[extropy-chat] Bush wants another $75 billion for wars

[Sean Diggins]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Brian Lee
>
>The third link above is easily the busiest bulletin board I have ever seen
>on the web, by several orders of magnitude. A cursory read through the 
>posts
>gives the reader a good idea of Bush's prime constituency beyond the large
>corporate and small business demographics.
>
>Sean

Come on man, I know it's nice to think about how much better you are than 
the "Rapture Ready" people, but this is like posting some links to fetish 
bulliten boards and then saying that it is a prime example of Bush's 
constituency.

-----------------------------
You couldn't be more wrong about me.
I do NOT consider myself to be better than anyone.
I fully respect their right to believe whatever they want to believe.
I have no idea if any religion on the planet is right or wrong, but I try to
form a viewpoint based on my own instincts and reasoning that none of the
religions are useful beyond being a means to organise pepole and give their
lives meaning.  
My point was, these are people of robust conviction and they also often
(mostly) occupy the far right of politics.
There are HUGE numbers of "reborn" Christians in the US, among them George W
Bush.
If you read my post in the context of the post I replied to (from Hal), he
asked this:

"So how do you explain to yourself why about 50% of Americans do want
to keep Bush in office?  Do you think they are all wicked people?

How seriously do you consider the possibility that they might be right
and you wrong?  Is that completely out of the question for you?"

And my answer was to point out that a large part of Bush's constituency is
sourced from the Christian Fundamentalists...and he is milking it for all he
is worth.
Maybe cynically, maybe not - I dunno. I once read a statistics article which
said something like "nearly 50% of the US population consider themselves to
be re-born Christians". That statistic seems manifestly incorrect to me, but
I imagine it's possible that 25% could be calssified in that manner. 

The site I linked is hardly a small fetish site. It is massive.
Some of the subjects have received well over 100,000 posts.
I know of no other bulletin board which has such responses to individual
threads.
It really is astonishing. 

To answer Hal's question "How seriously do you consider the possibility that
they might be right
and you wrong?", I would not consider it very seriously, personally. The
views of the Christian right (when angered) scare me more than most of the
other religions in the world (when angered)...and Bush has repeatedly used
"mission from God" imagery. He even invoked The Crusades at one point. So
no, I don't seriously consider "they" might be right, but I will concede it
is possible. After all, anything is possible.   

But Bush is almost certain to defeat Kerry. 
So far, it seems to me (from distant Australia) he is doing a VERY good job
at getting re-elected.
Except for the strange fact that over the past few days he has excluded
people from outside the US from visiting his website. Weird...or maybe DOS
attacks...who knows?
The only chance Kerry has is a surge in people voting _against_ Bush...and
choosing Kerry instead of Nader.
That's an outside chance, I suspect.
In other words, Kerry wont win by people voting _for_ him. Instead, he has a
slight chance of getting the edge from freshly enrolled voters determined to
remove Bush and the neocons. The young, who don't have landline phones and
therefore don't show up in the polls, may be a factor.

But Bush has good advisors who keep him on message.
Cynical they may be, but stupid they are not.
Bush is just the figurehead enabler. 

A rich man of conviction who proudly "is what he is" against a rich man
pretending to have conviction while wearing ill fitting "I'm for the people"
duds...nope, Kerry is facing a losing battle...

Sean