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Canadian Scientists Protest Political Sandbagging of Evidence-Based Policy
New submitter sandbagger writes "Stephen Harper and the Canadian government have made headlines several times for stifling opinions that dissent with their own. This also applies to respected, peer-reviewed science. Canadian scientists have chafed at being gagged and having evidence take a back seat when forming policy, so they're grabbing their slide rules and marching in protest. 'Hundreds of participants gathered in 17 cities for rallies on Monday. In Toronto some donned lab coats while in Vancouver protesters were seen wearing gags adorned with the Conservative Party logo – a reference to the alleged muzzling of federal scientists by political overseers. ... Dr. Gibbs and colleagues said they hoped the rallies would alert the public to scientists’ concerns that the federal government has shifted funding markedly toward commercially driven research at the expense of public-interest science. ... Dr. Gibbs said her group would consult with the Canadian research community and look to other countries in trying to craft recommended policies for science in government. In recent years explicit scientific integrity rules have been adopted by many U.S. federal departments and agencies, after accusations of censorship and politicization of science during the administration of former president George W. Bush. 'Canadian scientists are where American scientists were maybe a decade ago,' said Michael Halpern, a Washington, D.C.-based program manager with the Union of Concerned Scientists. 'They're trying to figure out how to protect themselves from a government that’s increasingly focused on message control over a more open discussion of the facts.'"
Don't they have corporations in Canadia to tell the scientists how the studies should turn out?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
> Canadian Government Muzzling Scientists
> Canadian scientists protest Tory's sandbagging of evidence-based policy
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Stephen Harper and the Harper government...
He demanded it, and it should be used in all articles, not just positive ones.
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Couldn't they just solve this problem with some sort of "laser"?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is Canada, they use a chicken cannon.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
what is this muzzled science? Why isn't that obvious let alone seemingly never mentioned.
getting the word out in this day and age isn't exactly the problem it was 20 years ago.
god knows I'm not sticking up for that cretin harper, but seriously, what's the deal?
Need Mercedes parts ?
Here in Australia the Minister for science role has been scraped, effectively removing scientific opinion from the decision making process.
Not really. What's happening is exactly what happened in Australia, the UK and the USA. That is the Murdoch empire has been blasting the populace with carefully orchestrated propaganda designed to shift the political spectrum "right" and get poor people to vote against their own interests.
It will never cease to amaze me how pathetically effective this type of targeted propaganda is at actively getting people to do things that are not in their own interest.
The Canadian shift has taken the longest to occur, part of that is because it took Murdoch longer to penetrate and take over enough of the Canadian media because Canada still has ownership rules (at least until the propaganda machine gets those revoked as an affront to capitalism like they did in the US). Inevitably the Canadian people will fall to the far right just like everyone else under the sway of the Murdoch propaganda machine.
No.
Just.... no.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It oughtn't be surprising: those least informed are most easily persuaded. If you went and told an englishman circa 1600 about science killing millions (a la hiroshima), but left out the part about it saving millions more (medicine, etc), they would be persuaded because they'd be presented with only part of the truth.
Hate to break the bad news to you, but people who vote to have their own rights taken away in the name of "security" probably didn't deserve to be making their own choices in the first place.
Incidentally, if you actually, sincerely believe that the current ball of shit that is world politics is entirely due to Rupert Murdoch, you're either mentally ill or trolling. The man is a speck, a drop in the ocean compared to some of the money moving in defense contract circles. Murdoch is just a rich fuck who's making himself richer parroting what the people with REAL power are saying, ingratiating himself to the royalty. Rupert Murdoch isn't sitting in some little control room somewhere surrounded by intelligence agents plotting to take away your freedom, that's just paranoia talking. The politicians you elected are the ones doing that plotting. Even if he were, again, not important enough to make a difference. He's a media mogul, nothing more. I'm sure if the Democrats threw more money at him he'd dance just as well for the opposite side. The know nothings that Americans elect are the problem, not their media whores.
The one plotting to take away your freedom is your president, worry about that and forget Murdoch, you might actually accomplish something. Unless the extent of your activism involves schizophrenic rants about Rupert Murdoch being some sort of conservative Voodoo shaman?
Mostly because they use the NSA spy program to identify the ACs and send the mounties to snowboard them.
(caveat - they don't waterboard except in summer)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Actually, it doesn't need to be blamed on Murdoch -- our government are the ones who don't want to hear facts and instead want to make decisions based on ideology.
They've basically cut funding for basic research, decided that anything which doesn't directly benefit industry is a waste of money, and told government scientists they're not allowed to say anything related to their researcher without a government rep being on hand to manage the spin and ensure the message is consistent with the crap the government tells us.
They don't want pesky facts getting in the way of what they want to say.
Rupert Murdoch has surprisingly little influence on our news from what I can tell.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Please, nobody is better at ignoring hard evidence than the left. Bad as all politicians are, right wing ones are still a lot less scaring than our new overlords from the left.
Except of course it isn't, save in the minds of the ideologically deranged.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm really perplexed by this, and I think the world is going to continue to get suckier and suckier the longer it goes on. At some point, we all will have to accept that Nature has it's own way of self-assembling as well as self-regulating, and that it is far superior to what man is capable of. Science has a place in politics, but politics has no place in science.
"Success" itself differs when viewed from a political standpoint vs. a scientific standpoint. Science is for everyone, it's universal. Politics are for politicians. Scientists are regular people that want to understand how the universe works. Politicians are regular people that want to manage how the universe works. One of them are a sensible people, the other are a silly people.
Until the sensible people have more ability to express their understanding, then our species is stuck, only evolving to the point of failing to manage ourselves in a sensible manner.
Why is it so hard to just accept Mother Nature as God, and let it rule...?
Hundreds of participants gathered in 17 cities for rallies on Monday
That's not a protest. That's at best one more person in the Tim Horten's line up on a Monday morning. A lab coat wouldn't even look out of place.
Really?
The right wing ones tell us that spending money to fix underlying social problems isn't as effective as prisons so we have huge expenditures on prisons and huge social problems. Yet in countries which spend money on fixing the social problems they have fewer people in prison.
Right wing politicians tell us that as long as a company is making profit it must be good, even if the banks are taking us to the cleaners.
Right wing politicians try to tell us what we can do with our bodies (eg abortion) because God told them so, and so therefore they must be right.
Right wing politicians have classified pot as a narcotic and make all sorts of claims about how dangerous and addictive it is without any evidence whatsoever other than their fervent belief in that.
