Well, hell, I don't even know why we're arguing with each other if that's what you think of Republicans.;) I don't even think that badly of all them.
The level of repression is getting really scary, though. There really are three kinds of morality preaching right-wing leaders:
1) They don't believe what they're saying. I.e., Ralph Reed.
2) They believe what they're saying, but somehow it doesn't apply to them. I.e., Newt Gingrich.
3) They are fighting inner demons that urge them to do exactly what they are fighting against, and they assume everyone else has these demons. The extreme example of this, of course, is Foley.
There is also a fourth category of people, those who honestly believe and are inherently decent people, I.e, Joel Hunter.(1)
Such a belief is more or less incompatible with being on the religious right, though, as the religious right is all about punishing people and Christianity is about loving God and loving each other. Decent people don't want to punish each other for sinning, or even punish people at all, although it's obviously sometimes necessary. Only wackjobs like to stand up there and say 'You have sinned against job, and now you will burn in the firey pits of hell!' like they're pleased to be able to declaim it is so.
But, getting back to torture, we've got, like, a 0 level there, where they don't even pretend to be moral, but somehow, magically, we're supposed to consider them so.
1) If you don't know who that is, google it, it's a funny story. Basically, they picked him to lead the Christian Coalition, so he started working out ways to feed the poor and not harm the earth. They all said 'Whoa, what are you, some sort of liberal hippy? Start gay bashing and fight abortion, like Jesus said!', so he declined the job.
American conservatism is a constellation of political ideologies within the United States under the blanket heading of conservative. Included are fiscal conservatives, free market or economic liberals, social conservatives,[1] and religious conservatives,[2][3] as well as supporters of a strong American military, opponents of internationalism,[4] and proponents of states' rights.[5]
That's not a philosophy. Like I said, some of those directly conflict.
I'm not saying that the 'conservative' you think exists cannot exist.
There are merely two problems. One, as you pointed you, conservatives have differing ideas on what the goals are. Even if we leave out the lunatics who want a theocracy or a invade the entire world, 'conservatives' differ too much in goals.
Some of them want a near anarchy, some of them want an almost socialist country, some of them want to crack down on harmful business activities, some of them think the market will fix everything, etc.
So...the guiding principle is...carefulness? That's not a philosophy. Everyone is voting on where to take a trip, and you're in the 'As long as we drive carefully' category, and just personally want to go to Washington DC. Other people in your group want to go to New York or Seattle or Mexico.
You. Can't. Vote. Being. Careful. As. A. Destination.
It's the destination that matters in politics. People who think we should slowly raise the minimum wage to 8 dollars an hour have a lot more in common than people who think we should instantly raise it that high than they do with people think we should slowly lower it to 2 dollars an hour.
The other problem that, even pretending 'careful' was a destination, no political party runs on the platform of 'slow, deliberate change'. The Republicans certainly don't. They are flatly opposed to certain changes, rejecting it out of hand, and completely in favor of other changes.
The Democrats, appear, at least, to take their time and debate issues with the country. Remember Hillary's health care initiative?
You can call yourself whatever you want, and you can call whatever you believe whatever you want.
Obviously some people on right actually hold political positions, and obviously some of them refer to their thoughts as 'conservative'. They can't agree on what this is, and the 'conservative' you're talking about is not actually reflected in any politician that the right runs.
The fact no one can figure out what term to call you should sorta clue you into that. The reason that no one can figure it out is that you assert you are 'conservative' to start with, and thus you end up with all sorts of weird labels that people who incorrectly insist they're on the right have called themselves. Drop that assertion, and everyone knows exactly what to call you. You're a progressive who urges caution, and like I mentioned earlier, probably a bit of a liberal too. (1)
But that won't happen, as you are associating with the wrong people. You are in McDonalds wondering why they never seem to be able to sell you a pizza. Well, um, they don't make pizza.
There is no political philosophy of the people who run for office on the right, except 'We're not the left', and the left actually has elected a group of people who think the way you do, we're actually selling pizza. (We just got a lot of pizza elected to Congress.)
It doesn't matter if half the customers there want pizza, and some have even brought their own and snuck it in until McDonalds, in some theoretical universe, starts serving pizza. You're in the wrong store.
Sadly, while you're there, you're buying soft drinks and other things to hold you over, so it is in McDonalds' interest to not correct your misconception that you will actually be able to purchase pizza at some time in the future. They are anti-pizza, it's reflected in their stances of 'small government' and 'don't tax the rich'. (Of course, in their 'legislate morality' concept, they have pizza, but it's a mushroom, sauerkraut, vanilla ice cream, and small-shards-of-metal pizza, raw.)
And, yes, I know you probably voted Democratic the last election, because, well, McDonalds has managed to burn down half the city. The problem is that you still consider yourself based in McDonalds, and you're waiting for them to fix their supposed problems with the pizza oven that they do not, in fact, possess.
1) Although objecting to torture and infringing various rights might just mean you are actually a human American, as opposed to elected Republicans, many who appear to be some sort of daywalking vampires.
Incidentally, chlorine gas, aka, mustard gas, is what you get when you mix ammonia and bleach in the right proportion.
If you mix it in the wrong proportion, you either get an explosion or a fire, depending on which you have too much of, in addition to some chlorine gas.
Anyone who tries to stop someone from gassing a room full of people by outlawing things is inane.
Agreed. Interestingly, there is a sort of overlap between the real-conservative world view and that of the true progressive (I'm thinking Lord Macaulay style here): both are concerned with improving the world by making only well reasoned, justified changes and eschewing both change for the sake of change and a neo-Luddite stasis quo.
I agree with you, except for the fact you haven't noticed that the 'real-conservative' world view you think exists doesn't actually exist, and the only people actually promoting 'slowly but surely trying to solve problems' are the progressives.;)
You want deliberative progressives, ones that err on the side of changing too slowly instead of changing too quickly. This is fine, different people have different priorities and speeds. But you don't want your fictional conservatives that don't appear to actually exist or run for office.;)
I had always assumed that a "progressive" was just a pretentious college-student word for "liberal"
Heh. The joke here is that the left started as 'progressive', way back in at the turn of the last century. Unions, minimum wage laws, child labor laws, food labeling laws, all courtesy of the Progressive Era.
