US Government Shut Down - new elections for senate and house of rep.?

[tar]

iNow,

 

You gave a prediction for the future in regards to the Fed tapering. I gave a slightly different solution. You base your prediction on the excellence of the Fed's ability, the ability of a group of our best, sitting down, looking at the facts and taking the most appropriate action in the best interest of the economy. I agree with you completely and still look at reality, and the effects that 65 billion has on market expectation, on animal spirits, on every player in a massive world where the realities of game theory come to the fore, and everybody assesses the new situation and determines what their next best move is. Where to hide their wealth and power for protection, or where to invest it for growth and profit. Known rules and metrics are use by each of these intelligent human beings. Each person in the thusly defined economy assesses the situation, determines what everybody else's best move is going to be, and buy's and sells, hires and lay's off, spends or saves, expands or contracts, innovates and adjusts, through any one of a complex myriad of interelated stategies, vehicles, and use trusted people and institutions in the real world, to affect real lives, build real companies, employ real people and cause wealth and power to trade hands amoungst people that trust each other's promises, and live up to their obligations.

 

But you tell me I don't know anything about the economy because I am not a Fed official, and they are smarter than me, know everything I know, and therefore cannot ease to early or too late, and will do it right on time, based on the data. The market however is ALWAYS ahead of the Fed. The Fed can only react appropriately. Set expectations from which everybody can work. Set the interest rate from which we all plan our next move and our futures.

 

QE is an extraordinary measure. It is beyond the usual tool kit. It is a peice of emergency equipment that shifts wealth and power around the world at extraordinary speeds and creates winners and losers at a pace that is unrealistic, and causes TAR to lose touch with reality, to not understand what is going on and what the "meaning" behind the 23 billion that my company generates world wide, is in relation to it. So I question the Fed. It is not because I am stupid, it is not because I am registered republican, it is because it does not make sense and I am trying to make sense of it.

 

Then I am called a fascist, or a supporter of fascists, or a dupe of fascists by Overtone,(who is a disbeliever in the trustworthiness of bankers), and attempt to illustrate that I do not believe that assessment of me is correct, to which Phi, a person who I have great respect for replies blah blah, strawman snip.

 

Over this last week I have undergone an extraordinary amount of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

both on this thread and at my company. An extraordinary week that has left me, rather a basket case.

 

I am trying to figure this thing out WITH you all, and you are treating me like the enemy. Perhaps I don't know everything, or have the purest heart, or the most capability and trustworthiness in every area of human endevor that a person can have, but I know I am a good person, and I know I live in a great country and being told that my assessment is untrue, or a result of manipulation or ignorance is personally quite disturbing.

 

I wish we could take this discussion, both on a personal level and a political level, to a higher level. Sort out the name calling. And look at the reality of the thing.

 

Regards, TAR2

Have we truely entered the world of doublethink and doubletalk expressed in the book 1984, where peace is war and love is hate and BIG BROTHER is in charge of us? Or are WE the ones still running the place?

I would rather believe the latter.

I would rather we stuck together, and made the latter the reality of the situation, since it IS the reality of the situation. We make our world, what it is, and we have more power, when we do it together, than when we fight.

And hate, and distrust.

Edited October 19, 2013 by tar

[overtone]

That was a different time, and a different continent. We fought a war to defeat that ideology already.

Apparently you think fascism was, or can be, defeated by military force. You think ideologies are bound by continental borders, and have been defeated in battle. You have asserted that "fascism" was defeated in WWII - whereupon, apparently, you think it disappeared somehow.

 

How gullible can a person possibly be?

 

Whether you simply have no idea what fascism is, or are flincihing away from acknowledging its significant presence and role in current American politics, or perhaps (as we see in many Republicans) are even more fundamentally ignorant and lack comprehension of the nature of ideologies or even the meaning of the word "ideology", I can't tell. But this is nonsense, what you are posting.

 

 

 

I am trying to figure this thing out WITH you all, and you are treating me like the enemy.

You are not.

