Slashdot Mirror
Does Obama Have a Problem At NASA?
MarkWhittington writes "Has NASA become a problem for the Obama transition? If one believes a recent story in the Orlando Sentinel, the transition team at NASA, led by former NASA Associate Administrator Lori Garver, is running into some bureaucratic obstruction." Specifically, according to this article NASA Administrator Michael Griffin made calls to aerospace industry executives asking them to stonewall if asked about benefits to be gained by canceling the current US efforts to revisit the moon; we mentioned last month that cutting Aries and Orion is apparently an idea under strong consideration by the Obama transition team.
Just an aside, I think you should leave monospaced fonts on MySpace.
Anybody who reaches old age childless, or whose children die (for example, killed on active service in the armed forces) is clearly a waster who has contributed nothing to society and deserves to be thrown on the scrapheap.
As I said, donate to relevant charities. Our country donates more to charity than anyone so I'm sure it could easily be funded.
Unless there's a flaw in your argument, of course...
Nope, no flaw. The flaw is in your moral code. You believe the ends can justify the means, and as a result you've discarded all possibility of an ethical foundation, for how can you answer the question, "what should I do?" in any situation without the foreknowledge that your choice of action will have the correct results. History is filled with the unintended consequences of people willing to discard all principles to fulfill goals at whatever means necessary.
The cure to your problem is to stop trying to save everyone, stop putting everyone else's interests above your own self-interest, and stop sacrificing everyone else's self-interests to what's convenient to you - in this case, promoting legislation that quickly accumulates money to fulfill your ill-conceived goal (saving everyone), rather than promoting the voluntary donation of money to charities that will support the elderly. The former is more convenient for you but violates individual rights, while the latter takes more work but violates no rights.
If we could rely on people to do what's right in the real world, we wouldn't need government in the first place.
Who is opposed to government? I never said that. The government is necessary to uphold and protect the rights of the citizenry, through military, police, and the courts. Unfortunately it has become more common for the government to violate rights than uphold them. The government should be scaled back to its proper role.
Yes, well, we used to do it that way. Some of those pesky elderly poor were starving to death in the streets.
Who, what, where, when? If you're trying to make an argument you will need to provide more than conjecture.
Do you support a government mandate forcing everyone to agree with your opinion that you own property?
No government mandate is necessary. However a government is necessary to uphold and protect individual rights such as the right to property.
If you say you think government shouldn't ever force people to ascribe to social contracts, I don't believe you.
Is that it or were you going to explain how/why you don't agree?
And if not enough is given to charity?
Do you have any evidence that that would be the case, or is this just another appeal to emotion?
Nope, I'm no utilitarian.
And yet you argue as one. You argue only on ends alone (saving everyone), and let others decide the means. Besides the evidence of your original reply, I submit your most recent reply. For example: "And if not enough is given to charity?"
Of course, in real life we don't have perfect foreknowledge of the consequences of any of our decisions, but most of us have enough intelligence to make a sufficiently reasonable stab at it to get on with life.
I think you completely misunderstood me. We're talking past eachother now. I said you argue for ends (saving everyone) regardless of means (violating rights). I said that destroys all ethics because ethics results from free will - your freedom to choose between actions X and Y - and so you have to be able to answer the question "what should I do?", but that's a question of means, not ends. Only with perfect foreknowledge could you work backwards from ends to means and thus answer the question "what should I do?"
You can find examples of this broken ethical system in any situation in which someone is punished for the results of their actions rather than the actions themselves. When people act according to their best judgment, with no intention of harming anyone else, but their actions inadvertently harm someone, they should not be punished if its reasonable that they could not have predicted those results (thus acting in their "best judgment").
Ok, there goes my charitable giving.
Maybe for you, but do you believe it's not possible to derive personal happiness from charity?
But you never addressed my point about the consequences of your policy
Again, you consider the ends over the means.
Resources get stretched to the limit leading to severe shortages, high crime and a poor standard of life for everyone.
Again you're talking in the abstract. You will have to provide specific examples so that they can be investigated to determine if the situations you describe are the result of the causes you claim, and not other causes.
Where do these "rights" come from?
Check out Locke's Second Treatise of Government for his explanation. I'll provide my own summary: Man has rights as a rational being, capable of making decisions. Only man can ask, "what is the right action here?", and only man can then come up with what he believes is the right action, and then follow through on that action. If man chooses to live, he must use his reasoning mind to decide what are the right actions to further his life. So if you choose to live, it is right for you to use your mind to reach rational conclusions. The use of force prevents you from making rational decisions that further your life - you instead are forced to further someone else's contrived goals. Likewise it is irrational for you to force someone else to further your goals, because they cannot think rationally and you would be creating a situation that promotes force against yourself.