In addition to the great progressive fuckup, Prohibition. People think that was about morality, but it actually was about the negative behaviors associated with alcohol, like wife-beating and not providing for your family. (It was mostly men who drank.) There was a huge overlap between woman's Suffrage and the Temperance movement.
Most of the problems Prohibition was trying to stop were actually stopped with legalizing divorce and child support and outlawing husbands raping their wives and stuff like that.
Then there was fun in the 30s with actual anarchists and communists and stuff, because the 'mainstream' had swung to the left too, with FDR, so the fringe of the left got a little kooky. And the left originally shunned minorities, and in fact tried to protect their jobs from them. (Of course, who these 'minorities' were depending on where you were. Sometimes it was a Irish coming in and 'taking our jobs', sometimes the Italians, sometimes the Chinese, whoever they were, they were always 'taking our jobs'.)
And then...something happened in the late 1940s. The liberals invaded the Democratic party, proclaiming equal rights for blacks. I honestly don't understand what happened there, but they did. Enough of the Democratic party was outraged that they left and ran on the Dixiecrat ticket.
Since then, the 'left' has been a weird mix of the two, often with no one appearing to understand why, for example, some on the left are in favor of gun control (The progressives think it would reduce crime) and some against it (The liberals thinks guns are a right, and that's the end of it.).
That's, like, progressive history, and I'm mostly a progressive. (Although I don't think gun control is a good idea.) Liberal history traces back to John Locke and the enlightenment, and is the foundation of the US, although I'm not sure what it was doing between that and the 1940s.
I'll agree with you that it would be nice if that was what being 'conservative' meant.
But the problem is, it hasn't. 'Conservative' wasn't 'stolen', it never stood for that, that's never been the philosophy of any 'conservative' elected to office, at all, except maybe Ron Paul, and, guess what? He calls himself a libertarian, not a 'conservative', and is pretty damn far outside mainstream Republican politics.
Have you ever talked with a communist before? One who actually believes that 'communism has never really been tried', and, thus, it is hasn't been disproven? That have a list of reasons that China and Russia and North Korea and Vietnam and, well, all over communist countries aren't really communists to start with and/or were successful until they stopped being communist?
Conservatives are sounding an awful lot like those guys, where they have a position they're sure will work, if only the people they put in charge of themselves would actually, you know, do that thing.
Of course, they can't even agree on what that thing is. 'Small government', 'don't change the laws', and 'socially conservative, aka, regulate morality' are all mutually exclusive of each other, and all of them have been called 'conservative' for a good 50 years.
I don't know if you can technically have three things that are mutually exclusive of each other, but passing laws regulating morality makes the government bigger, and is a change. Reducing the government is also a change, and disallows regulating morality. Not changing the laws disallows both reducing the government and regulating morality. Seriously, the fact that all three of these things are supposedly 'conservative' just shows that conservative wasn't stolen, it was missing to start with.(1)
And I'm sure you've been against Bush from almost the start. Most people who've been paying attention have. I'm not trying to insult everyone who calls themselves 'conservative' by attching Bush to them, I'm just pointing out that 'conservative' is so empty it was possible for his actions to, impossibly, be considered as such.
And I'm not sure being 'against' change, or 'resisting' change, in general is any sort of logical political philosophy anyway. That would imply that you think every single law is exactly at the right place, needing only some slow adjustments, and you'd want, for example, us to stop torturing people very slowly, reducing the amount over a period of five years or so to zero.
Obviously, you don't think that, but that's because you're actually a liberal, not a conservative. Almost all your list is liberal objections, with 'selling national parks' being somewhat progressive/socialist and 'reducing taxes without reducing spending' being the little known 'Let's not do incredibly stupid things' political philosophy.
1) Note those aren't goals, which can be mutually exclusive in the final stages, like, I said, affirmative action is, but positions, which are mutually exclusive to start with. You can fight to maximize both X and Y, or whatever, even if it turns out that you eventually get to a point where you can either add a bit more to X or Y and you must choose. You cannot fight to maximize X, minimize X, and leave X the same, all at the same time.
And what part of 'It doesn't matter if it's constitutional for the Feds to regulate email, the states can additionally regulate it anyway' do you not understand?
That's not what I said at all. I said there is no such thing as a conservative. The philosophy doesn't exist. There is no concept behind the word 'conservative'.
When the Democrats are in power, 'conservative' is 'what the government isn't doing'. When the Republicans are in power, 'conservative' is 'what the government is doing', until the morally backrupt conservatives run us off a cliff or into a wall, at which point people like you say 'Oh, those were just random Republicans, not real conservatives'.
The Republicans like to pretend there's some sort of 'fiscally and morally conservative' point that exists and that, inexplicably, all the politicians they keep running for office fall short of. There isn't such a point, or, if there is, it is outside of the political system in this country.
The left, OTOH, as I explained quite clearly, does have a philosophy. In fact, they have two. Politicians on the left almost always fall short of one or the other of them, and sometimes they fall short of both. (Sometimes they get kicked out of the party for falling short of both, and I think everyone knows what Senator I'm thinking of.) The difference, however, is that there is an actual set or two of standards, and the Democrats actually have people who understand and follow them.
I like how everyone keeps trying to make my posts fit in the Republican narrative that there are actually such things as 'real conservatives', and our failure is that we, for some reason, seem unable to elect them, when that's exactly the opposite of my post. It's getting kinda funny.
Did I once, in my post, say the government wasn't wrong?
Yes, you did in fact say that. Or at least, you said they were operating legally.
The first poster said: What the headline calls domestic spying is actually the tapping of phone calls to and from people inside the United States to and from someone outside the United States who is a known terrorist or member of Al Queda. It is not, as some believe, the government wiretapping phone calls internal to the United States.
Then someone said: And how do you know this? Because they told you so?
And you said: Yes, actually.... After all, you have no proof one way or the other. So yes, we go by what has been released to the public so far and we don't need to make up more conspiracy theories.
Which is all well and good, except what has been admitted it is illegal. The 'proof' is already there.
Now, in theory, you could have been agreeing he broke the law, but just not via the specific actions the GP said, which doesn't really make a lot of sense. It's basically saying 'I don't see why they have to search his house, he already confessed to killing that girl. We should just trust him that he didn't kill anyone else. Stop making up conspiracies.'.
