The sole exception should be active spying programs, allowed to operate solely in other countries and actual weapon and military vehicle designs.
Everything else, and I mean everything, should be public, after, at most, three months, with most stuff immediately public. The three months should be reserved for active investigations of crime and negotiations with other countries that we don't want third-party countries to know about, aka things that could be derailed if made public while happening. We could have a non-political agency to let government extend the three months if it required to finish whatever.
Suspending habeas corpus gives the government ability to hold people without any reason. They can just detained, with no charges or assertations they are member of a military or whatever. They can be detained for their speech or popularity or whatever. This is pretty much the definition, and the farthest the US can go, into 'martial law'.
This is why it's restricted to an actual invasion or rebellion, and most authorities agree that 'invasion' actually requires enemy troops attempting to gain and control ground, and not, for example, mere bombing runs. Those are acts of war, but not 'invasions'.
What the courts ruled in Ex parte Milligan is that people couldn't be charged with crimes in military courts when civilian ones were working. This isn't actually that relevant to imprisonment without habeas corpus, because they don't need any courts at all to imprison people without a right to habeas corpus.
Now, they can't find you 'guilty' of anything or punish you with more than imprisonment without trying you in a court, and Ex parte Milligan said that must be civilian courts if said courts exist.
Then when that Constitution priviledge is disputed (at the very least) on the basis of the people in question being rebels trying to negatively affect the safety of US Citizens, you disagree there too.
You asswipe. Congress can suspend the writ of habeas corpus in the case of rebellion or invasion, neither of which has actually happened, and, perhaps more to the point, Congress has not done so.
This is obvious to anyone with the slightest bit of intelligence, so I don't know how you managed to form English sentences. What I do know, however, is trying to use the fact that Congress can suspend it in limited circumstances as justification for violating it now, when it's not suspended, and the circumstances for the suspension do not actually apply, is about the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
Incidentally, Congress can also make it legal to murder people, but has not, in fact, actually done so, so murder is still illegal too. Hypothetical things Congress could do do not have a lot of bearing on what is actually true.(1)
But, that is the problem with most people defending Bush's actions, they have no idea what they are even talking about, and no idea of how a 'country of laws, not men', is supposed to work.
1) And the US has been in 'rebellion or invasion' maybe half a dozen times in history. Invasion != under attack. A few random high profile crimes isn't an invasion. To have an invasion, you probably actually have to have invaders in the streets shooting at people and taking control of the country, Pearl Harbor and WWII probably didn't even qualify. So it's highly questionable whether Congress could suspend habeas corpus right now even if they wanted to. But as they haven't even tried, it's rather a moot point.
I must say, I like how you repeatedly emphasis that taxes are 'stealing' from the rich.
It's possible to take a position that all taxes are theft, but, if so, I'm going to have to demand that you require the dismantling of, well, the entire government. Until you're ready to take that step, shut up about 'theft'.
Taxes are redistributing money, and, as I said, the way the system is currently set up, a very large percentage of the benefit of taxes goes towards the rich. Until you can demonstrate that that percentage is less than the percentage they pay, I will assume that my policies are making less 'theft', in that the money would actually be redistributed back towards the people who pay it more fairly. (And note I'm including the entire military and foreign policy apparatus in the 'benefits mostly the rich' category.)
See, you're still operating on the assumptions that taxes go from the rich to the poor. I've repeatedly tried to explain this is not actually the case, that almost everything the government does is for the rich, and thus doing more for 'the poor' with said money is not unfair or 'theft' or a 'redistribution'. (It is, in fact, an unredistribution.) I don't know how to explain it clearer.
And, yet again, I'm not suggesting handing out money. That is, in fact, communism, not socialism. I'd actually prefer we cut back on programs where we currently hand cash out, those are too prone to abuse, instead handing services out.
As a bonus, the government has to hire people to provide those services. (Which should be done directly, they should be government jobs, not contracts to companies.) Doing public works projects is a good way to help the economy. So do those in slack times, cut back in boom times when people need less support.
Incidentally, the fact that there at many corrupt 'liberals' that will not vote for things that will result in a less taxes going to their pockets is irrelevant. If they do not vote the way we want them, we will throw their fat ass out of the party, as we've already done with Lieberman. We elected populist Democrats, Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown, and half a dozen others. We converted Jim Webb, a Republican from way back, to a Democrat talking about income inequalities. We elected someone who ran as a socialist, Bernie Sanders. We elected Heath Shuler, who's a Republican except when it comes to ignoring the poor. We are pissed at the kleptocracy, and will continue electing people who will actually do something about it, and unelecting people, even if they call themselves 'Democrats' or 'liberals', who do not, or worse, enable it.
The really funny joke is that a lot of that was thanks to the Republicans, who in many cases ran on 'the economy' in the 2006 election, presumably to distract from Iraq. Rock, meet hard place. Feel free to, next election, switch back to running on the stellar handling of Iraq, which should be a magical utopia in...what was again? Six months from now? So that's like a year before the election, you guys might pull it off!
And we're watching you WRT Iraq too, Democrats. You saw what happened to Lieberman...do you think the Republicans will spring to your defense if we drop you? This is our party, not yours. Oh, and we have the internet now, and can actually track who exactly is slowing down what legislation.
No, actually, we don't believe that at all. You're arguing against an absurd straw man.
Oh, so you're the type of libertarian that does want to regulate businesses. My bad.
Tell me. Exactly how would your regulation of prostitution work? What about food?
What a wonderfully logical argument. And such good manners.
I'm sorry, but if you think the FDA 'is, at best, borderline competent at enforcing the very lowest of standards', you are a moron. The FDA enforces whatever standards we tell it to, and 'borderline competent' is just a way to say 'competent' and make it sound bad.
And, duh, these standards are, by definition, the 'lowest' standards, because they are the minimum standards we enforce, so I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make there. We could raise or lower them and they'd still be 'the lowest' because no one would be allowed to sell anything below that. We could require cars have safety systems such that people would survive 100% of all crashes, and that would be 'the lowest' safety standard for all cars.
What you actually said was 'The FDA does their job in enforcing a minimum level of food quality that companies are not allowed to go under', and tried to turn that into a bad thing.
There are only two options here:
a) You want to leave the FDA alone and want certification entities that check food at levels beyond that of the FDA, and put their stamp on it. In which case...go for it. I already pointed out they exist, and already do that exact job, so I'm not entirely sure what political solution you want here.
b) You want the same certification entities to take the place of the FDA, which means that, as long as no one forged a certification stamp, they could sell whatever toxic food they wanted. So every time we purchased food, we'd have to check for a known stamp, or risk death.
Heh, yeah, that's essentially what I'm talking about with 2D movement. Although calling that 'real-world-ish' is stretching it.:) And King's Quest actually animated things in its world. People would play it and just be blow away by something that actually looked like a cartoon instead of blocks on the screen. (Which was why IBM used it as a demo of the PCjr.)
From our point of view, it is horribly pixilated and unrealistic, but look at the other two 'graphic' games posted here. They were black and white tile-based games with no 'movement' at all. King's Quest broke like three different restrictions at once with smooth movement and animation, color, and pixel-base positioning. And topped it off with nice graphics and a reasonable plot. Yeah, maybe some games managed to break one or two of those before, but really, it was a huge effect on the game world, it's the difference between a flipbook and an cartoon on TV.
But, hey, why I am trying to convince you, you agree with me.:)
You said you support it inside the current system, but somehow it would nonetheless be horrible in a more libertarian system, because some women would then be forced into it in order to support their children. Well guess what, that happens already! So how is that a criticism of a libertarian system (or your idea of one, which seems a bit distorted?)
Um, it's a critization of prostitution without regulations. It happens now because prostitution is illegal, and it would happen under libertarian control because libertarians believe businesses should be free to do whatever the fuck they want to do.
If you want to look at how any system would operate under libertarianism, imagine it illegal without the violence that comes with being illegal. No regulations.
So because you don't want to figure out who to trust, you feel justified in prohibiting the very existence of certification agencies and condeming your fellow citizens to life without them?
Um...no? I don't think even vaguely implied anything of the sort. In fact, such entities already exist, certifying that food mets special dietary requirements, such as being prepared in a kosher manner. And many industries have them, like the UL certification for electronic devices. People are free to create whatever certifications they want.
It does not logically follow from there that those should be the only standards, though, and that people can sell me lead paint because they don't have a 'certified lead-free by Paint Labs Inc.' label on the can.
Frankly, it's a completely delusional world-view you have, where everyone can spend an hour researching things to make sure that the hairdryer they wish to purchased won't catch on fire and the restaurant they want to visit doesn't have rats running around in the back.
The FDA is, at best, borderline competent at enforcing the very lowest of standards. And while the standard can be changed politically, that borderline competence at enforcing it can't be. It's the nature of the beast. The FDA, like any government agency, is a monopolistic provider, with very thick walls insulating it from customer needs, and extremely subject to the phenomena of regulatory capture. The FDA does not keep the food safe - it keeps the big food suppliers safe, and provides the consumer with a false sense of security so they keep buying from them, as long as they don't bother to research them. They've certainly killed more than they've saved.
You're a moron WRT to the FDA and food safety. Go read 'The Jungle' and get back to me. People do not have the time to check if the food, and everything else, meets their minimal safety standards. If someone wants to sell things that doesn't meet government standards, well, whatever, but they have to inform the people before they do so, and 'food' is one of those things I wouldn't allow them to do that at all.
The FDA and drugs is another manner. The FDA should be run by doctors more and politics less, and it should not attempt to restrict certain pain-killers that can be abused, trusting in doctor's judgment more. (But I already said I'd legalize drugs, didn't I?) The drug war causes a lot of the FDA's problems, and big pharma causes the other. This is why we need to start seriously fining companies that lie to the FDA about trials, possibly even going so far as to revoke patents for that drug, and even other drugs.
That doesn't mean we should let doctors prescribe anything they want at any time for any reason. If so, now you've just vastly increased malpractice insurance, and it's already high enough. At least now, doctors can say 'That should have been safe, the FDA approved that drug for that disease.'.
