I have an inherent distrust of anyone that is basing inductive logic on the underpinnings of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, for the simple reason that I've never . . . *ever* . . . heard of Objectivism as being contributory to *any* philosophy of logic.
Quite the opposite in fact, I've seen logicians use her as examples of how people can be fooled by pseudo-logic which hides implicit assumptions under carefully concealed vagueness and frame shifting.
This smells more like an attempt to rehabilitate Ayn Rand as a genuine philosophical contribution than a book on logic.
Actually statistically it's pretty obvious that either 'something is happening' or, alternatively, we don't truly understand statistics and probability - a problem in which frankly I consider 'psychic ability' to be the lesser of two messy solutions.
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is dead to me now. I won't lift a finger, make one phone call, nor will i EVER vote for her in the future.
Gee, a blog post saying you're not voting for someone on a blog is 'encouragement', but the right wing eliminationist rhetoric is mere coincidence.
Right.
Don't worry so much - I'm sure the 'Liberal Media' will jump through hoops like they always do to make sure no conservative actually gets held accountable for anything they said on the record. They always do.
Ah - my openly despising an administration that allowed the largest terrorist attack in history months after suppressing FBI investigations into the Bin Laden family, which proceeded to use lies to justify invading a country that had no links to the attack, who speak to this day with pride about authorising warcrimes including waterboarding is of course exactly equivalent to the eliminationist rhetoric coming from the right wing establishment.
Against people that spoke with pride about authorising . . . heathcare for poor people and children.
I mean, other than the fact that the left never called for eliminating right wing politicians (Excepting some marginal comment down in a blog somewhere), that many people would not consider better healthcare morally inferior to, say, torturing people to death or going to war without cause, and . . . oh yeah . . . by odd coincidence despite your deep belief that we were all planning on it no left wing nut ever tried to take out the American Enterprise Institute nor has there been so much as a threat against a right wing politician . . . ever . . . these are completely identical.
but can easily imagine ACORN or similar organization doing it.
Just out of curiosity . . . why can someone imagine that. Acorn has never called for that, used any of that in it's rhetoric, been accused of anything like that. The worst accusation against them that you might not be aware was thoroughly disproved was of 'aiding' a pimp, the worst accusation that had some truth behind it was that they were not properly policing people gathering signatures for vote registration.
Yet . . . some people can imagine this coming from Acorn more easily than they can imagine someone being influenced by a massive media network and political machine like Fox that routinely espouses eliminationist rhetoric.
The problem with the principle of falsifiability is that we're talking about a matter of statistical data. Take a set of seemingly balanced six-sided dice.
Proving these dice are loaded, from *statistical data* is in principle unscientific - It's statistically *possible* to roll 6's until the thermal death of the universe - and indeed the next six is never all that unlikely.
Yet, at some point you have to make a decision that either A) despite no physical evidence that the dice are unfair, something is skewing your results, or B) without physical evidence of a mechanism to skew the results, there is a 1 in 6 chance to roll a 6 on the next roll, and no further statistical evidence will ever convince you to treat it otherwise.
Personally, these dice seem rigged, but from what I can see, a lot of skeptics regarding the more statistically verified variants of ESP seem to have opted for B.
Or that 'saving lives' makes a dandy rationalisation for a power trip, and indeed valid attempts to dispute the accuracy of the results would be dismissed as technicalities by people emotionally invested in believing that their power trip was in the pursuit of a greater good?
Given that Rush Limbaugh did exactly the same thing here in Indiana, I'm not sure I can get morally outraged per se.
On the other hand, this is the country that rewarded George Bush's incompetence with a second term and after the Republicans blocked everything that might help the economy for two years "Thanks you may we please have some more?".
What I find fascinating is how God never sent boat's and helicopters until after we invented them. I can only assume he saves us with our own inventions because we're a much more moral people than we used to be.
More to the point, yes it is spending more than it is taking in, and that is by design.
Recognising that baby-boomers were going to retire, we started building a surplus since the 80's and investing that in government bonds in order to let the interest build.