I don't understand. Where are the Democrats in that?
I mean, they're not the party that gets elected by making the American public wet their pants by waving imaginary dirty bombs around. The Democrats are, according to the Republicans, endangering the US, which is where they, in fact, live. If that's not living on the edge I don't know what is. So they're not the pussies.
And while they may have proposed stupid things in the past, at least they didn't, you know, stupidly invade Iraq.
The problem is, when a large group of people essentially hijack a term and take it as their own, there's not a lot you can do about it. I used to call myself a conservative, until I realized that I didn't agree with any of the new Evangelical would-be "conservatives." Like a lot of other people I know, I now tend to describe myself more in terms of libertarianism.
The actual problem is that there is no actual conservative philosophy. At all.
It means, at various times 'We want things to stay the way they are.', 'We want things to return to a mythical golden era', 'We want to reduce spending', 'We want to implement moral codes as law', along with various bigotted concepts that have snuck in, and probably more I haven't thought of.
Your thoughts are, kinda, what I'm complaining about, like there's some 'real' conservatism and people have lost their way. Although you've officially given up finding it, which is good, the point is, really, it never existed, at all, in any form. There never was, and never will be, a 'conservative' movement, because there's no principles behind in, it's just emptiness. All they know is they all have some disagreement with the left, or want something that the left won't give them. (Like the neocons, who got kicked out of the left back in the 70s because they were complete raving loonies who thought you could bring democracy to other countries at gunpoint.)
You can see there's nothing behind it by going back in time one decade and comparing what they said about Clinton to what they say now: Waco:bad::torture:good FISA:infringement of rights::wiretapping in violation FISA:good UN peacekeeping:bad::invading an innocent country:good Impeachment over something unrelated to the office:good::Impeachment over something related to the office:bad Ethics reforms while running for office:good::even vaguely having ethics in office:bad.
'Conservatives' do not stand in some fixed position and compare things objectively to that position. They instead say and do whatever the leadership says, it is, by defination, 'conservative', and that's all 'conservative' is, there is nothing else.
The left, OTOH, is made of just two movements, the progressive movement (Fighting for the government to solve problems, especially with the downtrodden) and the liberal movement (The principles this country was founded on, with rule of law and democracy and civil rights.). In general they go in the same direction, but you can see this conflict in, for example, affirmative action, where the progressive thought is to 'fix wrongs' in the past, and the liberal thought is to treat everyone completely equal no matter what. The ACLU is very liberal, and most left religious groups are very progressive. The 'left' has two positions it's standing in, and sometimes they fight each other.
But sometimes they point in the same direction anyway: The liberals object to the Iraq war because we were lied and tricked into it, subvert the democratic process, and people are getting tortured and wiretapped and all sorts of civil liberty issues are happening. And the progressives object to the Iraq war because the poor are dying for no damn reason at all while the rich are getting even more insanely super-duper rich, and that, um, we don't seem to be accomplishing anything.(1) (That's not to say, of course, that you can't be both liberal and progressive and object to it for both reasons.)
And, thanks to the current economic inequality, and the war, a bunch of progressives just got elected to Congress.
Of course, as the media is full of complete idiots, no one in it actually appears to understand ANY of this, and the right is presented as if it actually has some sort of coherent position, and left as if it only has, maybe, one, and usually not even that.
1) The progressive movement understands that, when something doesn't work, you should actually stop doing it, re: Prohibition, which was the great progressive mistake.
After all, you have no proof one way or the other. So yes, we go by what has been released to the public so far and we don't need to make up more conspiracy theories.
FISA doesn't allow the government to spy on communication between Americans and terrorists without a warrant, you lying sack of shit:
Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year if the Attorney General certifies in writing under oath that--
(B) there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party; and
Period. That's what the law says.
There's no other way to intercept without a court order, or at least a retroactive court order. (There are plenty of ways, however, to intercept with one.) Now, we can argue if that requirement is a good idea, or if it can be removed without constitutional issues. But it's right there, in the law. The Attorney General did not authorize the spying under that rule, because he knew he was listening to Americans. So the president is not 'withstanding other laws', specifically the law: 'A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute'.
So, as the executive branch has, you know, already admitted breaking the law(1), so maybe taking their word as to to, exactly, how much of the law they are breaking is not a good idea.
And stop saying 'the government'. I trust the government to follow the law. 'The government' includes the judicial branch issuing warrants and the legislative branch doing oversight of the program in general. It's the executive branch that decided to operate outside of that framework.
1) Yes, they have. Their 'AUMF authorized it' theory, which was actually only advanced by the media whores and not the administration, was shot down in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, where the courts said that authorization to invade a country didn't magically invalidate other laws, especially laws designed to cover, duh, war time. The AUMF could not, and does not, void FISA, anymore than it voided the UCMJ.
The only other thoery they have, and the only one they've actually advanced, is their nonsensical one that basically reduces to 'If the president does it, it's not illegal', which is just so manifestly incorrect under our system of government that it's actually hard to explain why, except to explain that all people must follow the law at all times unless explicitly noted.
Did everyone just forget that Bush (who they oddly trust implicitly) will not be in power forever.
And that this 'war' will continue forever, too.
Conservativism==Whatever the Republicans in power are doing, exactly until the Americans get so annoyed at them they vote them out or they have obvciously failed, at which point the whole thing becomes fake conservativism..real conservativism, you see, has never been tried, or never been tried correctly.
It's a lot like communism that way. All the failings are on the implementation and the people who try, or just pretend to try, to implement it, and it is never wrong.
Just wait. They're already turning on Bush, talking about how he's not really conservative. They are, of course, correct, but everyone else started pointing that out six fucking years ago. They don't get to disown him after years and years of sucking up.
You're mostly correct, but the courts have struck down laws that literally make no sense at all.
Sometimes it's because of typos, and sometimes it's because of, well, too much drinking in the legislative branch. But sometimes laws get passed that say nonsensical and contradictory things, and do get struck down because of that.
A good example right now are laws banning possession of dimethyltryptamine. As human beings produce this within their body, this technically results in every human being manufacturing, being in possession of, and under the influence of, a controlled substance. As this is a nonsensical legal result, laws against possession and use of dimethyltryptamine are being challenged, in various places, on the grounds that they are really really dumb.