Right wing governments will tell you abandoning safety and environmental regulations will actually make us safer and have a cleaner environment as if some magic will happen.
Right wing politicians tell us that tax cuts for the rich will somehow magically improve the rest of our lives when in fact there's no evidence for that.
Right wing governments will tell you all sorts of crap, specifically because it's in line with what they believe, but seldom because it's something they can prove.
Sorry, but you're an idiot if you believe that right wing politicians don't ignore evidence. The lies a right wing government tells you are just a different set of lies than what a left wing government tells you.
Which is why policy based on actual evidence is a much better choice.
Show me the proof, not what your ideology (left or right) has told you must be Immutable Truth.
If there's no evidence to support your claims, and the things you said were supposed to fix things aren't working -- then clearly what they've been claiming isn't based in facts or reality. Merely ideology and what they want the world to behave like.
Which is exactly what we see these days.
Since when was ignoring evidence the same thing as forcibly preventing the people who *are* qualified to talk about evidence from talking about it? Ignoring evidence is politics & persuasion as usual. Suppressing evidence goes well beyond that.
Harper has proven himself an ignorant, unworthy, corporate-serving and ego-driven jackass. Too bad he can't be thrown out of the PMO via non-confidence in the same way his party rose to power.
I would hope that the state of Canadian Science isn't still relying on Slide Rules. I learned with a slide rule but a good old calculator or crap, a cell phone these days with the right app kicks butt over a Slide Rule.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
yes everyone let's ignore Murdoch and focus on the REAL threat, anyone who isn't a republican!
One thing to keep in mind is that government scientists are pretty much in the same position as scientists who work in industry: they are there to serve the interests of their employer.
In the case of government scientists, their role is to conduct research that relates to policy or to support the civil service. For example: environmental scientists may be conducting research into acceptable harvest levels for fisheries or how to manage land in a flood plain. It is unfortunate when a government distorts that research to support their policies rather than using the research to inform policy, but that shouldn't be unexpected.
More concerning is the cutbacks to academic research, which has been more independent in the past. Academic scientists have not, traditionally, been tied to the interests of government so they have had much more leeway to express their results independent of external pressure.
Obama and the left gave banks most of their goodies a few years ago. Clinton deregulated the banks. Funny how you forget all of that.
Since fucking WHEN is Obama and Clinton left wing?????
You woldnt know a left leaning politcian if it bit you on the ass
The only segment of the scientific community that I've ever seen refer to themselves as "evidence-based" are the environmentalists, and I have also never heard any other segment refer to what they do as "public-interest science".
Both of those terms are political in nature, not scientific. They're meant to put themselves in the best light possible while stifling dissent because, of course, anybody that doesn't agree with them must be against "evidence" since they're the ones with the evidence. And of course their science is in the public's best interest because that's what they do. It's not like they're trying to get into politics or anything...."Dr. Gibbs said her group would consult with the Canadian research community and look to other countries in trying to craft recommended policies for science in government."
But we can't allow science to undo its own good work. That's why we so carefully limit the scope of its researches--that's why I almost got sent to an island. We don't allow it to deal with any but the most immediate problems of the moment. All other enquiries are most sedulously discouraged.
Brave New World
If you are referring to Obama and the democrats as being on the left side of the political spectrum then you are grossly mistaken. The democrats are more like center-right...it's just that you don't see it like that in your duality "democracy". Being non-American and an outside observer, this is very evident.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
See, for example "Nix V. Hedden" (1893 wherein the US government declared tomatoes to be a vegetable, for the convenience of collecting taxes, even though those pesky scientists said it was a fruit.)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I wish critical thinking were taught in schools, with a special emphasis on finding logical fallacies in things politicians say.
I wish more people understood why we have so few choices in elections.
And I wish the Union of Concerned Scientists had a political party arm so I could vote for them.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
This is exactly what we need in the US. Unless and until they stand up to these corporate/government censors, public opinion will continue to be lead by whomever has the most cash.
Obama and the left gave banks most of their goodies a few years ago.
The $700 billion bailout through TARP was authorized by Bush, not Obama. (While the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress, it was not a purely Democratic measure. In both houses, it received the support of the majority of congresscritters from both parties, and indeed needed support from both sides of the aisle to pass.)
Clinton deregulated the banks.
Well...
The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB) repealing part of Glass-Steagall was passed while Clinton was president, certainly. Of course, the original bill was introduced in both House and Senate by Republicans - who controlled both houses at the time - and supported by a majority of mostly-Republicans in the House, and exclusively by Republicans in the Senate. The final bill produced by the conference committee was passed by veto-proof margins in both House and Senate; Clinton couldn't actually have stopped it.
Left unsaid in your comment is the implicit suggestion that the subprime mortgage crisis was precipitated by GLB, or that GLB made the crisis worse. While GLB has a number of flaws - and I would not say that it represented good public policy - it is debatable whether or not the subprime mortgage crisis can fairly be laid at its feet. There are credible arguments made that even prior to GLB's deregulation there was nothing in law that prevented investment banks from merging, from investing in the risky instruments that helped precipitate the crisis, or from keeping their books in the ways they did to conceal the problem until everything came crashing down. Some respectable individuals have even whispered that GLB may have slightly softened the impact, as banks that merged investment and depository institutions actually performed better during the crisis than investment-only firms.
Funny how you forget all of that.
Funny the...interesting...way you choose to remember all of that.
~Idarubicin
Nobody needs to be radical to follow a doctrine. Obama, Clinton and Democrats in general are politically aligned to the left. They defend increasing control over the Economy, the Welfare State, Affirmative Action and many other ideas that practically define what is called political "left".
Excuse me, but don't you mean: "my museum collection, eh."?
I'm sorry, but there, I fixed it for you, eh.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The corporations are only interested in metaphorically buggering you.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
This started way before the GLB. It started decades ago with government interference in real estate contracts and financing. Thomas Sowell explains the process in detail in his book "The Housing Boom and Bust", which I highly recommend if you really want to understand what happened.
Oil sands mining is the world's largest environmental cleanup operation. They take polluted sand that some errant bacteria created hundreds of millions of years ago, wash it, and put the clean sand back, then plant it over with vegetation and the greens and still complaining about it...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Rupert Murdoch isn't sitting in some little control room somewhere surrounded by intelligence agents plotting to take away your freedom, that's just paranoia talking.
It's true his power is not absolute.
