. Hmmm - agree with the people who want to KILL us or defend ourselves...? Not a very tough choice really.

The false premise here is that for some reason Isreal is always held 100% 'responsible' for the Palestinian plight. Uh uh. There are at least three seats at the table. The Pals need to be far more aggressive at stomping out their extremist factions and behaving like a peace-seeking people. Then Isreal will have cause to believe that providing them territory will not result in security comprimises.

And (most critically) the REST OF THE FREAKING ARAB WORLD needs to stop pretending they are innocent bystanders in all this mess. Yeah - it sucked that the Palestinians got shafted after WW2. But the Pals wouldn't be in so much trouble if guys like Egypt, Syria, Lybia, and everyone else was willing to cut them some slack as opposed to expecting Isreal to just go away.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
Hmm - I'm more curious about INTENT here than anything else. Let's suppose for a moment that Joe Q. Theist sees the video and says, "Hmm - well he made a couple decent points." What then?
1. It could be simple self-righteous shadenfrued. Such persons may simply enjoy wagging their finger at what they consider to be the quaint, anachronistic, and occasionally foolish behaviors of their fellows.
2. Another goal could be recruitment. He may be seeking to convince others to abandon religion and faith completely so that they can join together as a larger group of similarly minded persons.
3. Possibly fame & money are his goals. He may simply be trolling for attention by attacking establishment morality. Or, if he's got a website with advertisers, then he could just be interested in hiking his own profits by addressing a controversial topic and garnering traffic.
Hey - this sounds familiar... Self-righteousness... Prosoletyzing... Attention... Money... This guy is a missionary for his church. Ah - nice try there pal. I've got 7th Day's and Jehovah's hitting me up to join their churches already. Not interested in hearing your particular spiel.

Your fictional average theist (what the heck is that supposed to mean, anyway? I don't even know what an "average Christian" would look like) would be using very poor reasoning skills in making such a judgment. Not only is such speculation about his motives entirely ungrounded, but it is irrelevant. To claim that, simply because his motives could be questioned, his argument and conclusion must be false, is to commit a classic example of the ad hominem fallacy.

QualiaSoup's arguments stand or fall on their own.


Seriously though - what is with atheists anyway? Faith-based initiatives contribute to society and the world with massive charity, good works, and personal benefits. They're clearly not 'all bad' as some would have us think. And - if you don't want to have 'faith' then none of them are forcing you to do anything. What's so awful about just taking personal satisfaction in your own beliefs privately?

If only it were the case that no one was forcing beliefs on people! Sadly, that's not the case, and it is through faith-based initiatives that it is done.

All too often, Christian and Muslim missions and charities make participation in religious services mandatory if one is to receive the benefits those organizations distribute. This is done all over North and South America.

Further, in outside the Americas and in the poorer areas of the Americas, the people who run Christian hospitals and charities all too frequently deny services to people who refuse to convert. Some of the workers are in fact proud to reveal this fact; they consider it their duty.

The people who go to these charities usually have no other options. And in many cases, the consequence of not receiving their benefits is death. They must literally convert to Christianity or die. Islam is, of course, not immune to this sort of thing; the Taliban holds its grip on Afghanistan by similar means.

Even in milder cases, the message is clear: you owe us, and the best way to pay us back is to convert. Charity provided by evangelistic, monotheistic religions comes with strings attached. It is not clear at all to me that their giving is a social good.

Hmm - I'm more curious about INTENT here than anything else. Let's suppose for a moment that Joe Q. Theist sees the video and says, "Hmm - well he made a couple decent points." What then?

1. It could be simple self-righteous shadenfrued. Such persons may simply enjoy wagging their finger at what they consider to be the quaint, anachronistic, and occasionally foolish behaviors of their fellows.

2. Another goal could be recruitment. He may be seeking to convince others to abandon religion and faith completely so that they can join together as a larger group of similarly minded persons.

3. Possibly fame & money are his goals. He may simply be trolling for attention by attacking establishment morality. Or, if he's got a website with advertisers, then he could just be interested in hiking his own profits by addressing a controversial topic and garnering traffic.

Hey - this sounds familiar... Self-righteousness... Prosoletyzing... Attention... Money... This guy is a missionary for his church. Ah - nice try there pal. I've got 7th Day's and Jehovah's hitting me up to join their churches already. Not interested in hearing your particular spiel.

Seriously though - what is with atheists anyway? Faith-based initiatives contribute to society and the world with massive charity, good works, and personal benefits. They're clearly not 'all bad' as some would have us think. And - if you don't want to have 'faith' then none of them are forcing you to do anything. What's so awful about just taking personal satisfaction in your own beliefs privately? Why do you feel the need to bash someone for having different beliefs than you?

"Wah wah wah - I got treated bad by some religions guy when I was a wee tot and it scarred me for liiiiiiiiife..." Pht - grow up. They're PEOPLE. If they do stuff like that it is not because God told them to. It's because they're jerks, and they'd have been jerks to you as a kid whether you were a theist, atheist, or a purple flying spaghetti unicorn. You're blaming something that's tertiary to the issue at best (God) and ignoring the primary problem (the PERSON).

>> ^bmacs27:
How exactly is force the exclusive domain of the government? What about the polluter that is forcing you to breath lower quality air? I can't do anything about that. I need a government to enforce my property rights over the air. Yes, the government employs force. It's our only recourse against the force employed by concentrated capital.

Everyone has access to some form of violence, and violent impulses are part of human nature. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the initiation of violence against another usually is. There are many ways to repress the initiation of violence, but the ultimate resource is violent retaliation. In a civilized society, a government should try to establish a monopoly over the use of force, so that private citizens can concentrate on more productive endeavours and not have to worry about coercion from fellow citizens.