However, the courts cannot strike down just plain 'stupid' laws. I.e., they can't strike down a law requiring you to walk around backwards, even though that is clearly stupid, but they can strike down one requiring you to levitate three feet off the ground, as that is actually impossible.
It might be wishful thinking, but it is, right now, TRIVIAL to track down spammers. You can ask spam fighters and they'll give you a huge list of names and businesses.
By your logic, we shouldn't make murder illegal, because people will just kill other people in secret and hide their bodies.
Well...yeah. And? We want spammers to have to operate in secret. We want it to be as hard to lease a T1 to spam with as it is to hire a professional killer. We want spammers to have to launder money through front business, and have met in dark alleys, and constantly be afraid that the person they're talking to that wants to hire them is wearing a wire.
Of course it won't stop all spam. We pass the law, we say that if you spam you will go to jail for six months, and we start locking up spammers, something like 90% of them will instantly quit, another 9% of them will be too stupid to quit and end up in jail, and maybe 1% will operate outlaw.
Of course, they'll have to do it via pump-and-dump and other indirect fraud, because, frankly, you can't operate outlaw businesses by indiscriminately telling people where you are and what you are selling, that is a completely insane modus operandi.
Even if it is constitutional to regulate email at the Federal level, that doesn't, in the slightest, affect whether or not states can also regulate it.
The US government regulates and taxes the importation of oil. Every state, additionally, has various taxes on it.
The US government regulates all automobiles sold in the US. California, for one, put additional restrictions on automobiles sold in their state. (Both also control whether or not said automobiles can be operated on the roads, but that's a separate issue. It's possible to own automobiles you can operate on the road, but cannot legally sell without repairing certain things. And it's legal, IIRC, to sell someone a car with tinted windows in California, but not to operate it on the road.)
It is perfectly possible to decide that the Federal government has the authority to regulate email, and that that doesn't have anything to do with the ability of states to add additional regulations to email.
The problem isn't constitutional issues, it's that CAN-SPAM specifically restricts what state laws can do.
Frankly, almost every Federal law that says 'States cannot outlaw X', where X isn't a clarification of something banned by the constitution anyway, is a bad idea. (By 'clarification', I mean things like the Civil Rights act disallowing pseudo-poll taxes and stuff like that.)
I think we have, in general, pretty good rules about what states can and cannot do in the constitution, and we don't need the Federal government butting in unless people's rights are being systematically infringed, in which case some temporary preemptive protection is a good idea until they learn to stop. Stopping states from outlawing certain, non-constitutionally-protected behaviors is an even worse overreach of the Fed's power than them outlawing whatever they feel like.
A strong hurricane season always means a weak one the next year, due to stirring up the ocean currents. Hurricanes are causes, in part, by warm surface waters, and they tend to mix the water up so it doesn't happen the next year. It doesn't matter what causes a strong season.
Likewise, a weak year, like this one, means we might have a moderately strong year next year. (Actually, I don't know how bad the season was, I just know not many of them hit land or even threatened to.) This isn't assured, because, like I said, a lot of factors are required for that.
In fact, you want a sure sign that something is screwing up the weather, that would be it, two strong seasons in a row. We're nowhere near that point.
Hurricanes are a lot like earthquakes in the respect that, if we could magically stop them, we'd start building up a monster one that would wipe everything out, as the top of the ocean got warmer and warmer. (Of course, we don't need them to hit the damn land.)
And people who insist on using the leaky ones, or who have leaks without them (Which does happen.), need to get the damn 'Restart Firefox' extension, turn on sessions, choose that every four hours or so, and STFU.
Seriously. It's not a Firefox problem, because, if it was, it would happen to me. I, like the parent, keep Firefox open almost all the time, with dozens of tabs and four or five windows, and have never had Firefox go above 100 megs. (It usually hovers around 60, but I have a lot of extensions.)
Yes, folks, imagine a fascist response that will not, in fact, happen, in a court of law.
People in the gallery can wear whatever they want. Defendants can wear whatever they want to. Judges and and bailiffs have a uniform. Jurors can wear whatever they want. (Although they'll probably be dismissed by one of the lawyers if they wear that, but they can be dismissed for pretty much any reason.)
It is barely possible that a lawyer might be told to change, but lawyers have to conform to certain behavior in a courtroom, including speech codes. They can't tell the jury certain things. It's possible that one of those things is 'Judges are all Liars!', in which case they couldn't wear the shirt either.
Pretending that is analogous to students in a classroom is idiotic. Lawyers are analogous to, duh, teachers. A teacher couldn't wear a shirt promoting a viewpoint they were forbidden to promote with speech.
That is, if you were intent on making the analogy, which doesn't make any sense at all. A court is much more restrictive in speech, and has a lot more constitutional justification to be more restrictive, than a school. They can't send you to prison for lying to a teacher, because your lies can't send others to prison.
But what, exactly, does happen if 'you', some random spectator in court, wear such a shirt? Nothing at all.
But you, you little fascist turd, would love it if something did happen, wouldn't you? You think it's the job of the government to punish people who wear clothing someone in the government disapproves of.
Surely if a cop pulls you over and you're wearing an anti-war t-shirt, he can beat the crap out of you, right? Or at least make up something to charge you with.
No, you see, I learned in school that 'clothing' was, in fact, pieces of fabric that people wear on their body, to cover themselves and for warmth and protection. Not only do they not disrupt class, they rarely take any action at all, being, like I said, non-animate fabric.
It's slightly confusing, because most clothing used to be alive, like part of sheep or cotton plants, but I assure you, they are long dead, and cannot move by themselves. Therefore, they cannot throw things at the teacher, or talk with other students, or any of the other ways to 'disrupt class' that exist.
Of course, they can 'disrupt class', by the teacher or other administrator choosing to make an issue over what is written on them, in which case the disrupter of class should be removed permanently from the school. Hopefully said teacher or administrator will be able to find another job somewhere else, where they're allowed to harass customers because of the clothing they wear.
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Well, hell, I don't even know why we're arguing with each other if that's what you think of Republicans. ;) I don't even think that badly of all them.
The level of repression is getting really scary, though. There really are three kinds of morality preaching right-wing leaders:
1) They don't believe what they're saying. I.e., Ralph Reed.
