This man owes his liberty to protest. He takes much for granted.

Wait, David Whatshislastname?

In regards to the comments about education around the 3:00 mark:

The problem with ideologues criticizing others' intellectual rigor is that ideologues themselves always lack rigor (throwing stones in glass houses).

Cenk should count the number of intellectual inaccuracies in his own videos, including that every time we say 99% we're decreasing our mental accuracy.

Sowell is also surely using empty rhetoric when he says the message of the protesters isn't clear; their message is the same as that of all protests from the left for the last 40 years.

Woohoo!! I'm finally Silver!

Funny, as I watched this before sifting it, I was wondering how accurate the pundits that I like are, Cenk in particular, and how egregious their errors are, and if they're repeated again and again in subsequent broadcasts.

My gut feeling is that on the whole Cenk is much more concerned with accuracy and correcting his rhetoric when it's false than, say, anyone on Fox News. That said, I have no motivation to go and try and find Cenk's mistakes. If you know if any, especially any particular message that is false that he keeps hitting again and again, I'd certainly be interested.

P.S., There's nothing in your link about why "99%" is an inaccurate number.>> ^chilaxe:

The problem with ideologues criticizing others' intellectual rigor is that ideologues themselves always lack rigor (throwing stones in glass houses).
Cenk should count the number of intellectual inaccuracies in his own videos, including that every time we say 99% we're decreasing our mental accuracy.
Sowell is also surely using empty rhetoric when he says the message of the protesters isn't clear; their message is the same as that of all protests from the left for the last 40 years.

@messenger said "There's nothing in your link about why "99%" is an inaccurate number."


The people who are saying they represent 99% actually think they're representing 99%.

It's good as a slogan, but the poll discussed by the San Francisco Chronicle found only 37% support the movement.

We can claim to represent anybody we want to, but if they don't agree with us and they don't feel we're representing their interests or the interests of society, that claim seems to contain large inaccuracies.

"99%" is the % of people who are losing under the corporate-run system. Whether you know it or not, whether you support their efforts or not, everyone not in the top 1% of earners in the country is making less than their fair share of profits from our combined labour. It's not a poll of support. The number is accurate. Just like the reaction number "the 53%" is accurate in that it represents the % of people who pay income tax in the States. It doesn't represent the % of people who support their point of view.

Also, you didn't say if you could name anything that Cenk consistently says or has said that's factually incorrect. Got anything?>> ^chilaxe:

@messenger said "There's nothing in your link about why "99%" is an inaccurate number."

The people who are saying they represent 99% actually think they're representing 99%.
It's good as a slogan, but the poll discussed by the San Francisco Chronicle found only 37% support the movement.
We can claim to represent anybody we want to, but if they don't agree with us and they don't feel we're representing their interests or the interests of society, that claim seems to contain large inaccuracies.

@messenger

Look at how the "99%" term is actually being used, though. Cenk's discussion in this video and the title of this video claim that Sowell said 99% of the population are parasites. Are there any interpretations in which that's not a lie?

It's expected that ideologues confuse their own thinking, but it's taking things a step further to actually criticize the intellectual status of his opponents at the same time that he's perpetuating these things.

You're right. Cenk did at least once conflate the actual 99% and the protesters, and another time, he put the word 99% into the mouths of the two Fox people in that same sense. When a movement takes its name from something it's easy to make mistakes like that. It's not professional, but speaking extemporaneously, I get it.

The crap the two Fox guys are coming up with though is just silly, and the same old false tropes, like the protesters are against capitalism, their message is incoherent, and so on.>> ^chilaxe:

@messenger
Look at how the "99%" term is actually being used, though. Cenk's discussion in this video and the title of this video claim that Sowell said 99% of the population are parasites. Are there any interpretations in which that's not a lie?
It's expected that ideologues confuse their own thinking, but it's taking things a step further to actually criticize the intellectual status of his opponents at the same time that he's perpetuating these things.

