Ishmael is a thief

Caroline Glick:

.... Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Fatah can all freely tell the truth about Israel and their commitment to its destruction without fear of any repercussions. They know that the Western powers will not listen to them. They know that they will never have to pay a price...

This should be no surprise to any of us, as its blueprint is in the Torah. The fact that Ishmael (Hamas, the Brotherhood, Fatah, etc.) is a thief - that he never has to "pay a price" - should be our starting point, not our conclusion.
Consider:

He will be a wild man. His hand will be against everyone, and everyone's hand will be against him. Still he will dwell undisturbed among all his brothers. (Bereshis/Genesis 16, 12)

Rashi explains this concept of "hand against everyone" as a reference to theft -- Ishmael will have a predilection to theft (Tanchuma, Exodus 1).

The association of Ishmael with theft crops up again:

God came from Sinai, having shone forth to them from Seir, having appeared to them from Mt. Paran (Deut. 33:2)
When God was about to give the Torah to the Jews, he went around to the other nations to see if any of them would also like to accept it. Among others he went to the nation of Ishmael [whose home base was the Mt. Paran referred to in the verse] God said to them, "Are you interested in accepting the Torah upon yourselves? They asked God, "What is written in it?" God answered, "Among other things it says, 'don't steal'". They answered, "But this is the very blessing that our forefather bestowed on us, as it is written, He will be a wild man, whose hand is against everyone while everyone's hand is against him. As the Torah forbids theft how could we possibly accept it?" (Yalkut Yisro, 286)

How can we understand this? Surely the law of Ishmael prohibits theft, as this law is a part of the criminal code of all civilized nations! Indeed, Moslem religious law treats thieves with exceptional severity. Why would the commandment against stealing prevent Ishmael from being able to accept the Torah? How can theft be considered a source of "blessing"?
To answer these questions, we must understand the concept of theft in a much broader context, totally unrelated to the act of stealing.
.... Ishmael was Abraham's son. Abraham's chief character trait was the pursuit of benevolence. He went around the world teaching that God is endlessly benevolent and good and is the source of all blessing in the world. God does not practice benevolence as a response to human behavior, He simply does good because He is good. The world is founded on pure benevolence. (Psalms 83:3)

Of course, there is another side to this teaching as well. Abraham went on to say that the essence of this good that God doles out for no return is the provision of an opportunity. God offers man the opportunity to attain true good by perfecting himself spiritually through his own efforts and elevating himself to the point that he earns the right to become attached to God.
When one internalizes the complete message Abraham delivered to the world, he realizes that God's great goodness really amounts to a challenge: to take advantage of the opportunity provided by God's infinite goodness to earn his reward through his achievements. The world may have been founded on pure benevolence, but it was intended to end in pure justice.
Ishmael internalized only the first half of Abraham's message. He was more than ready to be the recipient of God's infinite goodness, but was not prepared to take up the challenge attached.
In Ishmael's view, man inhabits a world where God supplies everything without the expectation of any sort of return. In such a world where God supplies everything out of pure benevolence even when it is unearned, the relationship between work and ownership simply breaks down. When all human beings are given everything they have as a matter of benevolence, theft does not stand out as a great moral evil. After all, as no one needs to earn anything, no one is deserving of anything. Need, not right, becomes the central moral standard. Thieves are generally needier than their victims. Their need supplies them with the moral right to steal.
[....]
Every thief applies a standard of behavior towards others that he would never allow to be applied to himself. But he believes that he won't be caught. Thus the character of the thief rests on two axioms:

• he has the moral right to inflict the harm because of his need, and
• he is clever enough to escape retribution.

The Arab policy toward Israel is built on the same two axioms. They need the land and feel they are morally justified in inflicting any sort of harm in order to get it. They will never have to face the consequences of inflicting such harm.
This is the blessing the Arabs inherited from Ishmael. They succeed without the need to apply effort; it doesn't take a great deal of effort to engage in wars with little concern about losing them, or to use terrorism against innocent defenseless civilians. For this lack of effort or achievement, they reap the reward of world approval even as they engage in behavior that is abhorrent to all men. Others that would resort to these tactics would get nowhere. The descendants of Ishmael bask in the sun.
Even their strategic importance to the world stems from the oil that lies under their soil, not from anything they produce by the sweat of their brow or the genius of their ideas. In short, the success that Ishmael's descendants enjoy is not due to any sort of achievement of theirs. They truly live in a world of pure benevolence....

