Dan Peterson's Stock goes down again

[_Analytics]

Was he deliberatingly going rouge?

I love the idea of Peterson deliberately going rouge[/]

( but sadly, I suspect you meant [i]rogue )

Damn that spell checker!

[_Droopy]

After reading Scratch's remarks about Dan Peterson's blog becoming a propaganda arm for the Right Wing,

Who is this "right wing," Kevin? The Bavarian Illuminati? The Rothchilds? The Israel Lobby? The TLC? The CFR? Better get Oliver Stone working on this right away, before the "vast right wing conspiracy" strikes again.

I decided to take a quick look at what the good doctor has been ranting about lately. To my astonishment, Professor Peterson has expressed outrage over President Obama's remarks in a speech given recently in Roanoke Virginia. Here is what Dan had to say yesterday:

Every once in a while, Barack Obama lets something slip (e.g., during his previous presidential campaign, his comment to “Joe the Plumber” about redistributing the wealth and his dismissive remark to elite donors about how the common folk in western Pennsylvania “cling to their guns and religion”) that grants us a glimpse into his genuine core socio-political beliefs.

One of the clearest views offered by the current campaign has come with his now notorious “you didn’t build that” remark, made on 13 July in Roanoke, Virginia.

Here’s a heartfelt video response from a small businessman:

http://www.mittromney.com/embed/video/t ... nds-nevada

Several more such responses are available here:

http://www.mittromney.com/videos

And here’s some good commentary from Kim Strassel, at the Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087 ... on_LEADTop

Conservatives like myself are acutely aware that personal success relies on a complex network of values and habits inculcated by family and faith, on solid education, on a socio-economic and political system that permits it. I wasn’t all that offended by Hilary Clinton’s famous book title, It Takes a Village, which is said to come from an African proverb declaring that “it takes a village to raise a child.” That proverb seems to me true, in a sense. My parents and my brother were crucial in my upbringing. They played an incalculably huge role in making me, for good or for ill, what I am today. And so too, to a lesser but still significant extent, did a wonderful scoutmaster, an inspiring high school German teacher, the elementary school psychologist who saw to it that I skipped a grade, a handful of influential university professors, a number of pivotal authors, some neighbors, and so on and so forth.

But it’s a giant and unjustifiable leap from acknowledging that “no man is an island, entire of himself,” to paying homage to The State as the author of all, most, or even a substantial portion of what I have and am.

I will not do so.

I am not a slave.

I am not a serf.

Mr. Obama is not my benevolent Great White Father, as presidents used to be portrayed to American Indians back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (And, to forestall the obvious comment, neither is he my Great Black Father, or whatever, for the sake of strict accuracy, I would have to call him.) Moreover, one has to say, to the extent that those early Indians trusted in the benevolent care of the Great White Father, look what it got them.

I’m a free man in a Republic. Not a ward of The State. Not a child to be decided for by a purportedly omnicompetent government – which, anyway, hasn’t been doing such a good job with its own proper responsibilities that it should feel justified in attempting to relieve me of mine.


Addendum: Some have claimed that, along with others, I’ve taken Mr. Obama’s words out of context. But have a look at this and then try to tell me with a straight face that he wasn’t disrespecting those who’ve built successful businesses through hard work and ability.

So Dan provides a bunch of links from Romney's website that interviews a bunch of disgruntled business owners who have a completely ignorant understanding of what Preisdent Obama actually said. Are we supposed to be convinced by emotion here? Where is the context of the President's remarks?

We've read them and heard them over and over and over and over and over again, in their entirety, since he made them. The context is crystal clear, so there's no need for your desperate massaging and spinning of his words in an attempt to squirt ink and disgorge chaff. Barack Obama is a socialist who's mind is saturated with despisal, resentment, and ill will toward the free market, the "rich," entrepreneurs, business, the profit motive, and property rights. He despises and seeks to degrade and destroy the private sector and the economic self sufficiency and independence of as many American citizens as possible while centralizing vast financial and political power in the state at its expense, just as all Marxists/socialists/communists before him.

