http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-01-30/rise-americas-lunatic-fringe
Every once in a while, you read an article that really puts it all together (or spot on, as some would say)
Ever on the Fringe,
metatron
The Rise Of America's Lunatic Fringe
by metatron 29 Replies latest jw friends
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EntirelyPossible
I found that article lacked a sense of history and contained a self-inflated sense or the importance our current place in time.
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yourmomma
as much as a loon guys like alex jones are, unfortunatly some of the stuff they post on their site is true, like the NDAA, TSA abuses, drones, etc.
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Heaven
I'm hearing Tom Cochrane and Red Rider's "Lunatic Fringe" in my head. "Lunatic Fringe... We all know you're out there"
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scotoma
They have to quit calling it the Lunatic Fringe. Is it really a "fringe" when half the people believe that stuff.
What do you call religion? It's conventional "lunacy".
It's an inability to weigh evidence.
And it's simple.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Conspiracy theories are really conspiracy excuses.
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sammielee24
Not really sure what you mean Scotoma..but here's what I think. I think that there is always some middle path that contains the truth. There are times that people question and look for answers and when no answer is forthcoming or found, they make decisions based only on what they have available to them. When a person has an opinion that is not popular and outside the mainstream, they are often called lunatics or conspiracy nuts. To me, a real fringe person is one who lives within a warped sense of reality that is far beyond asking questions and looking for answers - they have taken an extreme point of view and are living their lives within that reality.
A few examples are things like the Gulf of Tonken that led to thousands of lives lost or damaged in the Vietnam war - people questioned for years, asked, were denied, lied to and all those people were conspiracy nuts - turns out after 50 years they weren't nuts but too close to the truth for the mainstream to be comfortable. Then we have the Kennedy's and Pearl Harbour...all sorts of stories come up that most people just don't care about or refuse to accept an alternative to and so they are labelled pretty quickly. Now, in the bigger scheme of things we can always say 'so what?'...because in many instances if the deed is over, its done. On the other side, it proves that people should be skeptical of what they hear if they hear many conflicting stories because following blindly is having blind faith .....and that can be just as dangerous as being on the lunatic fringe so to speak. sammieswife
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metatron
Pew Research poll results today. 53% of the US thinks the Feds are a threat to their personal freedom/rights.
It's moving from the fringe to the political center.
metatron
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scotoma
I consider myself both open minded and skeptical. Let me explain how I got fooled lately.
I don't like Obama. He is not a leader. He's a law professor. Professors like to profess ie. sound authorative. He knows he's good looking. He knows white people are still under the spell of the perfect Huxtable (Cosby) family image. He's not liberal or progressive. He only wanted to get elected to two terms because that seals his legitimacy.
So I pick up a book about Obama knowing it was written by a conservative with an ax to grind. I like reading things by people I don't agree with.
Then I read this juicy morsel that fit into my personal contempt for Obama. The book says Obama brazenly gave the Queen of England an Ipod loaded with his speeches.
Perfect. This is the Obama I like to hate. So I pass it by my liberal friends who all know that I'm a communist by temperament. I want to show them what the "bougie" liberals are like.
Woe is me. I forgot to fact check the book. I searched on Obama/Ipod/Gift/Queen and found out that she requested an Ipod as a gift because even though she had one already she didn't have one with video capabilities. So the Obama crew gave her an Ipod with movies of her visit to the United States and also a video of her favorite Musical - Oklahoma. Also he installed numerous show tunes. .... and YES he included some of his speeches.
Now I had to call all my liberal friends and tell them I made a mistake. Now I look like a fool. Of course I am a fool. I was fooled. I could have let all this go and not tell my friends. They probably wouldn't even do the research I did to try to verify my statments. But I felt obligated to myself to set this straight for my own self respect.
This is a case where a half truth is worse than a bald face lie. Intuition can usually detect a lie. But a half truth sneaks right in there. I swallowed it down because it confirmed my feelings about Obama.
And that's what goes on with the Lunatics and religionists. They simply want to believe what they already believe because ambiguity is so hard to deal with.
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Berengaria
Well put scotoma!
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Berengaria
Pew Research poll results today. 53% of the US thinks the Feds are a threat to their personal freedom/rights.
It's moving from the fringe to the political center.
metatron
This doesn't really make sense. That 53% doesn't mistrust the same aspects of the Federal Government. In some cases, the lunatics are actually part of the Government, so to say that the populace doesn't trust them, is perfectly reasonable and mainstream.