2) They believe what they're saying, but somehow it doesn't apply to them. I.e., Newt Gingrich.
3) They are fighting inner demons that urge them to do exactly what they are fighting against, and they assume everyone else has these demons. The extreme example of this, of course, is Foley.
There is also a fourth category of people, those who honestly believe and are inherently decent people, I.e, Joel Hunter.(1)
Such a belief is more or less incompatible with being on the religious right, though, as the religious right is all about punishing people and Christianity is about loving God and loving each other. Decent people don't want to punish each other for sinning, or even punish people at all, although it's obviously sometimes necessary. Only wackjobs like to stand up there and say 'You have sinned against job, and now you will burn in the firey pits of hell!' like they're pleased to be able to declaim it is so.
But, getting back to torture, we've got, like, a 0 level there, where they don't even pretend to be moral, but somehow, magically, we're supposed to consider them so.
1) If you don't know who that is, google it, it's a funny story. Basically, they picked him to lead the Christian Coalition, so he started working out ways to feed the poor and not harm the earth. They all said 'Whoa, what are you, some sort of liberal hippy? Start gay bashing and fight abortion, like Jesus said!', so he declined the job.
Have you actually read the Wikipedia article?
American conservatism is a constellation of political ideologies within the United States under the blanket heading of conservative. Included are fiscal conservatives, free market or economic liberals, social conservatives,[1] and religious conservatives,[2][3] as well as supporters of a strong American military, opponents of internationalism,[4] and proponents of states' rights.[5]
That's not a philosophy. Like I said, some of those directly conflict.
I'm not saying that the 'conservative' you think exists cannot exist.
There are merely two problems. One, as you pointed you, conservatives have differing ideas on what the goals are. Even if we leave out the lunatics who want a theocracy or a invade the entire world, 'conservatives' differ too much in goals.
Some of them want a near anarchy, some of them want an almost socialist country, some of them want to crack down on harmful business activities, some of them think the market will fix everything, etc.
So...the guiding principle is...carefulness? That's not a philosophy. Everyone is voting on where to take a trip, and you're in the 'As long as we drive carefully' category, and just personally want to go to Washington DC. Other people in your group want to go to New York or Seattle or Mexico.
You. Can't. Vote. Being. Careful. As. A. Destination.
It's the destination that matters in politics. People who think we should slowly raise the minimum wage to 8 dollars an hour have a lot more in common than people who think we should instantly raise it that high than they do with people think we should slowly lower it to 2 dollars an hour.
The other problem that, even pretending 'careful' was a destination, no political party runs on the platform of 'slow, deliberate change'. The Republicans certainly don't. They are flatly opposed to certain changes, rejecting it out of hand, and completely in favor of other changes.
The Democrats, appear, at least, to take their time and debate issues with the country. Remember Hillary's health care initiative?
You can call yourself whatever you want, and you can call whatever you believe whatever you want.
Obviously some people on right actually hold political positions, and obviously some of them refer to their thoughts as 'conservative'. They can't agree on what this is, and the 'conservative' you're talking about is not actually reflected in any politician that the right runs.
The fact no one can figure out what term to call you should sorta clue you into that. The reason that no one can figure it out is that you assert you are 'conservative' to start with, and thus you end up with all sorts of weird labels that people who incorrectly insist they're on the right have called themselves. Drop that assertion, and everyone knows exactly what to call you. You're a progressive who urges caution, and like I mentioned earlier, probably a bit of a liberal too. (1)
But that won't happen, as you are associating with the wrong people. You are in McDonalds wondering why they never seem to be able to sell you a pizza. Well, um, they don't make pizza.
There is no political philosophy of the people who run for office on the right, except 'We're not the left', and the left actually has elected a group of people who think the way you do, we're actually selling pizza. (We just got a lot of pizza elected to Congress.)
It doesn't matter if half the customers there want pizza, and some have even brought their own and snuck it in until McDonalds, in some theoretical universe, starts serving pizza. You're in the wrong store.
Sadly, while you're there, you're buying soft drinks and other things to hold you over, so it is in McDonalds' interest to not correct your misconception that you will actually be able to purchase pizza at some time in the future. They are anti-pizza, it's reflected in their stances of 'small government' and 'don't tax the rich'. (Of course, in their 'legislate morality' concept, they have pizza, but it's a mushroom, sauerkraut, vanilla ice cream, and small-shards-of-metal pizza, raw.)
And, yes, I know you probably voted Democratic the last election, because, well, McDonalds has managed to burn down half the city. The problem is that you still consider yourself based in McDonalds, and you're waiting for them to fix their supposed problems with the pizza oven that they do not, in fact, possess.
1) Although objecting to torture and infringing various rights might just mean you are actually a human American, as opposed to elected Republicans, many who appear to be some sort of daywalking vampires.
Incidentally, chlorine gas, aka, mustard gas, is what you get when you mix ammonia and bleach in the right proportion.
If you mix it in the wrong proportion, you either get an explosion or a fire, depending on which you have too much of, in addition to some chlorine gas.
Anyone who tries to stop someone from gassing a room full of people by outlawing things is inane.
Agreed. Interestingly, there is a sort of overlap between the real-conservative world view and that of the true progressive (I'm thinking Lord Macaulay style here): both are concerned with improving the world by making only well reasoned, justified changes and eschewing both change for the sake of change and a neo-Luddite stasis quo.
I agree with you, except for the fact you haven't noticed that the 'real-conservative' world view you think exists doesn't actually exist, and the only people actually promoting 'slowly but surely trying to solve problems' are the progressives. ;)
You want deliberative progressives, ones that err on the side of changing too slowly instead of changing too quickly. This is fine, different people have different priorities and speeds. But you don't want your fictional conservatives that don't appear to actually exist or run for office. ;)
The matter is not, in fact, being investigated.
It might be investigated after the Democrats take power, but there is no actual investigation at this point.
I had always assumed that a "progressive" was just a pretentious college-student word for "liberal"
Heh. The joke here is that the left started as 'progressive', way back in at the turn of the last century. Unions, minimum wage laws, child labor laws, food labeling laws, all courtesy of the Progressive Era.
