Republicans Have Been Deceived by a Satanist

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Eugene Shubert, Aug 13, 2012.

  1. Eugene Shubert Valued Senior Member

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    Have you heard the persistently advocated Republican/Libertarian message that the evils of socialism will ruin the United States? It should be understood that the originator of that belief was a Satanist, a very hard-working advocate of the first demon's message. Her name was Ayn Rand.

    See Ayn Rand's first television interview at http://everythingimportant.org/

    So why aren't we hearing debates on the evils of insurance? Shouldn't there be a law requiring drivers to have car insurance? Why is social justice and social responsibility evil? If State required car insurance is morally justifiable, then why is State mandated health insurance labeled socialism? Isn't Social Security just an efficient, very reasonable, government-run insurance policy?

    Finally, why are so many Christians parroting the propaganda of a demon-inspired agenda?
     
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  3. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    She was an atheist.
     
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  5. FTLinmedium Registered Senior Member

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    Rand might have been crazy, and you can make a very good argument for her being evil (what with objectivists advocating the right of people to nail living cats to a wall if they feel like it, and insisting that it's wrong for anybody to interfere), but I don't think she believed in a devil.

    Modern Laveyan Satanism was derived from Rand's beliefs (and a few other things), but it is a newer invention. Satanists usually don't believe in a devil either. I can see how you would mix the two up, though.
     
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  7. Eugene Shubert Valued Senior Member

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    I didn't say that Ayn Rand believed in a devil. I simply said that she was a very hard-working advocate of the first demon's message.
     
  8. FTLinmedium Registered Senior Member

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    Ummm... yeah... given that you don't know what the "first demon's" message is, one could say that about anybody. The concept is undefined.

    What if the "First demon's" message is to tell people that Rand was an advocate of the first demon's message? In that case, you'd be an advocate of the first demon's message.

    Do you see the problem here?


    Unless she actually believed in the devil and deliberately advocated what she believed was its message, the accusation is completely arbitrary.
     
  9. Eugene Shubert Valued Senior Member

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    The first demon's message is the nonsense that got Satan kicked out of heaven, according to the Bible, and as referenced here: http://everythingimportant.org/

    Poor Ayn Rand. She believed that her philosophy was original with her.
     
  10. Repo Man Valued Senior Member

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    Eugene Shubert, thank you for my first laugh of the day.
     
  11. Eugene Shubert Valued Senior Member

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    One good laugh deserves another. When are you going to answer the questions of the opening post?
     
  12. FTLinmedium Registered Senior Member

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    That may be your religious faith, and you have the right to hold it... but other religions are in disagreement, and you can't say they're wrong. It all depends on which religion (even down to the details of denomination, and personal interpretation) you're going by.

    You can say anything with religion, because it's personal belief- like I said, arbitrary (depending on which religion you choose)- you could level that accusation at anybody (or have it leveled at yourself).


    She may have. She did consider herself terribly clever and creative. I agree with you there- she was neither- just very vocal.
     
  13. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    No one will take you seriously if you talk about demons. Except the mentally ill and Michelle Bachmann.
     
  14. Eugene Shubert Valued Senior Member

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    You are right in thinking that all conclusions depend on presuppositions. That's why the analysis in the above referenced document is based on two precisely stated axioms.
     
  15. FTLinmedium Registered Senior Member

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    I didn't see any such axioms clearly stated in your post.
     
  16. Eugene Shubert Valued Senior Member

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    A belief in the existence of demons is not an essential axiom in the exposition that I cited. It would be perfectly logical to acknowledge the existence of a literary form that merely refers to the personification of three different kinds of evil as a literary device.
     
  17. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    So you don't believe it, but you are wondering how Republicans can be such hypocrites? I guess they just take the parts of Rand's philosophy they like and leave the rest.
     
  18. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Excuse me. I'm a small-l libertarian philosophically and a capital-L registered member of the Libertarian Party. I don't appreciate your slanderous words.

    We believe in small government because we see large governments as being slow, inefficient, poorly run, and out of touch with their constituents. The current gridlocked U.S. government is a perfect example. Both wings of the Republocrat Party seem determined to push our economy over a cliff in January. They would rather posture and pander than compromise and actually govern. If the U.S. economy collapses, it could quite literally bring the entire world economy down.

    A government can be seen as an organism, and what do we know about organisms as they become larger and larger?
    • Slow-moving
    • Insensitive to external stimuli
    • Slow to react
    • More focused on their own internal metabolism than the outside world
    Is that a pretty good description of the U.S. government since FDR, even more so since LBJ and GWB? (I chose examples from both parties because there's nothing partisan about incompetence.)

    They don't know how many people are working on government projects. They don't even have a central list that identifies all the projects. They pass laws that do more harm than good, such as criminalizing drugs, resulting in 10,000 Mexicans killed every year by shootouts between rival cartels--more people than were ever killed by all now-illegal drugs combined.

