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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."
Now known as 'MITea'.
Whenever someone finds a right wing engineer? It's not really all that rare.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"Crazy" has no intellectual boundaries
book smart and people stupid.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Gimme the TL;DR version. Motorcycle accident? Brain cancer? Aneurysm?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
...wasn't disappointed.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. ~ Douglas Adams
he could be a force to be reckoned with in Washington, DC."
No, no he wont.
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.
and preparation for unpleasantness in general, but I have no taste for right-wing politics or christianity. Fortunately, preparation for the unexpected (i.e. EMPs, social unrest, the spanish inquisition...) does not require a right wing belief system, only a healthy paranoia and distrust of all institutions, over-complexified fragile, interdependent, energy-dependent supply chain ecologies and anything that comes over the mass media.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Speaking as a right wing, family oriented, gun loving engineer myself. Why would he ever want to go into politics?
4) He came to alternative conclusions than you did. Doesn't make them any more or less valid.
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.
perhaps his intelligence is by design.
He can't be that smart; he claims he and his wife working together (3 MIT eng. degrees total) can't do their taxes.
The tax code isn't exactly simple, but come on.
.: Semper Absurda
He's bootstrappy, and probably short on empathy. Fits the profile just fine. Just because you can understand the intracacies of circuits doesn't mean you're really going to understand the social implications of inequality.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It demonstrates an error in logical thinking faculties.
This guy makes 'em all over the place. For example, he thinks that denying people birth control will reduce abortions.
.: Semper Absurda
The level of Hate Speech on this forum makes me wonder if the posters are actually KKK members in disguise.
Democrats would never be so rude and insulting.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
"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..."
"But things have not gone smoothly for Massie in office—and that’s just how he wants it. “When you’re stalking waste within a government office, it’s like every rock that you turn over has a snake under it,” he says. Massie has been targeting waste, fraud, and abuse, starting with questioning electric bills, phone bills, contracts, and fees for things that don’t apply anymore. Like the county being charged rental fees for property that had long been sold, paying for phone lines that had been disconnected for years, or buying stuff from a magistrate’s store. He has upset a lot of entrenched powers, but has gained support from the masses for it. And he says that in his first nine months in office, he cut enough waste to pay his own salary for three years."
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.
Also see Amendment IX:
and Amendment X:
The Tea Party, to the extent they speak with one voice, appears to believe that the power of the Federal government is limited to what the US Constitution grants them.
So, there's nothing inconsistent with a Tea Party leader benefiting from patents which are granted by the Federal government.
Look, I went to MIT, and I can tell you that (a) the people there are remarkably bright and (b) I wouldn't particularly want to put my trust in the political or economic opinions of some randomly chosen person from there, right wing, left wing, or requiring more dimensions than string theory to characterize politically.
Really smart people often have amazingly insightful opinions, but there's nothing like a brilliant person to have unshakable confidence in an unassailably stupid idea, like Schockley (the inventor of the transistor) and his theories of white racial supremacy. Or like my friend who had an affair with a married man because he promised her that his wife would be cool with it. It was impossible to convince her of the obvious fact this was stupid, bat-shit crazy idea because as smart as I was, she was way, way smarter. Having an argument with her was like climbing into the ring with Ali in his prime for a few bare knuckle rounds. You couldn't lay a glove on her. That taught me that sometimes a friend's role is to wait and be there when life gives your friend an unavoidable hard lesson.
Really brilliant people are used to being right when everyone else around them is wrong. They're hard to argue out of a wrong position, and when you get enough of them together that they can sort themselves into loony birds of a feather even reality can't make a dent in their opinions. And brilliance in one area doesn't translate into competence in every area. There are people I'd trust to design an aircraft I had to fly in or a sub I had to dive in, but that I wouldn't trust managing by checking account.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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."