Now that the baby-boomers are retiring, of course we're spending more than we're taking in. The only reason we were taking in more than we were spending was because we needed to plan for this.
Of the many things I disagree with Ronald Reagan about, this he (in concert with a Democratic Congress and Alan Greenspan, among others) did right.
Birth certificate, announcement in the paper, original and certified copied, Internet pictures . . .
If you are seeing a sound argument to consider these alternate theories in the face of all that we fundamentally disagree on what forms a sound argument.
And here's what I observed: World Public Opinion is sponsored by the Liberal-leaning, socialist-loving University of Maryland (the state where 70% of the government is Democrat)(and 90% of professors are too). So the survey bashing Libertarian-leaning FOX viewers is as unsurprising as a Microsoft-funded survey showing Google Chrome is insecure. BOTH surveys are meaningless bullshit, not worth the paper they are printed on.
Remember folks - there is no factual information to check peoples opinions against and come up with objective data, and anyone that disagrees is is a Liberal-leaning Socialist loving Reality-based community Democrat who you should ignore at all costs before you are contaminated by their fact-checking ways!
Thank goodness for that, I thought I might have to consider new information for a minute there!
To the extent that states were free, until the 14th amendment, to ignore the provisions of the Constitution that limited the federal government, sure, states could have a state religion, though you're statement about 'gradually phased out' doesn't seem all that accurate going by the loc page.
But even ignoring that - So what? I will concede that properly prior to 1868 the statement should have been "The founders 'Clearly' believed these rights came from a higher power . . . and immediately initiated first and foremost an amendment explicitly banning the Federal government from formally recognizing said higher power?", but c'mon - despite the propoganda out there the public record clearly shows that yes the founders wanted government thoroughly segregated from religion. Even the State governments had lost the fashion well before 1868.
Trying to claim the founders had some other intent despite their repeated public writing to the contrary? Bullshit.
Perhaps no amendment has been twisted and turned as much as this one. The "birthright citizenship clause" was originally meant to ensure that children of freed slaves would be American citizens. Of course, we don't really have that problem anymore, so here's the 21st-century revision:
All persons who successfully sneak into the country will be allowed to stay indefinitely. All crimes committed by those lawbreakers (i.e., identity theft, fraud, and tax evasion) will be ignored. These non-American Americans will be afforded free health care at emergency rooms, free education,, and special in-state tuition deals at colleges, not afforded legal citizens. All children born of these lawbreakers shall immediately become citizens of the United States. Any person attempting to thwart this revision of Section I will be labeled racists, hatemongers, xenophobes, and all-around bad people.
Sorry, converting the plain words "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." to an anti-immigrant polemic while claiming that the simple and obvious reading of the language is 'Twisting' it - He said it, he wrote it, he profited on it, if you can't handle the fact that the man is a racist that hates the simple language of the 14th amendment, quit reading him.
And no, accusing Media Matters of being liberal media in no way changes the fact that Glenn Beck wrote that. Get over yourself.
As an aside, one of the interesting things covered in "The Constitution, A Biography" is that the southern states compounded this in their own voting setup, so that high slave density areas (remarkably small percentage of the southern population) were more represented in state government, and people without slaves were themselves disenfranchised at the state and local level.
So that 'average' didn't even imply the obvious that every southerner vote was worth seven northerners votes; even at the local level poor non-slave owning farmers votes had very little effect while the wealthy plantation owners power was multiplied by the number of slaves held.
The poor farmer was of course informed the reason he didn't get what he needed was those damn northerners - the politics of disenfranchisement never changes.
"The Judicial Power" of Article III flows from English Commonlaw which already gave the high courts the right to strike down laws or edicts for a variety of reasons (including, as I read it, simply for being logically contradictory). Marbury vs Madison simply formally brings that forward into U.S. law.
Clearly the founders of our country realized that the rights of men were not granted by governments, but came from some other higher power; they said so in the Declaration of Independence.