I don't 'seem to think' anything of the sort, but I like the really assumptious way you have decided there are 'ills of socialism'.
Europe is doing a hell of a lot better, government-income-wise, than the US, which is operating at an insane deficit. And it, for example, appears to be able to afford its various health-care systems, which gives it a leg up on the US.
But, hey, I like the way that you apparently have decided that liberals apparently will operate against their best interest, even if they are rich. (I don't quite know where you got the idea they are, but whatever.) That is the only logical way that Europe could be socialist, now isn't it?
Basically, you're just making up a bunch of silliness about how socialism is 'bad' and not actually addressing my point, in that socialism is aiming the government at providing things to benefit all people, instead of providing benefits to certain people. You cannot address this point, because you do not understand that everything the government does benefits someone, or it wouldn't be done. All socialism says 'Let's tend to do things that benefit all people, aka, health care, instead of, or in addition to, the traditional things that benefit certain rich people.', and doesn't have anything to do with 'redistributing wealth' beyond taxing people to provide government services, which all governments do. It doesn't even require higher taxes than 'traditional' government.
Do you have any rebuttal to that? Or are you going to rant about the 'ills of socialism' some more?
Oh, and what causes all inflation is printing money. It's just dampened by the fact that, in our government, the rich tend to suck it up into savings, so it doesn't actually affect anything except make them richer.
But if it really worries you that much, we can just destroy their money. Who's with me? Let's raise the taxes on the richest 2% and destroy that 2% they hand in. It'll be fun, and it'll cause deflation, thus resulting in everyone else having more money, proportionally speaking. It's exactly what we're doing now, in reverse.
Showing pictures is not what people usually mean by 'graphical'. But I will rephrase: King's Quest was the first animated adventure game. In fact, it is the first animated real-world-ish game, as far as I know.
Other games were showing images and maybe moving icons around, but there weren't people actually walking around in a 'real environment' with things to interact with. There certainly weren't any with two dimensions to move within a perspective-based image.
In fact, I can make the argument that King's Quest should be on the list twice, King's Quest 1 for the graphical innovation of what is essentually Zork, and King's Quest V for starting the genre of point-and-click adventure games.
And I know DOOM wasn't first FPS, I didn't mean to imply it was. It was just the one that exploded onto the market in the way that King's Quest did a decade earlier. Everyone was playing DOOM for about two years there.
No graphical adventure games? Where is King's Quest, a game that is, literally, one of the first graphical games at all, and launched an entire genre? It is, in a way, the 'DOOM' of adventure games.
Okay, I get that they wanted to start with ten games, and I can't deny that all the games they listed were pretty damn important, but the only logical reason to have Zork beat King's Quest if they were going for the first game in each category (Which is valid way to define 'important'.), but, if so, why Super Mario 3? And that's technically wrong, 'ADVENT' is, of course, the first adventure game, although I guess they'd be
Alternately, they could be treating 'graphical adventure games' as a
I guess if this is the starting point, I don't mind so much, but King's Quest better be in the first five games they add.
Also, does anyone have any ideas what 'Sensible World of Soccer' is doing on there? I don't know anything about that game, I don't really play sports games.
Ok, First, 20 or 100 years ago, people didn't waiste their money on going out to eat or whatever that resulted in them not taking care of their families. They didn't goto the doctor over the sniffles or a stubbed finger either. Now there is an epidemic of this. And now we are upposed to feel sorry because they cannot aford insurnce or decent health care because they spent their money on a new Xbox or a Four Wheeler or a baot or whatever else. The fact is that everyone who cannot afford insurance because they are poor has coverage in some way by welfare services. Everyone who cannot aford insurance because they spend their money on some toy or something made the choice not to have insurance over something else.
I don't know why I'm having to defend this, because you're presented no evidence at all that poor people have said luxuries, but a video game console costs a few hundred dollars. That is roughly equal to 10%-20% they have to spend each month to live, it won't pay for any actual illness, and it's a one time cost. Just because they saved up $200 over three months and purchased a video game for their kids last year doesn't mean they would magically be able to afford their kid getting pneumonia and racking up $2300 dollars worth of doctor bills suddenly.
This is assuming it actually happens, which, like I said, you haven't actually presented evidence of. But we're not talking about them being a few dozen dollars shorts, which the cost of a video game would cover, we're talking about them being tens of thousands of dollars in debt and not being able to afford a thousand dollar monthly rent or home payment or car payment. If I own someone 50 dollars, and don't have the money to pay them, does that mean I shouldn't buy a coke from a vending machine? Your sense of proportion is a little off, especially as the example you picked will last for years of entertainment, and, frankly, is a much better deal than cable TV or going to the movies or anything, and can be pawned if they actually do need a few dozen dollars. The fact that money could have given them housing a food for...well, four more days is not really that relevant to anything.
Next, I have never made any commens about a welfare queen. I have no idea were this is comming from. Unless you cannot follow the conversation. I said that the people classified as poor in america live a better lifestyle then the middle class in most countries. We have raised the bar on being poor to include these people. This has nothing to do with a secrete, itis all out there in plain site for everone to see.
No, it's a myth the republican party has preached since Reagan, that poor people were, as you and he both put it, driving fancy cars and using food stamps. Oh, and deliberately having children to get more aid. He called them 'Welfare Queens'.
I know people on food stamps. None of them have any extra money.
And, unlike 'the middle class in most countries', by which I'll assume you mean 'third world countries', people here have to pay our prices for food and shelter and clothing and electricity and transportation and property taxes, and, oh, everything. They can't grow vegetables in their own garden and make clothing from cloth they traded some vegetables for and never have any money at all. No one can live anywhere in this country for free, they have to pay for housing with money, which means they need a job, which means they need a telephone and a car and running water, which means they have those bills, and it quite logically spirals out from there.
And i don't understand about this bankruptcy thing. If a person is bankrupt and doesn't have a means to pay their debt, they can file bankruptcy. The only changes that were made were to people who can aford to pay but insist on waisting their money on other things. But that goes along with the people i'm talking about doesn't it.
I like how you went with the assumption that I was against legalizing prostitution, and tried to convince me of it, when I rather clearly said I was in favor of legalizing it.
However, I'm in favor of doing it with rules. Mandatory STD testing, checks on abusive contracts, reporting requirements, for individual prostitutes offsite records of customers so we can track down the ones who decide to murder them, etc. We'd need some sort of controlling authority, probably at the state level. (In fact, Nevada already has one, just copy them.) And, of course, all the generic contractual limitations, like inability to sign away your right to quit your job and bankruptcy law and whatnot.
In an ideal libertarian world, I certainly would not be in favor of legalized prostitution, anymore than I'd be in favor of the selling and purchasing of food. It's too damn dangerous for everyone involved without certain restrictions on it.
You can stop bad things from happening with rules about goods and services sold. When was the last time you got food poisoning from meat you purchased at the store? Yeah, it happens, but it's incredibly rare.
The problem with prostitution and drugs is that we've tried to outlaw goods and services that all human beings involved which to do, aka, we've created victimless crimes. This, rather obviously doesn't work, and it pushes the entire system into illegality so it's completely uncontrolled.
But that's doesn't mean that rules for those things are magically bad ideas, which is where libertarians get everything exactly wrong. I don't want to have to figure out what 'independent certification agency' actually is vaguely competent at certifying the meat I buy doesn't have maggots in it and I don't want to have to figure out which company actually STD tests the prostitutions I visit, and I don't want to have to figure out while gasoline doesn't have impurities in it that will blow up my engine.
I want it to actually be illegal to sell me things that do not meet certain standards so I don't have to go around checking every damn thing. As does any sane person who thinks about it more than ten minutes. There are dozens of things I buy every day that could seriously injury me, and there's no reason to let anyone sell dangerous or defective versions of 99.999% of them. The remaining 0.001%, fine, if someone wants to weed-whackers without safety guards so that people can trim things closer, let them sell them with waivers, I have no problem with that. (And we already let people sell things that don't work as long as they explain it in advance.)
Libertarians are awful humans, I'm surprised to have been labelled one twice already from the original question.
Heh. Sorry. I view Libertarians about the same way you do, but I was trying to play nice. I try to place nice with all sane people to try to get this to remove the current Administration. I used to think that no political philosophy could be dumber than libertarian, although the neocons have managed to make a fool out of me. (And the theocons are a close second.) At least the libertarians will never get elected.
And while left and right is a stupid axis, but the libertarians have stolen that complaint, hence everyone's assumption you were one. They have a completely rigged axis, when in reality most people would really be 'progressive', or, as it is confusingly referred to in the US, 'liberal', if not for the insane fake issues and lies the right has managed to implant in the past two decades. The 'political test' crap manages to point this out, but is rigged so that everyone ends up wanting 'total social freedom' and 'total business freedom', without realizing that without limits on business freedom, we'd have no, for example, child labor laws, and that with 'total social freedom', whatever the fuck that means, we'd have no disability and blind people would be begging in the streets.
The actual issues are vastly more complicated than a simple left or right, and on top of that, the things that the right pretends are issues are completely unrelated to anything to do with any logical position they would hold.
The right has so managed to muddy the waters, and screw everything up, so much I'm not even entirely sure what the actual issues really would be at this point. Maybe 'How much should the government attempt to stop smoking?' or something like that would be a real issue, with hypothetical actual conservatives saying 'Let's not waste money to stop people from hurting themselves.', which I would disagree with but at least respect.
Incidentally, whoever labeled your comment -1 was a dumbass.
Where do you build those competing roads ? There's no way out of the town which wouldn't cross the highwayman's land. The only way you could build those roads would be to take his property from him, and that's against libertarian ethics.
Ha, you're missed a trick:
It doesn't matter what people want to do later, if they live in the town and object to your barrier, because the very first time they realized they were trapped and had to cross your land, the toll would not only include cash, but a signed contract stating they'd never compete with you. Also, you'd block all food shipments into the town, selling only your stuff to people who agree to the same terms. And, while you're at it, if they happen to own land near any other towns, that's yours also, or at least a strip of it.
