Showing posts with label paraprosdokians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paraprosdokians. Show all posts

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Paraprosdokianism in the news: Colorado and Maine move to destroy democracy in order to save it

Do we really want another pre-civil war election, where one candidate doesn't appear, for whatever reasons, on the ballots of ten Democrat states, as Lincoln did not and became president despite 60% of the country wanting anybody but Lincoln?

Radicalism is in the air.

Please wear a mask.

 



 

 

 

 

Destroying democracy to save it: Maine shows the danger of zealots in our legal system:

Maine’s Shenna Bellows issued a “decision” that declared Trump an “insurrectionist” and ineligible to be president. She joined an ignoble list of Democratic officials in states such as Colorado who claim to safeguard democracy by denying its exercise to millions of Americans. ...

One columnist wrote that “Democrats may have to act radically to deny Donald Trump the 2024 Republican nomination. We cannot rely on Republicans to do it…Trump must be defeated. No matter what it takes.”

Friday, April 3, 2020

Here's the 2020 herd immunity paraprosdokian I thought I would never hear but did

We have to infect the entire population with the coronavirus in order to save it from the COVID-19 disease.

A few voices are actually saying this right now, mostly on "conservative" talk radio. You know who I mean.

England was going to pursue this policy until they realized just how many people would have to die.

Consider what this would mean in the US.

Let's take the South Korean mortality rate, which right now is 1.7% after 6 weeks with no new cases reported today (the US is currently at 2.7% after 4 weeks). Say half the population gets exposed because we give up, go back to work and carry on: 165 million get exposed @ 1.7% means 2.8 million deaths.

Mark Levin was poo-poohing such a catastrophe on his show tonight, like it's not even a possibility, as he rattled off the deaths annually from our wars, heart disease, cancer, etc.

He's wrong. They're all wrong. America is a wide open sitting duck for this disease, which spreads like a cold but kills like the flu. We have the most cases in the world already, by far, 276,965. Flu doesn't spread the way coronavirus does. Not everyone gets the flu. 30 million flu cases is typical, with 30,000 deaths, that's it, in a completely free and open society. But everyone gets a cold. Everyone. And that's the problem. A high morbidity rate.

Fortunately 3/4 of those surveyed think stopping this coronavirus is job one, not saving the economy.

Yes, this will be catastrophic for the economy. It already is. But we've had economic catastrophe before and we know how to rebuild.

The important thing right now is for the government to rescue people, not companies, and buy us some time so that the people actually saving us in the hospitals aren't overwhelmed and succumb. Without Americans there will be no America.

Conserve that. 

Remember George Bush in 2008?

Yeah, George Bush: We have abandoned free market principles in order to save the free market system.

Good times 2008 are here again in 2020. Not.

Saturday, February 15, 2020

Friday, January 31, 2020

NeverTrump Tom Nichols has to vote socialist in order to save the free market system

US Naval War College professor upset about the exercise of raw political power at the same time upset candidate Trump didn't do more to stop Russkies from interfering in his election.  Like the US Navy takes orders from unelected politicians.

Friday, December 1, 2017

Retiring Sen. Bob Corker demands Republicans raise taxes in order to cut them

We had to destroy the village in order to save it.

Bombing is the only way forward.

We had to have a war between the States in order to save them.

Export subsidies are necessary in order to preserve free trade.

I have abandoned free market principles in order to save the free market system.

The London Interbank Overnight Rate system had to be suppressed in order to save the banking system.

We had to bail out the banks so that we could sue them. 

Saturday, August 5, 2017

Liberalism has become illiberalism, insisting that bombing is the only way forward

Usefully discussed here.

"We have to destroy the village in order to save it."

Thursday, March 12, 2015

George Will confuses self-defense with imitation


When Fred P. Hochberg, the [Export-Import] bank’s chairman and president, defends it, an old joke comes to mind: A pastor officiating at a man’s funeral asks if anyone in the congregation would like to say something about the deceased. After a long, awkward silence, a voice shouts: “His brother was even worse.” South Korea, Hochberg says, provides “four to five times more export support than we do.” Thus does sound policy get defined down: Others are even worse, supposedly forcing us to emulate them.



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Nice try, George. War is evil, but when we are attacked, that we fight back doesn't mean that we are evil, too.

In this case a paraprosdokian aptly applies: We dispense with so-called free-trade in order to defend free-market principles.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Libertarian Republican Sen. Rand Paul Recommends Going Galt On Fiscal Cliff

Gee, what a shock, a libertarian recommending "strategic withdrawal" on new taxes. Does anyone think libertarians really believe in any principles at all?