His context was clear: you did not succeed through your own hard work, struggle, preparation, discipline, thrift, industry, and intelligence. We are all one, great, interconnected organic collective. Nothing you have actually belongs to you because nothing you have was actually created by your own, individual effort. Everything you have was created by the collective, and ultimately, inheres in the collective. You are an integral aspect, or cell, within that greater collective, but don't dare think you are any more than that. You only happened to reach into the collective pot and take more than your share. You had a teacher somewhere, you had a mother or a father. You had a scoutmaster (Gay, of course, or a wise Latina) who mentored you and taught you lessons. Somewhere, there was a bridge, or a dam, or a highway, or a telephone pole, and government, out of its bountiful and infinite grace and from its bottomless resources (the state has vast farms of trees from which grows money), provided the means by which you were able to devise, market, and profit from your widget.

But it wasn't really you. It was your teacher. It was your grandmother. It was public education. It was Dick and Jane at the Seashore (someone taught you to read, didn't they?) It was public television and Sesame Street. It was the politicians and bureaucrats who built the bridges and roads, and put in the sewers and telephone lines. You benefited from what they had put in place, but you didn't really create anything, as an individual, outside of the collective totality around you.

If it was the interconnected organic collective, of which you are a part, that really built your company, and created your wealth, and provided you with the house, cars, boat, big screen TV, and in-ground swimming pool, then society qua society has an implicit claim upon all you have made and own.

That is the socialist Idea, in a thimble, and that is what Barack Obama was saying, in context.

The state is all and all is the state. From each according to ability, to each according to need. All share in the creation of your personal wealth, so it isn't really your personal wealth, and it wasn't really your hard work that created it and made it yours (ownership). Its a collective "synergy" that created it and all of your personal property, and especially your money, and hence all your wealth is really a collective common stock held in common by the "society" that created it, and that soceity, through the mediation of the state, has a preemptive claim on any specific percentage of it (100% in point of logical fact).

Kevin's ignorant and petty ad hominem attack on the late Andrew Brietbart, a man who, whatever his weaknesses many have been, was orders of magnitude beyond Kevin in knowledge, intellectual seriousness, and educational substance, shall herewith be snipped...

So according to Dan Peterson - who merely mimicks what the Right Wing media is propagating as of late - The President was "mocking" business owners,

Of course he was, and we don't need a marrionette-like shill who needs to live out his totalitarian control freak fantasies through his maximum leader to try to verbally alter what words - words which mean things- and Obama's now well known history and past relationships, tell us he meant.

That's what education is really all about, Kevin. Making connections. Synthesizing, analyzing, and collating knowledge, facts, and concepts from a broad and deep background of study and reflection into a coherent whole, or template, within which speeches such as Obama made here can come under critical scrutiny and be critically inspected in light of that background of knowledge.

There are always Snowballs among us such as yourself, of course, who try to call black white, white black, up down, and wet dry, and who attempt to sow confusion, chaos, and intellectual bedlam so as to further the revolution ("hope and change"), but truth will, in the end, have the final say.

informing them that they didn't build their own business. It was a Freudian slip of course, so Obama's subsequent claim that he was taken out of context, must be nothing more than a lie. Apparently, Daniel Peterson, the charitable and reasonable fellow as he so often portrayed, doesn't think it is worth checking context before passing judgment in this manner.

The entire "context" shibboleth here is, of course, in your own imagination, not in Obama's speech. Move along...

I’ve got a different idea. I do believe we can cut -- we’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts. We can make some more cuts in programs that don’t work, and make government work more efficiently.

So we begin with three fantastic lies, one that he has any intention of cutting anything, two, that he as made any such cuts (this is sanity wrenching, at this point) and three, that he will ever make any, save it be to the military.

