I love it! He's absolutely right! The only way to pull up the poor is by pushing down the rich. Wars, increased government spending, subsidized industry and manipulated interest rates have nothing to do with it. He should title it Atlas Sighed.

"Pushing down the rich?"

Yeah...they've had such a hard time of it lately.

Why, the top 5% only doubled their wealth in the last ten years.

Poor babies.

And just look at all of the prosperity they've brought us as a result!

Because everybody knows how much the rich love creating jobs....

>> ^blankfist:

I love it! He's absolutely right! The only way to pull up the poor is by pushing down the rich. Wars, increased government spending, subsidized industry and manipulated interest rates have nothing to do with it. He should title it Atlas Sighed.


I love it. You didn't watch the video, I'm guessing?

Tags for this video have been changed from 'the real news network, paul jay, ralph nader' to 'the real news network, paul jay, ralph nader, philanthropy' - edited by kronosposeidon

Hey, this is a fun work of fiction that I used to toy around with as well. Where a social revolution starts with a wealthy man taking people of great intelligence left behind by our education system, giving them the means and education to start to make a change in world. It sounds like a really fun idea. There is the metal disconnect though from an intelligent person at the art of making money and the art of reforming society. A man that knows how to make lots of money might not have the same kind of smarts needed to start such a great social movement. But, for fiction, it works!

>> ^NetRunner:
I love it. You didn't watch the video, I'm guessing?

TL;DW

the title should read "the super-rich MUST save us"

Has Nader taken responsibility yet for being such a negative influence on liberalism? A lot of people will have been affected by the Iraq war, justices Roberts and Alito for the next 30 years, and the worst oil spill in US history.

Being a leader carries responsibility, even if the masses will follow the same leaders no matter what. Taking responsibility is good because it implies a person will try in the future to avoid the error in reasoning that led to the mission failure.

Taking responsibility also protects the reputation of liberalism. Defend it with your life.

@chilaxe, after 2000 Nader is pretty much persona non grata in liberal political circles.

Still, he's a bit like liberalism's alcoholic uncle -- we still love the stories he tells, and like to hang out with him, but we don't really look to him for leadership in the slightest, and are always afraid he's going to say something that embarrasses us.

In other words, your advice has already long since been taken.

This is something only Ralph Nader would think of to try, and it's a pretty harmless thing he can do by himself. It even has some chance of helping our cause in the process (for a change), so I wish him well...

@NetRunner,

Repeatedly giving an opinion leader a national stage and giving him enthusiastic and unalloyed plaudits doesn't sound like humoring a non-leader alcoholic uncle.

The problem is that for liberalism to oppose prosocial values like accountability when it's convenient limits its ability to persuade moderates to engage in the sense of collectivism liberalism hopes to achieve.

Indeed, Nader's point in this very video is that people other than himself (the mega-rich) should be more collectivist... so why should he be hypocritically exempt from basic prosocial values?

>> ^chilaxe:

Repeatedly give an opinion leader a national stage and giving him enthusiastic and unalloyed plaudits doesn't sound like humoring a non-leader alcoholic uncle.

Who's doing that?

@NetRunner
http://videosift.com/video/Ralph-Nader-Only-the-Super-Rich-Can-Save-Us
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/myriam-miedzian/is-ralph-nader-on-to-some_b_298483.html
http://videosift.com/video/Ralph-Nader-interviewed-by-Sonali-Kolhatkar

http://videosift.com/video/Ralph-Nader-Things-Are-a-Lot-Worse-than-We-Thought
http://videosift.com/video/Ralph-Nader-talks-about-Barack-Obama-and-Hillary-Clinton
http://videosift.com/video/Ralph-Nader-is-Obama-a-corporatist-like-BushCheney
http://videosift.com/video/Ralph-Nader-on-Fannie-Freddie-and-more
http://videosift.com/video/Ron-Paul-And-Ralph-Nader-together-on-The-Situation-Room
http://videosift.com/video/Ralph-Nader-on-Real-Time-September-26-2008
http://videosift.com/video/Ralph-Nader-makes-Tucker-look-silly-once-again
http://videosift.com/video/Ralph-Nader-on-Education
http://videosift.com/video/Nader-On-War-Profiteering-Eisenhower-Would-be-Proud
http://videosift.com/video/NADER-vs-O-REILLY-Pulling-Out-Of-Afghanistan-Another-9-11
http://videosift.com/video/Ralph-Nader-on-Organizing-Districts-for-Change
http://videosift.com/video/Why-the-Democrats-wont-Impeach-Bush-and-Cheney

>> ^rougy:

"Pushing down the rich?"
Yeah...they've had such a hard time of it lately.
Why, the top 5% only doubled their wealth in the last ten years.
Poor babies.
And just look at all of the prosperity they've brought us as a result!
Because everybody knows how much the rich love creating jobs....


I didn't mean the top 5%.

@chilaxe so, because there are some YouTube videos of Ralph Nader that got sifted, that to you is a specifically liberal attempt to elevate Ralph Nader to a position of leadership and national attention?

I mean, I'll accept that Huffington post and Democracy Now are both liberal networks, but the former was basically saying "hey, uncle Nader may actually have come up with a non-crazy idea for once!", and Democracy Now is seriously fond of giving a microphone to anyone who will say crazy shit, and as a result they rarely have an effect on more than the fringe of the liberal movement.

As for mainstream radio and TV channels, it might surprise you to learn that we actually don't control them, despite what conservative media tells you. They actually just love to shine a spotlight on our alcoholic uncle, especially when he's talking smack about Democrats. That's not liberals elevating Nader themselves, that's the media trying to hang him around our necks.