    The one thing that the government probably should actually exercise control over is the banks--and that's the one thing they have not controlled. By simply not paying attention, the Controller of the Currency allowed the subprime mortgage debacle to occur--something that my wife, an English major, foresaw. This was arugably the primary precursor of the current economic catastrophe.

    Sure, many truly competent, dedicated people are in the government work force, and they try to do many good things. But the organization itself is inefficient and incompetent, hamstrung by rules that have been in effect so long that the people who passed them are dead. Many agencies are still required to operate according to rules that were enacted before there were computers.

    This is not an organization which I wish to have substantial control over my life. Do you???

    Our detractors are fond of saying, "Libertarians believe that the solution to bad government is no government." That's a lie. What we believe is that the solution to too much government is less government. And if you look around, you'll notice that we have way too much government.

    Have you had the misfortune of going through an airport lately? How much time and money is wasted, how many insults, indignities and inconveniences do we have to endure, in response to terrorism, a phenomenon that kills three thousand Americans per decade? That is almost exactly the same number as are killed by peanut allergies!

    Look at the way they handle welfare. If all the money the federal, state and municipal governments collect for the alleged purpose of "helping the poor" were simply put in a pile, divided up, and given to the poor people, every family under the poverty line would suddenly have an annual income of $40K! Instead, most of them remain in poverty, just a tiny bit less poor, while most of that money pays the salaries of an army of bureaucrats who do nothing all day except sit around and "administer" each other. Private charities like the Salvation Army and the Red Cross, in contrast, operate at a 10-20% overhead level. And in addition, they have the wisdom and ability to turn away cheats and scammers.

    Would you like me to keep going and point out what the government has done to all of the industries they have effectively nationalized? The transportation industry: our bridges and highways are falling apart. The energy industry: we'll run out of generation capacity in your lifetime, but the distribution network is already collapsing. The communication industry: despite draconian regulation, it's a hodgepodge of incompatible systems run by providers who don't give a damn. Other utilities: my watershed (the Potomac River) is full of hermaphrodite fish, the result of hormone supplements in our sewage not being removed at the processing plants. The education industry: kids come out of college with student loans that will take as long to pay off as a home mortgage, yet they can't get jobs and have to sleep on their parents' sofa. The healthcare industry: we pay twice as much for almost every procedure as people in other western countries, and most of the money goes into the pockets of lawyers and bureaucrats rather than care providers.

    How about defense, which throughout history has been the province of government? Due to sheer incompetence, ours has started a New Holy War that has destroyed what little stability the Middle East ever had. It's becoming frighteningly possible that we'll see the Christians, Muslims and Jews lobbing nuclear weapons at each other until they finally succed in "bombing us back to the Stone Age," a time when people were too ignorant to challenge the foolish ideas of their religions.
    It's working for my wife and me, and with a little luck it might hang together for the next decade or two while we're still alive. Each generation's benefits are paid by confiscating the contributions of the next generation. That is not an insurance policy. Insurance policies, in aggregate, not only cover their own benefit payouts, but also return a profit to the insurer. Social Security is a textbook example of a Ponzi scheme. It relies on an ever-larger population of suckers to pay off the original investors.

    But that won't happen. The nation's birthrate is only barely above replacement level because of immigration. Native-born American women are having less than 2.1 children. The only thing that keeps Social Security afloat is the immigration that the Republicans rail about. This cannot continue. Look at Japan, where the birth rate has been below replacement level for years and the country is so xenophobic that there's virtually no immigration. Their economy is about to collapse because of social security. Ours will too, but hopefully on your watch, not mine.
    You need to jettison the religous metaphors. Perhaps you haven't spent enough time on SciForums to understand the culture, but this is not a community that has even the slightest respect for religion. Comments like that will be laughed at. No one will take you seriously if you keep it up.
     
  19. clusteringflux Version 1. OH! Valued Senior Member

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    I've often wondered why the stories and teachings of Jesus did not strike people as more socialist/communist than capitalist.
    Regardless, in the current social climate of the USA, people of faith have decided that the threat to their freedom to worship is the secular leftists.. Any evidence to the contrary would be rather well received, I'm sure.
     
  20. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Indeed. Marx was a Christian, despite a surname which, in the USA, is more common among Jewish people. His slogan, "To each according to his needs, from each according to his ability," is an elaboration of a line in the Book of Acts. Can you imagine any self-respecting Jew, Hindu or Confucian creating an economic model in which what a man takes from it does not have to correlate with what he puts back? Communism is an offshoot of Christianity. A fairytale.
     
  21. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    What slander?

    In the opinion of “we” just how much government is too much government? And how do you come to the belief that government is always poorly run?

    So you are saying that in a Libertarian world there would be no partisan gridlock? Oh please do explain how that would work. Is that because a dictator or plutocracy replaces democracy or do you just pull out the magical Libertarian (big L or small l) wand and declare that everyone will get along?

