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From MIT Inventor To Tea Party Leader
An anonymous reader writes "In the midst of Congressional races around the country, one stands out to techies. Thomas Massie, an MIT whiz kid who pioneered touch-based interfaces and founded SensAble Technologies in the 1990s, is the favorite to win the Republican nomination in his Kentucky district next week. SensAble was recently sold on the cheap, but in a new exclusive, Massie explains why he left the haptics firm years ago to lead a simpler life of farming, family, and guns — lots of guns. Along the way he built a solar-powered, off-the-grid house and became a local hero of the Tea Party. Now Massie is leading the charge to get more engineers into politics, and if he wins, he could be a force to be reckoned with in Washington, DC."
"Crazy" has no intellectual boundaries
...wasn't disappointed.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. ~ Douglas Adams
Because the right wing has slid into crazy land.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not everyone in the TEA Party movement is what you appear to envision (appear, since all we have to go on is your posting). You might not want to be so bigoted in your beliefs.
Or you can stay in your happy bubble, pretend that everyone there is Them, and not have to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
Speaking as a right wing, family oriented, gun loving engineer myself. Why would he ever want to go into politics?
WTF is someone who is intelligent enough to graduate from college (MIT no less) doing associating themselves with the Tea Party. It's got to be some kind of paid publicity stunt.
"But he's smart... I think I'm smart. He should agree with meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"
Intelligent people disagree on stuff all the time. Especially when it's something as complicated and untestable as political hypothesis. Get over it.
Sometimes. Not always.
For instance people who believe in a flat earth did not come to an alternative conclusion they are just wrong.
...sure it would make no sense to see an educated person associating themselves with what the major media outlets associate with them. After all, all tea party people are nazis and all democrats are communist sympathizers, right? right?
If, on the other hand, you intelligently realize that most American's are actually fairly close in terms of political view and the cartoons presented to you are false on their face, you might see that both sides have rational points that should be listened to, even fought for.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
"When you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around which you navigate each day. Credit leads into a desert with invisible boundaries."
---Anton Chekhov
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I honestly don't give a crap what party he's in - if he can get at least some good tech/engineer representation in that parliament of whores that we call Congress, it's win-win as far as I'm concerned.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
A rational person. You have no place on the US political spectrum.
You are in good company though.
My personal attitude is that you are a fine example of what is wrong with right wingers, instead of even asking to clarify anything you go beating up strawmen.
The last point is not begging the question at all. It is a simple statement that those who believe taxes are theft are simply wrong.
Simple principled answers would be nice. It's like when people want to throw out the old hairball code and write a 'clean' program from scratch; nothing maps so simply to reality.
What happens if your policies result in lots more people dying, getting seriously hurt, or going bankrupt?
Products that could be dangerous? Stick a warning label on there and let people buy what they want.
What about illiterate people? People who don't read English? Confused elderly people? (Confused middle-aged and young people?). What about people who simply overlook the instructions? Is it ok for them to suffer injury or disfigurement?
Should a Wall Street con artist be able to push whatever he wants on your grandmother, as long as he sends her the prospectus to read? What about a contest where the fine print says losers forfeit their houses; would that be ok as long as there is a warning? Products that explode when left in the sun?
I think that's a bit simplistic. Having expertise in any one area does not mean one has good judgement, which is ideally what lawmakers should have. Look at nobel prize winner Kary Mullis' statements on how HIV doesn't cause AIDS.
(He didn't win his award for anything related to HIV or AIDS, by the way).
What, exactly, is their point? Complaining that their taxes are too high when their taxes are historically low?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Taxes are voluntary in the same way home rent is voluntary - you're free to not pay it, but you need to move out then.
Why does this sort of stuff just plain piss the left leaning person off? I mean, even if you are a dedicated communist shouldn't you still wish to find corruption, overspending, and waste, and squash it? Shouldn't that be something anyone from any party would rally behind?
But no, unfortunately when someone says limited government they immediately get called a right wing racist teabagger.