So again, I dunno what you're talking about.

>> ^chilaxe:

Has Nader taken responsibility yet for being such a negative influence on liberalism? A lot of people will have been affected by the Iraq war, justices Roberts and Alito for the next 30 years, and the worst oil spill in US history.


In other words, "shut up and do as you're told."

Laying the blame for those things at Nader's feet is a pretty loathsome act.

Nader represents a lot of leftists, like myself, who are continuously marginalized and belittled by those "sensible" mainstream liberals who are "just being realistic."

"Just being sensible" like almost all of the Democrats we have in office now, who still can't get anything done even with the sizable majority voters gave them two years ago.

You Democrats...you want my vote, you want my support, but then you want me to just shut up and go away.

I've had it.

>> ^NetRunner:
In other words, your advice has already long since been taken.

And in taking his advice, you have lost my support.

>> ^rougy:

>> ^NetRunner:
In other words, your advice has already long since been taken.
And in taking his advice, you have lost my support.


Eh, I dunno why you want to start being standoffish with me. I've got no beef with the idealists and dreamers in the liberal/progressive movement, I'm just not one of them. We're still on the same team -- I want to see those pie-in-the-sky liberal ideas put into practice, I just think the way there from here will take time and hard work, and can't be won by refusing to support incremental moves towards the ultimate goal.

That said, I'm pretty ticked off at the lack of movement from the 111th Congress myself. I'm certainly starting to feel like something's going to have to give soon.

>> ^NetRunner: "...can't be won by refusing to support incremental moves towards the ultimate goal."


Sure, NR, because we've seen how much success the Democrats have had with those "incremental moves" over the course of the past two years.

The cons still run the show, even though they're in the minority.

And Nader was right. When he said "There's virtually no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans" he was right, and the congressional record of the last two years proves it.

No, the Dems don't get my vote any more. No more votes for nothing. No more votes for empty promises.

@NetRunner,

We can give various reasons for why the far left behaves in ways that aren't in its best interests - their behavior is so driven by passions - but the important point to draw from this is that it's never going to change.

We can see in this very thread that the far left will re-create the 2000 election loss in future elections if given a chance. (Same reason why liberal Canada is ruled by conservative Harper.)

There's never going to be a pro-rationality movement within liberalism. Maddow, Olberman, and Moore would rather talk about sports etc. than about the science of intelligence and how to improve ours.


Meanwhile, invest 100 units in society and you get back 1 unit. Invest 100 units in yourself and you get back 1000 units.

@rougy, ultimately, I cast my lot in with the marxist theorists who believe advanced technology will free humankind. Best of luck.

@chilaxe what about the far right? It seems as long as you guys have the KKK rooting for you, along with their dog whistlers like Limbaugh, Beck, and the Pauls at the forefront of conservative and libertarian thought's public image, you're never going to get the support of present-day liberals, idealistic or otherwise.

Then you have the secessionists, the goldbugs, the tenthers, the birthers, the minutemen, the militias, and the Paulites who want to destroy the modern economy with discredited economic theories from the 19th Century. Let's not even get started on the huge arm of the "small government" movement that want to pass laws regarding all human sexual activity, and engage in large scale wars with non-Christian religions.

If you want to judge a movement's capability for rational thought based on it's outliers, there's a lot worse over in your house than in mine.

@NetRunner,

Right, in the bigger picture, conservativism and libertarianism are full of crazies.

In my case, though, I've been a supporter of Obama ever since early in his candidacy, so I think I have to be first in line to try to improve liberalism. My only values are pro-intelligence and pro-science, so I'll side with whomever most advocates for those traits.

What I do object to is what seems to be the attitude in my liberal community that liberalism doesn't need to be self-critical and try to continually decrease its error rate.

For that reason, the safest prediction seems to be that its error rate will remain at the same level. (That's why liberals in Canada were surprised to find they had elected their enemy Harper, even though they had 4 years to ponder US liberals' 2000 loss.)

>> ^chilaxe: ultimately, I cast my lot in with the marxist theorists who believe advanced technology will free humankind. Best of luck.



No, actually you like to "play it safe" and "be reasonable" and not rock the boat with anybody like Ralph Nader because it means you might have to do some fighting for what you believe in.

You believe in the "slow and steady" method of reasoned democracy which has lead us to the place we are today.

Like Nader said, "You settled for the lesser of two evils...but you still got evil."

@rougy: "Like Nader said, "You settled for the lesser of two evils...but you still got evil.""

Is that the same Nader without whom 1 million Iraqis would still be alive and there would be hundreds of millions less gallons of oil in the gulf?

Things are really not so simple that some fringe figures like Nader can force their will on the rest of society without going through democracy.

You're free to continue on your course, though. Expect republicans to thus re-take the white house in 2016.

>> ^chilaxe:

What I do object to is what seems to be the attitude in my liberal community that liberalism doesn't need to be self-critical and try to continually decrease its error rate.
For that reason, the safest prediction seems to be that its error rate will remain at the same level. (That's why liberals in Canada were surprised to find they had elected their enemy Harper, even though they had 4 years to ponder US liberals' 2000 loss.)


I don't get the sense that liberals aren't self-critical enough. On the contrary, the problem I see is that we can't stop being self-critical long enough to actually form a cohesive bloc that can agree on a course of action and rally around it.

I'm not sure what the fix for that really is. Republicans get a lot of mileage out of strong, hierarchical discipline, but as a result they seem to have zero capability to have self-critical conversations anymore.

I was kinda hoping Obama would spend a little more time trying to rally and unify liberals than make all these ill-fated attempts to reach out to conservatives.