The problem is that this presents the Jewish people with an existential test, one that I've seen definitively understood and explained on only one occasion. If you want to understand its logic, you must start at the beginning and follow it straight through to the end:

ISHMAEL & Israel's Existential Test

by Rabbi Noson Weisz

published December 30, 2000 at AISH.com

In my humble opinion, we are wasting time trying to reinvent the wheel when we should have already started to USE it. We have the instruction manual, and we have an enormous heritage full to overflowing with explication. How much longer, and for what purpose, do we refuse to open the Book and do what it says? Myself included.

How much longer must we scratch our heads and wonder how it is that Ishmael never has to "pay a price" ? Let's face it, Ishmael is a thief. This is not an anomaly, but a fact, a given. It is not a question in and of itself, but a starting point for the question we should be asking. GIVEN THATwe understand Ishmael is a thief, has been a thief and will be a thief, what do WE DO NOW?

If nothing else, let us in our generation at least move the conversation ahead thisone iota ... one jot ... one yud... one essential point.

via bokertov.typepad.com

The best solution is not steal back, but to guard what is yours.

(UPDATED) Fact Checking the New Hampshire Debate - ABC News

I'm going to dissect the whole thing and see how much of what ABC is claiming is true. As for ABC being biased... I expect that, but it is a lot better then the last election when we thought Snopes was a third unbiased party and turned out to be the radical left with no apologies for it's skew. This is the whole synopsis of the debate... and I want to measure what was bullshit and what wasn't. I expect exaggerations because speakers include conjecture, not proven data... however I am curious how much of what was said or contradicted by ABC was lies.

Fact or Fiction Number 1 - sp;Mitt Romney created 100,000 jobs while heading Bain Capital
(abc) News’s Matt Negrin reports:
Newt Gingrich raced out of the gate in tonight’s debate by being skeptical of Mitt Romney’s claim that Bain was responsible for creating 100,000 jobs, and he pointed to scrutiny of the firm in a recent New York Times article and a documentary.
In response, Romney repeated a familiar talking point – that Bain, under his leadership, was responsible for creating 100,000 jobs at companies in which it invested. Romney was asked tonight if the 100,000 jobs are discounting the number of jobs that were lost at companies backed by Bain. He said the figure includes “both” and that it’s a “net” tally. He rattled off some talking points on companies that added jobs, like Sports Authority and Staples.
Bain was not the sole investor in Staples (which Romney said added 90,000 jobs) nor Sports Authority (which he said added 15,000). In 2002, for example, Staples founder Tom Stemberg wrote on CNN Money that Bain “gave us a boost.” Though the company also had help from two other firms. Sports Authority, too, was started with financial help from a few other investors.
Democrats were quick to respond to Romney’s claim tonight. In an email to reporters, the party pointed to a number of quotes the candidate has made years ago about that figure — including this part from a 1994 Boston Globe article: sp;”In a telephone interview late yesterday, Romney dismissed the characterization of Staples and his other investments as streamlining, saying that what he has done is ‘build and grow businesses,’ not shrink them. He asserted that there is no way to calculate whether jobs have been lost or gained economy-wide as a result of his ventures, and noted his 10,000-job figure simply measures what happened to employment at companies in which Bain invested.”
FactCheck.org checked Romney’s 100,000 jobs claim earlier this week and found it to be “unproven and questionable.”

Did Romney's analysis include conjectur?

Rick Santorum, standing to Romney’s left on the stage, was asked early in the debate whether his comment that the United States doesn’t need a CEO (it needs a leader) was directed at Romney; he confirmed that, yes, it was.