I wholeheartedly approve of this idea.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
Have you read their "contract on america"? They talk about reject emission trading, balanced budget, reducing taxes. These have nothing to do with constitution. They even talk about cutting Obama's healthcare based on constitution, but ask them if they want to cut social security/medicaid. Teaparty doesn't care about the constitution, they are too busy trying ban gay marriage,abortion and demanding to see Obama's birthcertificate. They also whine about the USPS and how it should be privatized, I wonder if they even read the constitution where explicitly defines as a task of the federal government.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Your characterization of Occupy is about as accurate as the GP's characterization of the Tea Party.
If I rented land from the government, that would be perfectly applicable. What about those who own?
I think you didn't quite get the point of my comparison. You are free to move to a different country and "rent" the government there; there are quite a few which are cheaper. Or you can try to set up a country of your own - except that all land is already taken up by someone else (but that is also true with my rent analogy - if all land everywhere is purchased, and they refuse to sell it to you, you can only rent; so free market does not offer any relief here, either).
What about those like that in TFA who can be entirely self sufficient and take nothing from the government. Why should those who take nothing from the system be forced to pay in.
The people who live in the country are not self sufficient. At the very minimum they enjoy the protection of the laws of that country - protection against both internal threats (i.e. the mob that would come and take away what's theirs), and external (a hostile country that would take over).
And for the record, Edison was a douche bag.
That is putting it mildly, he was an elephant electrocuting asshole. He would make Steve Jobs look like a good guy in comparison.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
The difference in this case is that it's not "your house". It's everyone's country, and its citizens have have collectively decided that residents are to pay for the privilege of living here.
If you don't want to pay taxes, you're free to move out and buy an island somewhere in the Pacific with full transfer of sovereignty, from any country that is willing to sell you one on such terms.
"Crazy" has no intellectual boundaries
The interesting thing is, there is another group of extremists who are known for the prominence of engineers in their midst. Osama Bin Laden was himself an engineer, and he's not the only one. It's not a science thing, you don't see many botanists or physicists running amuk, just engineers. It may be an engineering mindset thing.
It seems to me that as a group engineers may not be the best possible choice for political discourse. Bring on the botanists and psychologists and chemists and entomologists (and etymologists too, what the hell), but let's not overdo the representation from engineers.
"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!
There has been a smear campaign against the Tea Party by both the republicans and democrats alike since it first started to gain power. You've fallen for it, congratulations. The democrats paint them as "Even more conservative republicans" which is almost completely the opposite of what they are. And the republicans try to paint them as the lunatic fringe or, even worse, create their own version of the party: The Tea-party express, which is nothing more than republicans mascaraing as Tea-Party members to further discredit the name. Neither party wants them to gain any more momentum.
The true Tea Party is about what it's named after. When they threw the tea into the harbor back in the day, they were protesting a government that was over taxing them and not representing their interests. The taxes were levied to help support foreign wars that the colonies had no interest in. Most Tea Party members today feel we are in the same situation again. The government keeps raising taxes, spending more, borrowing more... all to fund wars they have no interest in, or to get more involved in our lives. Just like the revolutionaries that founded this country they want the government out of their lives. They want to keep more of what they earn, and they don't want to be involved in wars they know nothing about. Most could care less about social issues. Gay Marriage? Don't care. Abortion? Don't care. Religion? Don't care. Just stop taxing us so much, and get the hell out of our lives.
If you want to end war and lower taxes, get involved. Both republicans and democrats will continue waging war and raising taxes as long as you continue to let them. Is the Tea Party the answer? I doubt it. But they are a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
If, on the other hand, you intelligently realize that most American's are actually fairly close in terms of political view
Do you think so? I personally know Americans who think the US should be run under Old Testament of the Bible law -- including stoning adulterers -- and people who think that churches should be outlawed. I know people who own 100,000 rounds of ammunition and people who think guns should be banned. People who think sick people who can't pay medical bills should be dumped out on the street to die and people who think the government should provide free unlimited healthcare. People who think the Federal government should do nothing more than fund and run the military, and people who would like to see the government nationalize many large corporations and run them. I don't actually know anyone who argues that women shouldn't have the right to vote, but I've seen them talk. I do know people who think anyone who doesn't believe in the christian god should not be allowed to hold public office. That's a pretty wide spectrum of ideas, spanning from Saudi Arabian to Maoist to anarcholibertarian. I'm sure other countries have as broad a swath of ideas: I'm not claiming american exceptionalism as regards political leanings. However, I haven't seen much evidence of other countries having much broader political views.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
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.
