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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."
...wasn't disappointed.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. ~ Douglas Adams
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.
A rational person. You have no place on the US political spectrum.
You are in good company though.
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
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.
"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!
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.
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
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
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."