It's the one principle they do believe in which is at work here: freedom, a license to do anything.

They are no less culpable, and no less liberal, than the liberal Republicans they attack for raising taxes.

Senator Rand Paul, here:

"Why don't we let the Democrats pass whatever they want? If they are the party of higher taxes, all the Republicans vote present and let the Democrats raise taxes as high as they want to raise them, let Democrats in the Senate raise taxes, let the president sign it and then make them own the tax increase. And when the economy stalls, when the economy sputters, when people lose their jobs, they know which party to blame, the party of high taxes. Let's don't be the party of just almost as high taxes."

It's a kind of paraprosdokian like "We had to destroy the village in order to save it": We have to raise taxes in order to cut taxes.

Do House Republicans, who would have to surrender their majority and vote "present" on a Democrat tax bill, really want to be remembered for crashing the economy even more to make a political point? Haven't enough of us lost our jobs already? Hasn't the economy already sputtered for too many years?

If libertarians had their way, we'd all be smoking the dope that makes Senator Paul think this way.

How about just doing the right thing for its own sake and continuing to be the party of no new taxes in the face of economic stagnation, and let the chips fall where they may?

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Dick Bove Sounds Just Like George Bush: We Tampered With LIBOR To Save The Banks

The hypocrisy just never ends. It gets so common no one has the energy left from all the outrage to pick up a torch and a pitchfork anymore. The whole industry is corrupt and all we can hope for is God sends a meteor attack to destroy them all, preferably at the opening bell.

Dick Bove, quoted in a story here:


Bove acknowledged holding what "may be a contradictory stance," but he is sticking to it.

"It will be recalled that the regulators were dealing with a significant financial crisis. To stem the panic, they lowered interest rates, invested in banks, loaned trillions of dollars to these institutions and guaranteed trillions more in bank liabilities," he said in an analysis for clients.

"If the dollar Libor rate had risen sharply in this period all of this activity would not have succeeded."

Every time some new misdeed is discovered we're told that it was necessary to bend the rules in order to keep everything from falling apart.

We're nearly four years on from the onset of the panic, and here we have a leading cheerleader for the banking industry telling us that suppressing LIBOR was necessary to save the system. I seem to recall that was the argument for TARP which relieved NOT ONE SINGLE TOXIC ASSET, and for the Fed opening the discount window to the world with nearly $10 trillion in liquidity loans at ultra-low rates homeowners will never get, and for every other violation of the principles of free markets we have witnessed under Republicans and Democrats alike, all of which amounts to the biggest fascist swindle ever perpetrated on a once free people.

A pox on all your houses! 

"Look. I obviously have made a decision to make sure the economy doesn't collapse. I have abandoned free market principles to save the free market system. Having said that, I'm very confident that with time the economy will come out and grow and people's wealth will return."

-- President Bush, 2008

Saturday, February 25, 2012

"If I decide to do it, by definition it’s good policy. I thought you got that."






"I have abandoned free market principles to save the free market system."

Friday, February 10, 2012

The West's Problem: Ongoing Misdirection of Capital

So says Nicole Gelinas, here:

In the years leading up to 2007, the rules necessary to govern a flourishing market economy broke down, producing a financial and economic crisis. Rather than responding to the crisis by fixing those rules, the West aggressively repudiated market economics, and the repudiation continues to this day.

Or, to put it the way George Bush did, we've abandoned free-market principles to save the market.

Never works. Never will.


Thursday, September 8, 2011

'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it'

"'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,' a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong."

-- Peter Arnett, The New York Times, February 1968, cited here

'We had to save the banks in order to sue them'

Jonathan Weil gets off a good one here, concluding how ridiculous was bailing out the banks in the first place:

The government has so many conflicting agendas, we may never get satisfactory answers to those questions. All of this is part of the legacy of the unprecedented federal interventions in 2008, as well as a reminder of what a colossal mistake it was in the first place to create Fannie and Freddie with all their privatized profits and socialized losses.

The proper role of government in a free-enterprise system is to police market participants at arm’s length, not join their ranks and choose winners and losers. That’s a line we crossed a long time ago, though. The great outrage isn’t that a federal agency is suing some of these too-big-to-fail banks for damages. It’s that we ever bailed them out at all.

None dare call it fascism, though, not even Jonathan Weil.