Some libertarian is about to come up with a reason that this specific example would not be allowed, but specific examples aren't the problem.
All interactions between human beings are not equal, and if you remove all protections, people who have very very slight starting advantages can magnify them. Without any rules about these interactions, they can include almost anything. They can't literally include slavery (At least, I haven't heard any libertarian talk about repealing that amendment.), but they can come damn close. (OTOH, only involuntary slavery is illegal.)
It's even scarier when you realize they want to legalize prostitution, which, incidentally, I'm in favor for in this society, with regulations and stuff. In their hypothetical society, though...would women attempting to feed their families be forced to sell themselves into prostitution?
There are only about a dozen companies that provide food in this country. What if they all decided that, while they would still compete and all, they would like to 'own' everyone and held the entire country hostage by refusing to ship food to people who didn't sign absurd contracts with them?
I didn't say anything about how we should, or shouldn't, decide to redistribute money.
I merely pointed out that the government already redistributes money. A vast majority of the stuff it does benefits the rich more than the poor. This is a trait all governments throughout history share.
And I have plenty of more examples. Almost everything the government buys and uses comes from the rich, and a lot is used in ways that do not benefit the poor at all. For example, the military.
And don't even get me started on 'lawyers', which are a clever way to tilt the laws towards people who can afford to have them explained best.
Government arose as a method for the rich to protect themselves. It has, over time, extended to the idea that everything it does for the rich it should also, in theory, do for the poor, but the problem is that what benefits the poor is not the same as what benefits the rich. Imagine if the government offered 'free jewelry polishing services' and my point might be clear there.
The whole of what the government should do is directed towards the rich, it is such an old and inherent bias that all concepts of 'government' are slanted towards it. In terms of historical biases, it's probably right up there with 'women are property of men'.
'Socialism' is a government aimed more at poor people than 'traditional' governments. (Traditional in quotes because we're actually only talking about the western world and the past 200 years.) 'Communism' is what you eventually end up if the system does not bend. (Well, it would be, except whenever the government 'breaks', the whole process almost always resets, just with new people, so you just end up where you started.)
And I like how Europe is 'socialist' when talking about health care, but, somehow, all socialist countries become third-world countries when talking about 'socialism'. Would I prefer to live in, oh, Sweden, than the US? Probably not. It's cold, I don't know the languages, and we, supposedly, have a 'bill of rights' I keep hearing about. Would I prefer Sweden's taxes and healthcare system over ours? Yes.
And you can use this LLC to buy things on credit for yourself, and then fold the LLC when it runs out of money because you've been taking more money out than putting in?
Do the math and bring it down the years down to 20. The people we considered "poor people" 20 years ago didn't have two TVs, a car or two, They didn't have cell phones and ideo games. They didn't have computers and the such.And yes, some of these weren't invented or proaticle back then. But the point is thta non of them are esential to living or making a living yet they are over looked when we gauge how poor a person it. This means the bar has been raised on who is poor to include many more people. It is pretty bad when a poor person recieving government funding like food stamps or housing asistance drive abeter and newer car then I do. Tell me i'm poor now, huh. I'll tell you your full of it.
But they did have health care they could afford, they did have higher minimum wage (Or, to be technical, exactly the same minimum wage, but could obviously buy a lot more with it.), they did have bankruptcy laws they could actually use.
Pointing to a few 100 dollar luxuries that didn't exist 20 years ago and claiming they are better off is just idiotic. Trivial luxuries!=wealth.
And your 'welfare queen' talk is dumb too. You can keep repeating how 'poor people' are really, secretly rich, but no, they aren't, and claiming they are make you look pretty stupid, especially since we've long since stopped talking about 'poor people' and now are where middle-class people can't afford doctor bills because they don't have health insurance.
Somehing else that is just lip service. Clinton was a big supporter of NAFTA, WTO, and several other organization, law, and policy that directly resulted in jobs moving to overseas and slave wages. But i guess that was just Clinton the liberals most popular president of recent times. But who was it that got american workers american jobs when the american people were insisting on buy the then better made japanese cares? Your right Ronald Reagon the famed liberal---er um. never mind he doesn't count right? Do we have a historical record of wh say something but does something else? you tell me.
I don't know why you assume I'm a fan of Clinton, but he listened to the right-wing part of the Democratic party, the 'DLC', and thus completely fucked everyone over with NAFTA. Clinton's domestic policies were nice, his foreign policies were nice in general, but his foreign trade policies sucked ass.
But pretending Reagan was any better is a bit delusional. Reagan create the WTO, for pete's sake. NAFTA was his child, it just took two presidents and a Republican Congress to get it out there.
The problem is that most laws deal with morals. And it seems as if you and many other liberals are trying to claim their position doesn't so it is the high road. Hate crimes are a moral issue. Killing is a moral issue. forgiving third world debt is a moral issue (even when is is hidden in the Kyoto treaty). It isn't that the right are controling moral issues.
No, killing is a safety issue. Almost all laws deal with safety and fairness, not morality, unless your idea of morality is 'people should live in a safe and fair society'. Show me any moral reason we license automobile drivers, or a moral reason we have trespassing laws.
Or, OTOH, show me a law against treating someone like crap, abusing their trust and then leaving them in the cold to pick up the pieces, which most moralities would condemn to some extent.
It is best, everyone mostly agrees, if society has a set of rules that disallow people from harming others. It is possible to articulate a moral reason that people shouldn't hurt each other, and even come up with one that exactly matches the laws, but that doesn't really have a lot of do with the reason for them.
And if your talking about Gay rights, Then it is even worse. First, being Gay is a choice. Any gay person has all the same rights as normal people do. BUt they want special rights. Things like going to the hospital to visit sick
I don't see how it requires anything of the sort. In fact, I don't think I mentioned injustice anywhere, and certainly not the need to 'prevent' it in some violent manner. All I said was the the government, is to a very large extent, operated to protect and serve the rich. Because the government already vastly benefits the rich, the people who wish it to stay the same are called 'conservatives', and the people who wish it to change are called 'liberals'.
To fix this, all it requires is that the government emphasis services that would benefit the entire population, instead of benefiting people who have a lot of money. It doesn't require any sort of 'fighting injustice' at all.
For example, universal health care.
You're immediately going to launch into something about how it doesn't work, or is a failure in some obscure way despite dozens of countries being happy with it, but I have to point out those are practical problems. And if you're comparing practical problems, our existing system is literally the worse in the world, so even if we come up with a system as bad as theirs, it still beats our existing one.
The only theoretical objection you could be able to think of is that it benefits some more than others, the sick more than the healthy, but like I said, that completely falls apart when you realize the government already is vastly weighted towards helping the rich instead of the poor.
I mean adjusted for inflation and all, the poor today are wealthier then they were 100 years ago.
100 years is the wrong timescale.
The poor, and lower-middle class, are worse off than they were 20 years ago.
So wouldn't it be better to just create jobs, train these people to work at these jobs and let business rase their pay?
And this is why we need liberals in government, to make sure they actually do these things and not, for example, make everything using slave labor in third world countries.
I moderately disagree with the right's idea we need laws to control the moral behavior of human beings, even when said behavior doesn't hurt anyone, because society as a whole will suffer if we just leave them alone. In the end, I will possibly buy that conceit, although, as always, we'd need rather a lot more evidence that something is wrong, and we'd need to aim at the right effect.
I.e., if children being raised by unmarried teenagers is bad for the children, and I'll conditionally accept that as a valid premise, that doesn't mean we need to stop them from having sex, it means we need to stop them from having children. The first is stopping them from something they really want to do, the second is stopping them from something they really don't want to do. Guess which is easier to enlist their help in?
That was a bit offtrack, but here's my point: Conservatives don't seem to be willing to do the same with companies, which are much larger and capable of harming society much quicker, and by definition are amoral. And, to top it off, are fictional constructs of the government, so there's not really any moral issues there about restricting their behavior to help 'society as a whole'.
A random predatory-leading company that results in two hundred families defaulting on their mortgage and losing their house has almost certainly cause more marriage dissolutions than any gay person getting married. Where's the outrage there?
If you vote for someone because of these views either way, you been scammed by a political party to make you think you are going to make things change. We have a long time with Republicans in control, and no major changes to abortion laws... It seems like a big scam to me.
Amen to both those thoughts, especially that last one. The Republicans had, for at least two years, more than enough of a majority in the House and Senate to create a constitutional amendment overturning Roe vs. Wade. They didn't.
Why?
Because it has no support. They can't even pass an abortion ban in South Dakota.
When you actually come out and ask people 'Do you favor jail time for doctors who do abortions?', more than half of them will actually say 'No', even if they are 'pro-life'. (And jail time for the women is a non-starter, with almost no support.)
Luckily for everyone, the theocons have recently gotten so crazy in their belief that a large section of society, the so-called 'silent majority', agree with their skewed ideas of 'morality', that they are pushing these issues out in the open where they get voted on. Voted on and defeated.
While the Republican's base might, indeed, be so stupid as to continue to believe them forever that 'They'll stop abortion, somehow, someday, despite not attempting to make any laws about it after being in power for a decade with a span of four years they had near-total control', the theocons have gotten so much power and delusions they're now actually attempting to make the laws, fucking the whole scam up.
Now, at some point the most crazed anti-abortion person will realize that, under no circumstances, will abortion become illegal, simply because the evil secular (By 'secular, read 'Person who considers themselves a Christian and goes to church, and has noticed the Bible doesn't say anything about abortion.) society doesn't want it illegal.
So they'll realize it doesn't matter a damn if a politician is 'pro-life', anymore than it matters if they are 'anti-adults-having-sex-outside-marriage' or 'anti-drinking-alcohol', because they can't actually do anything about it. All you have to do is convince them that society has accepted it, no matter how 'evil' it is, and they will eventually move on from trying to outlaw it. This is exactly what the recent spat of shot-down abortion laws are doing, as the theocons shoot themselves in the foot.(1) When was the last time someone ran for office with the proposal to outlaw the consumption of alcohol?