The founders were 'Clearly' believed these rights came from a higher power . . . and immediately initiated first and foremost an amendment explicitly banning the government from formally recognizing said higher power?
Umm - no. The Constitution left the definition of 'Citizen' as an undefined term, but the weasel-wording it "three fifths of all other Persons" established the baseline, pretty explicitly; I disagree with Dred Scott regarding a states right to grant protections above that baseline, but as a constitutional manner yes they needed to amend.
I find "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside... " infinitely better.
Lots less weasel-words. No wonder Glenn Beck hates it.
Even as someone that has to agree with Scalia that any interpretation of the Commerce Clause that has no feasible argument which would limit is is necessarily false I have to disagree here.
But Congress has the right to regulate interstate commerce, chose to regulate that interstate market, it's a commodity market, and and the farmer was taking actions that clearly interacted with that market.
It's the polar opposite of the Scalia doctrine - if they can't enforce regulations of an interstate commodities market, then the Commerce Clause has literally *no* power.
Umm - actually no, that's part of what was *legally* wrong with Dred Scott - Taney declared that even if a state declared that within their demesnes African had the rights of citizens they had no method to enforce that right. A southern posse could in fact kidnap a *free* black man from a free state, and declare him a slave with no legal recourse.
Whenever I hear that old saw about the civil war being about 'States Rights' I endeavor to remind people it was actually about the southern states 'right' to enforce their laws across every state.
Slashdot Mirror
I have an inherent distrust of anyone that is basing inductive logic on the underpinnings of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, for the simple reason that I've never . . . *ever* . . . heard of Objectivism as being contributory to *any* philosophy of logic.
Quite the opposite in fact, I've seen logicians use her as examples of how people can be fooled by pseudo-logic which hides implicit assumptions under carefully concealed vagueness and frame shifting.
This smells more like an attempt to rehabilitate Ayn Rand as a genuine philosophical contribution than a book on logic.
Pug
See, that's how wily they are. To collect false registrations, then . . . flag them themselves . . .
Di - A -Bolical!!!
And having trustworthy people takes care of itself.
Actually statistically it's pretty obvious that either 'something is happening' or, alternatively, we don't truly understand statistics and probability - a problem in which frankly I consider 'psychic ability' to be the lesser of two messy solutions.
Pug
See Relevant portion right here:
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is dead to me now. I won't lift a finger, make one phone call, nor will i EVER vote for her in the future.
Gee, a blog post saying you're not voting for someone on a blog is 'encouragement', but the right wing eliminationist rhetoric is mere coincidence.
Right.
Don't worry so much - I'm sure the 'Liberal Media' will jump through hoops like they always do to make sure no conservative actually gets held accountable for anything they said on the record. They always do.
Pug
Um - where are you getting 'Far Left' out of that - looks more like standard Ayn Rand-ophile pseudo-logic than anything to me.
Pug
Ah - my openly despising an administration that allowed the largest terrorist attack in history months after suppressing FBI investigations into the Bin Laden family, which proceeded to use lies to justify invading a country that had no links to the attack, who speak to this day with pride about authorising warcrimes including waterboarding is of course exactly equivalent to the eliminationist rhetoric coming from the right wing establishment.
Against people that spoke with pride about authorising . . . heathcare for poor people and children.
I mean, other than the fact that the left never called for eliminating right wing politicians (Excepting some marginal comment down in a blog somewhere), that many people would not consider better healthcare morally inferior to, say, torturing people to death or going to war without cause, and . . . oh yeah . . . by odd coincidence despite your deep belief that we were all planning on it no left wing nut ever tried to take out the American Enterprise Institute nor has there been so much as a threat against a right wing politician . . . ever . . . these are completely identical.
Other than being completely different of course.
Pug
but can easily imagine ACORN or similar organization doing it.
Just out of curiosity . . . why can someone imagine that. Acorn has never called for that, used any of that in it's rhetoric, been accused of anything like that. The worst accusation against them that you might not be aware was thoroughly disproved was of 'aiding' a pimp, the worst accusation that had some truth behind it was that they were not properly policing people gathering signatures for vote registration.
