Why Politics is Pointless


SoAMadDeathWish

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You have just confessed that your words on this forum are impotent.

It's more of a statement of fact than an admission. My words are just as completely powerless to change anyone's chosen view as everyone else's because no one's view can be changed by words on a monitor. Only real life can do that.

Those who shrugged in Atlas had a hidden valley in Colorado to retreat to. It is not feasible for everyone who is suffering under Obamacare or the IRS or the Fed or the BATF to move into a little enclave in the Rockies.

Do realize the statement you just made is utterly devoid of any creative innovation? No one gets into Galt's Gulch without it.

Expressing complaints, specifically using words, facts, and logic to show that the present regime in Washington is based on falsehoods, fallacies, erroneous history, and bogus economic theories, is action.

...only if you take action to refine your own life first. I tell you, if you changed how you live you could be free. If I can do it with no higher education and only a simple blue collar skillset... anyone else can certainly do it also.

It is no different than the Enlightenment and its magnificent complaints about tyrannical government. It was the verbal actions--the ideas--of Enlightenment thinkers that made the American revolution possible.

It was the actions behind those words, Frank. And that explains why the Founders secured their freedom. while you're still a slave complaining about the chains forged by your own hand.

Greg

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You have just confessed that your words on this forum are impotent.

It's more of a statement of fact than an admission. My words are just as completely powerless to change anyone's chosen view as everyone else's because no one's view can be changed by words on a monitor. Only real life can do that.

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

Those who shrugged in Atlas had a hidden valley in Colorado to retreat to. It is not feasible for everyone who is suffering under Obamacare or the IRS or the Fed or the BATF to move into a little enclave in the Rockies.

Do realize the statement you just made is utterly devoid of any creative innovation? No one gets into Galt's Gulch without it.

The critical point, which you blissfully ignore, is that the author of Galt’s Gulch did not live there—but instead in the largest, most liberal city in America. She was not interested in keeping her head down or her mouth shut. She wanted her adopted country—the whole country—to return to the original promise of the Founders. And towards that goal she stayed in the public eye and did a hell of a lot of blaming and complaining.

I’m not just interested in saving the people who can easily buy their way out of the impending catastrophe of welfare/warfare statism or have already dug their own miniature gulch. I’m interested in the bulk of the population, people like myself: average, principled, hard-working Americans who didn't create Big Brother and shouldn’t have to live in a spider hole to escape his tyranny. Instead of ducking and evading the Gonif-in-Chief, we should be watching him on trial in a court of law.

Yes, there are very clever, very specific ways one can pay fewer taxes, dodge the drug prohibition warlords, and live beyond the scope of the EPA, OSHA, TSA, NSA and the other Obamaite commissars. I know a few of those tricks myself. In the 1970's we called it "Browneing Out," after my late friend Harry Browne, author of the self-liberation book, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.

But there is a profound difference between merely surviving Big Brother and destroying Big Brother. It is the difference between getting a few people out of a concentration camp through a tunnel and shutting the whole hellish place down and clamping the guards in irons.

The long-term goal of everyone who understands the philosophy of individualism and the genius of the free market should be the complete dismantling of the welfare state. For only such a development can free the great majority of the population and promote a humane, productive, prosperous society. Browne himself realized this and became more active politically in his final years.

But those who do choose to Browne-out have no business scoffing at the effort of those who are working to create a culture where the flame of liberty can glow brightly.

Expressing complaints, specifically using words, facts, and logic to show that the present regime in Washington is based on falsehoods, fallacies, erroneous history, and bogus economic theories, is action.

...only if you take action to refine your own life first. I tell you, if you changed how you live you could be free. If I can do it with no higher education and only a simple blue collar skillset... anyone else can certainly do it also.

Your idea of freedom and mine are quite different. You gladly pay tribute to Washington for the privilege of living in the "paradise" of Obama’s America. By contrast, I regard taxation as the very essence of what is unfree about America. Taxation is the means by which wealth is transferred from the productive, creative class to the fraudulent, parasitic criminal class. Taxation is the process by which good people are made weak and evil people made strong. My idea of freedom is a society in which not one red, white or blue cent is paid for tribute.