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
I'm not talking about spending, not tax burden as percentage of GDP. In 2011 government spending was 38.9% of the GDP, 2012 is predicted to be ~40%...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#Government_spending_as_a_percentage_of_GDP
The problem is that the government's debt has reached astronomical proportions and that money eventually has to be payed back. Just because our current tax burden is somewhat reasonable (although the claim that it is "historically low" and that ridiculous chart are laughable, as they will be historically high as soon as the Bush tax cuts expire), it can't keep up with our borrowing. If anything, it means we are in for even bigger problems down the road. There is a blog post on the Cato institute on the subject of calculating the government's percent of GDP here: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/american-government-spending-41-of-gdp/
Compared to some Euro zone nations we are in good shape. But they are also going bankrupt with governments near collapse.
We live in a time when people seem to think that "distribution of wealth" is something that governments are suddenly capable of doing when history has REPEATEDLY shown otherwise. My views are largely based on what I studied in school (ancient history) and I don't consider myself to be a tea party person. Reality is that the US government is currently operating in an unsustainable manner on many levels (state, federal, and local) and eventually that will catch up to us. Defaulting on government debts will lead to either major global war or an economic takeover by foreign powers. Some would argue the latter is already in motion.
Mr Beck, I didn't suggest removal of the First and Second amendments from your "list of freedoms". I suggested that their original intent, as clearly expressed by the guys who wrote those amendments, have been perverted by nasty little shits like you, who would happily piss in a public swimming pool and say, "Hey, it's a free country! So that means I get to piss and shit in the public pool. You betcha!"
And I certainly did not call for "censorship", you pathetic coward.
It's people like you that pervert the meaning of the Second Amendment. Let's break it down a little bit, shall we? "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." The first part: "a well regulated militia". In this they are clearly calling for a militia that is controlled by the government. That cannot be argued. However, one must also look at the definition of a militia. Militia are historically made up of local citizens, generally of a town or group of towns, that will on occasion get together and drill and practice, so as to be available to be called up for local defense in case of a conflict. Militia played a huge role in the Revolutionary War, bolstering the ranks of the Continental Army for a battle. The key point of a militia is that it is not equipped by the government. Equipment is privately purchased or crafted, and weapons are supplied by each individual militiaman. In the case of the Revolutionary War, militiamen used their own muskets or rifles that they would use for hunting or protection (in the case of some frontier areas). These were privately owned weapons, not government issue. The government only supplied the regular troops with equipment and weapons.
Now the second part: "necessary to the security of a free state". This says that militia are necessary for security. Note that the 2nd Amendment never mentions an army (an army is specifically addressed outside the Bill of Rights). For them to leave out the word 'army", they are clearly saying that the ability of local citizens to arm themselves and defend their home (not their house, but their town, their state, their country), is vital to the security of a state.
The third and fourth parts are just as easy to understand: "the right of the people to keep and bear arms". Look at the writings of the men that wrote the Constitution, the leading thinkers of that time. The phrase "the people" was always used as a stark contrast to the government. The phrase always meant the citizens, the common man, the farmer on his farm, and the merchant in the city. They are not talking about the governor, or the soldier, or elected representatives; these are all members or instruments of the government. Let's look at another famous phrase by these men for context: "a government of the people, by the people, for the people". This shows that the term "the people" is to be taken as distinct from "the government". And finally: "shall not be infringed". This means that this right, the right of the common man to possess and own firearms, should not be taken away without just cause (this right certainly can and at times should be forfeited, but that's another discussion).
Any logical, reasoned examination of the wording of the Second Amendment, especially when compared to contemporary writings of the writers of the Constitution and their peers, shows that they believed that gun ownership is extremely important. The fact that they chose to make it the second Amendment means that this right was held in their highest regards after the freedoms of speech, assembly, press, and religion. There is no need to try and interpret intent. Their intent is clearly spelled out.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil