UlsterScots432 - 10 February 2010 11:41 AM

To see the President of the United States bowing to an US Citizen (Mayor of Tampa who happens to be of Asian descent..seriously, is this guy for real?)

I think he was trying out one of his new “Ground Based Teleprompters”!      He got them after he used this one so much it just crashed to the ground!   

Rocinante - 10 February 2010 01:22 PM

UlsterScots432 - 10 February 2010 11:41 AM

To see the President of the United States bowing to an US Citizen (Mayor of Tampa who happens to be of Asian descent..seriously, is this guy for real?)

I think he was trying out one of his new “Ground Based Teleprompters”!      He got them after he used this one so much it just crashed to the ground!   

LMAO !  I hear ya.  I think in retrospect this guy is going to go down Quayle-esque by historical perspective.  People are going to look at this ten years later (like Nixon) and pretend they never voted for him, and talk about “those people who voted for that guy”.  You know you are finished, politically, when you become the walking characterture of yourself.

You are making the mistake of conflating atheism with Humanism.

They are not the same thing.

Even if it’s true that all Humanists are atheists (which it is not), atheism does not denote any particular philosophy or world view. Not even naturalism per se.

Atheists may be Humanists, Nihilists, Communitarians, Owenites, socialists, Fabians, Libertarians, all sorts of categories without God belief.

Humanism is a philosophy. Not all atheists are Humanists. There in lies the confusion.

I see two distinct types of Libertarians in the USA where the Libertarian Party, Randist Objectivists, Reason Magazine, and the CATO Institute predominate.

One is free market fundamentalism. The rigid belief that unregulated economic markets and firms will adjust themselves to buyers and sellers in such a way to benefit the overall good of society.

A liberal would argue that the government has a role to play in markets and the economy.
This is something that gets propertarian Libertarians and Objectivists all steamed up.

I don’t think that Michael Shermer is of that type. He surely can’t be that closed minded or rigid!

I think Michael Shermer is of the social Libertarian type—a laissez faire understanding of ethics and morals.
In the late 60’s, the expression was, “There should not be laws regulating the morals between consenting adults” and with that the attitude that individuals should be free to explore the world for themselves as long as they didn’t force themselves on someone else. (Which, indirectly, monopoly corporations do.)

Of course, with the Libertarian Party, those two Libertarian concepts are often shared by individuals.  Thus some Libertarians are both social libertarians and market libertarians.

In Europe there is a left libertarianism, which is out of the anarchist tradition and has anti-capitalist tendencies.

Chomsky, an early anarcho syndicalist has spoken on this.

Chomsky refutes “libertarian” “anarcho”- capitalism
LISTEN !!!:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPUvQZ3rcQ 

The Libertarian Party and Objectivists have distorted the meaning of Libertarianism and turned it into a right wing creed that pretends to be for freedom, but in reality is for freedom of the capitalists and property owners.

Chomsky: “If terms have lost their meaning it becomes impossible to talk.”

Gary the Grouch

Quoting Gary:

The Libertarian Party and Objectivists have distorted the meaning of Libertarianism and turned it into a right wing creed that pretends to be for freedom, but in reality is for freedom of the capitalists and property owners.

  Quite true, each of the Libertarians I know fit that mold.  I stopped at the Libertarian booth at a street faire two years ago, and, for the fun of it, picked up their literature.  It all matched this same definition, so I think that word has changed its meaning enough that we can’t mix in the earlier one or it just “becomes impossible to talk”.

