The Political Screwballs Thread

[jpholding]

Okey doke. From now on this is where you post your political screwballs, and also, you can have your discussion on them here too. That means mods need not calve off any messages -- just keep 'em here.

I'll keep this one running in perpetuity -- no need for a new one each month.

[Soyeong]

Platinum to Augustine2004.

[Manwë Súlimo]

AKA "Augustine's Conspiracy Playpen"

[Benson Shays]

Screwball to the author of this chain email suggesting that Obama's administration parallels the Nazi Party.

[Rayado]

If that thing shows up in my inbox there will be hell to pay

[Soyeong]

If that thing shows up in my inbox there will be hell to pay

I bet you'd round up all of the people who had sent that e-mail and send them off to camps.

[lilpixieofterror]

Since this is a political screwball type thing I thought I’d move this to the political screwball thread:

You really think expert snipers have not tried to replicate such wondrous feats of markmanship. Wow.

It’s been tested several times and done at far longer distances. The fact that Lee Harvy Oswald was an expert sharp shooter in the US military and scored excellent marks on his shooting tells me he was more than capable of shooting JFK, from a couple hundred yards, with a scope and a high powered rifle (which he had both). Tell me Augustine, how much do you know about shooting? If I can hit a shotgun shell casing at over 150 yards, using iron sights and a moderately powered rifle, I’m sure somebody could hit a much bigger target, at a longer distance too.

Why to patrol, of course--except there was a standdown order, if the document that Jesse Ventura published in one of his books is real.

I know people who were in the US military on 9/11 dear and I have yet to hear a single one of them report that there was any sort of standdown on 9/11 and even if there was. Can you explain how the USAF was suppose to fight an enemy they couldn’t see or would you prefer that the US military were to shoot down civilian airliners all over the US? Would that of made you happy?

AFTER the deed was done? I am not going to argue with you any more on this after this post.

Why? Because your conspiracy theories are not matching up to plain reasoning? How was the USAF suppose to know what planes were hostile and what planes were not and what were they suppose to do if they found one? Blow it out of the sky over a major city and let the wreckage damage and destroy many buildings? It’s a very simple question and I have a feeling you don’t have an answer to it, do you?

I am not sure what the AF would have done with the standdown order. Not clear to me.

And it’s too bad that Jesse Ventura is a first rate conspiracy theorist that seems to think he knows more about buildings then engineers and scientist that have commented on it and said there was no explosive used. Besides, do you have any idea of what sort of planning it takes to bring down a building, with explosives? You don’t just throw explosives into a building and call it good. It takes lots of planning and lots of prep work. Do you have any evidence that this happened? Ummm no and the fact that the engineers that designed the building say no explosives were used, but instead there was a cascading failure that caused the towers to fall or are they also part of the conspiracy to hide the truth?

And such quick action prevented 9/11--heh.

Not if you don’t know who your enemy is dear heart or do you understand that? US military plans of the time were to protect the US from incoming fighters and bombers, not from hijacked civilian airliners. Again, conspiracy theorists don’t seem to use plain reasoning very well, do they?

Not arguing with you anymore on this after this post.

Of course not because your conspiracy theories are bunk and fail to account for plain reasoning into account. Pretty much, for your theories to be true, the US government has to be lying, many people in the US military would have to be lying, building engineers, scientist, and anybody who knows a thing about explosive denotations would have to be lying. Pretty much, you have to assume that thousands of people are liars, con artist, or have all been fooled by a government conspiracy. Again, conspiracy theories fail because they fail to account for plain reasoning. Isn’t it funny that nobody, in the US military, has come forward about orders to stand down patrols, even when these orders would have come across the desk of pretty low ranking people? Those who were in the military on 9/11 talk about how they jumped right to work and prepped for what they knew was coming, but none of them seem to mention a thing about any sort of stand-down orders. Odd, isn’t it or are they all part of the conspiracy too?

[Teluog]

Screwball to all non-Canadian politicians, for being non-Canadian.

[Rayado]

I bet you'd round up all of the people who had sent that e-mail and send them off to camps.

Brony Reeducation Camps, led by Pinkie Pie.

[Soyeong]

Brony Reduction Camps, led by Pinkie Pie.

Fify.

[Manwë Súlimo]

The Final Solution to the Brony Question

[Challenger Grim]

Great sanity award to a poster (elsewhere) named "Secular Rightist".

The “Religious Right” doesn’t exist and never had any power. It’s a figment of the far-left’s imagination. They use the harmless, literally non-existent “Religious Right!” to scare people and make stories up about them. My sister is a devout chaste Catholic and I would choose her ideology any day over the evil worldview of liberalism.
...
And I mean it. Leftists are so psychotic that they routinely see friends of mine and figures in politics whom are classical liberals, neoconservatives, libertarians and whatnot as “far-right”. I mean come on if they are “extremists!” what on earth does that make me?

Gasp! Common sense! I thought it was nearly extinct.

[Benson Shays]

I would like to simultaneously nominate my local paper for a screwball for publishing an Amazon.com hate piece and an anti-screwball for publishing my response.

[Chaotic Void]

Screwball to the author of this chain email suggesting that Obama's administration parallels the Nazi Party.

You put in WAY too much effort for that kind of garbage.

I'd just invoke Godwin's Law and get it over with.

[Challenger Grim]

Sanity award to Jonah Goldberg's G-file today.

Empiricism! Fact Finding! Expertise! Oh My!
Maybe you haven't noticed, but liberals have been investing a lot of time and energy into the idea that if smart people run government, if they're guided by science and facts and reason, they can do all sorts of wonderful things. As I discuss in my upcoming book, this is a very old line of argument (see Comte, Condorcet, Lippmann, Dewey, Dukakis, Obama et al). But it's intensified in recent years. The liberal fad of describing themselves as members of the "reality-based community" and the sophomoric bilge about the "Republican war on science" marked the beginning of this boomlet for liberal "empiricism." And what with the terribly embarrassing failures of Obama's Keynesian schemes and industrial planning, the Left is particularly defensive (after all, all of this economic news is just so "unexpected"!).
...
But when liberals make this case it's a huge contradiction. The history of liberal technocrats' screwing things up is long, rich, and deep. This Solyndra mess is just a tiny footnote to that epic tale. And yet, despite all evidence, progressive technocrats and "empiricists" insist that they have the brains and the know-how not only to manage wildly complex phenomena involving literally billions of variable and millions of individual actors but to predict behavior and events years from now. But when it comes to the infinitely more discrete task of determining the guilt of a murderer, they suddenly say, "It's impossible to be sure! We can never be certain!"

Anyway back to the point I wanted to make. The process of a criminal procedure is vastly more "reality-based" and empirical than the policy-making process. Adversarial arguments, rules of evidence, an overseeing judge, hostile witnesses, a jury of peers: Do you think anything that went into the stimulus involved a fraction as much due diligence?

In short, if you think courts can never -- ever! -- be certain that a murderer did the deed, then you must become a full-blown libertarian to be logically consistent