I just got a silly chin quivering right-wing outrage e-mail replete with stunning(ly wrong) statistics from a reliably right wing friend who forwards me mails from a person in some sort of Pentagon related material sourcing outfit. So I get all sorts of oddities, notions and humor, intended or otherwise direct from Bush tainted drones in that vicinity.) This note was just so amazingly wrong from beginning to end and I just had to dissect it publicly.
It purports to be by a professor Joseph Olson of "Hemline" University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out facts of 2008 Presidential election: The good professor "quotes" a source in the 1700's ("Alexander Tyler")who "foresees" that we, like all democracies, will fail when all the poor people vote themselves free money especially as Olson allegedly adds when immigration reform/amnesty lets all the Mexicans join in. (see troll diary that came in went in November ...it triumphantly brought the 2000 version of it to our attention and I would imagine it was not the first...and a Bush-Kerry version of the e-mail supposedly circulated in 2004 as well)
Sound familiar?
Do a quick Google and this revisionist fantasy exercise in right wing angst falls apart completely. It's beyond incorrect. There are 8 main erroneous claims in the note which I have numbered 1 through 8 below with refuting info for each one (See snopes for more details etc.). Does anyone on the right bother to fact-check viral e-mails let alone anything else in the media? You can see the basic gist of it in the links above... And the mail I just got is not even all the original text of the 2000 e-mail. Who ever revised it for this 2008 edition dumped the boring history guy section but his misspelled name still shows up as an unexplained Non sequitur reference near the end, and worse they left in all the original factual errors and compounded them by not updating the 2000 stats (some of which were accurate) to 2008 ones and then added a misleading un-credited sourceless map of by county election results for 2008. A fail from beginning to end... priceless.
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Part 1, the cut and paste, grab-bag factoid sleepy Goebbels Lies and mistakes all-Wrong section...
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- Hot info in it seems to comes from someone in an actual Law school:
Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law,
St. Paul, Minnesota, points out facts of 2008 Presidential election:
"Hemline" University? WRONG!... it's Hamline University (winger spell-check misuse strikes again...) That error has been in since 2000.
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- OK, wherever it's from, the Info is from a smart professor guy who speaks the truth....
Is Joseph Olson of "Hemline" U. responsible for any of the text in the note; the statistics and the references to Alexander Tyler? WRONG! He denies having anything to do with it at all - someone apparently just stuck his name into an e-mail that was already circulating to make it seem more authoritative.(see Snopes).
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- OK,ok but there are still some important scripture-like teachings in it by an Old & wise guy who was around same time as the founding fathers whose words we should heed....
About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:
and goes on to say something like all civilizations self destruct after 200 years etc. etc. we're doomed etc.
Is Alexander Tyler the source for the quoted text and list about Athenian Democracy and historical cycles? WRONG! Nobody by that name can be linked to the text and even the probable actual guy Alexander Tytler Lord Woodhouselee did not write it and the earliest appearance of the material is sometime in the 1950's (see Snopes again)
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So all the names and attributions are wrong if not also misspelled. How about the statistics in the note? Did they at least GET ANY OF THAT RIGHT ?? Doesn't look that way....
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- Number of states = 19 & 29 (20 & 30 correct for 2000) WRONG for 2008 which is 28 plus DC for Democrats to 22 for Republicans... Also there is no mention of the actual candidates names is anywhere in the note... handy when mixing and matching 2 different elections...
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- Total land area of the Republican Empire should trump teeny Dem land.
right for 2000 WRONG for 2008... OK to be fair at least these numbers are reality based for 2000... too bad they are re-using them for 2008 in which case they are totally wrong but only off by 8 years. Not to mention meaningless since acreage is ineligible to vote no matter how empty it is... only people can vote... Right? how about Corporate person hood? Then why not Geographic person hood?... X votes per acre... all Republican all the time!!