(Applause.) Not every government program works the way it’s supposed to. And frankly, government can’t solve every problem. If somebody doesn’t want to be helped, government can’t always help them. Parents -- we can put more money into schools, but if your kids don’t want to learn it’s hard to teach them. (Applause.)

I see what the problem is now. Graham doesn't know the difference between pure, self interested politician's rhetoric and what a politician actually believes and supports. He's never done an iota of personal research on Obama's past, his relationships, intellectual mentors, political and professional history, or anything else. Like a mindless, automated flak, he swallows what the Glorious Maximum Leader says, incoherent or inconsistent as it may be, and then pukes it up for others to swallow, already predigested. Just a spoonful of sugar will help that go down, I suppose.

But you know what, I’m not going to see us gut the investments that grow our economy to give tax breaks to me or Mr. Romney or folks who don’t need them.

Now, all comic relief aside, a couple of things about this:

1. There is no such thing as "government investment." Government confiscates money through taxation, and then redistributes it - shifts, moves, reallocates it, from where it would have been used to where government desires it be used. This will "create" jobs over here, while depressing or eliminating them over there. Economically, it is a completely circular, self contained process. No new wealth is created in this manner, and no economic growth is possible in this way, save for those who receive the confiscated tax funds at the expense of those from whom they've been taken.

2. It is none of Barack Obama's or the federal governments business to decide who "needs" their own money. If there is any fundamental reason to severely curtail, de-fund, and shrink the federal government's present size and scope, it is precisely this.

So I’m going to reduce the deficit in a balanced way. We’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts. We can make another trillion or trillion-two, and what we then do is ask for the wealthy to pay a little bit more. (Applause.)

Kevin has conveniently omitted the fact, as Obama did in his speech, that the entire burden of those trillion dollar cuts will fall on one of the last actually constitutionally legitimate functions of the state - the military - while domestic spending runs wildly out of control into the foreseeable future.

Notice also the red, juicy class warfare bone thrown to the hungry Morlocks, who lap up the blood and marrow with gusto.

And, by the way, we’ve tried that before -- a guy named Bill Clinton did it. We created 23 million new jobs, turned a deficit into a surplus, and rich people did just fine. We created a lot of millionaires. There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t --

This term bolded above is leftspeak for "private property is theft. All wealth belongs to the state. Business people get rich on the backs of the poor."

The implication of the phrase "give something back" in the context of business, a bright, red flag to any conservative/libertarian still metabolizing, is well understood. The implication is that business and entrepreneurship - making money by creating and selling products/services at a profit, represents taking something away, or out of the community, and leaving a desert, in a sense, in its wake. To the Left, private sector wealth creation is inherently destructive; it consumes, extracts, denatures, dissipates, exhausts, and uses up. It is utterly exploitative in nature.

To make up for the destructiveness and economic inequity created by private sector economic activity (some people make more than others, can afford nicer houses, etc.) businesses must "give something back" to the community through high taxation or by various monetary gifts. Providing jobs, livelihoods, and economic upward mobility to people within the community, expanding the tax base, and making life materially better for all through the goods they sell or services they provide is not enough. Oh No, business is inherently evil, but a necessary evil. Hence, absolution can come through heavy, progressive taxation to be used to undo the terrible problems caused by the existence of private sector business (some are more affluent than others and markets, not government, determines who wins and who loses in the economic system) and heavy government regulation and control of resources.

At this point it should be easy to see what led to Obama's follow up remarks:

Kevin now begins the process of reading Obama's mind for us, so he can tell us what he really said. Here it comes...his salient point...what Obama really meant.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

So, Dan's point, and that of the "right wing" stand, and all Kevin has done is elucidate precisely nothing at all, providing us a sentence that begs more questions than it answers and in no way modifies or alters what Obama had said previously.

Leftists like Graham think words can alter reality, and yet, at the same time, they twist and struggle, caught in the strands of the web their own words have woven.