@messenger said: "The crap the two Fox guys are coming up with though is just silly, and the same old false tropes, like the protesters are against capitalism, their message is incoherent, and so on."

Yeah, I agreed above that the two Fox people said some dumb things, but there are countless similar things in Cenk's discussion, and his supporters always conveniently ignore them all. If Clinton had left office 6 months later, the dot-com bubble would have been burst, and we'd today be talking about how bad his performance was. That's been known for a decade, so when can we expect ideologues to understand it? Probably never.

Also, since Cenk is a college graduate (I checked; he went to some of the best schools possible), surely he knows to base his case on a variety of metrics, which would help him avoid errors like the one discussed above. For example, since Cenk is more interested in increasing his intelligence than in scoring statistical-artifact cheap shots, he'd surely be interested to add the comparative performance of red and blue states to his analysis.

I'll help:

The study looks at factors that affect state prosperity and economic outlook, such as tax burdens and population change. What’s clear is that red or red-leaning states dominate the top positions while blue states have the dubious distinction of dragging in last. In the economic outlook section, for example, the top 20 states are bright red or lean red, while eight out of the bottom 10 are very blue: New York, Vermont, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon and Rhode Island.

Most of the “poor states” states, as ALEC calls them, have the highest personal income tax rates and the largest unfunded state pension liabilities. Source

@chilaxe
Your source is "by the well-known Reagan economist Arthur B. Laffer, the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore, and Jonathan Williams of ALEC." I couldn't figure out which way ALEC leans in a 2-minute search, but the first two authors are almost certainly biased towards the right. Everything they say may be informationally accurate, and it might even be a fair all-around representation of the situation, but I wouldn't go quoting it as a neutral unbiased source any more than if Hilary Clinton co-wrote a similar book with someone from MSNBC.

Cenk's mistakes aren't "the same kind." The mistakes the Fox dudes are making are patently false and misleading. Cenk's "mistake" was talking about two things with the same name. I put mistake in quotes this time because I watched the video again, and he says, "the 99%", which is the slogan of the protest movement, so it's not even wrong. He didn't say, "99% of the population". Your argument that it's a lie is like saying that members of the Tea Party weren't actually in attendance at the Boston Tea Party in 1773. I think anyone listening would understand that both he and the Fox guys mean the protesters. The Fox guys might not even disagree with how he said it.

Is there anything else you can point to of Cenk's that is a clear falsehood, especially one that he continues to repeat? While I like having heroes, I prefer it when their armour is a little tarnished, so you'd be doing me a favour.

@messenger

If you wish to dispute mainstream economists regarding straight-forward issues, please provide other sources.


So now 99% doesn't mean 99%. Brilliant. You would equally support Republicans saying "We are the 99%. We represent the 99% of the population that suffers from the importing of long-term poverty via open borders. Any references to 99% are no longer a numerical reference, although we'll pretend they are when it's convenient."

Such sophistry is embarrassing. If it was so easy to not be fooled by this linguistic trickery, you yourself wouldn't have been fooled when you titled this video in a misleading way. I know from your past comments that you're one of the most mature and intelligent people on the sift, so I can only imagine the mental states of the rest of the sift.

The US is entering a prolonged period of economic decline because liberals practiced population replacement by importing 80 million permanently poor and less educable people in the last 40 years --precisely when unskilled labor has been rendered useless by global labor arbitrage and ever increasing automation. If you want to import people, import them from north-east Asia next time, and they'll be contributing more to society per capita than white people within a generation. All statistics are bunk when they don't take this population replacement into account.



Everything you hope to happen is going to fail, just as your ideology destroyed the California economy (which you'll never be honest about) despite it's ultra-high taxes and liberal policies. There is no reform movement within liberalism from the perspective of intelligence, so we can safely assume liberalism will remain frozen in time as it has been for the last 40 years.