In addition to the great progressive fuckup, Prohibition. People think that was about morality, but it actually was about the negative behaviors associated with alcohol, like wife-beating and not providing for your family. (It was mostly men who drank.) There was a huge overlap between woman's Suffrage and the Temperance movement.
Most of the problems Prohibition was trying to stop were actually stopped with legalizing divorce and child support and outlawing husbands raping their wives and stuff like that.
Then there was fun in the 30s with actual anarchists and communists and stuff, because the 'mainstream' had swung to the left too, with FDR, so the fringe of the left got a little kooky. And the left originally shunned minorities, and in fact tried to protect their jobs from them. (Of course, who these 'minorities' were depending on where you were. Sometimes it was a Irish coming in and 'taking our jobs', sometimes the Italians, sometimes the Chinese, whoever they were, they were always 'taking our jobs'.)
And then...something happened in the late 1940s. The liberals invaded the Democratic party, proclaiming equal rights for blacks. I honestly don't understand what happened there, but they did. Enough of the Democratic party was outraged that they left and ran on the Dixiecrat ticket.
Since then, the 'left' has been a weird mix of the two, often with no one appearing to understand why, for example, some on the left are in favor of gun control (The progressives think it would reduce crime) and some against it (The liberals thinks guns are a right, and that's the end of it.).
That's, like, progressive history, and I'm mostly a progressive. (Although I don't think gun control is a good idea.) Liberal history traces back to John Locke and the enlightenment, and is the foundation of the US, although I'm not sure what it was doing between that and the 1940s.
I'll agree with you that it would be nice if that was what being 'conservative' meant.
But the problem is, it hasn't. 'Conservative' wasn't 'stolen', it never stood for that, that's never been the philosophy of any 'conservative' elected to office, at all, except maybe Ron Paul, and, guess what? He calls himself a libertarian, not a 'conservative', and is pretty damn far outside mainstream Republican politics.
Have you ever talked with a communist before? One who actually believes that 'communism has never really been tried', and, thus, it is hasn't been disproven? That have a list of reasons that China and Russia and North Korea and Vietnam and, well, all over communist countries aren't really communists to start with and/or were successful until they stopped being communist?
Conservatives are sounding an awful lot like those guys, where they have a position they're sure will work, if only the people they put in charge of themselves would actually, you know, do that thing.
Of course, they can't even agree on what that thing is. 'Small government', 'don't change the laws', and 'socially conservative, aka, regulate morality' are all mutually exclusive of each other, and all of them have been called 'conservative' for a good 50 years. I don't know if you can technically have three things that are mutually exclusive of each other, but passing laws regulating morality makes the government bigger, and is a change. Reducing the government is also a change, and disallows regulating morality. Not changing the laws disallows both reducing the government and regulating morality. Seriously, the fact that all three of these things are supposedly 'conservative' just shows that conservative wasn't stolen, it was missing to start with.(1)
And I'm sure you've been against Bush from almost the start. Most people who've been paying attention have. I'm not trying to insult everyone who calls themselves 'conservative' by attching Bush to them, I'm just pointing out that 'conservative' is so empty it was possible for his actions to, impossibly, be considered as such.
And I'm not sure being 'against' change, or 'resisting' change, in general is any sort of logical political philosophy anyway. That would imply that you think every single law is exactly at the right place, needing only some slow adjustments, and you'd want, for example, us to stop torturing people very slowly, reducing the amount over a period of five years or so to zero.
Obviously, you don't think that, but that's because you're actually a liberal, not a conservative. Almost all your list is liberal objections, with 'selling national parks' being somewhat progressive/socialist and 'reducing taxes without reducing spending' being the little known 'Let's not do incredibly stupid things' political philosophy.
1) Note those aren't goals, which can be mutually exclusive in the final stages, like, I said, affirmative action is, but positions, which are mutually exclusive to start with. You can fight to maximize both X and Y, or whatever, even if it turns out that you eventually get to a point where you can either add a bit more to X or Y and you must choose. You cannot fight to maximize X, minimize X, and leave X the same, all at the same time.
And what part of 'It doesn't matter if it's constitutional for the Feds to regulate email, the states can additionally regulate it anyway' do you not understand?
That's not what I said at all. I said there is no such thing as a conservative. The philosophy doesn't exist. There is no concept behind the word 'conservative'.
When the Democrats are in power, 'conservative' is 'what the government isn't doing'. When the Republicans are in power, 'conservative' is 'what the government is doing', until the morally backrupt conservatives run us off a cliff or into a wall, at which point people like you say 'Oh, those were just random Republicans, not real conservatives'.
The Republicans like to pretend there's some sort of 'fiscally and morally conservative' point that exists and that, inexplicably, all the politicians they keep running for office fall short of. There isn't such a point, or, if there is, it is outside of the political system in this country.
The left, OTOH, as I explained quite clearly, does have a philosophy. In fact, they have two. Politicians on the left almost always fall short of one or the other of them, and sometimes they fall short of both. (Sometimes they get kicked out of the party for falling short of both, and I think everyone knows what Senator I'm thinking of.) The difference, however, is that there is an actual set or two of standards, and the Democrats actually have people who understand and follow them.
I like how everyone keeps trying to make my posts fit in the Republican narrative that there are actually such things as 'real conservatives', and our failure is that we, for some reason, seem unable to elect them, when that's exactly the opposite of my post. It's getting kinda funny.
Did I once, in my post, say the government wasn't wrong?
Yes, you did in fact say that. Or at least, you said they were operating legally.
The first poster said: What the headline calls domestic spying is actually the tapping of phone calls to and from people inside the United States to and from someone outside the United States who is a known terrorist or member of Al Queda. It is not, as some believe, the government wiretapping phone calls internal to the United States.
Then someone said: And how do you know this? Because they told you so?
And you said: Yes, actually. ... After all, you have no proof one way or the other. So yes, we go by what has been released to the public so far and we don't need to make up more conspiracy theories.
Which is all well and good, except what has been admitted it is illegal. The 'proof' is already there.
Now, in theory, you could have been agreeing he broke the law, but just not via the specific actions the GP said, which doesn't really make a lot of sense. It's basically saying 'I don't see why they have to search his house, he already confessed to killing that girl. We should just trust him that he didn't kill anyone else. Stop making up conspiracies.'.