Well, speaking as a left leaning person, I'd say nothing in that list pisses me off. What pisses me off is all the right wing social conservatism (often including a healthy dose of racism) and insane militarism that so often seems to go along with calls for "limited government" which, of course, isn't limited at all. Liberalism and libertarianism are both viewpoints that have a place in a sane political debate; what calls itself conservatism long ago went off into la-la land.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I'd at least like to have someone in government that understood the difference between statistics, studies, and facts. That won't get enraged over Dihydrogen Monoxide. Or will ask questions when presented with "studies" about EMF emitted by power lines, and compare them to all other sources of EMF. Or will stop second-guessing actual experts in a field when it comes to cost analysis. (Looking to trim 5-10% is one thing, but decrying it by an order of magnitude?)
Yes, I'm currently very frustrated with the local councillors for spending my tax dollars in fighting something that isn't even their jurisdiction, and basing their fight on non-science. I've been tempted to run, but trying to figure out how that would interfere with a much-higher-paying job ... but not so high paying that I have the independence to leave.
"When you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around which you navigate each day. Credit leads into a desert with invisible boundaries."
---Anton Chekhov
Neat. But living on cash is hardly better in a society where wealth and productivity are completely divorced.
Gah - there's so much wrong with this post I don't know where to start.
Yes, the voting on this bill happened quite quickly after it was finalized. But A.) it's not like it wasn't being debated for six months prior, and B.) it's largely what Massachusetts has had for years prior (oh, and was originally created and promulgated by Republican think-tanks) and C.) it's not some massive dumping of cash into Obama's offshore account. Its transparent, you can read it, its complicated BECAUSE THE U.S. HEALTH SYSTEM IS COMPLICATED, it's a sincere effort to solve a big, complicated, longstanding problem.
Yes, Ben Nelson got a bribe. Congress took it back from him later, look at the Congressional Quarterly if you want the details. People have been trying to get similar legislation passed in America for nearly a hundred years, they were supposed to call the whole thing off because of one last-minute hold out? Is it not clear that Congressman Nelson simply wanted a bribe, rather than him having substantial issues with the legislation?
Yes the bottom-line price of this legislation and the system it creates kinda-sorta is an estimate. Given the size of the system, the vagaries of predicting medical advances, etc, there's absolutely no way to write laws for any system where the bottom-line cost were absolutely known in advance.
The Tea Party. Basically everybody slept through George W. Bush's two terms as he blew through tremendous chunks of taxpayer money - giving tax breaks up the wazoo, laying out a huge new medicare benefit, created the largest new bureaucracy in fifty years, entering us into a war just on his own whim, apparently. I didn't see a single tea party person throughout all of that. Suddenly a Democrat comes to office, and every dime his administration spends is an affront to LIBERTY! TO THE BARRICADES! BUT WAIT WHILE I STAPLE THESE TEA BAGS TO MY HAT!
Nobody is entirely self-sufficient. Even the people who live out in the boonies, have their own well, their own power and their own food depend on living in an environment where thugs don't roam the area, looking for cheap thrills or money.
That's the problem with every single Libertarian/Tea Partier in the US. They think that a lack of government simply means that they get no medicare in exchange for no taxes. What they fail to understand is that the political and social stability of the US is built on taxes as well.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
It's kind of like owning a gun. Anyone who wants to own a gun is the last person who should have one. Anyone who wants political power is the last person who should have it.
horrible analogy. Most people who want to buy a gun, buy one for control over their own lives (self defense). Most people who want political power, want it for control over others.
What we need is campaign finance reform. Strict and absolute limits not only on how much money can be donated to a campaign, but how much money can be SPENT on a campaign. It seems like the best way to keep the people who want political power from getting it, and giving us the best chance of being represented by people we can trust.
how many times has this been said and tried throughout history? No clue, but I'll be willing to be no matter what laws would get passed there will be plenty of loopholes.
