Remember: If You Want Ron Paul to POOF! Away, You Must Say His Name Backwards Every 90 Days
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Ron Paul really comes off as a sort of “trickster imp” in a lot of the things he says and does, especially in the Republican debates. He’s just the latest in a long line of these “imps” in recent presidential elections, running back to Ross Perot in 1992, Lyndon LaRouche in 1996, Ralph Nader in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004, and Dennis Kucinich in 2008.
In the Superman comics, Mr. Mxyzptlk (pronounced “Mix-ush-pit-lick”) isn’t a bad man, and he actually considers himself to be Superman’s pal.
But his thought processes are rooted in a completely different dimension from our own.
Whenever Ron Paul goes off on a tangent describing his dream of withdrawing all American troops from everywhere in the world and closing down all our bases, so that Islamist theocracies like Iran (and the Islamizing countries that have radicalized under Barack Obama’s watch) will like us and drop all plans to arm themselves with nukes or obliterate Israel from the map, Dr. Paul comes across as a very naive and out-of-touch-with-reality little man who may very well hail from the Land of Zrrf somewhere removed from the visible spectrum.
During the debates, the talking-head moderators always seem to trick Ron Paul into saying something that the majority of Americans interprets as completely insane and horrifying. It’s happened at every single debate so far. Like orange clockwork.
It always reminds me of Superman tricking Mr. Mxyzptlk into saying his name backwards (Kltpzyxm) — which sends him POOF! back to the Fifth Dimension.
There was one episode of the late-90s Superman animated series where this happened over and over and over again, with Superman not having to work hard at all to make it happen.
Doesn’t that remind you of Ron Paul’s performance in the debates, where over and over again he falls for the moderators’ tricks and makes an outrageous statement about Iranian nukes or turning this country into an isolationist ostrich?
I hope at the next debate Newt Gingrich gets him to say “Luap noR” aloud so we can see what happens.
He won’t be able to participate in a debate for at least 90 days, if the comic books are right about this sort of thing (as they usually are). It takes that long for him to rematerialize from the Fifth Dimension and get up to his antics again.
© 2011, Kevin DuJan. All rights reserved.
Also Recommended:
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- An Open Letter to Anyone Who Complains About Ron Paul Coverage on This or Any Site: Like Him or Not, Ron Paul’s Fans Are Real and Will Be A Factor in the 2012 Election One Way or the Other
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Like John Edwards who helped Obama defeat Clinton, Ron Paul is an azzhole of universal proportions. Ron Paul is helping RomneyCare get the nod and helping taking down social conservatives and foreign policy conservatives.
Romney nomination would represent Obama even taking TEXAS in November. Only 45% of Americans like Mormons. Romney would be a disaster for the GOP no matter if the angel Moron is his running mate!!!
Religion has not been a problem for me, but I do understand it is for many people. So, electing a converted Catholic is more palatable than a Mormon? Newt needs to do the 8-week "Body for Life" regime & Just for Men hair color — (think Nixon/Kennedy)
Mormonism is one of the most DISLIKED sects in USA along with Jeovah witnesses. Freemasons even when they are a sect they are considered just an association or a LOGIA not a religion. Several US presidents were Masons but they all were CHRISTIANS. There have not been a US president who believed Jesus is not God or that was not baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity.
Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses ARE NOT Christians.
Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses ARE NOT Christians.
===============
Really, Junior, you must desist with hyperbole that these two are not Christian. You are as wrong as the day is long.
So Newt we go — I will hold a small gimmer of hope for Sarah, or the candiate that she will support.
LOL, Kevin. I forgot superman conning Luther into saying his name backwards. Thanks for the childhood memories.
It is scary how much Kucinich and Paul agree on. I do not like kuchinich, but he is anti-fed which is good.
Leno: Paul: anti-Fed Romney: Pro-fed Newt: over-fed
http://socyberty.com/politics/someone-playing-the…
They are playing the race card vs. Ron Paul. That means he is surgin adn they are afraid of him.