1) The SD ban is particularly hilarious, as they proposed it without any exception for rape or incest, and got hammered on that, and then reintroduced it with those exceptions, raising pointed questions about why a fetus that is the result of a rape is less a human being than one that isn't. (This bodes really bad for any court challenge, because they were trying to base it on the 'equal protection clause'.)
I've been having fun with exactly that question for a decade. That is the question to ask pro-lifers: 'Should there be an exception for rape?' because either answer is bad. (2) No is bad because it is 'unfair', and it is 'unfair' because, at root, anti-abortion people have a deep-seated and almost unnoticed 'Women who have sex should be punished with the result of their action' belief, and rape, obviously, 'shouldn't count'. (Society has, thank God, managed to ingrain in us the idea we shouldn't blame victims of rape.) So they really want to say 'yes', but yes is incredibly inconsistent with their stated 'fetuses are people' position. So it's a very very uncomfortable question from them, and either answer will turn off 75% of the people in agreement with them. (Yes, I'm aware that's more than half. Some people will be disgusted by either answer.)
2) Don't ask the 'incest' exception, just rape, people can rationalize that as 'a deformed life is not a full life', although that's rather ignorin
You can be baffled all you want, but that's just because that analogy is very stupid.
The government has always favored those with money. They always end up getting more out of it than poor people. Crimes, for example, are not only classified as worse the more is stolen, but often not even investigated below certain values.
Look at the entire concept of 'limited liability companies'. If you have enough money, you can suddenly not be liable for debts you incurred! (Without having to declare bankruptcy.)
Look at the air traffic control system, run for free by the government, and used only by people and companies that can afford their own planes. Meanwhile, the government bails out those same companies.
Look at copyright law. Extended retroactively after death. Yes, in theory this could benefit random individuals, but in practice almost all 'after-death' copyrights are held by rich individuals or organizations. Meanwhile, they don't make the dozens of changes that could actually result in much more fairness in the music industry, resulting in more works being created. (Which is the point of copyright law.)
And thats just the subtle stuff. For more blatant, go look at police operating as private security for companies. Look at police union-busting activities in the first half of the 20th century, where the police would sometimes literally commit assault on individuals at company direction, and other times just look the other way while the company hired people to do it.
Oh, and for the absolute most subtle thing: Without a government, the rich are, by a very very very high margin, one of the first people to be kidnapped and ransomed, and/or murdered and robbed. The odds of someone kidnapping me are much much lower. Likewise, my contracts are tiny. And barring some sort of physical injury, I would have a hard time suffering more than a few thousand dollars worth of damages if anyone did anything to me. They benefit much more from a society of laws and courts, simply by having more things of value and more people who would want to take those from them.
Liberals just want to alter who some of the benefits are aimed at, aiming more of them at poor people and less at rich. Or, more often, just leaving the ones aimed at the rich alone, and adding new ones aimed at the poor.
Like Anatole France said: The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. He neglected to add that the law, in its majestic equality, allow the poor, as well as the rich, to donate thousands of dollars to politicians, to hire people to protect them from ruffians, and to deduct golfing trips to Europe as business expenses.
And your 'pie' analogy is nonsensical. Money is non-linear. If you're living on 500 a month, and that's raised to 600, you're now a lot better off than if you were living on 50,000 a month and now you're at 60,000.
If 100 people go from 500 to 600, that is a lot better for society than for one person to go from 50,000 to 60,000.
That is so amazingly obviously I have no idea how you're going to redefine 'pie' to attempt to get around it.
You'd be completely and utterly thrown out and insulted by the right, period, for either of those two positions.
Being an anarchist would render you subject to jokes by everyone.
Being anti-welfare would not endear you to the left, but, frankly, the left knows how locked in that is and doesn't really consider being against it that much of a threat.
And Randian Objectivist would result in everyone on the left thinking you were fairly stupid. Ayn Rand philosophy is gibberish...she doesn't ever support her claims with any sort of facts or logic, just asserting that certain things are true therefore certain other things are true. Granted, all philosophy does this to some extent, but her claims are especially unsupported. And her followers like to twist her claims to even sillier positions, like their support for copyright law. Seriously. Ayn Rand is for people who've read no other philosophy.:)
But, anyway, you'd rather obviously be a Libertarian, but as they have no chance in hell of being elected, you should work with the Democrats to kick out the Republicans, and then join up wherever the actual small-government faction of the Republicans go when it collapses. They could end up with the Libertarians, they could stage a coup of their own party and end up in control, whatever. As they are the only intelligent faction of the Republicans, it's almost certain they'll end up in some sort of rebuilt opposition party to the Democrats, although it might take a decade or so.
You may consider yourself a libertarian, but you've been almost entirely drinking the Republican Kool-Aid. I will point out your factual errors:
Yes, he may have used things like the NSA wiretap program more extensively (a program in existance for decades and used extensively by Clinton as well),
He didn't use the legal FISA wiretap program, until recently forced to by the courts. Before that, he wiretapped in violation of the law. Whoever told you anything else was lying to you.
Obviously you hate Bush, and probably attribute anything that congress has done to him even though his working relationship with them has been tenious at best even when the Republicans were in power.
Asserting the Republicans in Congress 'did anything' is a factual error. Just kidding...barely.
One of those I have the most respect for is Liberman and his party has almost excommunicated him. He doesn't follow a party line and uses reason when making decisions rather than listening to the idiot figureheads with extremist views like most politicians on both sides.
Lieberman does follow a party line. He follows the Republican party line, which is why the Democrats got rather annoyed at him and kicked him out.
Granted, he lied during the election and asserted he was really a Democrat, and when the Republican in Conneticut reelected him he immediately continued his 'provide cover for Republican insanities by being a token Democrat who agrees with them' and supporting the war he had vowed to end.
Now, you may agree with Lieberman's position, although I have to say, the Libertarian party seems to be in a rather large disagreement with, at minimum, the continuation of the war. But don't blame Democrats for actually wanting Democrats in their party. Lieberman was free to run as an independent and get elected, and he did so.
Try doing some historical research if you really think the Bush is much much worse than a proven sexual preditor (I'm not talking about Monica, she was willing, but the trial where Monica came up where he haid to pay 100's of thousands in a civil judgement) named Clinton who was only the second President ever to be impeached for lying under oath
That is an extremely...wrong...description of the Paula Jones case. The courts dismissed her suit, because she couldn't demonstrate, even if her claims were true, that she actually suffered any harm. Before the appeal was looked at, Clinton, apparently tired of this whole thing, gave her $85,000 to just end it.
I don't know how you got 'sexual predator' out of that. The last court to look at the whole thing found him completely non-liable for anything.
And, yes, he lied, and, yes, he got in trouble for that with the bar. Shame on him for that, but that doesn't appear to be that related to politics.
an incompetent Carter that couldn't handle a hostage crisis
Oh, good lord. You do have the talking points down, don't you. First of all the hostage crisis was extremely unimportant. Seriously. 52 damn people. That many people die every fifteen minutes from smoking! It cost him the election, but pretending it's some huge stain on Carter is completely idiotic.
And secondly, Reagan caused the hostage crisis to be extended by almost twice as long as it should have been. Why you're blaming anything on Carter is beyond me. Carter couldn't very well invade Iran to get the hostages back, and once the Shah died, he proposed exactly the deal that was accepted minutes after Reagan was sworn into office.
Can you come up with a single reason why anyone should care one tiny bit about the hostage crisis, and, if so, why they should blame Carter? Can you explain how Carter should have handled it?
and made our already suffering economy worse,
Do you have an example of how he made it 'worse', or just repeating words you have heard before? Because he didn't actually make anyt
Which means he's the commander of whatever military Congress chooses to have.
Military commanders do not choose what the military does except within the limits defined for them. Lieutenant do not decide to take hills, generals do not decide to deploy nukes, and presidents don't decide to invade countries. They all merely follow lawful orders. The president doesn't get orders, but he does have to follow the law. (Or, to put it another way, Congress gives him orders via the law.)
And none of that means he's in charge of 'national security'. Congress is the group that has the requirement to raise an army and navy in times of war and to, and I quote 'provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions'. And to 'provide for the common Defence'.
That's right. It's the explicit job of Congress to repel invasions. Or, at least, provide the means for someone else to do it.
The President has the sole authority to declare war, not congress.
I'm sorry, you've apparently confused this country with a different one. Congress, in fact, has the sole authority to declare war. It rather explicitly says that when it says 'Congress shall have power...to declare war'
The president has...um...well, no authority to really do anything at all by himself. Seriously. Most of his powers are veto-ish, in that he can override another branch, or they require confirmation by another branch. But let's look at the sole places where he's given any power:
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States(As I said, being commander just means he's the top order-taker.); he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices(His amazing 'Demand an opinion of his own staff in writing' power), and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment. (His veto over the judicial branch.)
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur (And you could write this the other direction and say that Congress has the power to make treaties if he agrees.); and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law(Another 'must agree with Congress' power.): but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.(This isn't a power of the president at all, it's a power of congress to let the president do something.)
The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session. (So he can do something, only if Congress doesn't.)
Section 3 - State of the Union, Convening Congress
He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient(This isn't a power either! It's a duty!); he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them(That's right! An emergency power! If something really bad happens, he can...make Congress get their asses back to Washington and actually do something!), and in Case of Disagre
There are reasons that Clinton won in '96 other than voters standing behind him. The Republicans ran Bob Dole, who had the charisma of a wooden spoon at best, and gave Clinton at least the fence-sitter vote.
I'm not entirely sure that it's fair to compare Bob Dole and wooden spoons.
It'd likewise be hard to say that Bush won the 2004 election because voters were not distancing themselves from him. It seems more likely to me that the Democrats just got lucky and managed to run the only candidate who couldn't beat Bush.
Kerry is what you get when the Democrats in Washington choose a presidential candidate. (Or, in fact, choose anyone at all.) This is because the people advising the Democrats in Washington are complete fucking morons who have almost a zero success rate, yet for some reason keep being listened to.
If it had been up to them, the Democrats would have lost the 2006 election.
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I'm basically with you.
The sole exception should be active spying programs, allowed to operate solely in other countries and actual weapon and military vehicle designs.