I was tempted to say, anyone who believes in paying taxes deserves what he gets, for that is what he truly is inside. But my position is that taxation is always evil, even when it is imposed on its apologists.

It is no different than the Enlightenment and its magnificent complaints about tyrannical government. It was the verbal actions--the ideas--of Enlightenment thinkers that made the American revolution possible.

It was the actions behind those words, Frank. And that explains why the Founders secured their freedom. while you're still a slave complaining about the chains forged by your own hand.

Greg

The actions behind my words are the same as those of the Enlightenment progenitors of the Revolution: using one’s knowledge of human nature, economics and history to develop a coherent philosophy and a plan for a just social order, and using one’s persuasive powers to win others to the cause. This is what the essential philosopher John Locke and those who followed him were doing a century before Bunker Hill.

Furthermore, no one can state with certainty that words being written and spoken today will have no positive effect tomorrow or next year—just as no one in 1775 could state with assurance that the American rebels would eventually win. This point I’ve made before, but perhaps you’ve been too busy responding to my posts to read them first.

Forging my chains with my own hands? This is an example of what Ayn Rand called "taking the blame for the evils caused by the government." If the victims of statism are the guilty parties, then those who brought socialism to America (union organizers, Theodore Roosevelt, Upton Sinclair, Woodrow Wilson, FDR and LBJ) must be innocent.

Once more we can say, if people deserve what they get, then murderers, rapists, and molesters should be freed from prison, for they were only performing divine retribution for what the victims "truly are inside."

Yes, it is true that I complain and blame when it comes to taxes. I prefer that position to paying them with a smile and declaring that I’m free. It’s called fidelity to objective reality.

I am not an original philosopher, as Ayn Rand was, but someone who can contribute on a more modest level over the long term to the transformation of society from collectivism to individualism. Essential to this transformation is to bring injustices to the fore (complaining) and to expose the root causes for our society’s economic and cultural decline (blaming).

Ayn Rand wrote,

The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher. The intellectual carries the application of philosophical principles to every field of human endeavor. He sets a society’s course by transmitting ideas from the “ivory tower” of the philosopher to the university professor—to the writer—to the artist—to the newspaperman—to the politician—to the movie maker—to the night-club singer—to the man in the street. ("For the New Intellectual" in For the New Intellectual, p. 27)

I am the assistant field agent, the guy arguing on the street corner, just as Rand herself once was in 1940.

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Great (though well-contained) detonation, Francisco.

How much to fight/oppose - and perhaps make for a miserable life - and how much to accept or disregard, while seeking fulfillment on one's own terms...is what has absorbed me for a long while.

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Great (though well-contained) detonation, Francisco.

How much to fight/oppose - and perhaps make for a miserable life - and how much to accept or disregard, while seeking fulfillment on one's own terms...is what has absorbed me for a long while.

The real moral war is waged within each individual...

...and to the extent that each person prevails in that conflict, that is the extent to which the outside world follows suit. I tell you, if you can gain mastery over your own thoughts and emotions, you'd be totally surprised how complaint and acquiescent the outside world is to you, because it answers to the moral authority within you.

I fully understand that what I'm saying seems completely counterintuitive to everyone here, and that it flies in the face of how everyone was taught that power comes from the outside in, and that people are helpless innocent invertebrate victims who are oppressed by external power.

Well, I'm telling you that reality is exactly the opposite.

Real power actually comes from the inside out, and a truly innocent man is in total control of setting the moral tone in the world around him which is within his personal sphere of influence.

And that power is the moral authority which is established within each individual like an Army takes a beachfront in battle, when they do what's right. :smile:

Greg

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"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

It's a perfectly natural reaction to infer that the person who holds the other view that you had rejected could only have done it through a severe failure of perception like a beam in the eye. So it is only the reality of how each of our lives unfold that is the final judge of the validity of each of our respective views. So you already know how well the view you chose is working, as you're the one who knows your own life.

The critical point, which you blissfully ignore, is that the author of Galt’s Gulch did not live there—but instead in the largest, most liberal city in America. She was not interested in keeping her head down or her mouth shut. She wanted her adopted country—the whole country—to return to the original promise of the Founders. And towards that goal she stayed in the public eye and did a hell of a lot of blaming and complaining.