Engineers can buy into all sorts of sheer bullshit. Look up the Salem Hypothesis. Being an engineer does not mean one has some special ability to evaluate studies or facts, though some engineers seem to believe they do.
As to this guy, he sounds like a bit of a nut. Just what the Tea Party seems to attract. Being an engineer doesn't mean one is sane either.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If you want me to think the Tea Party has smart people, the smart people in the party need to speak up, and call out the dumb asses in their ranks.
This is the absolute worst aspect of the American Dream, the great lie that somehow you alone are responsible for what you become. There is this huge society around you that as responsible as anything you may want, but it won't survive if everybody argues themselves into a sort of self-righteous sociopathy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So being pissed off that the government wasted tax dollars bailing out banks makes someone crazy?
The Tea Party doesn't have a monopoly on being pissed off about that particular event. Most Tea Party claims ring hollow because they had 8 years of Bush to say something when all of these same types of things were happening, but conveniently waited until a Democrat took office before making any real noise.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
We already have people "in government" that fit the bill. They're just not legislators or executives. Being an engineer doesn't guarantee good judgement.
And we have had an engineer as president of the US during my lifetime, not that long ago. While he was a very decent person, he ended up getting chewed up and spit out by our political system. Because our political system does that to anyone who is decent or moral or reasonable.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It doesn't matter if someone is right about everything. What matters is that they try to educate themselves to figure out what's right. I think this quote is relevant, and I agree with it:
Massie recalls Sununu saying, "We need more engineers and fewer lawyers" in politics. As Massie explains, "Lawyers are taught to take a position, whether it's right or wrong ideologically, and defend it-to go collect facts to support it. Whereas engineers are taught the inverse of that, they're taught to collect facts and then come up with an answer based on the facts. He said, 'That's the kind of thought process we need more of in government.' On the stump, that's what I'm trying to convey, that we need more problem solvers in Washington, DC."
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Amen! A good government is not a government that just slavishly follows an ideology, but rather a government that remains pragmatic, and is populated by people who realize there are shades of gray to be found, and that no one has some sort of automatic and permanent patent on the truth.
Or, as Isaac Asimov said; Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
That's my axiom. A lot of what you think to be the capital-T truth is just simply prejudices and unquestioned assumptions. I work my ass off never to simply believe something because it "makes sense". Always be ready to modify, and yes, sometimes, even drop a position. I remember for many years I was staunchly anti-homosexual. I even wrote and had printed a letter in a big city newspaper railing against gay rights; a letter written in the foolishness and delusion of youth and a letter I truly regret now. I realized at some point that it doesn't matter at all what I think of homosexuals; they're people, they have a right to pursue their life as they see fit, they're not hurting me, and any objection I have had to them is nothing more than the untested assumptions that came out of my youth being raised in a very religious home.
It extends even to economics. This idea that a purely centrally controlled command economy is the way to prosperity is just as absurd as the idea that castrating a government's ability to regulate commerce is equally the road to happiness. I don't even think finding a middle path and sticking to it is a good idea. A government has to be able to modify its strategy and policy, and thus has to have the power to do so. That power cannot be unlimited, but it cannot be rendered so insignificant that ultimately the government cannot act at all.
The single biggest problem I have with ideological purists is a total inability to modify position. It's one thing to define oneself as, say, a fiscal conservative, but quite another to say "I think the Federal Government should be cut to pre-Civil War levels!" I think ideological purism shows an intellectual rigidity and an emotional immaturity, and neither of these are particularly desirable character traits.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
NOW is our chance. The Chinese seem to be making exactly the mistake we made - their up-and-coming leaders are career politicians, born-and-raised to rule.
Our chance to do what? Become the world's largest economy? Get the world's largest army? Bring indoor plumbing and electricity to 99% of the population? Because we're 'winning' in all those things.
China is growing quickly, but it's because they have a lot of room to grow. Once you have a developed economy, it's hard to wring the same kind of growth out of it, because you're a lot closer to your potential.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."