Yet . . . some people can imagine this coming from Acorn more easily than they can imagine someone being influenced by a massive media network and political machine like Fox that routinely espouses eliminationist rhetoric.
Seems odd.
The problem with the principle of falsifiability is that we're talking about a matter of statistical data.
Take a set of seemingly balanced six-sided dice.
Proving these dice are loaded, from *statistical data* is in principle unscientific - It's statistically *possible* to roll 6's until the thermal death of the universe - and indeed the next six is never all that unlikely.
Yet, at some point you have to make a decision that either
A) despite no physical evidence that the dice are unfair, something is skewing your results, or
B) without physical evidence of a mechanism to skew the results, there is a 1 in 6 chance to roll a 6 on the next roll, and no further statistical evidence will ever convince you to treat it otherwise.
Personally, these dice seem rigged, but from what I can see, a lot of skeptics regarding the more statistically verified variants of ESP seem to have opted for B.
Oh look, a six . . .
Pug
Or that 'saving lives' makes a dandy rationalisation for a power trip, and indeed valid attempts to dispute the accuracy of the results would be dismissed as technicalities by people emotionally invested in believing that their power trip was in the pursuit of a greater good?
Nah, that never happens.
Pug
Given that Rush Limbaugh did exactly the same thing here in Indiana, I'm not sure I can get morally outraged per se.
On the other hand, this is the country that rewarded George Bush's incompetence with a second term and after the Republicans blocked everything that might help the economy for two years "Thanks you may we please have some more?".
What if the idiots win again?
Pug
Why should public monies be spent to preserve any film not in the public domain?
Pug
What I find fascinating is how God never sent boat's and helicopters until after we invented them. I can only assume he saves us with our own inventions because we're a much more moral people than we used to be.
Pug
More to the point, yes it is spending more than it is taking in, and that is by design.
Recognising that baby-boomers were going to retire, we started building a surplus since the 80's and investing that in government bonds in order to let the interest build.
Now that the baby-boomers are retiring, of course we're spending more than we're taking in. The only reason we were taking in more than we were spending was because we needed to plan for this.
Of the many things I disagree with Ronald Reagan about, this he (in concert with a Democratic Congress and Alan Greenspan, among others) did right.
Pug
Umm - What sound arguments?
Birth certificate, announcement in the paper, original and certified copied, Internet pictures . . .
If you are seeing a sound argument to consider these alternate theories in the face of all that we fundamentally disagree on what forms a sound argument.
Pug
Good observation.
And here's what I observed: World Public Opinion is sponsored by the Liberal-leaning, socialist-loving University of Maryland (the state where 70% of the government is Democrat)(and 90% of professors are too). So the survey bashing Libertarian-leaning FOX viewers is as unsurprising as a Microsoft-funded survey showing Google Chrome is insecure. BOTH surveys are meaningless bullshit, not worth the paper they are printed on.
Remember folks - there is no factual information to check peoples opinions against and come up with objective data, and anyone that disagrees is is a Liberal-leaning Socialist loving Reality-based community Democrat who you should ignore at all costs before you are contaminated by their fact-checking ways!
Thank goodness for that, I thought I might have to consider new information for a minute there!
Pug
To the extent that states were free, until the 14th amendment, to ignore the provisions of the Constitution that limited the federal government, sure, states could have a state religion, though you're statement about 'gradually phased out' doesn't seem all that accurate going by the loc page.
But even ignoring that - So what? I will concede that properly prior to 1868 the statement should have been "The founders 'Clearly' believed these rights came from a higher power . . . and immediately initiated first and foremost an amendment explicitly banning the Federal government from formally recognizing said higher power?", but c'mon - despite the propoganda out there the public record clearly shows that yes the founders wanted government thoroughly segregated from religion. Even the State governments had lost the fashion well before 1868.