...except Ayn Rand actually DID something about it.

But ok... you've convinced me that you really haven't a clue about what Ayn Rand meant about Galt's Gulch.

I’m not just interested in saving the people who can easily buy their way out of the impending catastrophe of welfare/warfare statism or have already dug their own miniature gulch.

It's funny how that for which you have so much contempt and derision is the actually the real solution! :laugh:

Doing honest work to earn the money to BUY your freedom is the real solution. :smile: There can be no freedom without economic freedom.

Since you've made it perfectly clear that you completely disagree on that fundamental point, I don't think there's much of a point on continuing this discussion, as both of our views have been fully described as well as how they each differ from the other.

Greg

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"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

It's a perfectly natural reaction to infer that the person who holds the other view that you had rejected could only have done it through a severe failure of perception like a beam in the eye. So it is only the reality of how each of our lives unfold that is the final judge of the validity of each of our respective views. So you already know how well the view you chose is working, as you're the one who knows your own life.

The critical point, which you blissfully ignore, is that the author of Galt’s Gulch did not live there—but instead in the largest, most liberal city in America. She was not interested in keeping her head down or her mouth shut. She wanted her adopted country—the whole country—to return to the original promise of the Founders. And towards that goal she stayed in the public eye and did a hell of a lot of blaming and complaining.

...except Ayn Rand actually DID something about it.

Ayn Rand did not bring down the welfare state. It got bigger and bigger even as she fought against it. What she did was promote a positive view of laissez-faire capitalism in the realm of ideas. This is exactly what her students and admirers, Objectivists and libertarians like myself, are doing today.

But ok... you've convinced me that you really haven't a clue about what Ayn Rand meant about Galt's Gulch.

Then why don't you just interpret that portion of the novel, "The Utopia Of Greed," for us?

I’m not just interested in saving the people who can easily buy their way out of the impending catastrophe of welfare/warfare statism or have already dug their own miniature gulch.

It's funny how that for which you have so much contempt and derision is the actually the real solution! :laugh:

I've expressed no contempt or derision at all. Where are you reading that? I'm delighted when anybody can elude the clutches of the federal government and its tax collectors. (Although we both know some people have no wish to deprive Moloch of a portion of their income.) I am merely observing that it is not possible for 300 millions Americans to rent a condo in Galt's Gulch--just as millions of European Jews couldn't just hop on an airplane or ocean liner to New York in order to escape Hitler.

Doing honest work to earn the money to BUY your freedom is the real solution. :smile: There can be no freedom without economic freedom.

Since you've made it perfectly clear that you completely disagree on that fundamental point, I don't think there's much of a point on continuing this discussion, as both of our views have been fully described as well as how they each differ from the other.

Greg

Economic freedom means the ability to keep 100% of what one has earned. This is a freedom that will never exist as long as the income tax remains a fact of life in America.

If I have to spend, what?--$100,000 or $1,000,000?--to escape tyranny, to buy my freedom, that's a transaction cost. That's a loss of one's property and one's freedom.

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Democracy is working. People are getting what they vote for.

Why, then, do they shrink in horror from the sight of the world around them? That world is not the product of their sins; it is the product and the image of their virtues. It is their moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. They have fought for it, they have dreamed of it, and they have wished it, and democracy has granted them their wish.
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Democracy is working. People are getting what they vote for.

Why, then, do they shrink in horror from the sight of the world around them? That world is not the product of their sins; it is the product and the image of their virtues. It is their moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. They have fought for it, they have dreamed of it, and they have wished it, and democracy has granted them their wish.

We, the United States of America is a limited Constitutional republic not a democracy.

Locally, and Intra-State we have several different versions of democracy, as well as different constructions of representation, e.g., the NY City Council was elected with proportional voting in, I believe the late 1930's and 1940's.

NY City school board elections employed proportional voting to fill the decentralized school boards of the 1960's and '70's. Planning Boards in NY City are appointed by the Borough President.

Judges are appointed by the Mayor in NY City. Fifty feet east of the NY City line, in Nassau are elected.

Lot's of non democratic stuff going on in the US of A.

A...

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Democracy is working. People are getting what they vote for.