The level by which an individual is free of coercion from others determines how civilized a society is.

So, I'm not saying government has actual exclusivity over violence, but the reason we have government is so that it creates a monopoly over violence, so that it can use violence itself to repress those who use violence against each other. That doesn't mean government is allowed to go nuts and use violence to plan our lives, redistribute wealth, establish monopolies, control the currency, etc.

Services that *require* violence should be done by government. You can't have a "wagging finger" police, they're law enforcers, you can't have courts that can't apply punishment or incarceration, a military that shoots flowers, etc. However, any other service that doesn't *require* the use of force to be performed (education, healthcare, housing, insurance, product safety, space exploration, research, etc.), should be done and will tend to be done better by the private sector.

Please explain to me the law of nature which prevents corporate oligarchy in the absence of government force. Collusion is the rational selection for a small number of powerful agents. They reap the return, prevent entry into marketplaces, and price gouge when privy to exclusive control over an inelastic market (such as healthcare). You've been reading Ludwig too much... I'd recommend reading more of his brother Richard's work. He actually contributed to knowledge.

Well, how would they prevent entry into marketplaces in a free market? Usually it's the collusion between govt + corporations that stops new players from getting in a market with legislation and subsidies. If that's out of the picture, what's left, price dumping? Dumping can push competitors away, but, while it lasts, it's good for consumers (lower prices) and a dumping company's profit takes a hit. No matter how wealthy a company is, it can't practice dumping forever.

If, through price gouging, a company tries to take advantage of its "monopoly" in a market, that creates demand for competition. No matter how inelastic a market is, that doesn't stop the dynamics of supply and demand.

If you're dismissive of Ludwig's contribution to economics, yeah, I hear ya. Whatever knowledge he contributed got pretty much diluted in the mess that economics currently is. If after years of study you were lead to believe you're an economist, I can only offer you my sincere condolences.

Like I stated, healthcare is an inelastic market like police, fire, and water. As such, it should be provided by the government because the status quo of a small number of profit-driven actors in the market leads to price gouging.

You're talking about a highly regulated market that is about 60% provided by government. Gee, I wonder why it's so inelastic.

I'm not saying people got greedy... (loads of crap) It was the banks writing a junk bond, and slapping a smily face on it.

Look into how low interest rates set by the Fed for so long encouraged people getting into debt, how government pursued policies to encourage home ownership (good intentions gone bad), how the subprime market was only possible because of government guaranteed loans.

I've said this before, but I always find it curious how creative interventionists become when they come up with all sorts of "unsolvable" problems that arise from a free market, yet can't use any of that imagination attributing bad consequences to government intervention in a regulated market. It's always the market who gets the blame.

Actually, they do. If our dollar were to suddenly become worthless, they would have no currency reserves. While I agree, they have the upper hand in this, they've already seen what a collapse of consumption on our soil does to their own economic growth. (...)

China along with many other countries were duped into using dollars as reserves, pieces of paper we can print as many as we like. For a while now they've been accumulating actual reserves, such as gold, in preparation for the "quantitative easing" we'll soon be indulging ourselves in.

Consumption isn't a huge favor the world needs from us. Anyone can consume, it's not that hard. what matters is that you pay for it and America hasn't been able to do that for a very long time now. Hell, China has many more consumers than us who can actually pay for stuff with real money. Why would they care to export to us when they can consume most of their goods themselves?

Do you think a chinese is thankful he works in a dishwasher factory so he can go home and wash his clothes by hand on a rock? Or making cars for us so he can ride his bicycle to work?

Their government is also being stupid because they're still trying to prop up the dollar and devaluing their currency by keeping it pegged. They'll wise up eventually.

I didn't say hyperinflation... I said inflation. Between 2 and 4% inflation is a good thing. If you disagree, you are beyond help.

That's kind of a silly statement. Governments like inflation, people who have to produce and earn money don't. That's like saying "low interest rates are good". Depends on who you ask, they're good for debters, but not good for lenders and savers.

As for the Austrian school, yes, it's BS. (BS)

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." -- Hayek. Not that a keynesian would care.

No force, but enforce contracts. Right.

Touché Señor Nitpicker I meant something along the lines of "don't allow use of force among citizens".

It's easy not to worry about how the rules are set up so long as they are benefitting you. Once you see that not everybody is getting a fair deal, you realize the moral, and even selfish reasons for entering a broader scoped social contract. In the end, we all benefit from a well educated, healthy society. We just need to put up the VC.

Unfairness is, most often than not, advanced by the use of force. Problems that don't involve force to begin with, don't require force to be solved. Violence is in a different domain. That's like bullying people into liking you.

Why aren't you questioning the selfishness of those who advocate the use of force? They want power over a whole domain of other people's lives. They say people are being wronged yet they propose using the most destructive tool, something that opens up so much potential for abuse, to solve everything.

Libertarians are always worried about individuals instead of this group, or that group, or whoever claims to be speaking for the interests of society, not out of blind selfishness, but because "individual" is a very cool concept with the following magic properties:

An individual is the smallest minority, so when you help the individual, you help the minority that needs the most protection from abuse (they're the smallest!). An individual is the most numerous minority, so you help the most minorities. An individual is the majority because everyone is an individual. So when you keeps things always at the level of individual, individual rights, individual liberties, etc. you're helping everybody and people tend not to be benefitted at the expense of others.

That sounds a lot more fair to me.

This video has been declared a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof declared by NetRunner.

Sorry man,

*dupeof=http://www.videosift.com/video/Colbert-Wag-of-the-Finger-Cynthia-Davis-Fox-News

tail wag = *happy

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Goat, Pygmy, Jump, Hop, Having, Fun' to 'Goat, Pygmy, Jump, Hop, Having, Fun, tail wag' - edited by ponceleon