Everything else, and I mean everything, should be public, after, at most, three months, with most stuff immediately public. The three months should be reserved for active investigations of crime and negotiations with other countries that we don't want third-party countries to know about, aka things that could be derailed if made public while happening. We could have a non-political agency to let government extend the three months if it required to finish whatever.
Actually, that's not related.
Suspending habeas corpus gives the government ability to hold people without any reason. They can just detained, with no charges or assertations they are member of a military or whatever. They can be detained for their speech or popularity or whatever. This is pretty much the definition, and the farthest the US can go, into 'martial law'.
This is why it's restricted to an actual invasion or rebellion, and most authorities agree that 'invasion' actually requires enemy troops attempting to gain and control ground, and not, for example, mere bombing runs. Those are acts of war, but not 'invasions'.
What the courts ruled in Ex parte Milligan is that people couldn't be charged with crimes in military courts when civilian ones were working. This isn't actually that relevant to imprisonment without habeas corpus, because they don't need any courts at all to imprison people without a right to habeas corpus.
Now, they can't find you 'guilty' of anything or punish you with more than imprisonment without trying you in a court, and Ex parte Milligan said that must be civilian courts if said courts exist.
Then when that Constitution priviledge is disputed (at the very least) on the basis of the people in question being rebels trying to negatively affect the safety of US Citizens, you disagree there too.
You asswipe. Congress can suspend the writ of habeas corpus in the case of rebellion or invasion, neither of which has actually happened, and, perhaps more to the point, Congress has not done so.
This is obvious to anyone with the slightest bit of intelligence, so I don't know how you managed to form English sentences. What I do know, however, is trying to use the fact that Congress can suspend it in limited circumstances as justification for violating it now, when it's not suspended, and the circumstances for the suspension do not actually apply, is about the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
Incidentally, Congress can also make it legal to murder people, but has not, in fact, actually done so, so murder is still illegal too. Hypothetical things Congress could do do not have a lot of bearing on what is actually true.(1)
But, that is the problem with most people defending Bush's actions, they have no idea what they are even talking about, and no idea of how a 'country of laws, not men', is supposed to work.
1) And the US has been in 'rebellion or invasion' maybe half a dozen times in history. Invasion != under attack. A few random high profile crimes isn't an invasion. To have an invasion, you probably actually have to have invaders in the streets shooting at people and taking control of the country, Pearl Harbor and WWII probably didn't even qualify. So it's highly questionable whether Congress could suspend habeas corpus right now even if they wanted to. But as they haven't even tried, it's rather a moot point.
I must say, I like how you repeatedly emphasis that taxes are 'stealing' from the rich.
It's possible to take a position that all taxes are theft, but, if so, I'm going to have to demand that you require the dismantling of, well, the entire government. Until you're ready to take that step, shut up about 'theft'.
Taxes are redistributing money, and, as I said, the way the system is currently set up, a very large percentage of the benefit of taxes goes towards the rich. Until you can demonstrate that that percentage is less than the percentage they pay, I will assume that my policies are making less 'theft', in that the money would actually be redistributed back towards the people who pay it more fairly. (And note I'm including the entire military and foreign policy apparatus in the 'benefits mostly the rich' category.)
See, you're still operating on the assumptions that taxes go from the rich to the poor. I've repeatedly tried to explain this is not actually the case, that almost everything the government does is for the rich, and thus doing more for 'the poor' with said money is not unfair or 'theft' or a 'redistribution'. (It is, in fact, an unredistribution.) I don't know how to explain it clearer.
And, yet again, I'm not suggesting handing out money. That is, in fact, communism, not socialism. I'd actually prefer we cut back on programs where we currently hand cash out, those are too prone to abuse, instead handing services out.
As a bonus, the government has to hire people to provide those services. (Which should be done directly, they should be government jobs, not contracts to companies.) Doing public works projects is a good way to help the economy. So do those in slack times, cut back in boom times when people need less support.
Incidentally, the fact that there at many corrupt 'liberals' that will not vote for things that will result in a less taxes going to their pockets is irrelevant. If they do not vote the way we want them, we will throw their fat ass out of the party, as we've already done with Lieberman. We elected populist Democrats, Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown, and half a dozen others. We converted Jim Webb, a Republican from way back, to a Democrat talking about income inequalities. We elected someone who ran as a socialist, Bernie Sanders. We elected Heath Shuler, who's a Republican except when it comes to ignoring the poor. We are pissed at the kleptocracy, and will continue electing people who will actually do something about it, and unelecting people, even if they call themselves 'Democrats' or 'liberals', who do not, or worse, enable it.
The really funny joke is that a lot of that was thanks to the Republicans, who in many cases ran on 'the economy' in the 2006 election, presumably to distract from Iraq. Rock, meet hard place. Feel free to, next election, switch back to running on the stellar handling of Iraq, which should be a magical utopia in...what was again? Six months from now? So that's like a year before the election, you guys might pull it off!
And we're watching you WRT Iraq too, Democrats. You saw what happened to Lieberman...do you think the Republicans will spring to your defense if we drop you? This is our party, not yours. Oh, and we have the internet now, and can actually track who exactly is slowing down what legislation.
No, actually, we don't believe that at all. You're arguing against an absurd straw man.
Oh, so you're the type of libertarian that does want to regulate businesses. My bad.
Tell me. Exactly how would your regulation of prostitution work? What about food?
What a wonderfully logical argument. And such good manners.
I'm sorry, but if you think the FDA 'is, at best, borderline competent at enforcing the very lowest of standards', you are a moron. The FDA enforces whatever standards we tell it to, and 'borderline competent' is just a way to say 'competent' and make it sound bad.
And, duh, these standards are, by definition, the 'lowest' standards, because they are the minimum standards we enforce, so I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make there. We could raise or lower them and they'd still be 'the lowest' because no one would be allowed to sell anything below that. We could require cars have safety systems such that people would survive 100% of all crashes, and that would be 'the lowest' safety standard for all cars.
What you actually said was 'The FDA does their job in enforcing a minimum level of food quality that companies are not allowed to go under', and tried to turn that into a bad thing.
There are only two options here:
a) You want to leave the FDA alone and want certification entities that check food at levels beyond that of the FDA, and put their stamp on it. In which case...go for it. I already pointed out they exist, and already do that exact job, so I'm not entirely sure what political solution you want here.
b) You want the same certification entities to take the place of the FDA, which means that, as long as no one forged a certification stamp, they could sell whatever toxic food they wanted. So every time we purchased food, we'd have to check for a known stamp, or risk death.
There aren't any other options.
Heh, yeah, that's essentially what I'm talking about with 2D movement. Although calling that 'real-world-ish' is stretching it. :) And King's Quest actually animated things in its world. People would play it and just be blow away by something that actually looked like a cartoon instead of blocks on the screen. (Which was why IBM used it as a demo of the PCjr.)
From our point of view, it is horribly pixilated and unrealistic, but look at the other two 'graphic' games posted here. They were black and white tile-based games with no 'movement' at all. King's Quest broke like three different restrictions at once with smooth movement and animation, color, and pixel-base positioning. And topped it off with nice graphics and a reasonable plot. Yeah, maybe some games managed to break one or two of those before, but really, it was a huge effect on the game world, it's the difference between a flipbook and an cartoon on TV.
But, hey, why I am trying to convince you, you agree with me. :)
You said you support it inside the current system, but somehow it would nonetheless be horrible in a more libertarian system, because some women would then be forced into it in order to support their children. Well guess what, that happens already! So how is that a criticism of a libertarian system (or your idea of one, which seems a bit distorted?)
Um, it's a critization of prostitution without regulations. It happens now because prostitution is illegal, and it would happen under libertarian control because libertarians believe businesses should be free to do whatever the fuck they want to do.
If you want to look at how any system would operate under libertarianism, imagine it illegal without the violence that comes with being illegal. No regulations.
So because you don't want to figure out who to trust, you feel justified in prohibiting the very existence of certification agencies and condeming your fellow citizens to life without them?
Um...no? I don't think even vaguely implied anything of the sort. In fact, such entities already exist, certifying that food mets special dietary requirements, such as being prepared in a kosher manner. And many industries have them, like the UL certification for electronic devices. People are free to create whatever certifications they want.
It does not logically follow from there that those should be the only standards, though, and that people can sell me lead paint because they don't have a 'certified lead-free by Paint Labs Inc.' label on the can.
Frankly, it's a completely delusional world-view you have, where everyone can spend an hour researching things to make sure that the hairdryer they wish to purchased won't catch on fire and the restaurant they want to visit doesn't have rats running around in the back.
The FDA is, at best, borderline competent at enforcing the very lowest of standards. And while the standard can be changed politically, that borderline competence at enforcing it can't be. It's the nature of the beast. The FDA, like any government agency, is a monopolistic provider, with very thick walls insulating it from customer needs, and extremely subject to the phenomena of regulatory capture. The FDA does not keep the food safe - it keeps the big food suppliers safe, and provides the consumer with a false sense of security so they keep buying from them, as long as they don't bother to research them. They've certainly killed more than they've saved.
You're a moron WRT to the FDA and food safety. Go read 'The Jungle' and get back to me. People do not have the time to check if the food, and everything else, meets their minimal safety standards. If someone wants to sell things that doesn't meet government standards, well, whatever, but they have to inform the people before they do so, and 'food' is one of those things I wouldn't allow them to do that at all.
The FDA and drugs is another manner. The FDA should be run by doctors more and politics less, and it should not attempt to restrict certain pain-killers that can be abused, trusting in doctor's judgment more. (But I already said I'd legalize drugs, didn't I?) The drug war causes a lot of the FDA's problems, and big pharma causes the other. This is why we need to start seriously fining companies that lie to the FDA about trials, possibly even going so far as to revoke patents for that drug, and even other drugs.
That doesn't mean we should let doctors prescribe anything they want at any time for any reason. If so, now you've just vastly increased malpractice insurance, and it's already high enough. At least now, doctors can say 'That should have been safe, the FDA approved that drug for that disease.'.