Why, then, do they shrink in horror from the sight of the world around them? That world is not the product of their sins; it is the product and the image of their virtues. It is their moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. They have fought for it, they have dreamed of it, and they have wished it, and democracy has granted them their wish.

Ayn Rand said it so well.

It amazes me how people can choose to ignore the connection between what they demand and what they get.

Greg

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Ayn Rand did not bring down the welfare state.

Of course not.

She doesn't need to when the moochers and looters will bring down the welfare state by their own unproductive dead weight. Ayn Rand showed people how to free themselves from their self imposed slavery.

Then why don't you just interpret that portion of the novel, "The Utopia Of Greed," for us?

This is why you'll never be free.

Economic freedom means the ability to keep 100% of what one has earned.

That's an even better reason why you'll never be free. You don't understand that freedom is the ability to live a good and happy life in this world just as it is right now.

This is a freedom that will never exist as long as the income tax remains a fact of life in America.

And that is why you will remain a slave waiting for the world to change... and only because you failed to change yourself.

Greg

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This thread should be called "The Three Freedoms."

1) Greg's approach (ex-existential)

2) The Objectivist approach (existential)

3) 1 plus 2 (opps, nobody's doing 3 here)

--Brant

or, "My Way!" (calling Frank Sinatra)

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Ayn Rand did not bring down the welfare state.

Of course not.

She doesn't need to when the moochers and looters will bring down the welfare state by their own unproductive dead weight. Ayn Rand showed people how to free themselves from their self imposed slavery.

Ayn Rand did show people how to be free, but it was not through silence. Above all, she was not an advocate of letting America fall into ruin. She explicitly and consistently called for a moral defense of capitalism in the arena of public opinion. She did not tell her followers to retreat to a gulch but rather to engage the enemies of reason and freedom and fight for the conscience of America:

The need for intellectual leadership was never as great as now. No human being who has a trace of personal worth can be willing to surrender his life without lifting a hand—or a mind—to defend it, particularly not in America, the country based on the premise of man's self-reliance and self-esteem. Americans have known how to erect a superlative material achievement in the midst of an untouched wilderness, against the resistance of savage tribes. What we need today is to erect a corresponding philosophical structure, without which the material greatness cannot survive. A skyscraper cannot stand on crackerbarrels, nor on wall mottoes, nor on full-page ads, nor on prayers, nor on meta-language. The new wilderness to reclaim is philosophy, now all but deserted, with the weeds of prehistoric doctrines rising again to swallow the ruins. To support a culture, nothing less than a new philosophical foundation will do. The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy's impotence, but the proof of philosophy's power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state—it is only philosophy that can lead them out. For the New Intellectual, p. 50

Ayn Rand's best students have now taken up that call and are fighting for her vision of a laissez-faire America in the classroom, the boardroom, the break room and the family kitchen. Ayn Rand called for people to free themselves by intellectually defeating the enemies of freedom. Rand said it was not the lack of actions, but of words and ideas, the proper ideas, that was causing capitalism's demise:

By their silence—by their evasion of the clash between capitalism and altruism—it is capitalism's alleged champions who are responsible for the fact that capitalism is being destroyed without a hearing, without a trial, without any public knowledge of its principles, its nature, its history, or its moral meaning. It is being destroyed in the manner of a nightmare lynching—as if a blind, despair-crazed mob were burning a straw man, not knowing that the grotesquely deformed bundle of straw is hiding the living body of the ideal. "Introduction" to Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Quote

Then why don't you just interpret that portion of the novel, "The Utopia Of Greed," for us?

This is why you'll never be free.

I figured that you'd be unwilling to back up your claim that I didn't know what Rand meant by Galt's Gulch.

Quote

Economic freedom means the ability to keep 100% of what one has earned.

That's an even better reason why you'll never be free. You don't understand that freedom is the ability to live a good and happy life in this world just as it is right now.

I see. Why worry about barbed wire, firing squads, and cremation pits as long as people can enjoy life "just as it is"? Can anyone then explain why Rand would flee to the United States when all along she had the ability to live "a good and happy life" in the Soviet Union, "just as it was"?

Quote

This is a freedom that will never exist as long as the income tax remains a fact of life in America.