[_Equality]

Droopy Balls, what does all this have to do with John Dehlin and Gerald Bradford?

[_Analytics]

His context was clear: you did not succeed through your own hard work, struggle, preparation, discipline, thrift, industry, and intelligence. We are all one, great, interconnected organic collective. Nothing you have actually belongs to you because nothing you have was actually created by your own, individual effort....

Out of morbid curiosity, in the very same speech when he stated what his point was, what do you think he meant by the part I highlight?

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Also, why do you think that the editorial board of the Newspaper owned by your church agrees with the president about what he obviously meant?

[_Kevin Graham]

Kevin now begins the process of reading Obama's mind for us, so he can tell us what he really said

Actually it was Dan Peterson who said Obama accidentally gave us a quick glimpse into his Socialist psyche, or something to that effect. And this, based on the out of context remark he refused to put in context for us. All I did was read his remarks in context, and his point was perfectly clear. You deny this because, well, you're an idiot for one, but also because, even if you had basic comprehension skills, your bias and hatred of all things non-republican would never permit you to see it anyway.

Reasonable, and more importantly, honest readers will note the context of what was said and further understand that the only way people like you and Dan Peterson can continue to propagate these lies is by flat out ignoring the context. Fox News did the same exact thing when they laughed at Obama's rejection of their interpretation, and then claimed that they were going to show the context to prove him wrong, but then showed yet ANOTHER edited clip that completely deleted the preceding remark about roads and bridges.

Instead of opting for an honest approach, they doubled-down on their bet that Americans are just too lazy or stupid to look this stuff up for themselves. Thanks to people like Loran Blood, they feel confident that can succeed with such deceptions.

[_Droopy]

Out of morbid curiosity, in the very same speech when he stated what his point was, what do you think he meant by the part I highlight?

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Pure cynical rhetoric. He's saying what he thinks he needs to say to the broad electorate, blended with the raw meat thrown to his base, and that meat represents his actual beliefs, as everything we know about his personal and professional past that hasn't been buried or sanitized indicate.

Also, why do you think that the editorial board of the Newspaper owned by your church agrees with the president about what he obviously meant?

I could care less.

[_Bob Loblaw]

Pure cynical rhetoric. He's saying what he thinks he needs to say to the broad electorate, blended with the raw meat thrown to his base, and that meat represents his actual beliefs, as everything we know about his personal and professional past that hasn't been buried or sanitized indicate.

Thus Droopy loses all pretense of being intellectually honest.

I could care less.

That pretty much sums up my attitude toward your rhetorical guano.

[_Kevin Graham]

Pure cynical rhetoric. He's saying what he thinks he needs to say to the broad electorate, blended with the raw meat thrown to his base, and that meat represents his actual beliefs, as everything we know about his personal and professional past that hasn't been buried or sanitized indicate.

So you have to fall back on the lame argument that when Obama says something that contradicts the boogyman you've envisioned him to be, then he must be lying. You're essentially mind-reading here, basing your interpretation not on what he actually says, but rather what you think he really meant to say. Your frequent misrepresentations of economic scholarship falls along the same lines.

Obama's remarks were clear whether you hate that fact or not. No wonder you have to rely on a context-free snippet. That's pretty much how you approach any and all scholarship which usually flies right over your head.

[_Bob Loblaw]

So you have to fall back on the lame argument that when Obama says something that contradicts the boogyman you've envisioned him to be, then he must be lying. You're essentially mind-reading here, basing your interpretation not on what he actually says, but rather what you think he really meant to say. Your frequent misrepresentations of economic scholarship falls along the same lines.

Obama's remarks were clear whether you hate that fact or not. No wonder you have to rely on a context-free snippet. That's pretty much how you approach any and all scholarship which usually flies right over your head.

Who cares what Obama said? What matters is what Droopy wants him to have said.

[_3sheets2thewind]

Shawfan, Droopy, loran, when are you going to keep your word and not post here anymore?