Public Housing Projects & Boston

Not comparing Obama to Hitler would seem to be a good place to start.
 
Here's what Sowell said:

When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics.

Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.

"Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.
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http://news.investors.com/article/537967/201006211813/is-us-now-on-slippery-slope-to-tyranny-.htm

I don't see a problem here. Neither side has a monopoly on the sucker vote. The Dems have the unions, the poor and the elderly; the GOP has the religious crazies and tea party slobs.
 
^^ Don't know if I would call the Tea Party the "sucker" vote. Along with financiers and bond traders (who are fairly sharp on this stuff), the Tea Party crowd is about the only politically defined group in the country that seems to be worried about the debt these days.

To wit, we've got $44K in outstanding sovereign debt for each man, woman, old-timer and newborn in the nation. Greece could only be so lucky; with a mere $39K in debt (second-highest in the world, after us, obviously), we best them by over 13% per capita and come out with a grand total of over $16 trillion right now.

Moreover, Obama's budget as it is currently proposed foresees that per capita debt rising to $75K by 2020. Forget about college loans being a burden; we've got the federal government's handiwork to fund. And this will only get worse as more and more of the Boomers retire. Not like it's not bad now: we're currently running a deficit of over a trillion dollars ($1.3 trillion, I believe, this year ... though information is surprisingly hard to come by, as the media is unconscionably loath to report on this) for the third or fourth year in a row.

Of course, that's all assuming a budget ever gets passed; I believe it's been almost 3 years since a budget was passed, which is unprecedented in its incompetence (and, no, the Republicans can't physically be held to blame for that, since they've only had control of one house of Congress since Jan. 2011).

The numbers are disturbing. Taxing the rich at 90% (and sending them for the greener pastures of Bermuda or Switzerland) won't find you anywhere near the amount needed to close the deficits and start paying off the debt. Neither will anything else but economic growth higher than anyone is forecasting, or long-overdue spending cuts.

I'm not the type for wearing tricorner hats at political rallies amongst people 2+ times my age, but to my mind the Tea Party is about the only group that isn't behaving like a bunch of suckers at the moment. Continuing to pooh-pooh the debt or "paying it off" via devaluation of the dollar is not a solution so much as a slow-bleed death for the economy. Would that the president had a little Tea Party in him.
 
Itchy, there's two Tea Party's... the one initiated by Ron Paul, and the one hijacked by Neocons. The latter are the "suckers" who continue to think Bush was great, Obama was born in Kenya, and that Gingrich or Palin would be great presidents.
 
Sowell could have cited any number of people who have done the exact same thing, and we're supposed to believe that his choice of Hitler (who right wing extremists are and have already been ridiculously comparing Obama too) wasn't some sort of coding? Yeah right.

Here's the entire thing if you want to read it in context: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/225695/idols-crowds/thomas-sowell

To bring the conversation back on topic, there's plenty of good research posted in this thread about Public Housing and housing policy generally if you want to learn more. Sowell isn't included.
 
underground said:
Sowell could have cited any number of people who have done the exact same thing, and we're supposed to believe that his choice of Hitler (who right wing extremists are and have already been ridiculously comparing Obama too) wasn't some sort of coding? Yeah right.
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Good point. Luckily, nobody ever compared Bush to Hitler, nor did they do the same to Reagan. And if anyone compared Bush to Hitler a few years ago, it certainly wouldn't have been done so much to have become a veritable commonplace on any college campus or in any urban area to hear, "I'm so embarrassed to live in a country full of the sorts of retard right-wing f***s who elected this Nazi president." Come to think of it, Sowell is probably the only person to have (kind of, barely) mentioned a US president in the same breath as Hitler, and Sowell probably is racist too.
 
I wouldn't want to cite research from someone who compared Bush to Hitler either. What's your point?
 
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How about a new rule: When Hitler starts to come up it's time to close the thread. Agreed?
 
itchy said:
Good point. Luckily, nobody ever compared Bush to Hitler, nor did they do the same to Reagan. And if anyone compared Bush to Hitler a few years ago, it certainly wouldn't have been done so much to have become a veritable commonplace on any college campus or in any urban area to hear, "I'm so embarrassed to live in a country full of the sorts of retard right-wing f***s who elected this Nazi president." Come to think of it, Sowell is probably the only person to have (kind of, barely) mentioned a US president in the same breath as Hitler, and Sowell probably is racist too.
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Itch -- Absolutely -- that's why when Sowell wanted to study the pernicious effects of living on the dole on the life and lifestyle of a community he picked Harlem --- NOT -- no in fact his ground breaking work on culture and economics was global.

For exmple -- Sowell identifies a white southern "miliantly-manly" culture that separated the south from the northeeast in terms of industrialization, education and economic standing until the middle of the 20th Century. He tracks its origins to the relatively un-governed border between England and Scotland in the 17th and 18th century whose inhabitants emigrated to the antebellum South. This rural sourthern culture migrated north to the big cities in the Northeast and Midwest and now it today exists in the inner-city minority gangs in the U.S.

However If you don't want to read Sowell because he's a conservative black academic -- you can always read Theodore Dalrymple, who is white, and British (the scion of a manual laborer), and who writes about the underclass white culture of the dole in the UK today.

Dalrymple wrote "Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass," is a collection of Dalrymple's observations made while working as a physician in the 'lower class" neighborhoods of Birmingham UK.

Sowell reviewed the book and wrote:

This devastating account and analysis of underclass life—and the elite ideas which support it—is a classic for our times. It is as fundamental for understanding the world we live in as the three R’s. The book’s own three R’s are readability, rationality, and reality. The fact that the setting is a white underclass community in Britain may enable some people to see and acknowledge a pattern of self-destruction that they may be reluctant to acknowledge in America, for fear of being considered ‘racist.’”
—THOMAS SOWELL "
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http://news.google.com/newspapers?i...,670715&dq=life-at-the-bottom+dalrymple&hl=en


Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass is a collection of essays written by British writer, doctor, and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple and published in book form by Ivan R. Dee in 2001.

Life_at_the_Bottom_Cover.jpg
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
How about a new rule: When Hitler starts to come up it's time to close the thread. Agreed?
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You know who else suggested closing a thread when Hitler was mentioned?

Hitler!

No...wait, it was Godwin.

My bad.
 
Dalrymple was also a prison doctor and practiced medicine in Rhodesia. He has several writings on his views of architecture and urbanism in the UK as well.
 
Anyone want to suggest any research from someone who doesn't work for a right wing think tank?
 
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underground said:
Anyone want to suggest any research from someone who doesn't work for a right wing think tank?
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Research about what? Frankly none of the bickering above is making sense to me, I can't tell what you guys are even on about at this point.
 
I'm not sure what we're talking about either. I thought it was about Public housing, but I think it's about people who take Ayn Rand seriously.
 
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BostonUrbEx said:
Research about what? Frankly none of the bickering above is making sense to me, I can't tell what you guys are even on about at this point.
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Short version:
Public housing started the thread. Someone said something vaguely left or right wing (I can't remember/tell anymore).
Whiglander broke out some neocon ideological monologues that took up more of the internet than Napster.
Hitler made an appearance.
Van had the greatest idea in history (when Hitler is mentioned, close thread).
I woke up in a pile of my own filth.
Submit, Repeat.
 
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