And that is why you will remain a slave waiting for the world to change... and only because you failed to change yourself.

Greg

Oh, but I have changed myself: from one who at 15 was complacent about the world "just as it is" to one who today believes that a free market would benefit all levels of society and greatly enrich life on earth.

Furthermore, I am following the prescription that Ayn Rand wrote:

In an intellectual battle, you do not need to convert everyone. History is made by minorities—or, more precisely, history is made by intellectual movements, which are created by minorities. Who belongs to these minorities? Anyone who is able and willing actively to concern himself with intellectual issues. Here, it is not quantity, but quality that counts (the quality—and consistency—of the ideas one is advocating)...

If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the default of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell. But time is on our side—because we have an indestructible weapon and an invincible ally (if we learn how to use them): reason and reality. "What Can One Do?" in Philosophy Who Needs It?

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History made by "intellectual movements" is actually "moral movements" with the rational, intellectual part implicit. And a scientist doing science doesn't argue for the scientific method while using it save implicitly.

--Brant

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These sections are very well put.

Ayn Rand did show people how to be free, but it was not through silence. Above all, she was not an advocate of letting America fall into ruin. She explicitly and consistently called for a moral defense of capitalism in the arena of public opinion. She did not tell her followers to retreat to a gulch but rather to engage the enemies of reason and freedom and fight for the conscience of America:

The need for intellectual leadership was never as great as now. No human being who has a trace of personal worth can be willing to surrender his life without lifting a hand—or a mind—to defend it, particularly not in America, the country based on the premise of man's self-reliance and self-esteem. Americans have known how to erect a superlative material achievement in the midst of an untouched wilderness, against the resistance of savage tribes. What we need today is to erect a corresponding philosophical structure, without which the material greatness cannot survive. A skyscraper cannot stand on crackerbarrels, nor on wall mottoes, nor on full-page ads, nor on prayers, nor on meta-language. The new wilderness to reclaim is philosophy, now all but deserted, with the weeds of prehistoric doctrines rising again to swallow the ruins. To support a culture, nothing less than a new philosophical foundation will do. The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy's impotence, but the proof of philosophy's power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state—it is only philosophy that can lead them out. For the New Intellectual, p. 50

Ayn Rand's best students have now taken up that call and are fighting for her vision of a laissez-faire America in the classroom, the boardroom, the break room and the family kitchen. Ayn Rand called for people to free themselves by intellectually defeating the enemies of freedom. Rand said it was not the lack of actions, but of words and ideas, the proper ideas, that was causing capitalism's demise:

By their silence—by their evasion of the clash between capitalism and altruism—it is capitalism's alleged champions who are responsible for the fact that capitalism is being destroyed without a hearing, without a trial, without any public knowledge of its principles, its nature, its history, or its moral meaning. It is being destroyed in the manner of a nightmare lynching—as if a blind, despair-crazed mob were burning a straw man, not knowing that the grotesquely deformed bundle of straw is hiding the living body of the ideal. "Introduction" to Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Furthermore, I am following the prescription that Ayn Rand wrote:

In an intellectual battle, you do not need to convert everyone. History is made by minorities—or, more precisely, history is made by intellectual movements, which are created by minorities. Who belongs to these minorities? Anyone who is able and willing actively to concern himself with intellectual issues. Here, it is not quantity, but quality that counts (the quality—and consistency—of the ideas one is advocating)...

If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the default of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell. But time is on our side—because we have an indestructible weapon and an invincible ally (if we learn how to use them): reason and reality. "What Can One Do?" in
Philosophy Who Needs It?

Good job.

A...


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The need for intellectual leadership was never as great as now.

Well, Frank... there's another point where we each differ in our views.

I'm different from you in that I don't need a leader because I lead myself. That is a quality inherent to being a free American. Leftists need leaders. Blacks need leaders. Feminists need leaders. Parasites need leaders.

But today in America... because Americans govern themselves, they don't need leaders.

I figured that you'd be unwilling to back up your claim that I didn't know what Rand meant by Galt's Gulch.

Knowing something intellectually is useless if it is not manifest in our actions. Reading Atlas Shrugged inspired me to work to earn the money, first to buy my own financial freedom, and then to use it to build my own Galt's Gulch.