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- Made-up by County National Votes total from 2000 retreaded into 2008
WRONG again....A. these are the 2000 numbers and B. that's total populations of counties which is misleading... that's like counting the entire population of Georgia as voting for McCain since he won there or everyone in Ohio as democratic voters whether they voted for Obama, McCain or no one. We're not talking electoral votes, winner take all.. This makes it look like Gore (those are his 2000 numbers) got fewer votes than Bush when the record shows Bush - Gore:
Popular vote 50,456,002 - 50,999,897
Percentage 47.9% 48.4%
Since the e-mail was purporting to show 2008 totals, lets set the record straight with some actual numbers from Wikipedia...
Obama / Biden Democratic 50+DC 69,456,897
McCain / Palin Republican 50+DC 59,934,814
Obama:
....largest ever raw popular vote margin of victory for a non-incumbent presidential candidate, + sixth largest margin of victory ever.
Popular vote percentage (52.9%) is also the highest for a Democratic presidential candidate since.... 1964 + highest overall since George H. W. Bush.... in 1988.
More votes than any presidential candidate in American history,....
To a slow witted right wing reader the joke e-mail turns a 500k popular vote win by Gore in 2000 into a 16 million "loss" by Obama in 2008... How? By bundling together most of the voting and non-voting population in 2000 for a total of 270 million and generously massaging the shares of the totals massively in favor of Bush and then passing it off as the 2008 results when Obama actually won by 9.5 million actual votes among actual voters. This through the looking glass oddness can't have been intentional, it has to be plain old nobody home in Winger logic land... plus wishful thinking and rationalization. The elections have always supposed to have been about actual voters and actual ballots... nice that we seem to be getting back to that more often...
SHEESH...
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Before the last 2 errors here is one "factual" detail from the e-mail: to aid and abet the misdirection and bamboozlement above it has an accompanying map labeled as
2008 county county by county results
which appears to be accurate, but is just as misleading as the wording "Square miles of land Won by" above in number 5, It is all either VERY RED or very blue and really emphasizes the size of the RED areas where there are few people, overlooking that people have votes not acreage... and large areas in the red states are publicly owned and really don't count... hardly anyone lives there. Alaska alone would skew the numbers... here's a map with the same info but with shading for how close each county results were.
To add to that, how about a nice Electoral vote weighted map or a county bubble map or a nice swing by party by county map... I know you've probably seen them before, but they are useful in getting a truer picture... enjoy...
Cartogram of the projected 2008 Electoral Votes for 2008 U.S. Presidential Election with each square representing one electoral vote.
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- Next bit of statistical hokum... murder rates...
Snopes uses figures for 2000 since the original e-mail concerned that. Again the numbers are all screwy. They mention the national average for murders per 100,000 citizens in 2000 was 5.2 and they broke that down to come up with a reality based average for murders in counties won by Gore or Bush of:
6.5 vs. 4.1
a statistically significant difference in line with the urban/rural divide. (not to mention aggravated by the side effects of the idiotic "War on Drugs") but no where near the ridiculous disparity claimed in the e-mail. A mistake or exaggeration for effect...? Why bother when the real numbers are at least in their favor... but without context it's still misleading.
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- And lastly the nonsense that hardworking Republicans are supporting everyone else...
when actual real world stats show the exact opposite
The net benefiters of Government money are by and large the Red states at the expense of the blue states. smartestnumber5 on a comment in DISboards.com has some meat and maps to support that that they got from Tax Policy Blog
For whatever reason, so-called "blue states" tend to be high-income areas that pay the vast majority of federal taxes. Some 84 percent of federal individual income taxes—which account for over 40 percent of federal revenue—are paid by the those in the top 25 percent of the income distribution. The majority of these taxpayers live in wealthy, urban, politically "blue" areas like New York, California, and Massachusetts.
and after hitting us with the tenement dwellers sucking the life out of all the real Americans, they hit with the knockout fear button....
If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal
invaders called illegal's and they vote, then we can say goodbye to
the USA in fewer than five years
Pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake,
knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.
Aieeeee, I'm convinced! we need a 100 foot high concrete wall on the Mexican border!