Even in Australia (where his control of the print amounts to almost 77% of papers sold) he has, since he backed Whitlam in1972, lost the federal election on 3 occasions (1973, 1993 and 2010). He only missed 2010 by a hair's breath (his influence did not extend to those independents who decided which party to back in the hung parliament). That's a success rate of well below 100% (it's actually only a touch above 80%). And yes, in Australia, Murdoch backs either side of politics as the expediencies of current business imperatives demand. Though in the US (where his power is much diluted) his media seem welded on to the Republican side.
In Australia, of course, he has just notched up another win, in an election that (given the (re)emergence of a popular figure on the non-Murdoch just before the election) was being touted as almost a test of his power to determine the government of Australia. In the event Rudd ran a pretty lousy campaign so the precipitous fall in his popularity cannot entirely be attributed to Murdoch's admittedly shameless propaganda: among other things dressing the incumbent and his deputy in Nazi uniforms (actually Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schulz) on the front covers of Australia's highest circulation dailies.
OTOH, it would be foolish simply to ignore Murdoch's influence. And I would stress to that the use of 'Murdoch' here is somewhat of a synedoche, it being perhaps more accurate to speak of the influence of the upper management of News Ltd in general --including of course Col Allan, whom Murdoch sent in specifically to fight the 2013 federal election.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
The only people shrugging are the worthless executives who take credit for Atlas's hard work.
Oops, sorry that was 1974, not 1973
and
... on the non-Murdoch side ...
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I'm a leftist. I'm upper middle class, and I believe that my taxes ought to be higher so as to help people who need it. I also believe your taxes should be higher in order to help people who need it. The world isn't so simple that we can just lump all poor people into one label (that is, "lazy") and say that they, as a group, deserve to starve and die. That is immoral. It is far more immoral than raising the income tax on the wealthy by a few percent.
I'm a leftist. I am aware of the fact that corporate profits are up while wages are down. I don't believe that people should live off of the government; I just wonder where all those jobs are now that the "job creators" are doing so well.
I'm a leftist. I am aware of the fact that the reason abortion was made legal in the first place was because people did it anyway, and many many people died from it. I also think it's funny as hell that you're this big conservative yet you expect young people to take care of your selfish ass in your old age. Save up some money like a good fucking responsible self-sufficient capitalist and pay those immigrants to take care of you, dipshit.
I'm a leftist. I'm no expert on climate change, but I know that people who study the climate for a living are more reliable sources on climate change than people who really really want climate change not to be true. That said, like every other leftist, I hope we are wrong about climate change, because if we're right about it, we're all fucked. Also, unlike with climate change, there's a lot of actual scientific debate on the merits of pot.
I'm a leftist. My car gets 45 miles to the gallon, and I'm in favor of pushing for stronger efficiency and emissions standards rather than stopping them. Every leftist in the world could shiver in the dark, but that wouldn't solve our emissions problem. Change needs to happen on a global scale, or we're fucked.
I'm a leftist, and I don't even know where the fuck to go with this one. We gave the rich their money? Are you fucking high? We want to tax it all back? Are you really, really fucking high? Fuck, I'd settle for having the investor class taxed at the same rate I am rather than at 15 percent.
I'm a leftist, and I understand that science starts out wrong about a lot of things, but when their observations don't fit their hypotheses, they refine their conclusions to fit the data rather than dogmatically repeating the same claims over and over again in the face of overwhelming evidence the way conservative economists do. You don't like science?
part of that is because it took Murdoch longer to penetrate and take over enough of the Canadian media
Actually Rupert has been synonomous with Aussie/UK newspapers since he busted the Fleet St unions in the 80's. If there's a recent shift then the Aussie shift has been the slowest since Canada and the UK have had conservative governments for a while now, whilst we've only just flipped the government a couple of weeks ago. We also have coss-media rules, meaning that since Rupert controls most of the Aussie print media, he is automatically banned from owning a significant portion of radio or TV. Their main print rival is Fairfax (Age/SMH) who (surprisingly) gave their editorial vote to the conservatives this time around. The only significant publisher to give the left the thumbs up was (oddly) "Bussiness week".
We also have our own rat pack of rich independent miners headed up by the world's richest spoilt brat, Gina Reinheart. Rupert just prints whatever keeps his customers happy, and here in Oz independent miners are amoungst his biggest customers. For example "Australia's most popular column" is written by a mining shill who goes by the name of Andrew Bolt, sort of a right wing "shock jock" who can write with something other than a crayon. Murdoch doesn't actually agree with many of Bolt outrageous propoganda. Bolt is Gina's personal mouthpiece, Rupert keeps him on the payroll because Gina pays the bill. Gina loves him so much that she bought him his own Sunday show on channel 10. She also tried to buy herself a seat on the board of Fairfax but she failed the board's "character test".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Thanks for your thought
"The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science." - Carl Sagan
Yeah it def happens in australia. When John Howard was in, my sister worked in climate research, and the government was regularly threatening researchers that if their research kept demonstrating potential hazards from climate change funding could be pulled or worse. She was pretty much told "The official government line is climate change is not real, and if you scientists dont start conforming we'll pull your funding". When the press started getting involved and her collegues started recieving death threats from crazed climate denialists (Apparently science is some sort of "communist plot") she left the country to go work in the UK.
Similar things happened to a friend of the family in the 1980s who was researching the effects of forestry on the water table, and after a report he wrote warning that the water table was getting salty due to logging in the Karri forests, his report was officially censured and he was ordered not to tell anyone. He also resigned.
Incidently this is why I sometimes want to slap assholes who claim climate scientists are doctoring reports for grants. Nothing could be further from the reality. Scientists in Australia, the US, and UK all report recieving threats from politicians that if they dont "tone down" the reports they could lose funding. As a result I believe the situation we are in, and this is a belief privately held by many researchers, is a lot worse than the official models show.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
And since when did they start passing legislation?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Is it a lie that the invisible hand of the market lets some people slip through its fingers into poverty? That's the idea behind social services, such as for instance affordable education. It seems to be working pretty well in Europe, where you get an educated workforce without having to mortgage their futures.
The left has their flaws, but saying all based on lies is pushing it.
It's a conservative government after all. It is more or less their self-description that they cater to the needs of companies and not the people ...
Exactly. Less eloquently worded: Calling Democrats left shows a serious lack of historical and international perspective.