 

In the first place, you need to quit projecting your reflexive creation of "enemies" and "both sides" and so forth unto other people. It's insulting. I am treating you like a victim, somebody who was honestly duped and conned and misled by bad people, and is now brought to the point of being forced to recognize a reality that in a sensible and reasonable person would create a fair amount of shame and regret - or deny that reality and retreat into a world of fantasy and mythical "history", in which all this stuff happened sort of by accident despite the good intentions of everyone involved (either that or didn't happen - a remarkably common response among registered Republicans).

 

In the second place, this isn't rocket science - there is no need to bring in subtle and profound and difficult complexities to be unraveled here. Other people have had this simple stuff figured out for many, many years. You don't need to "figure", you just need to pay attention. You can tell who they are by using your memory - go back to what you remember people saying, to pick two examples of dozens, about the Iraq War or the consequences of deregulating the banks, and compare what they said with what happened and what we found out later. The people who have been consistently right about stuff over many years are probably worth listening to now, eh?

 

Absent that enlightenment, meanwhile, you are not trying to figure out anything "with" anyone. You are trying to set the frame of discussion and debate so that other people's observations and reasonings are denied by presumption, and so that you bear no responsibility for the consequences of your years of misled political support and subverted allegiances. And they have been very, very bad consequences.

 

 

 

I am trying to offer common ground that we can all stand on, that we all do stand on, so democrats and republicans can see that they are standing on the same ground, and you keep coming back at me like I am defending Rush Limbaugh

There is no ground, common or otherwise, in the denial of physical reality and historical event. That is fog, not ground. This shutdown, for example, was engineered and strategized and planned by a fairly small and defniable - nameabe - bunch of people acting according to overt and clearly articulated "principles" of a sort, or agenda. One the names is Ted Cruz, another is Michael Needham, a third is David Koch, and so forth. They are to blame. "Both sides" are not to blame. You are not "defending" Limbaugh, but imitating him, and attempting to establish as the basis of discussion a set of presumptions essentially identical to his. That should stop you in your tracks.

Edited October 19, 2013 by overtone

[Phi for All]

Phi for all,

 

Not sure what your point is. Can you be more specific?

 

Wow, really? I highlighted all the words pertinent to my point and everything.

 

overtone states that national level Republican politicians have adopted an ideology of fascism, and you pull that statement over onto yourself and then claim he's wrong in calling YOU a fascist. Are YOU a national level Republican politician, or are you just swinging at strawmen like one?

 

It's such a Limbaugh tactic that I thought next you'd be telling him he doesn't support the troops because he doesn't support the war.

[tar]

Overtone,

 

I know already that slavery has not been removed from this nation.

I know already that class warfare has not ended in this nation.

I know already that the conflict between rationality and religion has not been resolve

 

But I, in my personal muses surrounding discussions at work and home and here have made some sense of it, or see some glimmers of hope, avenues of understanding of oneself and hence of human behavior, and hence of societal interaction. Insights that I am trying to share, that I sense, I have a little bit shared.

 

It has to do with capability and trustworthyness. The power that each of us has to effect the reality around us, and what rules we adhere to, in the excercise and accumulation and application of that power.

 

As you say, ideologies cannot be defeated by armies, but armies can change reality. A single man or woman, with a single idea has great power if they are in control of an army. The president of the United States has great power because he IS in control of an army. Therefore his/her ideology must be subject to the will of his soldiers, or the army will dissolve or revolt.

 

Is the army of the U.S. subject to the will of the masters or the slaves amongst the population?

Is the army of the U.S. subject to the will of the rich or the poor amongst the population?

IS the army of the U.S. subject to the will of the scientist or the artist?

Is the army of the U.S. subject to the will of an ideator, or the ideology he/she is guided by?

 

My insight is that we have already been addressing these issues. People, long dead, have passed on to us the principles, the ideologies, under which we should operate. The founders of the constitution were brilliant men. They set up the checks and balances that they already knew would be required to keep any one man's ideology, from controlling the army.

 

Regards, TAR2

[hypervalent_iodine]

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