I see. Why worry about barbed wire, firing squads, and cremation pits as long as people can enjoy life "just as it is"? Can anyone then explain why Rand would flee to the United States when all along she had the ability to live "a good and happy life" in the Soviet Union, "just as it was"?

There you go again... back into the dead past. So again I'll remind you that everything I've said pertains to
today in America.
Could you at least try to remember just that one little fact? It could save you wasting your time writing about the dead past.

Oh, but I have changed myself: from one who at 15 was complacent about the world "just as it is" to one who today believes that a free market would benefit all levels of society and greatly enrich life on earth.

There's another difference in our two views. Unlike you, I don't just believe... I
know
that the free market benefits America, and that's why I'm an independent American Capitalist entrepreneur who
creates
that free market within my personal sphere of influence in the business world.

"If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the default of those who keep silent.

It will... which is why I express myself as an active Tea Party Patriots member who served a term as our local group's President, and also contribute to politicians who share my moral values as well as vote in every election. So if America ends up with a dictator, it won't be because of me. It will be because there aren't enough Americans living in America to keep it free.

Greg

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It seems that complacency is the meal ticket of the day. Shortsighted people see bad things happening to good people and as long as it isn't happening to him or his "group" the standard motto is either "that does not affect me, I'm good on the inside.." When the president tosses "You did not build that!" as some kind of platitude to the unproductive so they feel good about the misery surrounding everyone there is a biggggg problem.

When the government is now going after ex-pats for income tax "owed" as a mad scramble to make people fear the repercussions of living abroad and evading/not paying their fair share? Houston we have a problem. There is a reason these people LEFT!! It is not because they do not love the country it is because they cannot stand what the country has become and indeed just seek to escape a sinking ship.

When I was younger I often thought about becoming American because Canadian socialism sucks. Our taxes they say are higher in order to cover our "free" healthcare. Wait till you die healthcare. 6 months for an MRI? 2years for knee or hip replacement? Many actually do end up traveling down to the states for the surgery...

It is pretty sad when Canada ranks 6th over the USA at 12th on the economic freedom scale.

http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

It is bloody shameful actually. I lament the sad state of the USA. If people can not look up to the "Land of the Free" as the golden shining example of what to strive for what then?

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Greg:

I was watching an ecellent interview about a new book called "Paperclip." ****

One of the photos that she displayed was this one:

220px-Germany06_513aa.jpg
magnify-clip.png

Buchenwald's main gate, with the slogan Jedem das Seine (literally, "to each his own", but figuratively "everyone gets what he deserves"). The slogan is legible only from inside the camp.

Fascinating that it is there.

A...

****

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=UyWe4zFhmVwC&source=productsearch&utm_source=HA_Desktop_US&utm_medium=SEM&utm_campaign=PLA&pcampaignid=MKTAD0930BO1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/13/operation-paperclip_n_4781137.html

The United States recruited Nazi scientists after the end of World War II and put them to work on secret military and intelligence programs during the Cold War -- that is the astonishing topic of a new book published this week.

In "Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America," journalist Annie Jacobsen documents how the Joint Chiefs of Staff brought more than 1,600 German scientists to work for the U.S. after 1945.

The book describes the roles of 21 Nazi scientists who were part of Operation Paperclip, drawing on declassified intelligence and historical records to detail their startling role in America's Cold War effort. According to Jacobson, the scientists had helped Adolf Hitler to develop weapons such as sarin gas and weaponized bubonic plague, and several had even stood trial for war crimes.

But the U.S. military was consumed by a new looming menace, the prospect of 'total war' with the Soviets post WWII. "Operation Paperclip" employed the scientific brainpower of the Third Reich to help develop America's arsenal of rockets and chemical and biological weapons, as well as aviation and space medicine.

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Greg:

I was watching an ecellent interview about a new book called "Paperclip." ****

One of the photos that she displayed was this one:

220px-Germany06_513aa.jpg

magnify-clip.png

Buchenwald's main gate, with the slogan Jedem das Seine (literally, "to each his own", but figuratively "everyone gets what he deserves"). The slogan is legible only from inside the camp.