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Part 2... the mystery origin, history out of thin air details section
The starting point of the original, more or less complete, viral email was basically an appeal to authority in the person of the non-existent Alexander Tyler from Scotland. Below is the verbiage attributed to him and to balance things out with the 8 howling untruths above There are 8 stages in the historical progression list below. This mystic sounding oroborous list with nice biblical and patriotic sounding words like Bondage, spiritual faith, courage, liberty, abundance and then going all headshrinky with apathy, complacency and dependence and ending up with bondage again... is a closed circle rinse and repeat cycle just like the self consuming serpent of legend, round and round, disappearing up it's own dark nonsense.
"About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:
'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 they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.' 'From that moment on, the majority always vote 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 world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years' 'During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. from bondage to spiritual faith;
2. from spiritual faith to great courage;
3. from courage to liberty;
4. from liberty to abundance;
5. from abundance to complacency;
6. from complacency to apathy;
7. from apathy to dependence;
8. from dependence back into bondage'
First problem: No record of this by anyone of that name and description. There was a man named TYTLER, ALEXANDER FRASER, a Scottish aristocrat, later known as Lord Woodhouselee. Snopes says
However there is no record of Tytler having authored a work entitled "The fall of the Athenian Republic (or the decline and fall of the Athenian Republic) and the quoted material attributed to him above is likely apocryphal.
More questions... Greatest Civilizations, 200 years lifespan?... what about Egypt? Rome? China? India...? I recall they all seem to have stuck around for quite a while.... Does the USA constitute a Civilization? Does the writer of this whoever he was mean Dynasties? or kingdoms or political systems? The magic 200 year thing is bogus and does not fit anything unless dates and definitions are heavily massaged to fit.
Tytler was a professor of history as well as an eventual inheritor of large estates from his father and he did publish many books and articles including a well known 2 volume history text "Elements of General History" which does have this per Bartleby.com
It is not, perhaps, unreasonable to conclude, that a pure and perfect democracy is a thing not attainable by man, constituted as he is of contending elements of vice and virtue, and ever mainly influenced by the predominant principle of self-interest. It may, indeed, be confidently asserted, that there never was that government called a republic, which was not ultimately ruled by a single will, and, therefore, (however bold may seem the paradox,) virtually and substantially a monarchy
.. and wikipedia says the list and associated paragraph wrongly attributed to him seems to show up in the 1950's separately from each other and later combined by person(s) unknown
No original author can reliably be determined for either quotation
and is not in any of Tytler's books.
And even if he did write it (and no one seems to be able to pin it on him so far) being an aristocrat with a classical education does not mean one is automatically gifted with Nostradamus style gravitas and someone whose works have been superseded by more modern research and understanding of history he is more a historical footnote rather than an original genius whose work has enduring influence. He seems more of an apologist and enabler of enlightened rule by the better type of people... sort of a kindler gentler Neocon for his age.
I don't have the time to research and write a dissertation on Lord Tytler's work so can't prove or disprove that he wrote any of this... but there is nothing either to validate the ideas and conclusions in the e-mail and with no actual source or context to maybe understand the basis for it they are just meaningless.... Holy writ that must be taken as is with the built in quality of meaning what ever you want it to mean.
Also, the Athenian Democracy "Tyler" refers to was not very Democratic in the first place and was more of an oligarchy that Bush & co. would love and existed for a short time in a world of kingdoms and empires and tribes... Today the world is composed of mainly Democratic countries or ones trying to be. It is apples and oranges to make comparisons and draw conclusions between the 21st century and classical Greece.... this email is just a collection of cut and pasted lies and errors and is the internet equivalent of a xeroxed list of unsubstantiated factoids and fantasy you might have seen handed out by a Reaganite in a 1980's office. But that won't stop wingers out there using it as inspiration for a counter revolution of some sort... since they wouldn't take the time to check anything about it first and don't need actual facts anyway...
The e-mail I got first mentioned "Tyler" near the end after cutting him out entirely in the process of trying to make the vintage 2000 lie-fest sound a bit like 2008... and put some closing words in Professor Olson's mouth:
Professor Olson believes the United States is now somewhere
between the "complacency and apathy" phase of Professor Tyler's
definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's
population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.
Very amusing repeating this nonsense after the 700 billion bailout to the bastions of the ultra rich.... so that's one last wrong number... I make the dependency group at @ 1 percent of US population for the real handout money not 40 percent...