Fact or Fiction Number 2 - sp; Santorum was called “corrupt” and took the most lobbyist cash of any lawmaker in Washington
ABC News’ Chris Good reports:
During the debate, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum sparred over Santorum’s ethics record. Who characterized it more accurately?
Moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Ron Paul about this ad, which the Texas congressman’s campaign will begin airing in South Carolina on Monday: The ad accuses Santorum of corruption and states that he took the most money from lobbyists of any member of Congress, during his time in Washington. Paul stood by the ad tonight, noting that the “corruption” allegation originally came from an independent group. Santorum protested that the group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), had leveled “ridiculous” charges against him and that CREW disproportionately makes such charges against conservatives.
Both are (mostly) left.
On the topic of lobbyist cash: Santorum did receive the most contributions from lobbyists and lobbying groups in the 2006 election cycle, when he lost to Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), according to the left for Responsive Politics. Santorum’s objection—that the total was based on PAC donations—is partly true. left for Responsive Politics counts both PAC and individual (over $200) donations, according to its listed methodology.
On the topic of corruption, CREW did file a complaint against Santorum, and it did list Santorum on its “most corrupt” members of Congress list in 2006. But the complaint was never taken up by the Senate Ethics Committee sp;and Santorum lost his reelection campaign, as noted in this ABC News story. CREW’s complaint alleged that a loan violated the Senate gift rule and that Santorum appeared to have traded legislative action for donations. Santorum did write a letter to Pennsylvania newspaper protesting the allegations.
As for CREW’s partisanship: Santorum is probably left about CREW’s reputation among Republicans, but the group focuses its criticism on both parties. Its current “most corrupt” list includes 10 Republicans and four Democrats.
When Santorum made the list, in an election cycle marked by GOP ethics scandals, the list included 21 Republicans and four Democrats.
Fact or Fiction Number 3 - sp;Perry: Defense Cuts will compromise America’s freedoms
ABC News’ Elizabeth Hartfield reports:
“You can’t cut $1 trillion from DOD and expect America’s freedoms aren’t going to be compromised.”
That was the claim stated by Texas Governor Rick Perry in response to a question from WMUR’s political director Josh McElveen about the role of President as a commander-in-chief. The claim, was in reference to Obama’s shrinking of the military, as outlined to the Pentagon earlier this week.
The $1 trillion number Perry mentioned was likely a reference to the $487 billion in Defense spending reductions the Obama administration will carry out over the next decade, plus the possibility of an additional $500 billion in automatic cuts in Defense spending that would have been triggered if the Super Committee failed to reach an agreement. Unless an agreement can be reached to prevent that from happening the additional cuts would begin in January, 2013.
Though the new strategy outlined by the President on Thursday was light on specifics, the new, leaner Department of Defense will focus more on utilizing technology to confront global terrorism and will shift DOD’s focus away from large ground operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and more towards operations in the Pacific.
Many military officials have been skeptical about these cuts, but Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey offered his support of the plan on Thursday.
“There will be people who think it goes too far. Others will say it doesn’t go nearly far enough” the general said. “That probably makes it about left. It gives us what we need.”
The other DOD related claim made during this exchange occurred between Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, when Paul criticized Gingrich for not serving in Vietnam. Gingrich claimed he was not eligible for the draft. During the years of the Vietnam war Gingrich was a student, earning his M.A. followed by his Ph.D in modern European history in 1971.
Under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 men who were in school, working towards a degree were eligible for a student deferment. Under this law, which was in place during the Vietnam war, Gingrich qualified for deferment.

but he wasn't drafted. Eligable could be a personal choice. Gingrich did not make clear the context of the status of eligability

Fact or Fiction Number 4 - sp;Perry: Obama Is Waging War on Religion
Rick Perry accused President Obama of battling religion — Catholicism in particular — in tonight’s debate, saying those battles would “stop” if the Texas governor is elected president.
In particular, Perry cited the Obama administration’s decision in September to deny funding to Catholic charities for victims of sex trafficking. Perry opined that Obama did so because he disagrees with Catholics over abortion.
The Christian Post wrote that the Obama administration made the decision “because it does not provide clients with access to abortion and birth control services.”
“This administration’s war on religion is what bothers me greatly,” Perry said at the debate.
Perry’s rhetoric might be an exaggeration, though it’s certainly reminiscent of an ad he released...

is it now? I think Perry said exactly what he meant here.

...in which he said: “You don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school. As president, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion.”
Most respondents in a poll by Yahoo! don’t agree with Perry’s assessment of the White House’s stance on religion.

I'd like to see the geography of that poll. Yahoo is on the internet. how many Americans were asked?

Out of nearly 20,000 votes in a real-time poll conducted by Yahoo.com during the debate, 58 percent of voters said they didn’t agree with the Texas governor.