I should probably stop commenting on videosift. Compared to the Silicon Valley people I spend my time with, videosift culture appears to be permanently anti-success. That's why they need income redistribution in the first place. There are never enough talented 21st century workers in Silicon Valley because it's so on the right side of history. People should learn from the culture here.

@chilaxe

I'm not disputing their facts. I'm disputing their pedigree, and thus their probable selective use of facts. Like I said, if career Democrats wrote a book showing how right-wing policies are destroying the world I wouldn't cite it as an independent source because I wouldn't trust it to be impartial.

FWIW, Wikipedia says, "We are the 99% is a political slogan, Internet meme and implicit economic claim that emerged from the "Occupy" protests in 2011." So yes, it's both an economic fact and a term used to refer to supporters of the protest movement themselves. This is in contrast to people who don't support the protest. These people don't define themselves as part of the 99% who are losing out (even though they are). They define themselves as part of the 53% who are "contributing". Either way, if your point is that Cenk should stop confounding the two uses of the term, then yes, I'm with you, and might even send him a note to that effect myself. I took the title straight from the YouTube video.

I hope you don't mind my bringing in a quote of yours from elsewhere:

Liberalism doesn't prefer decay, but it does prefer the conditions that cause decay.

Twice now, your example to support this is California, which isn't something I know anything about, nor am interested in studying in enough depth to argue with you. I can point, instead, to statistics that clearly show that economic inequality in the developed world correlates very strongly with all sorts of social problems.

http://videosift.com/video/Richard-Wilkinson-How-economic-inequality-harms-societies

Notice, I'm not talking about liberal policy or conservative policy or anything ideologically based, just the observable facts. Now, you might think that the only measure of success is some financial indicator, but for me, success can only be measured by high social conditions. Otherwise, what good is money? Money is the means to the end of good conditions. Current American policy helps outrageously rich people become richer at a rate several times that of the rest of the country. In other words, almost all the economic success of your country is being enjoyed by the top 1% simply because of government policy, not because they're doing anything different from what they did in the 50s. Now correlation doesn't entail causation, but it makes more sense that the causal arrow points from the gap to the problems than vice-versa, or from a third unknown factor which causes both the economic gap and the wide array of social "decay" in country after country.

"A third unknown factor which causes both the economic gap and the wide array of social "decay" in country after country."

Nobody alive knows how to bring white people's average test scores up to the scores of north-east Asians and Jews, or NAMs (non-Asian minorities) up to the scores of white people. Naturally, permanent gaps in test scores cause all manner of social decay, all deriving from population replacement.

This chart concisely explains every problem the US experiences (the need for income redistribution, high murder rate & prison population, low test scores, high unemployment. On every societal factor, if you break it down by region of ancestry, the US scores equal to or better than the countries its population came from, and it's the population replacement responsible for problems.



Before I leave the sift, we should place a bet.

You bet is OWS will help fix these problems by creating a shift to the political left. If the next president after Obama is Republican, as I expect, or if the economic decline continues in liberal states, that would seem to be counter to your prediction.

My bet is the US is in permanent economic decline that will correlate (just as it already correlates) with 1. how liberal a state is and 2. the proportion of the state population that's not White/Asian/Jewish. Next time you notice statistics suggesting that the global fiscal crisis only occurred because it was assumed NAMs would manage their finances in the same way Whites/Jews/Asians do, question whether it's really in society's interest to pretend reality isn't the way it is. If these achievement gaps close within the next 100 years without the help of reprogenetics (reprogramming genetics will probably start via embryo selection around 2040, and liberals will oppose it until they finally reverse their position in the latter half of the century), that would disprove my prediction.



Some sources that Cenk would be furious we're talking about without applying deception:
• NYT: Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in City Schools
• The Great Dumbing Down: California Skills Decay Due To Immigration



Anyway, I'm off. This should be my last substantive comment on videosift. Best of luck on your path, Messenger.