Food for thought

As long as this is food for thought, think about this: Alexander Tytler (not "Tyler"; Gunner has used this quote with the same misspelling, so you both probably got it from the same bogus source) was a professor of ancient Greek history, and the last democracy he knew anything about was 2,000 years old. Nevertheless, there is no record that he ever wrote those words. People have done complete searches of his known writings and haven't come up with it. According to a guy named Mike Powell, who did a complete textual search and who is quoted by Snopes, "In no case was text identified that was remotely similar in words or intent to the alleged Tytler quote." See Snopes for details. Powell provides a link to an online text of Tytler's best known book on the subject of government, if you're really ambitious.

This never happened. Ever. Try to find an example if you wish.

Bush got all the stinking desert.

There are 50 states, not 48. In fact, Bush won 30, Gore won 20.

Wrong. The numbers were cooked up out of thin air. Here are the actual numbers: Gore: 6.5; Bush: 4.1. That fits with the stinking desert comment above. The shots in Bush country are taken over longer distances, on the average.

Olson never said it. Again, from Snopes: "Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University is not the source of any of the statistics or the text attributed to him. Professor Olson was contacted (by me) via e-mail, and he confirmed that he had no authorship or involvement in this matter."

Congratulations, Harold, you've just perpetuated a bunch of utter nonsense brought to you by the Conservative Minister of Disinformation.

Ed Huntress

I just printed this out to give to my daughter. She'll be taking it to her government class for discussion.

To avoid having her look like a fool, print this for her while you're at it:

It's mostly bogus.

Ed Huntress

Got it. Unfortunately there's something in the snopes page that crashes both netscape and explorer when I try to print it. I'll hold off on both of them until I can figure it out.

Even if they do contradict, it still might be an interesting project for her.

It certainly could be. Knowing that it's urban legends is itself a basis for some good discussion. It should be a hot topic in school, with so many of them flying around.

And you can strip the attributions and just examine the words, ignoring who said them. Which brings up the need to research the claimed "facts" that one quotes -- a subject of increasing importance, based on what we're seeing in newsgroups these days.

BTW, when I run into trouble printing from a Web page, I either cut-and-paste into my text editor (TextPad, in my case) or I save the page as text and open it in a word processor. The latter can drag in a lot of crap, but it's easier than fixing the formatting in Word.

Ed Huntress

Pasting into WordPad (usually) works ok. Preserves the fonts & colors, but unlike Word, doesn't try to make it into a web site. ;-)

I always associate .rtf with WordPad instead of Word.

-- Mark

What about this- "----- THIS WILL OPEN YOUR EYES. By Paul Harvey -

Conveniently Forgotten Facts

Back in 1969 a group of Black Panthers decided that a fellow black panther named... Alex Rackley needed to die. Rackley was suspected of disloyalty. Rackley was first tied to a chair. Once safely immobilized, his friends tortured him for hours by, among other things, pouring boiling water on him.

When they got tired of torturing Rackley, Black Panther member, Warren Kimbo took Rackley outside and put a bullet in his head. Rackley's body was later found floating in a river about 25 miles north of New Haven, Conn.

Perhaps at this point you're curious as to what happened to these Black Panthers.

In 1977, that's only eight years later, only one of the killers was still in jail. The shooter, Warren Kimbro, managed to get a scholarship to Harvard, and became good friends with none other than Al Gore. He later became an assistant dean at Eastern Connecticut State College. Isn't that something?

As a '60s radical you can pump a bullet into someone's head, and a few years later, in the same state, you can become an assistant college dean! Only in America!

Erica Huggins was the lady who served the Panthers by boiling the water for Mr. Rackley's torture. Some years later Ms. Huggins was elected to a California School Board.

How in the world do you think these killers got off so easy? Maybe it was in some part due to the efforts of two people who came to the defense of the Panthers. These two people actually went so far as to shut down Yale University with demonstrations in defense of the accused Black Panthers during their trial.

One of these people was none other than Bill Lan Lee. Mr. Lee, or Mr. Lan Lee, as the case may be, isn't a college dean. He isn't a member of a California School Board. He is now head of the US Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, appointed by none other than Bill Clinton.

O.K., so who was the other Panther defender?

Is this other notable Panther defender now a school board member? Is this other Panther apologist now an assistant college dean? No, neither!

The other Panther defender was, like Lee, a radical law student at Yale University at the time. She is now known as The "smartest woman in the world."

She is none other than the Democratic senator from the State of New York----our former First Lady, the incredible Hillary Rodham Clinton.

And now, as Paul Harvey said; You know "the rest of the story". "

D.

