Your Favorite/Most Annoying Talking Points

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Talking points are sound-bite arguments used to establish a position or counteract a position. The most successful ones become platitudes that the general culture comes to assume are true.

Here are some talking points that have become platitudes:

• The United States is a republic, not a democracy. (How many of the people who spout this can really describe the similarities and differences between the Roman Republic and Athenian democracy? Notice how it subtly suggests the Republican Party is more "American" than the Democratic Party, too.)
• The government is the problem, not the solution. Related: The public sector is less efficient/more corrupt than the private sector.

Obviously once these sorts of things become the received wisdom among the common person who tends not to think critically on these things, anyone proposing something different is going to have an uphill battle.

I think there's a John Locke quote similar to this, but I don't recall what it is just now

Platitudes, but true nevertheless. The word "democracy" does not occur in the the U.S. Constitution. Governments do not produce wealth. They are not formed or establish to produce wealth. Governments are there to protect property and rights and to keep the peace in the society. Government is a purely regulative entity, and is in no way a productive entity. Think of it this way: thermostats regulate the way furnaces work but produce no heat. Furnaces produce the heat but do not regulate themselves.


Those societies in which government assumed total command of production failed economically.

ruveyn

At least in principle, governments exist to produce public wealth.

What is public wealth? Do you mean roads and bridges. They are produced by private firms and financed by taxes. Governments generally do not run factories in the non-communistic or non-socialistic part of the world. One exception: armories. Governments used to manufacture the weapons used by their armed forces. Now the production of weapons is contracted out to private firms.

The people who are in government are generally useless in the direct activities of wealth production. They are mostly lawyers and burocrats. Totally useless humans. Like udders on a bull.

ruveyn

Good talking points, there.

Roads and bridges are public wealth. No private firm, on its own, is going to produce roads and bridges, without figuring out a way to profit from it.

Schools are public wealth.

That's like saying banks don't produce wealth because they only supply the money for entrepreneurs who do the actual production. It's a semi-psychotic attitude of people who object to public involvement in creative processes. Much of the great innovation of the world was spurred by government sponsorship from atomic power to transistors to space ventures to railroads etc. The moronic platitudes spread by Ronald Reagan were spread to permit private concerns to avoid government examination of the wild corruption rampant in large corporate enterprises. Private enterprises don't want regulation so they can do terrible things to working conditions, spread poisonous foods, sell useless medicines, and screw the consumers in all sorts of ways without criminal conviction. The immense corruption in the current US government is out of the billions spent to support corrupt congressmen by private industry to get huge contracts without regulation. The monstrous Pentagon budget is a prime example of waste and useless final products by private industry. The problem isn't government, it's bad government and that's the result of a misinformed public that pays more attention to how many women Tiger Woods is making happy than how much public money is poured into the pockets of private crooks.

Amen!

Bankers lend money to people who know how to design and manufacture things. The producers who know what they are doing, sell the stuff they produce and pay the bankers back with interest. Bankers are useful parasites. People in government are just parasites.

ruveyn

The government funds a huge amount of basic research. The internet itself is the result of government projects.

governments exist at every level of organization. classrooms are governed by teachers. schools are governed by administrative staffs, school districts are governed by another level of administrative staffs. these administrative systems interact with parallel, nonlocal, administrative systems and are influenced by lobbying associations such as the PTA and special interests like uniform manufacturing companies and soft drink distributors.

larger businesses are governed in much the same way.

to expect our larger organizational patterns to differ from this, significantly, is foolish.


political strategists get better results with increased message saturation. an easy shortcut is to associate your adversary with someone or something that your target audience already has a negative opinion of. there are plenty of examples of this in the daily back-and-forth we follow on the tv, internet, and newspapers as if this is a sporting event in which there are clearly defined rules, points, and win-criteria. the left doesn't like the right's ideas for decentralizing government power so they say that the right is "pro-big business." the right doesn't like the left's ideas for strengthening the central government so they say that the left is "pro-big government." it doesn't take much to see that both sides promote government power and corporate profits.

perhaps and easier example is abortion. no one says that they are "pro-abortion" or "anti-life." no one says that they are "anti-choice" or "opposed to reproductive rights." the terms we use to even discuss that issue are, in and of themselves, talking points.


talking points are great ways to turn people into free ad time.
ads work. just look at all the websites you visit daily that don't charge you membership fees.



my favorite, lately, is anything having to do with "death panels," though i'm very much looking forward to some hilarious anti-gay marriage talking points again.

I have never heard of British people saying that the privatisations under Margaret Thatcher improved service quality and price. Privatisation is a racket. Private business skims money off the top. If everything was public, then there'd be no profit as overhead. This is so self-evident that I congratulate the evil propagandists who have convinced people otherwise.

Moreover, when profit is the only consideration then money will be funnelled into areas that can attain profit and not areas that increase value to society. Drug dealing is very profitable, you know. Selling quack cures is profitable. Making money through currency speculation is profitable but totally useless socially, and in fact is worse probably than drug dealing. Governments with industrial strategy when they use their power to direct investments into strategic industrial sectors with the goal of increasing the health and power of the country always get better results than those who say let them search for the greatest profit.

Anti gay marriage talking points? The one about if you allow gay marriage you will allow polygamy in due course, as well as people marrying animals.

amen to that!

I'm not entirely up on the anti-gay marriage debate but if that is the line of argument taken (equating a man marrying another man with a man marrying an animal) then it is probably one o the more homophobic things i've heard

Another one is the one about married people claiming that their own marriages will be devalued, as if it's some kind of currency and increasing the supply will devalue the currency. Then there's the deliberate confusion of religious marriage and civil marriage - when people are married in church, both apply, and churches can govern the rules of their own marriages at their leisure. There's no question of forcing religious organisations to recognise gay marriage, it's a matter that civil marriages, a legal contract, recognise this. They then say that this is a violation of freedom of religion to force that the "religious institution" of marriage be extended to gay people.

Another very dangerous talking point is the one about how deficits must be taken down at the cost of half of the economy because "households must balance their budgets". A very dangerous one that the American President recently used.

The cult of capitalism claims that a bunch of greedy people out to make money create a synergy that causes wealth and progress for all. That they say that "the business of business is business" and not of making things confirms that there's some kind of irrational magic behind capitalism, that it's these strange forces that cause any progress under it, and this voodoo is accepted as gospel truth.