The only wacko here are you. I am a very much left leaning social democrat. Obama and US Democratic party is centre-right. US Green party is centre-left. KPUSA is far left. Republicans are somewhere between the far right and the crazy right. You are probably beyond crazy right.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Right wing politicians have classified pot as a narcotic and make all sorts of claims about how dangerous and addictive it is without any evidence whatsoever other than their fervent belief in that.
Damn that right-winger, Franklin Delano Roosevelt!
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
First, economics is not a real science, it is social science, and, in its prediction craft, often similar to astrology.
Second, as you could see at the example of West Germany, social market economy was far better than fundamentalist capitalism to improve the lives of common people.
And above all, saying that there never was such thing as collective, is sheer idiocy because human society evolved in small collectives, not as a bunch of individuals. All this "special snowflake" individuality is a very recent invention and seems to breed arrogant arseholes first and foremost.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
If you actually read the parent post yo would see that he was not espousing leftist ideas, he was simply criticising right wing ones.
You are so wrapped up in your blind adherance to ideology that you cannot apparently see that both wings are stupid in so many ways. You are instead merely attacking the left to apparently defend the right. Both are blindly ideological and you are following the blind. Well done.
Now, to play the game...
(And just to note because I'm criticising your precious ideals, I am sure you will assume I'm a commie or something. Rest assured, I will flouridate your precious bodily fluid.)
Leftists defend state control over the economy regardless of the fact that it has been proven, by the economic calculation problem that it is simply impossible for centralized control to work. .
Ah well done. Pushing the left to communism and the right to anarchy, and then declaring by fiat that communism is better. You know, both sides want some degree of central control over the economy, even the batshit rightwing tea partiers.
Leftists defend political and economical models that have been empirically shown time and time again ineffective and unsustainable at their best and catastrophic at their worse, but who cares about those last dozen tries or so, THIS time it will work, right?
Like trickle down economics? Fact: both wings do this. Stop being blinded by ideology.
Leftists ignore that there isn't any other economical system that got even near Capitalism in improving the lives of common people.
Again, left is not the same as communism. Communism is easy to pick holes in. Sadly, capitalistic socialist democracies such as those which exist in much of Europe illustrate the ignornace of your statement.
Leftists blatantly ignore that all countries that have the freest economies have consistently improved the quality of live of the normal citizens, while those that have tried leftists "solutions" are either broken or breaking at this point.
Like... Sweden? Norway, Finland? Those famously right wing places.
And above all leftists defend that the collective know what is best for the individual when all examples in human history show that there is no such thing as "collective". There is only people ready to make use of class warfare, bigotry and naivete to gain power and live the lives of kings while the very people they pretend to care about die from hunger
Ah, again with assuming left==communism. You know the straw man completely false scotsman right assumes the invisible hand will fix everything. You know there IS NO HAND, right?
Right wing ideas are not the "Immutable Truth" even because this concept is utopic. They are wrong many many times, but they are right at least part of the time. Left wing ideas on the other hand, are all based on lies that come directly from the core of its doctrine and as such are the "Immutable Farce".
Ah I see, so right wing doctrine is not bad because you say so but left is because you say so. Got it.
Leftists are above and beyond anything else a bunch of self-serving hypocrites.
And if you're anything to go by, right wingers are a bunch if ignorant loonies. Fortunately, I know this not to be the case in general.
Though I'd put anyone who self-identifies with either wing as an ignorant loonie of sorts.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Publish your evidence. Scan the letter and put it on a web site. Put a recording of the threat up on Youtube.
I'm not saying these scientists are lying, but I'm fucking fed up with serious accusations being made without evidence. And if you're telling the truth but you're too scared to pipe up because you want to put your career first (even though all your efforts will be in vain), you're part of the problem.
You might want to peruse the leaked IPCC report. They admit they were way wrong. It came out 2 days ago.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Also, NASA pointed this out to them in 2010.
Need Mercedes parts ?
He is destroying Canada for the sake of his Jewish masters. Mass immigration is genocide, plain and simple. Whatever is good for the Jews, is all that matters to these worthless parasites. Who prints all the money out of thin air? Why, it's the JEWS. And thus, the corrupt politicians do whatever the Jews tell them, including genociding their own people by FORCING them to accept millions of non-white INVADERS into their country. What's not to like?
Quick, better mod me down, can't have a factual discussion on Slashdot can we?
WHOO UP THERE!! I mod you up for being FUNNIER THAN HELL! Sounds like you are wearing a pointed white hat while you watch fox news. Either that or you live somewhere in the BUSH with all sorts of toys like ak 47s and the like. If you actually believe the crap you just wrote then I suggest you had better get a vasectomy because any off spring you might conceive deserve better.
But this is a discussion about how a government that essentially controls Canadian research is deliberately trying to edit the results of their research. This is the very same government who has let individuals take huge amounts of the economy off shore and has privatized many things in the name of free enterprise. The same said government has to a great extent devalued labour to such an extent with policies like allowing the wholesale export of natural resources at fire sale prices instead of investing in industry through materials science. The very method that made our country great and a world leader in things like the forest industry.
Funny but it has gotten so bad that the individuals that have essentially raped the economy of this great country have created a counties of their own. Much the same as the Mafia did with Cuba in the 1950's. It is a group of offshore islands called the Cayman Islands where many companies and individuals have to only have a small office to deposit obscenely huge amounts of cash in the banks. In fact in these off shore tax havens in the Caribbean have the largest gold reserves in the world held in the name of the individuals who have raped Canada and elsewhere. This has been going on unabated since the founders of the offshore tax havens, the friends of ex-prime minister Brian the First established Canadian Banks off shore in their little tax haven fiefdoms. My suggestion is that Canada should invade Belize and the Cayman Islands the same way Regan invaded a little island once upon a time. It might even bring Canada and the US out of the recession!
Obama and the left gave banks most of their goodies a few years ago.
The $700 billion bailout through TARP was authorized by Bush, not Obama. (While the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress, it was not a purely Democratic measure. In both houses, it received the support of the majority of congresscritters from both parties, and indeed needed support from both sides of the aisle to pass.)
Clinton deregulated the banks.
Well...
The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB) repealing part of Glass-Steagall was passed while Clinton was president, certainly. Of course, the original bill was introduced in both House and Senate by Republicans - who controlled both houses at the time - and supported by a majority of mostly-Republicans in the House, and exclusively by Republicans in the Senate. The final bill produced by the conference committee was passed by veto-proof margins in both House and Senate; Clinton couldn't actually have stopped it.