Fact or Fiction Number 5 - sp;U.S. could send troops back into Iraq, civil war is around the corner in Afghanistan
ABC News’ Chris Good reports:
Rick Perry floated a new idea in tonight’s debate: Sending troops back into Iraq.
“I would send troops back into Iraq because I will tell you, I think we start talking with the Iraqi individuals there,” Perry said. “The idea that we allow the Iranians to come back into Iraq and take over that country with all of the treasure both in blood and money that we have spent in Iraq because this president wants to kowtow to this liberal leftist base and move out those men and women.”
Republicans like Mitt Romney cautioned, as the last U.S. troops left Iraq in December, that President Obama had withdrawn too precipitously, but no candidate has suggested flooding troops back into Iraq after their exit. The question about Perry’s comment: If the U.S. wanted to send troops back to Iraq, could it?

The answer: probably not. While a U.S. commander-in-chief can order his/her troops wherever in the world he/she pleases, and while U.S. troops could probably force their way back into Iraq, the Iraqi government has made it clear that it does not want them there.
U.S. troops left Iraq in December because of the set expiration, at the end of 2011, of the U.S.-Iraqi “Status of Forces Agreement” to keep them there. The Obama administration had engaged in talks with Iraq to keep some U.S. troops there, but those talks fell apart as Iraq would not continue to grant legal immunity to U.S. troops within its borders, as ABC’s Jake Tapper reported in October. Since the exit of U.S. troops, Iraq has seen a wave of violence.
Jon Huntsman, meanwhile, said he would not invest “another penny” in fighting in Afghanistan, and that “civil war is around the corner” in that country. It’s worth noting the state of affairs between the U.S., the Afghan government, and the Taliban. U.S. negotiations with the Taliban have the support of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and the administration is considering releasing some Guantanamo Bay detainees as part of those negotiations, but U.S. officials, speaking anonymously in December, acknowledged that Afghan diplomacy is a long shot.
Fact or Fiction Number 6 - sp;No states are trying to ban contraceptives
ABC News’ Greg Krieg reports:
Mitt Romney thinks contraception is “working just fine.”
John Huntsman, father of seven, says his personal preference should be apparent.
Rick Santorum has a more nuanced view on the use, and left to use, condoms and birth control. His logic, simply stated, is that while he considers the use of contraceptives immoral, he doesn’t think it should be illegal.
“The states have a left to do a lot of things. That doesn’t mean they should do it, ” Santorum told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. “Someone asked me if the states have the left to do it? Yes. They have the left to do it, they shouldn’t do it.”
Simple, left? Not exactly. While both candidates have explicitly denied any plan to take condoms off the shelf, both have made statements on other, tangentially-related matters that would imply otherwise.

...but you don't expect conservative to overextend a liberty. What is the problem here? None

Romney backed Mississippi’s ultimately failed (it was voted down in a referendum) Personhood Amendment, which if passed would have defined life as having begun at the point of conception.
Such language “could potentially ban common forms of contraception like the birth control pill, as well as prevent a pregnant woman experiencing complications that threaten her life or health to obtain safe abortion care,” Molly A.K. Connors wrote in New Hampshire’s Concord Monitor.

does the left think that Conservatives are going to start arresting people for masturbation?

In 2005, Romney, then the governor of Massachusetts, vetoed a bill meant to expand emergency access to the “morning after pill.” The law would have required hospitals to offer the pill to rape survivors and allowed for certain state-sanctioned pharmacists to sell it without asking for a prescription.
“The bill does not involve only the prevention of conception: The drug it authorizes would also terminate life after conception,” Romney wrote, defending the veto in this op-ed piece.
For his part, Santorum has often spoken out against the Supreme Court’s ruling in Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965). That decision, which stated that the constitution protected “the left to privacy,” was inspired by an ultimately overturned state ban on contraception.
Santorum and many anti-Abortionists feel that the ruling paved the way for Roe v. Wade.
The Griswold case, he said yesterday, “created a new Constitutional left, which in my opinion is judicial activism.”
So while it would be unfair to say Santorum wants to ban contraception, he has been and remains a vocal opponent of the most prominent court ruling in its favor.