I have been thinking about Kevin's monetary problems (discussed in the previous Luap noR thread). I see that we can subscribe to HillBuzz for $4.95/month, and I subscribe to PJTV for about that amount now. That is roughly the price of a Peach Slice Plus Smoothie at Smoothie King, or your choice of a medium-sized coffee of some sort at Starbucks.
For Kevin, I am giving up one smoothie a month, and subscribing to HillBuzz, so he knows this much: He can count on $4.95 from MathMom every month.
So? Anyone else in?
Kevin, how many $4.95 subscriptions do you need to pay your monthly expenses for HillBuzz?
I'm also sending a Christmas donation of $50, because I made some money at my minuscule business and want Kevin to continue to do the important work he does.
Thank you Kevin, and Merry Christmas.
MathMom,
Great idea. I think I’ll join you.
Thank you, Bridget. I don't know Kevin personally, but I know I felt his absence when he was gone. I know some people truly can't afford $5 a month to help out, but all of us who can, should. Thanks again. BTW, thanks for writing while he was gone.
It's been an honor to write for Hillbuzz and I thank all of you guys for making it so much fun. Merry Christmas!!!
The problem with Ron Paul is that he thinks his foreign policy positions are derived from Constitutional principles of natural justice, whereas they aren't.
The fallacy arises from an attempt to use the philosophical approach, a priori, beyond the limits of its validity, that is to say in a field of knowledge where, on the contrary, prior historical analysis is absolutely necessary.
We must insist on the fact that Ron Paul’ principled isolationism is inspired by fallacies and not only by different assessments or a lesser tendency to compromise, because its critics as well as its supporters sometimes believe that his isolationism is a direct consequence of his Libertarian principles, whereas it is not the case: on the contrary, it stems from his inability to apply them seriously to a complex political reality.
The categorical error of an a priori foreign policy
Indeed international politics, like all politics, but even more than national politics because it deals with two or more states — by definition aggressive and violent, is the domain of the dilemmas, of seeking the lesser evil, where the principles of freedom cannot be applied directly nor with certainty.
On the contrary, we can only identify the policy to be pursued though political intuition, after a thorough analysis of its implications. It requires knowledge and direct experience of the political societies in question, and of their mutual relationships, which obviously cannot be gained by anyone who thinks he can decide everything in advance.
Similarly, the advisability of a policy depends largely on the circumstances, not least because it depends on balances of forces which are constantly changing.
To claim a priori knowledge of the right decision is a guarantee of failure for the policy at issue, whatever it may be.
To try and determine foreign policy a priori is a categorical error which in turn guarantees the incompetence of those who commit it
Thus the advisability of a policy must necessarily depend on the circumstances, and any decision made upon it must be the end product of a localized and dated historical study, and not of a general philosophical argument.
A logical consequence of that is that the very concepts of "isolationism" or "interventionism", or "pacifism" or "warmongering" are meaningless if taken in absolute terms, that is to say, independently of the political circumstances in which the decision applies.
Yet that is precisely what is an attempt to define isolationism as "the" free-market foreign policy.
As a consequence, anyone who has seriously studied any matter of international politics can only conclude that in those matters Ron Paul and his followers regularly ignore relevant facts which run counter to their pre-determined conclusions.
As they generally know only the United States and believe that they can dispense with knowing other governments, they have failed to take the measure of how much more mendacious and criminal those can be, and as a consequence they have more often than not sided with the worst murderers against those who tried to neutralize them, while repeating lies from their propaganda.
The false "exception" of isolationism
The inability to understand politics engendered by this categorical error has inspired its followers a set of secondary fallacies which essentially consist in postulating natural differences between the policies they advocate and those they denounce which are in fact purely imaginary :
The fallacy of borders
The fallacy of borders means to believe that the laws of politics are different once the border has been crossed: Whereas he knows better than anyone that if you do not care about politics, that will not prevent politics from dealing with you, the Ron Paul isolationist believes that, on the other side of the border, then things change, and there are no aggressors among foreigners:
"if we leave them alone, they will leave us alone."