    Oh I would love to see some proofs here. So elephants and horses are slower than humans because they are larger? Apparently you are not familar with elephants or horses. And you appear to know nothing about context or the differences between hot and cold blooded animals. Size has nothing to do with the ability of an organism to respond to external stimuli. How it is constructed and context or environments (e.g. cold blooded versus warm blooded) are much more relevant to stimulus response. Your thinking here is all too symptomatic of the simple thinking so prevalent and all too characteristic of right wing extremism.

    How do you measure responsiveness of government? To whom should government be responsive in your view or in the view of “we” and how would you measure it? So just what forms the basis for your claim that government, especially large government (whatever that is), is somehow less responsive. Medicare is a very popular government run program. So you think Medicare is an example of an unresponsive big government program?

    Who doesn’t know how many people are working on government projects? You want people to believe that the government doesn’t know how many people it has on it’s payroll? Oh, I would love to see some proof of this wild claim.

    You may not agree with all of the laws our elected officials make, God knows I don’t’. But what is the alternative? Should we appoint you as dictator? If we did, I am sure there will be folks who would not like the way you would run things, what then? It sounds like your beef is more with democracy than it is with the size of government.



    Aside from the fact that the recent financial debacle had nothing to do with the Comptroller of the Currency or the subprime mortgage problem, yeah, government should regulate banks. What government should not have done was to have repealed Glass-Stegall and passed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 and relaxed SEC oversight.

    And where is your proof that government bureaucracy is somehow less efficient and hamstrung by rules or is this a religious belief?

    And just what would you replace government with exactly, the Koch brothers? Would you rather the corporate elite exercise unrestrained control over your life rather than an elected government?

    Again, what is too much government? Too much government is a phrase you Libertarians like to throw around. But I have never met a Libertarian who was able to express in any meaningful terms what that means. It may be a nice for demagoguery, but that is about it.

    So the solution to this perceived injustice in your view is to destroy disassemble government? How is this relevant to the size of government? If government gets to be a certain size it tightens transportation security, is that what you are saying? Again, it sounds like your beef is more with our democracy than the size of government. The reason those security people are in the airport is because our elected representatives put them there. It has nothing to do with the size of our governmet.

    So again where is the proof? You like your fellows are great at making unsupported allegations, not so good at supporting them. This stuff makes great demagoguery, but is of little use in a rational discussion. Medicare operates much more efficiently than private insurers with an operating overhead of 5 percent versus the private industry overhead of 20-30 percent. In the case of charities, are you suggesting that you could find enough volunteers to take on all the responsibilities currently managed by state and federal governments?

    Oh please do. The US has not nationalized an industry – not very good for your demagoguery, but it is a fact none the less.

    Nice broad accusations, nothing specific, so why I am not surprised? So you would rather we go back to the days before the Environmental Protection Agency, back to the days when rivers burned because of the toxic sludge industry dumped into them. How would less government solve our infrastructure and pollution problems? As for the US healthcare industry it is true that we pay more than twice as much for less service and for poorer outcomes than any other industrial country in the world. But can you tie that to size of our government? It is certainly not because of lawyers; the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that law suits account for no more than 5% of our healthcare expenses. There is no evidence that torts are responsible for our healthcare problems. The problem with the American healthcare system is the influence of special interests in Washington, protecting healthcare markets and profits at the expense of the healthcare consumer. It is a result of the way we elect our officials and the influence of money on our politicians. It has nothing to do with the size of government.

    And just how would a smaller government change the ability of our POTUS to go to war? Are you suggesting the way to prevent the POTUS from using our military is to eliminate the military or to curtail it enough so as to effectively take it off the table as a tool of diplomacy? How is smaller government immune to incompetence? How is any human endeavor, public or private, small or large, immune to incompetence? They are not.

    As for Medicare and Social Security, while calling it a Ponzi scheme is great demagoguery, it is not fact. It is, it has always been a pay as you go system. The thing I find fascinating is that people like you think only in terms of A or B, totally ignoring other solutions. The problems with Social Security are minor and can be easily fixed using a number of potential solutions. Medicare, like American healthcare in general, is a much more difficult nut to crack. But it can be cracked. The answer is to not kill off the older generation by denying them access to healthcare, but rather option c, deliver better more efficient and more effective healthcare using the proven “socialist” models in use by other industrial nations. It does not rest in denying healthcare or in smaller government as the Libertarians seem to think. Even the Libertarian Goddess herself, Ayan Rand, was a beneficiary and recipient of big government Social Security and Medicare.
     
    Last edited: Aug 14, 2012
  22. Eugene Shubert Valued Senior Member

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    So money that has been confiscated by Social Security taxes are eventually returned to those who paid taxes? And you believe that's a moral evil?
     
  23. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

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    All taxation schemes are a redistribution of wealth. There is nothing inherently evil about taxation schemes. All people dislike paying taxes -- all children dislike receiving vaccinations -- but there are both personal and societal benefits to paying your taxes or receiving vaccinations.

    Rather than worry about moral evil, you should ask the question if Social Security has a laudable goal and if it is making cost-effective progress towards that goal.
     

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