Fascinating that it is there.

A...

Well, that highlights the difference between Nazi Germany in the dead past

and America here and now in the present.

Other people don't decide what Americans deserve. :smile:

Greg

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The United States recruited Nazi scientists after the end of World War II and put them to work on secret military and intelligence programs during the Cold War -- that is the astonishing topic of a new book published this week.

In "Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America," journalist Annie Jacobsen documents how the Joint Chiefs of Staff brought more than 1,600 German scientists to work for the U.S. after 1945.

The book describes the roles of 21 Nazi scientists who were part of Operation Paperclip, drawing on declassified intelligence and historical records to detail their startling role in America's Cold War effort. According to Jacobson, the scientists had helped Adolf Hitler to develop weapons such as sarin gas and weaponized bubonic plague, and several had even stood trial for war crimes.

But the U.S. military was consumed by a new looming menace, the prospect of 'total war' with the Soviets post WWII. "Operation Paperclip" employed the scientific brainpower of the Third Reich to help develop America's arsenal of rockets and chemical and biological weapons, as well as aviation and space medicine.

It also put an American on the Moon. The Saturn vehicle was a descendant of the V-2. As Werner von Braun often said: "I am for the Stars, but sometimes I hit London and Antwerp"

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The United States recruited Nazi scientists after the end of World War II and put them to work on secret military and intelligence programs during the Cold War -- that is the astonishing topic of a new book published this week.

In "Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America," journalist Annie Jacobsen documents how the Joint Chiefs of Staff brought more than 1,600 German scientists to work for the U.S. after 1945.

The book describes the roles of 21 Nazi scientists who were part of Operation Paperclip, drawing on declassified intelligence and historical records to detail their startling role in America's Cold War effort. According to Jacobson, the scientists had helped Adolf Hitler to develop weapons such as sarin gas and weaponized bubonic plague, and several had even stood trial for war crimes.

But the U.S. military was consumed by a new looming menace, the prospect of 'total war' with the Soviets post WWII. "Operation Paperclip" employed the scientific brainpower of the Third Reich to help develop America's arsenal of rockets and chemical and biological weapons, as well as aviation and space medicine.

It also put an American on the Moon. The Saturn vehicle was a descendant of the V-2. As Werner von Braun often said: "I am for the Stars, but sometimes I hit London and Antwerp"

"Our Nazi scientists are better than your Nazi scientists."

--Brant

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That's too -horrendously- true, Greg.

It touches on my sometime reservations about technology. On the one hand it vastly benefits the person's ability to grasp and handle reality - on the other, it further removes many from reality (/morality), becoming its own value and purpose, separating from men and their values..

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"Our Nazi scientists are better than your Nazi scientists."

--Brant

Technology devoid of morality only builds better ovens.

Greg

Interesting.

This is one of the reasons that I was as "surprised" by this reporter's unearthing of archival material in Germany and the U,S,

In "Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America," journalist Annie Jacobsen documents how the Joint Chiefs of Staff brought more than 1,600 German scientists to work for the U.S. after 1945.

The book describes the roles of 21 Nazi scientists who were part of Operation Paperclip, drawing on declassified intelligence and historical records to detail their startling role in America's Cold War effort. According to Jacobson, the scientists had helped Adolf Hitler to develop weapons such as sarin gas and weaponized bubonic plague, and several had even stood trial for war crimes.

For example, the "father of the Saturn rocket" was a convicted war criminal. Many of the convicted Nuremberg Nazis were quietly released after they were convicted.

Their release allowed the Allies to scoop them up and interrogate them to decide which scientists were going to come to America and which ones were going to be hanged, or, imprisoned.

I knew that we had Operation Keelhaul.

Operation Keelhaul was carried out in Northern Italy by British and American forces to repatriate Soviet Armed Forces POWs of the Nazis to the Soviet Union between August 14, 1946 and May 9, 1947.[1] The term has been later applied - specifically after the publication of Julius Epstein's eponymous book - to other Allied acts of often forced repatriation of former residents of the USSR after the ending of World War II that sealed the fate of millions[2] of post-war refugees fleeing eastern Europe.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Keelhaul

However, was not aware of Operation Paperclip.

A...

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