CATO, AEI, HOOVER AND OBJECTIVE REALITY

[William Bacon]

On Thu, 13 Jun 1996 11:27:59 -0700, Bert Gold <bgold at itsa.ucsf.edu>
wrote:

[snip]

>I think there really are things I can say for sure at this moment
>are true, accurate representations of the real universe, just
>as there are things I can say which for sure are not such 
>accurate representations.

And what, exactly, is the criterion for this distinction?  Your own
biases?

>My experience with lawyers and politicians has been that members of these
>two professions can be relied upon (with very few exceptions) to provide
>us with no accurate assertions whatsoever.
>
>Since they are engaged in trying to deceive, rather than elucidate,
>few ever provide accuracy.
>
>However, that does not mean that accuracy in the political sphere
>does not exist; it merely means that there are many engaged in
>trying to obfuscate it.

No doubt there are, probably most.  That just makes my question above
even more important.

>The institutions named above, admittedly all conservative, but I
>would with equal validity allege that Greenpeace and some of the
>quirkier north woods lefties like Earth First (certainly the Socialist
>Workers Party, where a woman in Houston three weeks ago tried to
>convince me that Fidel Castro was a 'giving' leader, gimme a break)
>are oftimes just as guilty, if not more so.  Now, you might ask me
>why I didn't include Socialist Workers' Party, Earth First, and Greenpeace
>in the title of this essay... and I would tell you, that I did not because
>they did not come up in talk.politics.medicine as having any position
>whatsoever on the issue of 'the Right to healthcare', if they had,
>I assure you I would have put them in the title.

I note you did not mention organizations such as Brookings, or the
CBO.  Possibly because their biases and/or conclusions tend to agree
with yours?

>So the question netters, is this: 
>
>I wrote the following in an earlier thread:
>
>
>> What does disturb me on this newsgroup, though, and should disturb
>> netters of every political stripe, is the amount of fabrication,
>> misrepresentation and outright lying going on in this group in
>> order to support opinions which would otherwise be untenable.
> 
>
>That, it seems to me IS the problem... 
>
>CATO, The Hoover Institution (the place of origin of the famous Laffer
>curve, which predicts that if you give more money to the rich, everything
>will be OK [which even David Stockman now admits was a ridiculous joke])
>and the American Enterprise Institute, sole surviving refuge
>of Charles Murray, co-author of 'The Bell Curve' which 'proved'
>that people are genetically and racially programmed to have IQs ((which we
>all know measure the complete total capacity for credible existence as a
>human [please note the sarcasm])) are among the places in the world
>which propagate untruths most commonly.

Fine, you've put Hoover and AEI in their, respective places.  Now,
would you care to find any one, objective, verifiable slam to aim at
CATO; assuming, for the sake of argument, that Hoover and AEI are
"wounded to the quick" by your barbs?

>These places (Cato, Hoover and AEI, along with the aforementioned
>leftist organizations) do this for a reason:  They don't want for
>you to know the truth, so they lie instead.

Ah.  Would you care to substantiate THIS claim?

>So, when someone in this group quotes any of the above on anything,
>I promise I will not pay much attention...
>
>(I do not much enjoy listening to the Pope talk about his stands
>on birth control or abortion, and I do not pay any heed to him either).

Yet you believe your own biases.