Anthropology could suffice to dispel this illusion by refuting its racist underlying assumption that non-Westerners have no power of agency and can only react to the initiatives of the West — who, in the anti-white version of this kind of racism, could be the only ones who ever commit aggression.
Yet, the history of the United States should also have been enough: in the first quarter century of their existence, the United States were attacked by the Barbary pirates, by France, and by England. That is why they spent the rest of the nineteenth century preventively conquering the strategic space outside of their state : that was the "Frontier".
Now that the conquered territories have been incorporated to it, we forget that they were not part of it and claim that a US "imperialism" was born in the late 19th century; this way of writing history rests on a biased selection of the events and their questionable interpretation, which allows for a suspicion that evidence has been sought exclusively to support pre-determined conclusions.
Dude I stopped reading about 1/4 of the way down. You sound like a doctoral dissertation. Talk like a human.
Go ahead and laugh and make fun of Ron Paul. His supporters want the world he's proposing. We want it bad, and our numbers are growing. The Republicans will not be putting their puppet in the White House. It's Ron Paul or Obama. Keep laughing. Wake up.
The verbal analogy of interventionism
Another, simpler fallacy rests on a verbal confusion: Ron Paul's isolationism, in order to say that "interventionism" abroad is bound to fail, points to the fact that economic "interventionism" always fails to achieve its purported goals.
Yet, if economic "interventionism" does fail to achieve its purported goals, it achieves by definition at least one of its real objectives, which is to enable the powerful to steal from the weak. As regards its purported goals, economic "interventionism" can only fail because it claims to serve production whereas it is inherently aggressive and aggressive violence is pure destruction — since it involves investments made not in production but in trying to avail oneself of the production of others: those are pseudo-investments, in effect lost for any production.
That, and that alone is true a priori reasoning about "interventionism": every extension of such reasoning beyond this axiomatic truth, which Ron Paul and his followers do, is fallacious and leads inevitably to error.
That is true of the other aspects of economic interventionism, like who its real victims and beneficiaries are, which do depend on the a priori economic laws of fiscal incidence and effective protection, but not independently of the circumstances.
That is obviously also true of "interventionism" abroad, where all that can be known a priori is that gangs of aggressors confront other gangs of aggressors there, so that, logically, the advisability of siding with the ones or the others cannot be determined a priori.
And as regards the effectiveness of such intervention, victory, not production, is the ostensible criterion of its success or failure; also, such violence may well serve production to the extent that it assaults criminals, something which the officials of the foreign states are by definition.
The warfare-welfare state
Another variant of the verbal sleight-of-hand about "interventionism", this time borrowed from the left, and which is also characteristic of the illegitimate use of an a priori approach in matters of history, is the warfare-welfare-state argument: this argument represents as a necessary and universal connection the coincidence between the development of the welfare state and the war observed in the United States during the 1960s.
Without even having to explain this historical coincidence, only one counter-example is logically necessary to refute the universality of those claims, and two can already be given: Britain’s evolution towards laissez-faire as it was developing its empire, and conversely, the expansion of the welfare state in Western Europe at the expense of defense since the mid-1960s.
The contradictions inherent in the complexity objection
The confusion over the word "interventionism" sometimes expresses a more subtle argument: that which argues that foreign policy is doomed to failure because society is opaque to those who would change it: that society is too complex and unpredictable for anyone to act effectively upon it.
It is true that international politics is more complex than national politics; and it is therefore also true that one must conclude that political action is even more uncertain and should be more cautious there than in national politics.