Here at least is an authentic quote:

"No society is sustainable wherein the power to dispense benefits is not directly answerable to the contituency that produces the means to fund those benefits. The reason is rooted in human nature and in the realities of the material world: that desires are endless, while the means to fulfill them is finite and painfully produced. The peril inherent in democratic governments is the attractive promise of the classic pyramid scheme: that an ever-expanding constituency will vote themselves a benefit to be paid for by someone else."

- Steve

An authentic quote from whom?

This, like 99% of all the so-called "facts" about various political figures floating around the net, is utter bullshit. The people who broadcast these so called "facts" are relying on the majority of the people being too damned illiterate and/or lazy to research the truth for themselves. Check the following link if you have any real interest in the facts, but beware - you might have to actually read and comprehend many paragraphs of multi-syllable words...

I could tell after reading the first sentance how well this has been researched. They can't even spell Edinburgh right, so I'd guess everything else is bullshit.

Much better is this item:

Just as bogus - the IQ ranking of Presidents. See original at Snopes.com

182 .. William J. Clinton (D) 175 .. James E. Carter (D) 174 .. John F. Kennedy (D) 155 .. Richard M. Nixon (R) 147 .. Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) 132 .. Harry Truman (D) 126 .. Lyndon B. Johnson (D) 122 .. Dwight D. Eisenhower (R) 121 .. Gerald Ford (R) 105 .. Ronald Reagan (R) 098 .. George HW Bush (R) 091 .. George W. Bush (R)

Regards,

Marv

Ed Huntress wrote:

Haha! Oh, man, those guys will cook up anything to smear Hillary. Did you know she was actually the Boston Strangler?

Ed Huntress

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004 02:46:25 -0800, "Harold & Susan Vordos" brought forth from the murky depths:

Well, I think we all know who our next dictator will be, especially if he's re-elected...

Very good food for thought.

--snip--

Unfortunately, I fear that he's correct.

Eek!?

Perhaps in the minutia, but in context, the post was largely correct.

Can you Ed, give me an example of a country based on democracy, that has remained unchanged politcally for more than 200 yrs?

Try hard

Gunner

"To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. To be incapable of committing mayhem is not the mark of the civilized, merely the domesticated." - Trefor Thomas

Jeez. Who said it, you?

Ed Huntress

Yes and a good experience for the class re checking sources.

No problem grabbing it with Netscape under OS/2 (ironic since.asp is M$ thing). I "printed it to my virtual PostScript printer and converted the PostScript to plain text with GhostScript. Sounds complicated but it only too about a dozen keystrokes. :-)

Ted

" At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinborough) had this to say about "The Fall of The Athenian Republic" some 2,000 years prior:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the most recent Presidential election:

Population of counties won by: Gore = 127 million Bush = 143 million Square miles of land won by: Gore = 580,000 Bush = 2,2427,000 States won by: Gore = 19 Bush = 29 Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Gore = 13.2 Bush = 2.1 Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the tax¡paying 1 of 4 2¡9¡2004 11:57 AM Urban Legends Reference Pages: P...e Fall of the Athenian Republic)

"In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the tax¡paying citizens of this great country. Gore's territory encompassed those citizens living in government¡owned tenements and living off government welfare . . ."

Olson believes the U.S. is now somewhere between the "apathy" and "complacency" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy with some 40 percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: P...e Fall of the Athenian Republic)

I really enjoyed one recent message that was circulated extremely widely, at least among conservatives. It gave several interesting "facts" supposedly compiled by statisticians and political scientists about the counties across the nation that voted for George Bush and the ones that voted for Al Gore in the recent election. Supposedly, the people in the counties for Bush had more education, more income, ad infinitum, than the counties for Gore.

I didn't have time to check them all out, but I was curious about one item in particular... the contention that the murder rate in the Gore counties was about a billion times higher than in the Bush counties. This was attributed to a Professor Joseph Olson at the Hamline University School of Law. I never heard of such a university, but went online and found it. And Prof. Olson does exist. "Now I'm getting somewhere," I thought.

But in response to my e-mail, Olson said the "research" was attributed to him erroneously. He said it came from a Sheriff Jay Printz in Montana. I e-mailed Sheriff Printz, and guess what? He didn't do the research either, and didn't remember who had e-mailed it to him. In other words, he got the same legend e-mailed to him and passed it on to Olson without checking it out, and when Olson passed it on, someone thought it sounded better if a law professor had done the research, and so it grew. Who knows where it originally came from, but it's just not true. "

The minutia?? You mean, like they never actually said it? Holy cow, Gunner. You've been 'way out on patrol too long.

Hell no. That's strictly for monarchies, theocracies, and hereditary dictatorships.

Ed Huntress

Hmm, then all that other stuff that Snopes says is complete horseshit, it actually 'mostly correct?' I think somebody has a bad case of situational ethics here. Like, 'if it supports my conclusions, it's gotta be right.'

Jim

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