Left unsaid in your comment is the implicit suggestion that the subprime mortgage crisis was precipitated by GLB, or that GLB made the crisis worse. While GLB has a number of flaws - and I would not say that it represented good public policy - it is debatable whether or not the subprime mortgage crisis can fairly be laid at its feet. There are credible arguments made that even prior to GLB's deregulation there was nothing in law that prevented investment banks from merging, from investing in the risky instruments that helped precipitate the crisis, or from keeping their books in the ways they did to conceal the problem until everything came crashing down. Some respectable individuals have even whispered that GLB may have slightly softened the impact, as banks that merged investment and depository institutions actually performed better during the crisis than investment-only firms.
Funny how you forget all of that.
Funny the...interesting...way you choose to remember all of that.
Stop messing with his selective memory algorithms.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
What a load of unmitigated rubbish. Not much of a surprise it's been given a +5 here at Slashdot.
"Laws" in politics are normative. People can be rational or irrational and politicians are no different. Scientists can be correct or incorrect. Sometimes the effects they claim decline over time. Sometimes they're just plain wrong, and sometimes the political consequences of doing what they say is impossible for the electorate to accept. Only in Plato's Republic would you want scientists dictating policy.
The battle between Liberal Capitalism and Marxism is over, in case you weren't aware. Liberal Capitalism won. You Trots failed to feed and clothe your people. You kept hold of power by repression of freedoms. You lost the ideological battle, please get the fuck over it. Collectivism no longer has a viable economic theory. Come back to Slashdot and post an article when you've thought one up.
Actually, it doesn't need to be blamed on Murdoch -- our government are the ones who don't want to hear facts and instead want to make decisions based on ideology.
They've basically cut funding for basic research, decided that anything which doesn't directly benefit industry is a waste of money, and told government scientists they're not allowed to say anything related to their researcher without a government rep being on hand to manage the spin and ensure the message is consistent with the crap the government tells us.
They don't want pesky facts getting in the way of what they want to say.
Rupert Murdoch has surprisingly little influence on our news from what I can tell.
What I find fascinating about conservatives is that a large portion of them does not only chooses to be ignorant, they revel in being ignorant and declaring war on science. Conservative pundits can say what they want, pull out all the old slogans and call dissenting voices 'communists' and 'socialists' but even the old Soviet Union did not revel in ignorance. The communists did many things wrong but they at least they saw some value in scientific research and managed to turn Russia from a medieval kingdom into a modern technologically advanced country.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Let's talk about the ACTUAL Threat, the Bipartisan "Keep Our Spoiled Butts in Power" party. The longer a pol is in office, the more bought-off he or she gets. . .
The answer, of course, is hard and enforced term limits, so that politicians can only get captured by the system only somewhat, before it kicks them out. . .
Fracking. It's spelled fracking. When you've cashed your astroturfing cheque you might want to consider a dictionary.
There are some left-leaning politicians out there in the US, but they're few and far between. For example, Senator Bernie Sanders has been an avowed socialist his entire career.
I am officially gone from
I fucking hate that bitch Harper. He's Canada's W.
It is certainly a question of how you define left and right wing. In the U.S., we have come to define left-wing as those whose political belief is that the solution to most problems is increased government power and responsibility and right-wing as those whose political belief is that the solution to most problems is greater individual responsibility and freedom. I understand that in Europe they define those terms differently, since almost everyone there accepts the idea that the solution to problems is greater government power and the only question remaining is how that power is exercised.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Makes me curious. What are the 51st and 52nd states?
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
For Americans, democrats are considered Left. But if you take a look at what happen outside of U.S.A. they have politics that could be what the Extreme Right parties have out there.
Hate to break the bad news to you, but people who vote to have their own rights taken away in the name of "security" probably didn't deserve to be making their own choices in the first place.
Incidentally, if you actually, sincerely believe that the current ball of shit that is world politics is entirely due to Rupert Murdoch, you're either mentally ill or trolling. The man is a speck, a drop in the ocean compared to some of the money moving in defense contract circles. Murdoch is just a rich fuck who's making himself richer parroting what the people with REAL power are saying, ingratiating himself to the royalty. Rupert Murdoch isn't sitting in some little control room somewhere surrounded by intelligence agents plotting to take away your freedom, that's just paranoia talking. The politicians you elected are the ones doing that plotting. Even if he were, again, not important enough to make a difference. He's a media mogul, nothing more. I'm sure if the Democrats threw more money at him he'd dance just as well for the opposite side. The know nothings that Americans elect are the problem, not their media whores.
The one plotting to take away your freedom is your president, worry about that and forget Murdoch, you might actually accomplish something. Unless the extent of your activism involves schizophrenic rants about Rupert Murdoch being some sort of conservative Voodoo shaman?
While I agree that the state of world politics is not due solely to Rupert Murdoch, I disagree that he is merely a speck. He controls quite a bit of media around the world. I hope we can all understand by now that when you can control what news and viewpoints people hear you can control what and how they think. Of course there are other news outlets, but in the US those are owned and controlled by a handful of corporations (five, I think). The operators of these corporations share certain interests and so will not allow much talk about certain subjects or viewpoints.
Murdoch is more than a speck; he is a master propagandist that has a heavy hand in how many people see the world. It's hard to overstate that kind of power. He serves a valuable purpose as a member of the Elite.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
No hypocrisy in saying they should be higher (or lower) provided that means higher (or lower) for everyone.
How old are you, nine?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What I find fascinating about conservatives
That is simply because you have a chosen hobby of authoring your own personal parody-conservatives to make fun of. Like many other hobbies, you don't have to construct them all yourself. A thriving industry provides you with kit-parody-conservatives to help you along in your stereotyping.
It's fine to be amused. But don't think of yourself as more enlightened than the average stamp collector, or dude who buys pewter game figures at the hobby shop to paint.
Is it a lie that the invisible hand of the market lets some people slip through its fingers into poverty.
It is a lie to say that it is any worse than all the alternatives we have. No other system has improved the lives of the average people more than Capitalism and the free market. It isn't perfect, but its problems must be compared to the problems of the alternative solutions provided, and those solutions not only do not fix those problems but tend to make them worse.
I agree with most of what you wrote, except this:
Right wing politicians try to tell us what we can do with our bodies (eg abortion) because God told them so, and so therefore they must be right.
Religion is a ruse. More offspring are of benefit to the farmers of mankind. Even if they be unwanted, abused, and maladjusted, they will employ (or be employed by) the privatized prison industry.