Yet it remains to be seen what will be called "prudence" in this case, since in those matters, to do nothing is still to do something (see below). And that is why the complexity of international politics is an argument that Ron Paul could hardly use without contradiction, since it means that it should be studied even more deeply in order to avoid elementary failures, whereas he claims on the contrary, with his a priori defined "libertarian foreign policy", that such study could be completely dispensed with.
If the “complexity” argument proved that any "intervention" abroad is necessarily doomed to failure, then it would prove the same of any kind of political choice, and first, of any kind of foreign policy whatsoever – including an isolationist one.
Again, borders are irrelevant: whoever preaches isolationism expects some effects from it, and those may very well not obtain, especially if such a policy was based on fallacies which inspired a refusal to get seriously informed.
A self-refuting position
Furthermore, if the opaque and unpredictable nature of society necessarily doomed any foreign intervention to failure, that would hardly be less true of all political action, including in national politics.
And what do you do when you denounce a foreign policy in the name of the "unknowable and unpredictable" nature of international society, if not politics, "unknowable and unpredictable" according to your own disqualifications?
Is it not an obvious practical contradiction to derive policy recommendations from an attempt to disqualify any policy for reasons of principle?
Conclusion: if you want to do politics, you must accept all its rules and implications
Thus, Ron Paul and his followers in foreign policy have criticized certain policies to demande another single one, on behalf of general statements which are quite untrue, notably:
— Their fallacious pretension to define foreign policy a priori, a delusion which guarantees the incompetence of whomever it deceives;
A substantive error which comes with
– The implicit assertion of alleged "differences in nature" between the policies they criticize and their own, "differences" which in reality do not exist.
In anarcho-capitalist terms, international politics by definition deals with complex relationships between criminal gangs. If you pretend to judge them, you must analyze every time the concrete political situation, in order to know which approach happens to be the least harmful, and where, and when.
The particular hostility that Ron Paul's followers harbor towards the so-called neo-conservatives on foreign policy, — while the objectivists, whom they do not attack so much, are only different because they are much less expert and much more ruthless (verbally) — shows that there is jealousy in this hostility ; yet if those “neo-conservatives” have influence while the Libertarians have none, that is also because, on the basis of false reasoning, they have failed to engage in any serious study of international politics.
Mathmom, I have joined you in firing a few bucks to hillbuzz. I love this site and am thankful to Kevin, Kathleen, Bridget and all the others who work so hard on our behalf.
Merry Christmas to all of you!
Thank you, 56survivor. Well done.
Since Sarah decided not to run I have no candidate at this time. I am not comfortable with Ron Paul's foreign policy but I don't have a problem listening to his supporters. Both of my twenty something kids are Ron Paul supporters. He seems to have captured the imaginations of an entire generation!
With that said, both of them are also huge admirers of Gov Palin and still hold out hope she is engaging in a stealth campaign. We are all praying for her and her family. I am sure if she feels led by God to step up to the plate, she will be obedient to Him and offer her service to the country. Of this I am certain.
I'm writing in Sarah in the primary.
I just signed up for a subscription because this post moved me. I'll see if I can pull in something else as well. Kevin does a ton of hard work at great cost to himself and his personal life.I just signed up for a subscription because this post moved me. I'll see if I can pull in something else as well. Kevin does a ton of hard work at great cost to himself and his personal life.
He is a national hero as far as I'm concerned.
Merry Christmas Kevin.
Thank you, bkennedy86. I hope everyone who can swap out some $4.95 choice they make each month will swap it for a subscription.
"Whenever Ron Paul goes off on a tangent describing his dream of withdrawing all American troops from everywhere in the world."
Today's world is different than the post WWII era. We don't need troops physically present. We are stretched too thin and use the Reserves and National Guard like they are regular Army, etc. Ron Paul sees the future of the military as does the military, itself in that the wave of the future is in the virtual and not the physical.
Ron Paul accused of "raaaaaacism" for allowing THIS to be published in his name ?
LOS ANGELES RACIAL TERRORISM
The Ron Paul Political Report, 1992 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dLraW1pPL1pNW…