I don't 'seem to think' anything of the sort, but I like the really assumptious way you have decided there are 'ills of socialism'.
Europe is doing a hell of a lot better, government-income-wise, than the US, which is operating at an insane deficit. And it, for example, appears to be able to afford its various health-care systems, which gives it a leg up on the US.
But, hey, I like the way that you apparently have decided that liberals apparently will operate against their best interest, even if they are rich. (I don't quite know where you got the idea they are, but whatever.) That is the only logical way that Europe could be socialist, now isn't it?
Basically, you're just making up a bunch of silliness about how socialism is 'bad' and not actually addressing my point, in that socialism is aiming the government at providing things to benefit all people, instead of providing benefits to certain people. You cannot address this point, because you do not understand that everything the government does benefits someone, or it wouldn't be done. All socialism says 'Let's tend to do things that benefit all people, aka, health care, instead of, or in addition to, the traditional things that benefit certain rich people.', and doesn't have anything to do with 'redistributing wealth' beyond taxing people to provide government services, which all governments do. It doesn't even require higher taxes than 'traditional' government.
Do you have any rebuttal to that? Or are you going to rant about the 'ills of socialism' some more?
Oh, and what causes all inflation is printing money. It's just dampened by the fact that, in our government, the rich tend to suck it up into savings, so it doesn't actually affect anything except make them richer.
But if it really worries you that much, we can just destroy their money. Who's with me? Let's raise the taxes on the richest 2% and destroy that 2% they hand in. It'll be fun, and it'll cause deflation, thus resulting in everyone else having more money, proportionally speaking. It's exactly what we're doing now, in reverse.
Showing pictures is not what people usually mean by 'graphical'. But I will rephrase: King's Quest was the first animated adventure game. In fact, it is the first animated real-world-ish game, as far as I know.
Other games were showing images and maybe moving icons around, but there weren't people actually walking around in a 'real environment' with things to interact with. There certainly weren't any with two dimensions to move within a perspective-based image.
In fact, I can make the argument that King's Quest should be on the list twice, King's Quest 1 for the graphical innovation of what is essentually Zork, and King's Quest V for starting the genre of point-and-click adventure games.
And I know DOOM wasn't first FPS, I didn't mean to imply it was. It was just the one that exploded onto the market in the way that King's Quest did a decade earlier. Everyone was playing DOOM for about two years there.
No graphical adventure games? Where is King's Quest, a game that is, literally, one of the first graphical games at all, and launched an entire genre? It is, in a way, the 'DOOM' of adventure games.
Okay, I get that they wanted to start with ten games, and I can't deny that all the games they listed were pretty damn important, but the only logical reason to have Zork beat King's Quest if they were going for the first game in each category (Which is valid way to define 'important'.), but, if so, why Super Mario 3? And that's technically wrong, 'ADVENT' is, of course, the first adventure game, although I guess they'd be
Alternately, they could be treating 'graphical adventure games' as a I guess if this is the starting point, I don't mind so much, but King's Quest better be in the first five games they add.
Also, does anyone have any ideas what 'Sensible World of Soccer' is doing on there? I don't know anything about that game, I don't really play sports games.
Ok, First, 20 or 100 years ago, people didn't waiste their money on going out to eat or whatever that resulted in them not taking care of their families. They didn't goto the doctor over the sniffles or a stubbed finger either. Now there is an epidemic of this. And now we are upposed to feel sorry because they cannot aford insurnce or decent health care because they spent their money on a new Xbox or a Four Wheeler or a baot or whatever else. The fact is that everyone who cannot afford insurance because they are poor has coverage in some way by welfare services. Everyone who cannot aford insurance because they spend their money on some toy or something made the choice not to have insurance over something else.
I don't know why I'm having to defend this, because you're presented no evidence at all that poor people have said luxuries, but a video game console costs a few hundred dollars. That is roughly equal to 10%-20% they have to spend each month to live, it won't pay for any actual illness, and it's a one time cost. Just because they saved up $200 over three months and purchased a video game for their kids last year doesn't mean they would magically be able to afford their kid getting pneumonia and racking up $2300 dollars worth of doctor bills suddenly.
This is assuming it actually happens, which, like I said, you haven't actually presented evidence of. But we're not talking about them being a few dozen dollars shorts, which the cost of a video game would cover, we're talking about them being tens of thousands of dollars in debt and not being able to afford a thousand dollar monthly rent or home payment or car payment. If I own someone 50 dollars, and don't have the money to pay them, does that mean I shouldn't buy a coke from a vending machine? Your sense of proportion is a little off, especially as the example you picked will last for years of entertainment, and, frankly, is a much better deal than cable TV or going to the movies or anything, and can be pawned if they actually do need a few dozen dollars. The fact that money could have given them housing a food for...well, four more days is not really that relevant to anything.
Next, I have never made any commens about a welfare queen. I have no idea were this is comming from. Unless you cannot follow the conversation. I said that the people classified as poor in america live a better lifestyle then the middle class in most countries. We have raised the bar on being poor to include these people. This has nothing to do with a secrete, itis all out there in plain site for everone to see.
No, it's a myth the republican party has preached since Reagan, that poor people were, as you and he both put it, driving fancy cars and using food stamps. Oh, and deliberately having children to get more aid. He called them 'Welfare Queens'.
I know people on food stamps. None of them have any extra money.
And, unlike 'the middle class in most countries', by which I'll assume you mean 'third world countries', people here have to pay our prices for food and shelter and clothing and electricity and transportation and property taxes, and, oh, everything. They can't grow vegetables in their own garden and make clothing from cloth they traded some vegetables for and never have any money at all. No one can live anywhere in this country for free, they have to pay for housing with money, which means they need a job, which means they need a telephone and a car and running water, which means they have those bills, and it quite logically spirals out from there.
And i don't understand about this bankruptcy thing. If a person is bankrupt and doesn't have a means to pay their debt, they can file bankruptcy. The only changes that were made were to people who can aford to pay but insist on waisting their money on other things. But that goes along with the people i'm talking about doesn't it.
You can think that, but they 'waste'
I like how you went with the assumption that I was against legalizing prostitution, and tried to convince me of it, when I rather clearly said I was in favor of legalizing it.
However, I'm in favor of doing it with rules. Mandatory STD testing, checks on abusive contracts, reporting requirements, for individual prostitutes offsite records of customers so we can track down the ones who decide to murder them, etc. We'd need some sort of controlling authority, probably at the state level. (In fact, Nevada already has one, just copy them.) And, of course, all the generic contractual limitations, like inability to sign away your right to quit your job and bankruptcy law and whatnot.
In an ideal libertarian world, I certainly would not be in favor of legalized prostitution, anymore than I'd be in favor of the selling and purchasing of food. It's too damn dangerous for everyone involved without certain restrictions on it.
You can stop bad things from happening with rules about goods and services sold. When was the last time you got food poisoning from meat you purchased at the store? Yeah, it happens, but it's incredibly rare.
The problem with prostitution and drugs is that we've tried to outlaw goods and services that all human beings involved which to do, aka, we've created victimless crimes. This, rather obviously doesn't work, and it pushes the entire system into illegality so it's completely uncontrolled.
But that's doesn't mean that rules for those things are magically bad ideas, which is where libertarians get everything exactly wrong. I don't want to have to figure out what 'independent certification agency' actually is vaguely competent at certifying the meat I buy doesn't have maggots in it and I don't want to have to figure out which company actually STD tests the prostitutions I visit, and I don't want to have to figure out while gasoline doesn't have impurities in it that will blow up my engine.
I want it to actually be illegal to sell me things that do not meet certain standards so I don't have to go around checking every damn thing. As does any sane person who thinks about it more than ten minutes. There are dozens of things I buy every day that could seriously injury me, and there's no reason to let anyone sell dangerous or defective versions of 99.999% of them. The remaining 0.001%, fine, if someone wants to weed-whackers without safety guards so that people can trim things closer, let them sell them with waivers, I have no problem with that. (And we already let people sell things that don't work as long as they explain it in advance.)
Libertarians are awful humans, I'm surprised to have been labelled one twice already from the original question.
Heh. Sorry. I view Libertarians about the same way you do, but I was trying to play nice. I try to place nice with all sane people to try to get this to remove the current Administration. I used to think that no political philosophy could be dumber than libertarian, although the neocons have managed to make a fool out of me. (And the theocons are a close second.) At least the libertarians will never get elected.
And while left and right is a stupid axis, but the libertarians have stolen that complaint, hence everyone's assumption you were one. They have a completely rigged axis, when in reality most people would really be 'progressive', or, as it is confusingly referred to in the US, 'liberal', if not for the insane fake issues and lies the right has managed to implant in the past two decades. The 'political test' crap manages to point this out, but is rigged so that everyone ends up wanting 'total social freedom' and 'total business freedom', without realizing that without limits on business freedom, we'd have no, for example, child labor laws, and that with 'total social freedom', whatever the fuck that means, we'd have no disability and blind people would be begging in the streets.
The actual issues are vastly more complicated than a simple left or right, and on top of that, the things that the right pretends are issues are completely unrelated to anything to do with any logical position they would hold.
The right has so managed to muddy the waters, and screw everything up, so much I'm not even entirely sure what the actual issues really would be at this point. Maybe 'How much should the government attempt to stop smoking?' or something like that would be a real issue, with hypothetical actual conservatives saying 'Let's not waste money to stop people from hurting themselves.', which I would disagree with but at least respect.
Incidentally, whoever labeled your comment -1 was a dumbass.
Where do you build those competing roads ? There's no way out of the town which wouldn't cross the highwayman's land. The only way you could build those roads would be to take his property from him, and that's against libertarian ethics.
Ha, you're missed a trick:
It doesn't matter what people want to do later, if they live in the town and object to your barrier, because the very first time they realized they were trapped and had to cross your land, the toll would not only include cash, but a signed contract stating they'd never compete with you. Also, you'd block all food shipments into the town, selling only your stuff to people who agree to the same terms. And, while you're at it, if they happen to own land near any other towns, that's yours also, or at least a strip of it.