Exactly. Less eloquently worded: Calling Democrats left shows a serious lack of historical and international perspective.
Employing false dichotomies in political discourse is the mark of an immature species. You will not solve the Fermi Paradox in time if you do not put aside this lizard brained binary thinking.
What you need to know about "For The People" vs. "Attached To Government Tit" can be summed up by Contact:
Drumlin: I've always felt science should be done to benefit The People.
Scientist: Not unlike my [work on] L-band globular clusters.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
West Germany drastically reduced its technological and industrial production by abandoning the free market (the same that happened with the Nordic countries). They are still economically well mainly because they still have a lot of money to burn and a lot of industry to trash, unlike Sweden and Finland, for example, but as it is the case with the latter their economic model is unsustainable. Just a quick reference:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/08/number-one-problem-economy-europe
And although humans have organized in societies throughout human history there was never and never will be a monolithic group called "collective". Human civilization evolved as groups of individuals getting together to accomplish common goals and fighting to the death clubbing one another when their needs conflicted. Believing in this fairy tail of "collective needs" is what can be called stupidity. There are no collective needs or wishes, there are only individual needs and wishes that are accomplished by group efforts.
The communists did many things wrong but they at least they saw some value in scientific research and managed to turn Russia from a medieval kingdom into a modern technologically advanced country.
Don't forget Lysenko.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
If you think that YOUR taxes should be higher and you take every deduction that you can, thus minimizing how much tax you pay, you are a hypocrite. Because that means that you do not really think your taxes should be higher (if you did, you would pay more). If you truly believed that your taxes should be higher, you would pay more while working to get the tax rate changed. If you are paying the least you can, while claiming that you think your taxes should be higher, I am going to conclude that you want MY taxes increased while figuring that you will be able to sneak some provision into the code to keep yours from going up.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Bad as all politicians are, right wing ones are still a lot less scaring than our new overlords from the left.
Where on earth do you live that you can talk about "our new overlords from the left"?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I understand that in Europe they define those terms differently, since almost everyone there accepts the idea that the solution to problems is greater government power and the only question remaining is how that power is exercised.
Nope,
Right-wing = defense of entrenched priviledge.
Left-wing = liberty, equality, brotherhood. (and sisterhood too, of course).
Government is a means, not an end.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Good write :)
You Trots failed to feed and clothe your people
Where have Trots been in government since Lev Davidovich moved to Mexico?
(Answer - the USA, lots of the early neo-cons were ex Trots).
Watch this Heartland Institute video
If your definition is correct, why are the results of every "left wing" government less liberty, greater inequality and more division?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
There's also a word for a person who only cares about him or herself: sociopath.
There are real slaves in the world who have to do what they're told 100% of the time and make no money. Paying a portion of your income in taxes doesn't make you a slave -- you are still free to choose what to do, and you are free to choose not to do anything at all. Your misuse of the word slavery is pathetic and laughable.
Otherwise known as: tu quoque.
And now you are talking even more out of your arse. In fact, the reduction of technological and industrial production started at the same time when the social market economy started to gradually change for the free market extremism - around the millennium.
Also, there was always a collective - the pack, the extended family, the clan, the village. And individualists were punished.
But I know that you won't let puny facts stand in the way of your convictions.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
So, since you believe that your taxes should be higher, I assume that you do not take any deductions when you file your income tax (or only those that bring your taxes down to what you think they should be)? If such is not the case, you are a hypocrite...
Um, no.
...and what you really believe is you are willing to pay more as long as I am paying more.
That's more like it. Paying more taxes as an individual accomplishes nothing. It's like a one-man boycott of a store; it doesn't work. If everyone in a certain bracket is paying more, then something can be accomplished. And, for the record, I have voluntarily paid a higher tax rate (you can do that in Massachusetts).
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
If your definition is correct, why are the results of every "left wing" government less liberty, greater inequality and more division?
Examples?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Sorry, but you are talking from your ass, my friend. The farther Germany (or any country in Contemporary History) went from the free-market economy the worst it got, German is still pretty much a social market economy and that is what is dragging it down. The small recoveries German had were exactly in the few areas where they decided to stop to intervene. But as I said in my previous post nobody is better at ignoring evidence than leftists like you, my friend.
Okay, lets start from the top:
The right wing says when a company is making profit then they will hire more people and create additional jobs. Are you implying that more jobs is a bad thing? Obviously you are already employed or else you wouldnt think that way.
The right wing can say that, but it doesn't make it true. When a company makes a profit, they can do with it what they like, which often includes increasing salary and bonuses of management and the owners. That's fine in and of itself, but it doesn't necessarily lead to more jobs.
The right wing will defend all human life, even if the child isnt born yet. Even if you remove God from the equation it still seems like a noble cause to me. Only the left wing is arrogant enough to think they know exactly when a human becomes a human and stops being "just a bunch of cells".
Unless the person is a criminal or terrorist, right? I don't see many on the right opposing the death penalty. Does the right know when a person ceases to be a person?
As far as pot goes, i think that the narcotic is across the board for both left and right wing.
Pot is not a narcotic. Just saying.
The right wing says that "stifling regulations" cost a company a lot of money which cuts into profits which reduces jobs available. Its a diminished returns thing. Like salt on your food, regulation is a great thing in small amounts but too much of it will destroy an industry.
But Republican governments do things like exempt energy companies from the clean air and water acts. Is the energy industry in such a fragile state that it must be allowed to pollute our air and water in order to stay in business?
The whole "tax cuts for the rich" is the biggest illusion of them all. We consider the rich as having a "tax cut" when they are still paying a higher percentage than we are. Should wealthy people be punished for being rich? Or should we stop bellyaching and blaming everyone else and try to work hard so we can be rich someday?
The top 1% have something like 45% of the entire country's wealth. They should pay more than anyone else. Taxes are not a punishment; they are a way to pay for the government and infrastructure we all use, and that helps the wealthy become and remain wealthy. Working hard is no guarantee of becoming rich. Family influence and connections are a much better indicator. That is after all, a primary way that the rich maintain their status.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
They did not make an argument. They made a statement of belief. They said , "I believe that my taxes ought to be higher..." If such was is the case, they have the option of paying more in taxes (which option they may be taking advantage of). If they are not taking advantage of that option, they are a hypocrite.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
If you believe that your taxes should be higher, but do not pay that higher rate, you are a hypocrite. More over, I believe that you are a liar (in your case, kilfarsnar, I accept your claim to paying more than required by law and do not consider this to apply to you), who expects that they will be able to get special exemptions written into the law so that while my taxes go up, yours remain the same or go down.
