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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
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
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.
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
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
"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..."
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.
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.
"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!
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
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.