Occam

All,

I wonder where Michael Shermer gets the idea that American Humanism was founded by academic Marxists. Was Paul Kurtz, for example, an academic Marxist? I have nothing against Marxists (of which there is broad variation) but I think Shermer is being historically inventive on this score. If free market fundamentalist atheists want to get their camels hump under the Humanist tent,  they will have to be smarter than this. Humanists are liberal, and yes we care about freedom, but we do understand that the government needs to play a role in protecting the disadvantage from the abuse of power and majority of use understand that the government needs to play a role in the regulation of markets—at the very least to protect us from being poisoned by bad products! Just because Libertarians are atheists doesn’t mean their “free market” philosophy of freedom and our Humanist philosophy of rational concern for the human condition and mutual responsibility have a lot in common.
—Gary the Grouch

Humanism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

....
In 1941, the American Humanist Association was organized. Noted members of The AHA included Isaac Asimov, who was the president from 1985 until his death in 1992, and writer Kurt Vonnegut, who followed as honorary president until his death in 2007. ... After World War II, three prominent Humanists became the first directors of major divisions of the United Nations: Julian Huxley of UNESCO, Brock Chisholm of the World Health Organization, and John Boyd-Orr of the Food and Agricultural Organization. ... Knowledge: Modern Humanists, such as Corliss Lamont or Carl Sagan, hold that humanity must seek for truth through reason and the best observable evidence and endorse scientific skepticism and the scientific method. ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism -

The American Humanist Association says Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life, but progressive is by no means limited to or inclusive or exclusive of Marxism.
The AHA was founded in 1941 as a successor to the Humanist Press Association, which was itself successor to the Humanist Fellowship founded in 1928.

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

I noticed that the article of or about Shermer’s brand of Libertarianism appeared in “The Objectivist.” Not exactly an indepentent journal of “free thought.”

Here is a list of honorees. I don’t see a noted hard core Marxist among them:

AHA’s Humanists of the Year

  * PZ Myers - 2009
  * Pete Stark - 2008
  * Joyce Carol Oates - 2007
  * Steven Pinker - 2006
  * Murray Gell-Mann - 2005
  * Daniel Dennett - 2004
  * Sherwin T. Wine - 2003
  * Steven Weinberg - 2002
  * Stephen Jay Gould - 2001
  * William F. Schulz - 2000
  * Edward O. Wilson - 1999
  * Barbara Ehrenreich - 1998
  * Alice Walker - 1997
  * Richard Dawkins - 1996
  * Ashley Montagu - 1995
  * Lloyd Morain - 1994
  * Mary Morain - 1994
  * Richard D. Lamm - 1993
  * Kurt Vonnegut - 1992
  * Lester R. Brown - 1991
  * Ted Turner - 1990
  * Gerald A. Larue - 1989
  * Leo Pfeffer - 1988
  * Margaret Atwood - 1987
  * Faye Wattleton - 1986
  * John Kenneth Galbraith - 1985
  * Isaac Asimov - 1984
  * Lester A. Kirkendall - 1983
  * Helen Caldicott - 1982
  * Carl Sagan - 1981
  * Andrei Sakharov - 1980
  * Edwin H. Wilson - 1979
  * Margaret E. Kuhn - 1978
  * Corliss Lamont - 1977
  * Jonas E. Salk - 1976
  * Betty Friedan - 1975
  * Henry Morgentaler - 1975
  * Mary Calderone - 1974
  * Joseph Fletcher - 1974
  * Thomas Szasz - 1973
  * B.F. Skinner - 1972
  * Albert Ellis - 1971
  * A. Philip Randolph - 1970
  * R. Buckminster Fuller - 1969
  * Benjamin Spock - 1968
  * Abraham H. Maslow - 1967
  * Erich Fromm - 1966
  * Hudson Hoagland - 1965
  * Carl Rogers - 1964
  * Hermann J. Muller - 1963
  * Julian Huxley - 1962
  * Linus Pauling - 1961
  * Leo Szilard - 1960
  * Brock Chisholm - 1959
  * Oscar Riddle - 1958
  * Margaret Sanger - 1957
  * C. Judson Herrick - 1956
  * James P. Warbasse - 1955
  * Arthur F. Bendley - 1954
  * Anton J. Carlson - 1953

Peace,
—Gary the Grouch