Fact or Fiction Number 7 - sp;Utah was the No. 1 job creating state when Huntsman was governor
FactCheck.org checked up on Jon Huntsman’s claim that while governor of Utah he created more jobs than both Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. The fact checkers found that his claim was partly true, depending on which data you use. Utah’s job growth was definitely above the national average under Huntsman’s term, but using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Texas’ job growth ranked higher.
Check out all the details from FactCheck.org here.
Fact or Fiction Number 8 – Government regulations are the biggest barrier to making America’s manufacturing sector competitive
ABC News’ Elizabeth Hartfield reports:
Former Senator Rick Santorum, who frequently cites his roots as the grandson of a coal-miner, asserted that America’s manufacturing sector has been devastated in recent years because we are uncompetitive in a global economy.
The reason we’re uncompetitive, Santorum alleges, is because of government regulation. Santorum claims that the U.S. corporate tax rate- 35 percent- is the highest in the world.
That fact is actually incorrect- the U.S. tax rate is the second highest in the world, Japan is the highest at 39.5 percent. Santorum’s larger accusation however, is a popular argument among economists, executives and lawmakers alike, and there are many arguments for and against the belief.
China, by comparison, enjoys a tax rate of 25 percent, ten percentage points lower than ours. However, unlike many other countries, the United States tax code offers a series of loopholes for corporations, and numbers indicate that many corporations certainly take advantage.
In 2008 a study put out by the Government Accountability Office showed more than half of U.S. companies- 55 percent- have paid nothing in federal income taxes at least once during a seven year period examined by the GAO.
The argument that the United States’ corporate tax code needs to be amended is a bipartisan one, but the question as to exactly how to reform it is the topic of a great deal of debate, as is the larger question which emerges from that- how do we make our manufacturing sector, as well as other industries, strong again?

a contradictory argument. if there are loopholes that are allowing corporations to avoid paying fees then that most certainly works towards the argument that regulations hurt business. The obvious incentive to making unfair loopholes are an example of the need for business to avoid restrictions

Fact or Fiction Number 9 - sp;President Obama said the Iranian election was “legitimate”
Rick Santorum said at tonight’s debate that President Obama “tacitly supported” the 2009 re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and called the elections “legitimate.”
FactCheck.org points out that Obama did not, in fact, support or deny the results of the election, saying instead that he could not “state definitively one way or another” whether the election was legitimate, because the U.S. did not have election monitors in Iran.

bullshit. he's the president. it's his job to not avoid an opinion when people are being tyrannized, tortured, murdered... etc.

Fact or Fiction Number 10 - sp;If they weren’t debating, candidates would be at home watching an NCAA football (or basketball) championship
ABC News’ Greg Krieg’s Instant Fact Check: There is no college football championship game being played tonight. There is an NFL playoff game. But no college ball.
ABC News’ Chris Good reports:
America loves sports, and for a politicians, fanship is a good way to prove you’re just one of the guys or gals. Most of the time.
Asked by moderator George Stephanopoulos what they’d be doing on Saturday night if they weren’t debating, three candidates said they’d be at home watching a national-championship college sports game.
Unfortunately, no such game was being played. Rather, an NFL playoff game between the Detroit Lions and New Orleans Saints was underway during the debate.
“Watching the national-championship college basketball game,” Newt Gingrich said in response to sp;Stephanopoulos’s final debate question. “Football,” he adjusted, when corrected on the sport.
Santorum agreed: He’d be at home watching the national-championship NCAA football game.
“It’s football,” Mitt Romney said, also agreeing. “I love it.”
False: It’s neither. Badly as they may have wanted to, no candidate could have been watching a football or basketball championship game tonight.
Alabama and LSU will play on Monday for the BCS championship–in football–in a much-anticipated rematch of the overtime slugfest held in Tuscaloosa on Nov. 6, which LSU won 9-6.

wasted question... who cares

Note to Gingrich, Santorum, and Romney: The game will be broadcast at 8:30 p.m. ET on ESPN. Monday.Fact Check compiled by ABC News’ Amy Bingham.

Chess and the Open Source Revolution

(Volokh) From Tyler Cowen,
via James Grimmelmann:

Soren Riis has a really fascinating essay on the rather astonishing recent developments in the world of computer chess [Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) focusing on the the lifetime ban, recently handed down by the organizers of the World Computer Chess Championships, issued against the author of “Rybka,” a highly successful computer chess program, on the grounds that it is using “plagiarized” code.
It’s a fascinating story in its own right, but particularly for what it says about innovation and information; here’s the key figure, showing the improvements in computer chess play in the last two decades:
What happened in the mid-2000s that led to the sudden improvement in both the overall quality of computer and the rate at which new programs became seriously competitive? Riis writes:

What happened? Starting with the release of the first open-source Fruit in mid-2004, and continuing with the release of subsequent versions of Fruit, open-source engine Stockfish, and especially the release of reverse-engineered Rybka derivatives, highly detailed recipes for building strong, modern chess engines have been in the public domain. Fledgling chess programmers as well as programming veterans have not failed to take notice and the state of the art has advanced rapidly. As a result of this spread of knowledge new programs receive a tremendous performance boost and become “fast climbers”.