I don't understand. Where are the Democrats in that?
I mean, they're not the party that gets elected by making the American public wet their pants by waving imaginary dirty bombs around. The Democrats are, according to the Republicans, endangering the US, which is where they, in fact, live. If that's not living on the edge I don't know what is. So they're not the pussies.
And while they may have proposed stupid things in the past, at least they didn't, you know, stupidly invade Iraq.
The problem is, when a large group of people essentially hijack a term and take it as their own, there's not a lot you can do about it. I used to call myself a conservative, until I realized that I didn't agree with any of the new Evangelical would-be "conservatives." Like a lot of other people I know, I now tend to describe myself more in terms of libertarianism.
The actual problem is that there is no actual conservative philosophy. At all.
It means, at various times 'We want things to stay the way they are.', 'We want things to return to a mythical golden era', 'We want to reduce spending', 'We want to implement moral codes as law', along with various bigotted concepts that have snuck in, and probably more I haven't thought of.
Your thoughts are, kinda, what I'm complaining about, like there's some 'real' conservatism and people have lost their way. Although you've officially given up finding it, which is good, the point is, really, it never existed, at all, in any form. There never was, and never will be, a 'conservative' movement, because there's no principles behind in, it's just emptiness. All they know is they all have some disagreement with the left, or want something that the left won't give them. (Like the neocons, who got kicked out of the left back in the 70s because they were complete raving loonies who thought you could bring democracy to other countries at gunpoint.)
You can see there's nothing behind it by going back in time one decade and comparing what they said about Clinton to what they say now:
Waco:bad::torture:good
FISA:infringement of rights::wiretapping in violation FISA:good
UN peacekeeping:bad::invading an innocent country:good
Impeachment over something unrelated to the office:good::Impeachment over something related to the office:bad
Ethics reforms while running for office:good::even vaguely having ethics in office:bad.
'Conservatives' do not stand in some fixed position and compare things objectively to that position. They instead say and do whatever the leadership says, it is, by defination, 'conservative', and that's all 'conservative' is, there is nothing else.
The left, OTOH, is made of just two movements, the progressive movement (Fighting for the government to solve problems, especially with the downtrodden) and the liberal movement (The principles this country was founded on, with rule of law and democracy and civil rights.). In general they go in the same direction, but you can see this conflict in, for example, affirmative action, where the progressive thought is to 'fix wrongs' in the past, and the liberal thought is to treat everyone completely equal no matter what. The ACLU is very liberal, and most left religious groups are very progressive. The 'left' has two positions it's standing in, and sometimes they fight each other.
But sometimes they point in the same direction anyway: The liberals object to the Iraq war because we were lied and tricked into it, subvert the democratic process, and people are getting tortured and wiretapped and all sorts of civil liberty issues are happening. And the progressives object to the Iraq war because the poor are dying for no damn reason at all while the rich are getting even more insanely super-duper rich, and that, um, we don't seem to be accomplishing anything.(1) (That's not to say, of course, that you can't be both liberal and progressive and object to it for both reasons.)
And, thanks to the current economic inequality, and the war, a bunch of progressives just got elected to Congress.
Of course, as the media is full of complete idiots, no one in it actually appears to understand ANY of this, and the right is presented as if it actually has some sort of coherent position, and left as if it only has, maybe, one, and usually not even that.
1) The progressive movement understands that, when something doesn't work, you should actually stop doing it, re: Prohibition, which was the great progressive mistake.
After all, you have no proof one way or the other. So yes, we go by what has been released to the public so far and we don't need to make up more conspiracy theories.
FISA doesn't allow the government to spy on communication between Americans and terrorists without a warrant, you lying sack of shit:
Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year if the Attorney General certifies in writing under oath that--
(B) there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party; and
Period. That's what the law says.
There's no other way to intercept without a court order, or at least a retroactive court order. (There are plenty of ways, however, to intercept with one.) Now, we can argue if that requirement is a good idea, or if it can be removed without constitutional issues. But it's right there, in the law. The Attorney General did not authorize the spying under that rule, because he knew he was listening to Americans. So the president is not 'withstanding other laws', specifically the law: 'A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute'.
So, as the executive branch has, you know, already admitted breaking the law(1), so maybe taking their word as to to, exactly, how much of the law they are breaking is not a good idea.
And stop saying 'the government'. I trust the government to follow the law. 'The government' includes the judicial branch issuing warrants and the legislative branch doing oversight of the program in general. It's the executive branch that decided to operate outside of that framework.
1) Yes, they have. Their 'AUMF authorized it' theory, which was actually only advanced by the media whores and not the administration, was shot down in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, where the courts said that authorization to invade a country didn't magically invalidate other laws, especially laws designed to cover, duh, war time. The AUMF could not, and does not, void FISA, anymore than it voided the UCMJ.
The only other thoery they have, and the only one they've actually advanced, is their nonsensical one that basically reduces to 'If the president does it, it's not illegal', which is just so manifestly incorrect under our system of government that it's actually hard to explain why, except to explain that all people must follow the law at all times unless explicitly noted.
Unfortunately, they didn't realize that, in 2000, the election was actually:
A) Democrats
B) Neocons
Did everyone just forget that Bush (who they oddly trust implicitly) will not be in power forever.
And that this 'war' will continue forever, too.
Conservativism==Whatever the Republicans in power are doing, exactly until the Americans get so annoyed at them they vote them out or they have obvciously failed, at which point the whole thing becomes fake conservativism..real conservativism, you see, has never been tried, or never been tried correctly.
It's a lot like communism that way. All the failings are on the implementation and the people who try, or just pretend to try, to implement it, and it is never wrong.
Just wait. They're already turning on Bush, talking about how he's not really conservative. They are, of course, correct, but everyone else started pointing that out six fucking years ago. They don't get to disown him after years and years of sucking up.
You're mostly correct, but the courts have struck down laws that literally make no sense at all.
Sometimes it's because of typos, and sometimes it's because of, well, too much drinking in the legislative branch. But sometimes laws get passed that say nonsensical and contradictory things, and do get struck down because of that.
A good example right now are laws banning possession of dimethyltryptamine. As human beings produce this within their body, this technically results in every human being manufacturing, being in possession of, and under the influence of, a controlled substance. As this is a nonsensical legal result, laws against possession and use of dimethyltryptamine are being challenged, in various places, on the grounds that they are really really dumb.