Some libertarian is about to come up with a reason that this specific example would not be allowed, but specific examples aren't the problem.
All interactions between human beings are not equal, and if you remove all protections, people who have very very slight starting advantages can magnify them. Without any rules about these interactions, they can include almost anything. They can't literally include slavery (At least, I haven't heard any libertarian talk about repealing that amendment.), but they can come damn close. (OTOH, only involuntary slavery is illegal.)
It's even scarier when you realize they want to legalize prostitution, which, incidentally, I'm in favor for in this society, with regulations and stuff. In their hypothetical society, though...would women attempting to feed their families be forced to sell themselves into prostitution?
There are only about a dozen companies that provide food in this country. What if they all decided that, while they would still compete and all, they would like to 'own' everyone and held the entire country hostage by refusing to ship food to people who didn't sign absurd contracts with them?
What if AT&T did that?
I didn't say anything about how we should, or shouldn't, decide to redistribute money.
I merely pointed out that the government already redistributes money. A vast majority of the stuff it does benefits the rich more than the poor. This is a trait all governments throughout history share.
And I have plenty of more examples. Almost everything the government buys and uses comes from the rich, and a lot is used in ways that do not benefit the poor at all. For example, the military.
And don't even get me started on 'lawyers', which are a clever way to tilt the laws towards people who can afford to have them explained best.
Government arose as a method for the rich to protect themselves. It has, over time, extended to the idea that everything it does for the rich it should also, in theory, do for the poor, but the problem is that what benefits the poor is not the same as what benefits the rich. Imagine if the government offered 'free jewelry polishing services' and my point might be clear there.
The whole of what the government should do is directed towards the rich, it is such an old and inherent bias that all concepts of 'government' are slanted towards it. In terms of historical biases, it's probably right up there with 'women are property of men'.
'Socialism' is a government aimed more at poor people than 'traditional' governments. (Traditional in quotes because we're actually only talking about the western world and the past 200 years.) 'Communism' is what you eventually end up if the system does not bend. (Well, it would be, except whenever the government 'breaks', the whole process almost always resets, just with new people, so you just end up where you started.)
And I like how Europe is 'socialist' when talking about health care, but, somehow, all socialist countries become third-world countries when talking about 'socialism'. Would I prefer to live in, oh, Sweden, than the US? Probably not. It's cold, I don't know the languages, and we, supposedly, have a 'bill of rights' I keep hearing about. Would I prefer Sweden's taxes and healthcare system over ours? Yes.
And you can use this LLC to buy things on credit for yourself, and then fold the LLC when it runs out of money because you've been taking more money out than putting in?
Somehow I really doubt it.
Do the math and bring it down the years down to 20. The people we considered "poor people" 20 years ago didn't have two TVs, a car or two, They didn't have cell phones and ideo games. They didn't have computers and the such. And yes, some of these weren't invented or proaticle back then. But the point is thta non of them are esential to living or making a living yet they are over looked when we gauge how poor a person it. This means the bar has been raised on who is poor to include many more people. It is pretty bad when a poor person recieving government funding like food stamps or housing asistance drive abeter and newer car then I do. Tell me i'm poor now, huh. I'll tell you your full of it.
But they did have health care they could afford, they did have higher minimum wage (Or, to be technical, exactly the same minimum wage, but could obviously buy a lot more with it.), they did have bankruptcy laws they could actually use.
Pointing to a few 100 dollar luxuries that didn't exist 20 years ago and claiming they are better off is just idiotic. Trivial luxuries!=wealth.
And your 'welfare queen' talk is dumb too. You can keep repeating how 'poor people' are really, secretly rich, but no, they aren't, and claiming they are make you look pretty stupid, especially since we've long since stopped talking about 'poor people' and now are where middle-class people can't afford doctor bills because they don't have health insurance.
Somehing else that is just lip service. Clinton was a big supporter of NAFTA, WTO, and several other organization, law, and policy that directly resulted in jobs moving to overseas and slave wages. But i guess that was just Clinton the liberals most popular president of recent times. But who was it that got american workers american jobs when the american people were insisting on buy the then better made japanese cares? Your right Ronald Reagon the famed liberal---er um. never mind he doesn't count right? Do we have a historical record of wh say something but does something else? you tell me.
I don't know why you assume I'm a fan of Clinton, but he listened to the right-wing part of the Democratic party, the 'DLC', and thus completely fucked everyone over with NAFTA. Clinton's domestic policies were nice, his foreign policies were nice in general, but his foreign trade policies sucked ass.
But pretending Reagan was any better is a bit delusional. Reagan create the WTO, for pete's sake. NAFTA was his child, it just took two presidents and a Republican Congress to get it out there.
The problem is that most laws deal with morals. And it seems as if you and many other liberals are trying to claim their position doesn't so it is the high road. Hate crimes are a moral issue. Killing is a moral issue. forgiving third world debt is a moral issue (even when is is hidden in the Kyoto treaty). It isn't that the right are controling moral issues.
No, killing is a safety issue. Almost all laws deal with safety and fairness, not morality, unless your idea of morality is 'people should live in a safe and fair society'. Show me any moral reason we license automobile drivers, or a moral reason we have trespassing laws.
Or, OTOH, show me a law against treating someone like crap, abusing their trust and then leaving them in the cold to pick up the pieces, which most moralities would condemn to some extent.
It is best, everyone mostly agrees, if society has a set of rules that disallow people from harming others. It is possible to articulate a moral reason that people shouldn't hurt each other, and even come up with one that exactly matches the laws, but that doesn't really have a lot of do with the reason for them.
And if your talking about Gay rights, Then it is even worse. First, being Gay is a choice. Any gay person has all the same rights as normal people do. BUt they want special rights. Things like going to the hospital to visit sick
I don't see how it requires anything of the sort. In fact, I don't think I mentioned injustice anywhere, and certainly not the need to 'prevent' it in some violent manner. All I said was the the government, is to a very large extent, operated to protect and serve the rich. Because the government already vastly benefits the rich, the people who wish it to stay the same are called 'conservatives', and the people who wish it to change are called 'liberals'.
To fix this, all it requires is that the government emphasis services that would benefit the entire population, instead of benefiting people who have a lot of money. It doesn't require any sort of 'fighting injustice' at all.
For example, universal health care.
You're immediately going to launch into something about how it doesn't work, or is a failure in some obscure way despite dozens of countries being happy with it, but I have to point out those are practical problems. And if you're comparing practical problems, our existing system is literally the worse in the world, so even if we come up with a system as bad as theirs, it still beats our existing one.
The only theoretical objection you could be able to think of is that it benefits some more than others, the sick more than the healthy, but like I said, that completely falls apart when you realize the government already is vastly weighted towards helping the rich instead of the poor.
I mean adjusted for inflation and all, the poor today are wealthier then they were 100 years ago.
100 years is the wrong timescale.
The poor, and lower-middle class, are worse off than they were 20 years ago.
So wouldn't it be better to just create jobs, train these people to work at these jobs and let business rase their pay?
And this is why we need liberals in government, to make sure they actually do these things and not, for example, make everything using slave labor in third world countries.
I moderately disagree with the right's idea we need laws to control the moral behavior of human beings, even when said behavior doesn't hurt anyone, because society as a whole will suffer if we just leave them alone. In the end, I will possibly buy that conceit, although, as always, we'd need rather a lot more evidence that something is wrong, and we'd need to aim at the right effect.
I.e., if children being raised by unmarried teenagers is bad for the children, and I'll conditionally accept that as a valid premise, that doesn't mean we need to stop them from having sex, it means we need to stop them from having children. The first is stopping them from something they really want to do, the second is stopping them from something they really don't want to do. Guess which is easier to enlist their help in?
That was a bit offtrack, but here's my point: Conservatives don't seem to be willing to do the same with companies, which are much larger and capable of harming society much quicker, and by definition are amoral. And, to top it off, are fictional constructs of the government, so there's not really any moral issues there about restricting their behavior to help 'society as a whole'.
A random predatory-leading company that results in two hundred families defaulting on their mortgage and losing their house has almost certainly cause more marriage dissolutions than any gay person getting married. Where's the outrage there?
If you vote for someone because of these views either way, you been scammed by a political party to make you think you are going to make things change. We have a long time with Republicans in control, and no major changes to abortion laws... It seems like a big scam to me.
Amen to both those thoughts, especially that last one. The Republicans had, for at least two years, more than enough of a majority in the House and Senate to create a constitutional amendment overturning Roe vs. Wade. They didn't.
Why?
Because it has no support. They can't even pass an abortion ban in South Dakota.
When you actually come out and ask people 'Do you favor jail time for doctors who do abortions?', more than half of them will actually say 'No', even if they are 'pro-life'. (And jail time for the women is a non-starter, with almost no support.)
Luckily for everyone, the theocons have recently gotten so crazy in their belief that a large section of society, the so-called 'silent majority', agree with their skewed ideas of 'morality', that they are pushing these issues out in the open where they get voted on. Voted on and defeated.
While the Republican's base might, indeed, be so stupid as to continue to believe them forever that 'They'll stop abortion, somehow, someday, despite not attempting to make any laws about it after being in power for a decade with a span of four years they had near-total control', the theocons have gotten so much power and delusions they're now actually attempting to make the laws, fucking the whole scam up.
Now, at some point the most crazed anti-abortion person will realize that, under no circumstances, will abortion become illegal, simply because the evil secular (By 'secular, read 'Person who considers themselves a Christian and goes to church, and has noticed the Bible doesn't say anything about abortion.) society doesn't want it illegal.
So they'll realize it doesn't matter a damn if a politician is 'pro-life', anymore than it matters if they are 'anti-adults-having-sex-outside-marriage' or 'anti-drinking-alcohol', because they can't actually do anything about it. All you have to do is convince them that society has accepted it, no matter how 'evil' it is, and they will eventually move on from trying to outlaw it. This is exactly what the recent spat of shot-down abortion laws are doing, as the theocons shoot themselves in the foot.(1) When was the last time someone ran for office with the proposal to outlaw the consumption of alcohol?