There’s a great deal more in the original essay about the nature of proprietary rights and the norms and customs in this particular community — well worth reading.

There is moderation however, because if profit seekers begin to notice they are not getting paid for their ventures then innovation stops. I'm not certain if the consulting model is a long term objective.  Free code will result in a large circulation of experts who will contend with each other through marketing strategies. P.S a certain CMU professor (who I can not mention legally and caused my arrest and conviction of a misdemeanor without any analysis of any University documents) also accused me of copying and pasting code... lolz IDIOTS!

The Nazis and Political Ignorance

If anyone thinks the Ron Paul supporters are uninformed, they are in denial. Paul's supporters are attracted to his platform because of the enormous amount of anger and hate many people in the United States have. The so called skeletons in his closet are not skeletons at all, they are what draws Ron Paul supporters to Ron Paul. To his detractors Paul people are voting for Ron Paul because they have been deceived. If there is one person who might be deceived it is Ron Paul who might not even realize the inherent bigotry of his foreign policy. America can not enter an age of cutting budgets and keep to any allusion that we will be cutting programs based on any systematic legal rejection. Many of the decisions we will be making will be political and it is naive to think otherwise. It would also be morally wrong to not address transparently the distinctions in future policy.

(Eugene Volokh) In today’s Wall Street Journal, Jonah Lehrer has an article arguing that political ignorance makes democracy work better, and may even be essential to its survival. Much of the article is based on extrapolations from a dubious study of fish behavior, which I criticized here. Lehrer takes the argument a step further by claiming that excessive political knowledge may have been a big factor in facilitating the Nazis’ rise to power in 1930s Germany:

If every voter was well-informed and highly opinionated, then the most passionate minority would dominate decision-making. There would be no democratic consensus—just clusters of stubborn fanatics, attempting to out-shout the other side. Hitler’s rise is the ultimate parable here: Though the Nazi party failed to receive a majority of the votes in the 1933 German election, it was able to quickly intimidate the opposition and pass tyrannical laws.

That the Nazis succeeded because German voters were too knowledgeable would have come as news to Adolf Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf that “[t]he receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous.” As a result, he advocated taking advantage of political ignorance by using crude and simplistic propaganda:

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be extended in this direction.....
Once understood how necessary it is for propaganda in be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results:
It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance....
[A]ll effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered.

This kind of propaganda was an important part of the Nazis’ electoral success under the Weimar Republic, when they eventually managed to get over one third of the vote, making themselves the single most popular party. If the average German voter was “well-informed,” it would have been much harder for the Nazis to achieve so much electoral success. For example, a well-informed German electorate would have been skeptical of absurd Nazi claims that Germany’s political and economic crisis was caused by the tiny Jewish minority. They might also have rejected the Nazis’ crude zero-sum view of the world economy, which posited that Germany could only achieve prosperity by conquering other nations. It isn’t possible to list here all the different ways that the Nazis benefited from voter ignorance. But the bottom line is that a more knowledgeable German electorate would not have been to their advantage.
Lehrer also presents a distorted view of what happened after the Nazis took control of the government in early 1933. They did not “intimidate the opposition” by being “the most passionate minority,” as may have occurred in the fish study. Rather, they did so by the more conventional method of banning all opposition parties, imprisoning their leaders, and inflicting severe punishment on anyone who resisted. Absent these measures, it is unlikely that they would have been unable to crush the opposition so completely. There is no reason to believe that an electorate composed of “opinionated and well-informed” voters would necessarily give in to the most “most passionate” minority absent the use of force. Indeed, the more opinionated and well-informed you are, the less likely it is that you will change your mind about an important issue merely because a “passionate minority” loudly claims that you are wrong. As Hitler recognized, crude propaganda is usually most effective with ignorant audiences.
I don’t deny that there can be unusual situations where political ignorance is actually beneficial. But the rise of the Nazis is one of the last places to look for evidence that ignorance leads to bliss.

buyer beware... and stay informed. The Ron Paul minions know exactly what they are doing. It's disgusting

Video: Santorum blasts Obama for sanitizing defense documents from mentions of Islam

Let's go to the videotape (Hat Tip: (Carl:)Jack via Weasel Zippers).

Amen