However, the courts cannot strike down just plain 'stupid' laws. I.e., they can't strike down a law requiring you to walk around backwards, even though that is clearly stupid, but they can strike down one requiring you to levitate three feet off the ground, as that is actually impossible.
It might be wishful thinking, but it is, right now, TRIVIAL to track down spammers. You can ask spam fighters and they'll give you a huge list of names and businesses.
By your logic, we shouldn't make murder illegal, because people will just kill other people in secret and hide their bodies.
Well...yeah. And? We want spammers to have to operate in secret. We want it to be as hard to lease a T1 to spam with as it is to hire a professional killer. We want spammers to have to launder money through front business, and have met in dark alleys, and constantly be afraid that the person they're talking to that wants to hire them is wearing a wire.
Of course it won't stop all spam. We pass the law, we say that if you spam you will go to jail for six months, and we start locking up spammers, something like 90% of them will instantly quit, another 9% of them will be too stupid to quit and end up in jail, and maybe 1% will operate outlaw.
Of course, they'll have to do it via pump-and-dump and other indirect fraud, because, frankly, you can't operate outlaw businesses by indiscriminately telling people where you are and what you are selling, that is a completely insane modus operandi.
Even if it is constitutional to regulate email at the Federal level, that doesn't, in the slightest, affect whether or not states can also regulate it.
The US government regulates and taxes the importation of oil. Every state, additionally, has various taxes on it.
The US government regulates all automobiles sold in the US. California, for one, put additional restrictions on automobiles sold in their state. (Both also control whether or not said automobiles can be operated on the roads, but that's a separate issue. It's possible to own automobiles you can operate on the road, but cannot legally sell without repairing certain things. And it's legal, IIRC, to sell someone a car with tinted windows in California, but not to operate it on the road.)
It is perfectly possible to decide that the Federal government has the authority to regulate email, and that that doesn't have anything to do with the ability of states to add additional regulations to email.
The problem isn't constitutional issues, it's that CAN-SPAM specifically restricts what state laws can do.
Frankly, almost every Federal law that says 'States cannot outlaw X', where X isn't a clarification of something banned by the constitution anyway, is a bad idea. (By 'clarification', I mean things like the Civil Rights act disallowing pseudo-poll taxes and stuff like that.)
I think we have, in general, pretty good rules about what states can and cannot do in the constitution, and we don't need the Federal government butting in unless people's rights are being systematically infringed, in which case some temporary preemptive protection is a good idea until they learn to stop. Stopping states from outlawing certain, non-constitutionally-protected behaviors is an even worse overreach of the Fed's power than them outlawing whatever they feel like.
That's right, we must win the fight to end our way of life! If they get there before we do, we're screwed!
Those people are idiots.
A strong hurricane season always means a weak one the next year, due to stirring up the ocean currents. Hurricanes are causes, in part, by warm surface waters, and they tend to mix the water up so it doesn't happen the next year. It doesn't matter what causes a strong season.
Likewise, a weak year, like this one, means we might have a moderately strong year next year. (Actually, I don't know how bad the season was, I just know not many of them hit land or even threatened to.) This isn't assured, because, like I said, a lot of factors are required for that.
In fact, you want a sure sign that something is screwing up the weather, that would be it, two strong seasons in a row. We're nowhere near that point.
Hurricanes are a lot like earthquakes in the respect that, if we could magically stop them, we'd start building up a monster one that would wipe everything out, as the top of the ocean got warmer and warmer. (Of course, we don't need them to hit the damn land.)
Almost all 'leaks' in Firefox are extensions.
And people who insist on using the leaky ones, or who have leaks without them (Which does happen.), need to get the damn 'Restart Firefox' extension, turn on sessions, choose that every four hours or so, and STFU.
Seriously. It's not a Firefox problem, because, if it was, it would happen to me. I, like the parent, keep Firefox open almost all the time, with dozens of tabs and four or five windows, and have never had Firefox go above 100 megs. (It usually hovers around 60, but I have a lot of extensions.)
Yes, folks, imagine a fascist response that will not, in fact, happen, in a court of law.
People in the gallery can wear whatever they want. Defendants can wear whatever they want to. Judges and and bailiffs have a uniform. Jurors can wear whatever they want. (Although they'll probably be dismissed by one of the lawyers if they wear that, but they can be dismissed for pretty much any reason.)
It is barely possible that a lawyer might be told to change, but lawyers have to conform to certain behavior in a courtroom, including speech codes. They can't tell the jury certain things. It's possible that one of those things is 'Judges are all Liars!', in which case they couldn't wear the shirt either.
Pretending that is analogous to students in a classroom is idiotic. Lawyers are analogous to, duh, teachers. A teacher couldn't wear a shirt promoting a viewpoint they were forbidden to promote with speech.
That is, if you were intent on making the analogy, which doesn't make any sense at all. A court is much more restrictive in speech, and has a lot more constitutional justification to be more restrictive, than a school. They can't send you to prison for lying to a teacher, because your lies can't send others to prison.
But what, exactly, does happen if 'you', some random spectator in court, wear such a shirt? Nothing at all.
But you, you little fascist turd, would love it if something did happen, wouldn't you? You think it's the job of the government to punish people who wear clothing someone in the government disapproves of.
Surely if a cop pulls you over and you're wearing an anti-war t-shirt, he can beat the crap out of you, right? Or at least make up something to charge you with.
No, you see, I learned in school that 'clothing' was, in fact, pieces of fabric that people wear on their body, to cover themselves and for warmth and protection. Not only do they not disrupt class, they rarely take any action at all, being, like I said, non-animate fabric.
It's slightly confusing, because most clothing used to be alive, like part of sheep or cotton plants, but I assure you, they are long dead, and cannot move by themselves. Therefore, they cannot throw things at the teacher, or talk with other students, or any of the other ways to 'disrupt class' that exist.
Of course, they can 'disrupt class', by the teacher or other administrator choosing to make an issue over what is written on them, in which case the disrupter of class should be removed permanently from the school. Hopefully said teacher or administrator will be able to find another job somewhere else, where they're allowed to harass customers because of the clothing they wear.