Trying to claim the founders had some other intent despite their repeated public writing to the contrary? Bullshit.
Pug
Oh noes - it took the 10 seconds of a Google search to find documentation. Well, I also had to click the 1st link.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/200909230024
From: Arguing with Idiots, Chapter 12 "The U.S. Constitution: Lost in translation":
Perhaps no amendment has been twisted and turned as much as this one. The "birthright citizenship clause" was originally meant to ensure that children of freed slaves would be American citizens. Of course, we don't really have that problem anymore, so here's the 21st-century revision:
All persons who successfully sneak into the country will be allowed to stay indefinitely. All crimes committed by those lawbreakers (i.e., identity theft, fraud, and tax evasion) will be ignored. These non-American Americans will be afforded free health care at emergency rooms, free education,, and special in-state tuition deals at colleges, not afforded legal citizens. All children born of these lawbreakers shall immediately become citizens of the United States. Any person attempting to thwart this revision of Section I will be labeled racists, hatemongers, xenophobes, and all-around bad people.
Sorry, converting the plain words "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." to an anti-immigrant polemic while claiming that the simple and obvious reading of the language is 'Twisting' it - He said it, he wrote it, he profited on it, if you can't handle the fact that the man is a racist that hates the simple language of the 14th amendment, quit reading him.
And no, accusing Media Matters of being liberal media in no way changes the fact that Glenn Beck wrote that. Get over yourself.
Pug
As an aside, one of the interesting things covered in "The Constitution, A Biography" is that the southern states compounded this in their own voting setup, so that high slave density areas (remarkably small percentage of the southern population) were more represented in state government, and people without slaves were themselves disenfranchised at the state and local level.
So that 'average' didn't even imply the obvious that every southerner vote was worth seven northerners votes; even at the local level poor non-slave owning farmers votes had very little effect while the wealthy plantation owners power was multiplied by the number of slaves held.
The poor farmer was of course informed the reason he didn't get what he needed was those damn northerners - the politics of disenfranchisement never changes.
Pug
"The Judicial Power" of Article III flows from English Commonlaw which already gave the high courts the right to strike down laws or edicts for a variety of reasons (including, as I read it, simply for being logically contradictory). Marbury vs Madison simply formally brings that forward into U.S. law.
A History of the Supreme Court get's into it a bit early on: See Dr. Bonham for more.
Pug
Clearly the founders of our country realized that the rights of men were not granted by governments, but came from some other higher power; they said so in the Declaration of Independence.
The founders were 'Clearly' believed these rights came from a higher power . . . and immediately initiated first and foremost an amendment explicitly banning the government from formally recognizing said higher power?
You fail logic forever.
Pug
Umm - no. The Constitution left the definition of 'Citizen' as an undefined term, but the weasel-wording it "three fifths of all other Persons" established the baseline, pretty explicitly; I disagree with Dred Scott regarding a states right to grant protections above that baseline, but as a constitutional manner yes they needed to amend.
I find "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside ... " infinitely better.
Lots less weasel-words. No wonder Glenn Beck hates it.
Pug
Even as someone that has to agree with Scalia that any interpretation of the Commerce Clause that has no feasible argument which would limit is is necessarily false I have to disagree here.
But Congress has the right to regulate interstate commerce, chose to regulate that interstate market, it's a commodity market, and and the farmer was taking actions that clearly interacted with that market.
It's the polar opposite of the Scalia doctrine - if they can't enforce regulations of an interstate commodities market, then the Commerce Clause has literally *no* power.
Pug
Umm - actually no, that's part of what was *legally* wrong with Dred Scott - Taney declared that even if a state declared that within their demesnes African had the rights of citizens they had no method to enforce that right. A southern posse could in fact kidnap a *free* black man from a free state, and declare him a slave with no legal recourse.
Whenever I hear that old saw about the civil war being about 'States Rights' I endeavor to remind people it was actually about the southern states 'right' to enforce their laws across every state.
Pug
If it owns a piece of me you need to invest in a better fund.