Those who, as kilfarsnar, pay more taxes than they are required by law are consistent and, while I disagree with their policy prescription (increased taxes), I respect them.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Soviet Russia, China,
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No, his description of conservatives is entirely accurate. It's easy to find examples of conservatives glorifying ignorance on most web forums. If you think such people don't exist, then you're indulging in the same kind of deluded, wishful thinking that you're accusing in others.
Please, nobody is better at ignoring hard evidence than the left. Bad as all politicians are, right wing ones are still a lot less scaring than our new overlords from the left.
Wow. I'm always amazed at how much bullshit and projection rightwingers can compress into such small sentences. It's a sort of awesome literary feat, how you can fit so many completely false world views into so few words. It would be very difficult to write conservative characters with the same convincing density of completely wrong opinions.
If your definition is correct, why are the results of every "left wing" government less liberty, greater inequality and more division?
This is why it's almost impossible to have political conversations involving Americans these days. Before you can even start, you first have to face the legions of cultural myths that Americans take as gospel that just have absolutely nothing to do with reality.
And has been happening for at least a century. From chapter 3 of Frederick Lewis Allen's Only yesterday, An Informal History of the 1920s:
Free Martian Whores!
Soviet Russia and China are your canonical examples of "Left wing government"?
Tsarist Russia and Imperial China were havens of freedom, equality and harmony?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Please give me examples of "left-wing" governments, by your definition, that you would like to see emulated elsewhere. One of the things I often run into in these discussions is people who support "left-wing" ideals comparing their ideal government with actual governments and then saying, "See, my ideals for government are better than yours."
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Well, Tsarist Russia was a haven of freedom, equality, and harmony compared with the Soviet Union and the Communist government in China did not replace Imperial China. The Communist government in China replaced the government that evolved into the current government of Taiwan, which would you rather have governing you, the successors to Mao, or the successors the Chiang Kai-Shek? Which government is over the country with the greater freedom, equality, and harmony?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
He said his and yours. In a democracy we all have to play by the same rules; that's basic fairness. Fairness is nothing to do with whether you agree with them or not. In a democracy, there will always be laws that somebody doesn't agree with, and everybody will find some of its laws disagreeable. Grow up and live with that, or fuck off to Somalia.
Sports analogy: A football coach may think field goals are overvalued, and that the game would be improved if they were only 2 points. He may actively campaign for the rules to be changed and go on about it endlessly in post-match interviews. In the meantime, does he order his team to intentionally miss one out of three?
It's not inconsistent at all to play within the rules as they are while wishing they were different.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The same people that defend higher taxes are those that thing we should not play by the same rules. That some people should have special grants, that certain groups should be benefited by quotas, etc. And that is just a small part of the hypocrisy you defend.
In your example the football coach does not have the power to directly change parts of the game or a given match on his own, without waiting for "the rules to be changed". He must stick to the rules until they are changed if his campaign is successful.
On the other hand a person that thinks he is paying to little of his income in taxes and thus depriving or great government from the money he could and should give can already give all his money even donating in excess of current taxes while still trying to change the laws and force everyone else to do the same. It is actually the only non hypocritical way of acting.
As I saw on the CBC
Leader: What do we want?
Crowd: Evidence-based decision-making!
Leader: When do we want it?
Crowd: After peer review!
He said that he believed that his taxes should be higher. He then said that he believed that mine should be as well. The problem with your example of the football coach is that the football coach does not have the option of getting the scorer only count his teams field goals as two points, while everyone who believes that their own taxes should be higher does have the option of paying more in taxes, either by not taking all of the deductions they are eligible for or by writing a check to the government for the additional amount that they think they should be paying. So your football example does not apply here.
What this discussion generally comes down to is that some people think they are being generous by giving those in need someone else's money. That is not generosity, that is theft (and don't compare it to Robin Hood, Robin Hood stole from the tax collectors and other government officials in order to give to the poor).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No, I believe our taxes should be higher. Not taking deductions myself will do precisely jack squat. The difference is that if I just do it myself, nothing will happen. There's no hypocrisy there, and you know it.
Just to clarify, you're saying that the fact that this one guy exists and was arrested for this proves that people still die from abortions on a massive scale?
I am saying that people NEVER died from abortions on a massive scale and that they are STILL dying from abortions on the same scale that they always did. Legalizing abortions did nothing to reduce the dangers from abortions because those who are pro-choice oppose all attempts to regulate them. Dr. Gosnell only got stopped because one of his workers was selling prescription drugs on the side and the DEA raided his clinic. Those who were supposed to ensure that he was running a safe clinic were aware of the problems and refused to take any action until DEA agents, who were horrified by what they found, reported it to the press. How many other abortion clinics are just like Dr. Gosnell's clinic?
As to taxes, since you take the maximum deductions that you can, what you really mean is that you think other people should pay more taxes and you will take the risk that you will have to as well. Basically, you think that you, through the government, can make better use of my money than I can. I do not favor higher taxes because I believe that I can make better use of my money to help others than the government can. The fact of the matter is that I think that you can as well. Whether you choose to do so or not I will leave as up to you. I do not think that I have any right to force you to help others and since I think I, and you, can do a better job of helping those in need with our resources than the government can, I see no benefit to giving my money to the government in order for the bureaucrats to take a cut of money I would rather see help those in need.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
It's interesting. The people who bitch the most about affirmative action are the same people who feel very very strongly that discrimination by private companies should be legal. Here's a thought: make discrimination illegal, and then maybe we can talk about getting rid of affirmative action.
Discrimination kind of throws the whole "personal responsibility" thing right out the window, doesn't it? Hey, look at me! I was born white and wealthy, but I got where I am with hard work. If other people worked as hard as I do, they'd be right where I am. The fact that it's harder for minorities to get jobs even when they have the same qualifications doesn't enter into it, right?
I believe in personal responsibility. We have a personal responsibility not only to take care of ourselves if we're lucky enough to be able to do so, but also to take care of others who are not. Again, it's time we started admitting that this warped view people have of the phrase "personal responsibility" where it means "take care of me, and fuck everyone else" is a serious moral issue with American society.
The hell it isn't. Try Googling Dick Cheney and the Clean Water Act before you embarrass yourself. Whoops, too late.