1) The SD ban is particularly hilarious, as they proposed it without any exception for rape or incest, and got hammered on that, and then reintroduced it with those exceptions, raising pointed questions about why a fetus that is the result of a rape is less a human being than one that isn't. (This bodes really bad for any court challenge, because they were trying to base it on the 'equal protection clause'.)
I've been having fun with exactly that question for a decade. That is the question to ask pro-lifers: 'Should there be an exception for rape?' because either answer is bad. (2) No is bad because it is 'unfair', and it is 'unfair' because, at root, anti-abortion people have a deep-seated and almost unnoticed 'Women who have sex should be punished with the result of their action' belief, and rape, obviously, 'shouldn't count'. (Society has, thank God, managed to ingrain in us the idea we shouldn't blame victims of rape.) So they really want to say 'yes', but yes is incredibly inconsistent with their stated 'fetuses are people' position. So it's a very very uncomfortable question from them, and either answer will turn off 75% of the people in agreement with them. (Yes, I'm aware that's more than half. Some people will be disgusted by either answer.)
2) Don't ask the 'incest' exception, just rape, people can rationalize that as 'a deformed life is not a full life', although that's rather ignorin
You can be baffled all you want, but that's just because that analogy is very stupid.
The government has always favored those with money. They always end up getting more out of it than poor people. Crimes, for example, are not only classified as worse the more is stolen, but often not even investigated below certain values.
Look at the entire concept of 'limited liability companies'. If you have enough money, you can suddenly not be liable for debts you incurred! (Without having to declare bankruptcy.)
Look at the air traffic control system, run for free by the government, and used only by people and companies that can afford their own planes. Meanwhile, the government bails out those same companies.
Look at copyright law. Extended retroactively after death. Yes, in theory this could benefit random individuals, but in practice almost all 'after-death' copyrights are held by rich individuals or organizations. Meanwhile, they don't make the dozens of changes that could actually result in much more fairness in the music industry, resulting in more works being created. (Which is the point of copyright law.)
And thats just the subtle stuff. For more blatant, go look at police operating as private security for companies. Look at police union-busting activities in the first half of the 20th century, where the police would sometimes literally commit assault on individuals at company direction, and other times just look the other way while the company hired people to do it.
Oh, and for the absolute most subtle thing: Without a government, the rich are, by a very very very high margin, one of the first people to be kidnapped and ransomed, and/or murdered and robbed. The odds of someone kidnapping me are much much lower. Likewise, my contracts are tiny. And barring some sort of physical injury, I would have a hard time suffering more than a few thousand dollars worth of damages if anyone did anything to me. They benefit much more from a society of laws and courts, simply by having more things of value and more people who would want to take those from them.
Liberals just want to alter who some of the benefits are aimed at, aiming more of them at poor people and less at rich. Or, more often, just leaving the ones aimed at the rich alone, and adding new ones aimed at the poor.
Like Anatole France said: The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. He neglected to add that the law, in its majestic equality, allow the poor, as well as the rich, to donate thousands of dollars to politicians, to hire people to protect them from ruffians, and to deduct golfing trips to Europe as business expenses.
And your 'pie' analogy is nonsensical. Money is non-linear. If you're living on 500 a month, and that's raised to 600, you're now a lot better off than if you were living on 50,000 a month and now you're at 60,000.
If 100 people go from 500 to 600, that is a lot better for society than for one person to go from 50,000 to 60,000.
That is so amazingly obviously I have no idea how you're going to redefine 'pie' to attempt to get around it.
pro-choice...anti-war
You'd be completely and utterly thrown out and insulted by the right, period, for either of those two positions.
Being an anarchist would render you subject to jokes by everyone.
Being anti-welfare would not endear you to the left, but, frankly, the left knows how locked in that is and doesn't really consider being against it that much of a threat.
And Randian Objectivist would result in everyone on the left thinking you were fairly stupid. Ayn Rand philosophy is gibberish...she doesn't ever support her claims with any sort of facts or logic, just asserting that certain things are true therefore certain other things are true. Granted, all philosophy does this to some extent, but her claims are especially unsupported. And her followers like to twist her claims to even sillier positions, like their support for copyright law. Seriously. Ayn Rand is for people who've read no other philosophy. :)
But, anyway, you'd rather obviously be a Libertarian, but as they have no chance in hell of being elected, you should work with the Democrats to kick out the Republicans, and then join up wherever the actual small-government faction of the Republicans go when it collapses. They could end up with the Libertarians, they could stage a coup of their own party and end up in control, whatever. As they are the only intelligent faction of the Republicans, it's almost certain they'll end up in some sort of rebuilt opposition party to the Democrats, although it might take a decade or so.
You may consider yourself a libertarian, but you've been almost entirely drinking the Republican Kool-Aid. I will point out your factual errors:
Yes, he may have used things like the NSA wiretap program more extensively (a program in existance for decades and used extensively by Clinton as well),
He didn't use the legal FISA wiretap program, until recently forced to by the courts. Before that, he wiretapped in violation of the law. Whoever told you anything else was lying to you.
Obviously you hate Bush, and probably attribute anything that congress has done to him even though his working relationship with them has been tenious at best even when the Republicans were in power.
Asserting the Republicans in Congress 'did anything' is a factual error. Just kidding...barely.
One of those I have the most respect for is Liberman and his party has almost excommunicated him. He doesn't follow a party line and uses reason when making decisions rather than listening to the idiot figureheads with extremist views like most politicians on both sides.
Lieberman does follow a party line. He follows the Republican party line, which is why the Democrats got rather annoyed at him and kicked him out.
Granted, he lied during the election and asserted he was really a Democrat, and when the Republican in Conneticut reelected him he immediately continued his 'provide cover for Republican insanities by being a token Democrat who agrees with them' and supporting the war he had vowed to end.
Now, you may agree with Lieberman's position, although I have to say, the Libertarian party seems to be in a rather large disagreement with, at minimum, the continuation of the war. But don't blame Democrats for actually wanting Democrats in their party. Lieberman was free to run as an independent and get elected, and he did so.
Try doing some historical research if you really think the Bush is much much worse than a proven sexual preditor (I'm not talking about Monica, she was willing, but the trial where Monica came up where he haid to pay 100's of thousands in a civil judgement) named Clinton who was only the second President ever to be impeached for lying under oath
That is an extremely...wrong...description of the Paula Jones case. The courts dismissed her suit, because she couldn't demonstrate, even if her claims were true, that she actually suffered any harm. Before the appeal was looked at, Clinton, apparently tired of this whole thing, gave her $85,000 to just end it.
I don't know how you got 'sexual predator' out of that. The last court to look at the whole thing found him completely non-liable for anything.
And, yes, he lied, and, yes, he got in trouble for that with the bar. Shame on him for that, but that doesn't appear to be that related to politics.
an incompetent Carter that couldn't handle a hostage crisis
Oh, good lord. You do have the talking points down, don't you. First of all the hostage crisis was extremely unimportant. Seriously. 52 damn people. That many people die every fifteen minutes from smoking! It cost him the election, but pretending it's some huge stain on Carter is completely idiotic.
And secondly, Reagan caused the hostage crisis to be extended by almost twice as long as it should have been. Why you're blaming anything on Carter is beyond me. Carter couldn't very well invade Iran to get the hostages back, and once the Shah died, he proposed exactly the deal that was accepted minutes after Reagan was sworn into office.
Can you come up with a single reason why anyone should care one tiny bit about the hostage crisis, and, if so, why they should blame Carter? Can you explain how Carter should have handled it?
and made our already suffering economy worse,
Do you have an example of how he made it 'worse', or just repeating words you have heard before? Because he didn't actually make anyt
It's called the commander in chief role.
Which means he's the commander of whatever military Congress chooses to have.
Military commanders do not choose what the military does except within the limits defined for them. Lieutenant do not decide to take hills, generals do not decide to deploy nukes, and presidents don't decide to invade countries. They all merely follow lawful orders. The president doesn't get orders, but he does have to follow the law. (Or, to put it another way, Congress gives him orders via the law.)
And none of that means he's in charge of 'national security'. Congress is the group that has the requirement to raise an army and navy in times of war and to, and I quote 'provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions'. And to 'provide for the common Defence'.
That's right. It's the explicit job of Congress to repel invasions. Or, at least, provide the means for someone else to do it.
The President has the sole authority to declare war, not congress.
I'm sorry, you've apparently confused this country with a different one. Congress, in fact, has the sole authority to declare war. It rather explicitly says that when it says 'Congress shall have power...to declare war'
The president has...um...well, no authority to really do anything at all by himself. Seriously. Most of his powers are veto-ish, in that he can override another branch, or they require confirmation by another branch. But let's look at the sole places where he's given any power:
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States(As I said, being commander just means he's the top order-taker.); he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices(His amazing 'Demand an opinion of his own staff in writing' power), and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment. (His veto over the judicial branch.)
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur (And you could write this the other direction and say that Congress has the power to make treaties if he agrees.); and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law(Another 'must agree with Congress' power.): but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.(This isn't a power of the president at all, it's a power of congress to let the president do something.)
The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session. (So he can do something, only if Congress doesn't.)
Section 3 - State of the Union, Convening Congress
He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient(This isn't a power either! It's a duty!); he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them(That's right! An emergency power! If something really bad happens, he can...make Congress get their asses back to Washington and actually do something!), and in Case of Disagre
There are reasons that Clinton won in '96 other than voters standing behind him. The Republicans ran Bob Dole, who had the charisma of a wooden spoon at best, and gave Clinton at least the fence-sitter vote.
I'm not entirely sure that it's fair to compare Bob Dole and wooden spoons.
It'd likewise be hard to say that Bush won the 2004 election because voters were not distancing themselves from him. It seems more likely to me that the Democrats just got lucky and managed to run the only candidate who couldn't beat Bush.
Kerry is what you get when the Democrats in Washington choose a presidential candidate. (Or, in fact, choose anyone at all.) This is because the people advising the Democrats in Washington are complete fucking morons who have almost a zero success rate, yet for some reason keep being listened to.
If it had been up to them, the Democrats would have lost the 2006 election.