Obama's energy policies are utterly indistinguishable from his Republican predecessor - "all of the above". Why do you think he appointed Ken Salazar? Sad thing for you wingers is that all the honest criticism of Obama comes from the left.
Actual statistics contradict your bogus claims about abortion deaths.
I get to state my own argument. You don't get to make it for me. Much like I said above, how one person happens to allocate their funds means precisely jack. What I am saying is that this is everyone's responsibility. That includes yours and mine, but it is not, as you imply, limited to you and me.
Also, while we're making assumptions about how other people use their money, I assume that, since you seen to believe so much in private charity, you donate a significant portion of your money to charity in order to help people in need? What portion? Who knows, really. It's just like arbitrarily saying that because I take tax deductions, I'm a hypocrite.
When taxes on the wealthy go down and assistance programs are cut, charitable donations never go up enough to make up the difference, so honestly, your whole point is complete bullshit, even on the off chance that you do donate a significant portion of your money to charity as you imply. Yes, I believe that tax funded government assistance programs are more effective than private ones, precisely because they have an adequate budget to make a difference.
Discrimination kind of throws the whole "personal responsibility" thing right out the window, doesn't it?
It certainly does not. Discrimination is actually desirable in many cases. For example when you are hiring people to be picture models you want them to be handsome. When you are hiring people to be scientists you want them to be intelligent. When you are hiring someone to play the role of Martin Luther King in a movie you want him to be black.
What is not desirable is discrimination for the wrong motives, based on prejudices, but that harms the discriminator far more than it does to the people being discriminated in any competitive field. If companies decide not to hire black people, for example, because of prejudice, those that do decide to do so will pay less because there will be more offer and less demand. If they pay less and get the same work they will be more competitive and win the competition. Those that, by prejudice, refuse to adapt will lose and fail, and the system will reach an equilibrium eventually where nobody that lasted will hire discriminating by prejudice and where the amount paid equalizes.
That is simple logic and has worked very very well in the last decades, at least anywhere the government hasn't applied affirmative action, as affirmative action transforms discrimination by prejudice in discrimination with good motives very quickly,
We have a personal responsibility not only to take care of ourselves if we're lucky enough to be able to do so, but also to take care of others who are not
You may have as many responsibilities as you wish to carry, but do not try to push them to me. Personal responsibility is the responsibility to take care of yourself and to deal with the consequences of your own wrong decisions and nothing else.
It is not my problem if the wealthy do not choose to give to help those in need. I am not being charitable by sticking a gun in their face to take the money to give to the needy (which is really what taxing is). I do NOT believe that tax funded government assistance programs are effective (unless you mean at taking people's money and giving it to those who are politically connected), let alone being more effective than private ones. Basically, you think that you get to feel like you help the poor because you want to take other people's money to help them. That way, you don't have to bother to spend your own time and money figuring out what they need and help them get it. It is so much easier to just vote for the government to take other people's money and do something with it and count that as helping. You are right in one thing as a general rule, one person does not have enough money to pay for the kind of corruption that a government program can.
And the answer is, yes, I give a significant portion of what I earn to charity. The thing is that I DON't make assumptions about how other people use their money because it is THEIR money.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
You sure as hell do:
I missed your "statistics" on abortion. If you look, they are "estimates" but nowhere do they tell you what they based those estimates on. The article gives lots of numbers (including talking about "legal, safe abortions" in the Soviet Union, at the same time that they say that the biggest cause of the danger of illegal abortions in the U.S. was the fact that penicillin had yet to be developed. The Soviet Union did not have penicillin then either), but no source for any of them. I am supposed to take the word of a publication that thinks the Soviet Union under Stalin was a paradigm of women's rights? The article which is the source for your link goes into great detail about the horrors that women of color faced when they tried to get abortions...it sounds a lot like Dr. Gosnell's clinic.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
You made the statement that you thought your taxes should be higher, so I assumed that you acted accordingly. So, yes, I guess I do make assumptions. I assume that people are not hypocrites until informed otherwise. At this point, I am beginning to think that you are a hypocrite, although you never quite come out and admit that you take all of the deductions you legally can, that seems to be what you are saying.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Truth be told, I just take the standard deduction. I'm not sure what kind of deductions I'd get if I itemized, so I can't be absolutely certain that I take the maximum -- I probably don't. I doubt it's a significant difference, though, and I didn't get into it because it's beside the point. Whether I happen to be a hypocrite by your convenient and warped standards is irrelevant.
This is the primary issue with your philosophy. "It's not my problem." Poor are in trouble? Fuck them. If they worked hard, they wouldn't be in trouble, because the world is just and all poor people are lazy.
Young child has poor parents who can't afford to put adequate food on the table? Fuck that kid. Not my problem. Should have been smart enough to be born into a wealthy family. I donate to charity (interestingly, Internet libertarians must be an incredibly generous group, since they all donate to charity even though poverty is Not My Problem).
Someone gets cancer and loses their job and health insurance? Fuck them. Not my problem. Dude should have been smart enough not to get cancer.
Charity alone has never solved these issues, no matter how much you really, really want it to. And yet, there are other civilized first world countries where everyone has health care and enough to eat, even if they're dumb and lazy enough to be born into a poor family or get cancer, because their governments can and do deal with these issues effectively.
It takes 290 votes in the house of representatives to overturn a Presidential Veto, and 67 in the Senate. In the 106th Congress, republicans had a 223 member majority in the house and a 55 member majority in the Senate. Hardly Veto-Proof.
I'd keep a closer eye on George Soros ...
You have two eyes, no?
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I think I'll just patiently wait for the actual release of the final report in a few weeks rather than speculating on what they say. I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you.
I would certainly agree he was the most conservative acting of the last 3 or 4.
Please give me examples of "left-wing" governments, by your definition, that you would like to see emulated elsewhere. One of the things I often run into in these discussions is people who support "left-wing" ideals comparing their ideal government with actual governments and then saying, "See, my ideals for government are better than yours."
And vice-versa of course.
Left wing governments I have had personal experience with:
Labour, UK 1974-1979
Partie Socialiste Francais 1981-1993, 1997-2002, 2012-...
In neither case did things descend into poverty and repression.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I would have to do some research on the French government but the UK was heading in that direction until the British people had the sense to elect Margaret Thatcher.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
What, increasing inequality - no, that was Maggie. Less liberty? It was Maggie that passed the Putin style law against "homosexual propaganda". More division? Yup Maggie again.
Watch this Heartland Institute video