Few things are intrinsically bad. Yes, it can be done safely, but if anyone could build a hydrogen bomb in their garage with off-the-shelf parts, we would recognize this as a danger. The more common, cheap, and accessible genetic tinkering gets, the more script kiddies you will have, and the higher the probability of something bad happening. If anyone can do it on the cheap, doomsday cults will start looking into it. Will they do so in a half-witted, incompetent manner? Yes, just as they have with nerve agents and explosives. But nerve agents and explosives are not biological creatures that go on to reproduce and evolve.
Joy's article was not supposed to be a PhD thesis in the subjects involved. It was published in a layman's magazine as food for thought. His musings on robotics left me cold, but as far as the nanotechnology angle, K. Eric Drexler also wrote about the "gray goo" problem in Engines of Creation some time earlier. Joy isn't (or wasn't in that article) a hair-on-fire radical. The idea that our technology could spell the end of us is not a new subject. I'm not saying we should ban the technology and bury our heads in the sand, only that we could kill ourselves in the process of discovery. That intelligence might be a self-limiting phenomenon is also not a new idea.
Just like Bill Joy wrote in Wired ever so long ago. I have thar article printed out here somewhere, and I force it on everyone who will read it. I really think biotech will kill us all, or at least enough of us where the distinction is academic. I'm not worried about nuclear winter, or overcrowding, but the dang microbes. All it takes is one pissed-off bacterium or virus, and we get Stephen King's The Stand. No, I'm not a microbiologist, so I can't tell you, using the correct terminology, why we're all doomed, but I can't help but think that tinkering with life is bad. It might be an accident, but there are also quite a few well-heeled doomsday cults on the planet. Couple that with normal evil and quasi-evil government biowar research, and this freelance crap isn't going to help the situation. We're just too convinced that nothing bad can happen to little old us. The bacteria will win, I tell you.
You probably got a dirty look just because you were a northerner criticizing southern weather. Pretty much anything you say, apart from "Man, I wish I was born down here--it's much better!" is going to be taken as disrespectful, insulting, and so on. The south has a huge inferiority complex (well-earned, IMO), and they'll assume you're talking down to them even if you aren't. I was born/raised in Texas, BTW. Now where did I leave that Dr. Pepper...
does the right wing have a "real work" monopoly?
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I know it's gross stereotyping, but it seems as though the bulk of people who spend their time spouting ideals (Communists, OSS giants, pop stars, Obama) have done little to none of what society considers real work.
It isn't just that you are stereotyping, but that the stereotypes themselves are off-base. I'd wager that Che Guevara and Trotsky put in some serious work doing what they believed in. The "OSS giants" swipe is asinine, since they're just programmers, which is the same activity whether you're being paid or not.
Pop stars also work hard, even though some of us may be indifferent to their accomplishments. What's with your Obama issue? He was a professor of constitutional law, then a state state Senator and then a US Senator. Do you consider McCain's 25+ years of service in the US Senate to not be "real work?" Do you have a thing against teachers, or just professors, or just professors of consitutional law? Or just professors of constitutional law who later run for president?
Even if we flip the political polarity of your post, I'd argue that Rush Limbaugh, Grover Norquist, and Tom Delay do (or have) worked hard at what they do. What they do may not be good for the country, but that isn't the same thing as being lazy. Many people spend their time on advocacy, and I'd be cautious in assuming that they're all doing so just because they're a failure in other areas. Or do you only think that left-leaning advocates are abject failures, while right-wing advocates are all motivated by a love of truth and justice?
I've antagonized peers. People in my own age group, income group, and approximate mental status. As an adult, I don't antagonize young teenagers, or those subordinate to me at work, or people who I just think can't handle it mentally. Picking on my peer at work isn't the same thing as me, as an adult, targeting a young teenager to torment. What she did is unconscionable. What's more, she didn't just make a mean one-off statement in a fit of anger; she systematically set out to destroy this young girl's mental status. The thought of someone my age picking on a kid that age is no less repulsive than that of a person exploiting another kid's insecurities and need for love for sex. She got her kicks at tormenting a young teenager.
I'm 39, and every time I can't quite remember a name, word, date, whatever, I attribute it to age. But then again, it's not as if I wasn't absentminded in my early 20s as well. Heck, I was an absentminded child who didn't know how to get anywhere because all our time in the car I spent daydreaming. I'm sure there has been scientific study done on memory and I'm not saying that age has no affect, but I'd wonder if part of it isn't just that we increasingly attribute the forgetfulness we already had to advancing age, while forgetting (aha!) that we also forgot stuff in our youth. I think many people have a disproportionate memory of exactly how sharp they were in their youth. Me, I'm fully aware that I was a dumb-ass. If I'm less of one now, it's only because I've learned to shut the hell up and keep it slightly more of a secret.
That said, I certainly am worried. It's hard not to be, when the man who will be our president in a few short months has little real experience doing... well, anything,
Well, other than being in the Illinois state and then the US Senate, and along the way sponsoring many bills, etc... you know, doing that stuff that legislators do. And since the US Senate is, well, not anything, and McCain has worked there for almost 30 years, that means McCain doesn't have any experience doing, well, anything. He was in the military, but since we don't cede much to Murtha, Cleland, Kerry, or Gore over military service, I don't see why we should get misty-eyed over McCain's service.
I too doubt that Obama is going to turn America into a paradise of milk and honey. But then again, I never expected him to. Few did. The ecstatic happiness you see concerning Obama is not because people consider him so great, but because people consider the status quo so bad. If he ends waterboarding and reinstates full habeas corpus, observation of the Geneva Conventions, closes the black site secret prisons, etc, I'll have gotten all I really wanted. And you might want to stop pissing all over hope and optimism. In the long term hope and optimism are usually unwarranted, but it motivates people to try, to get involved, to care. If everyone concluded that none of the candidates would or could do anything good, no one would vote. I don't consider that a good thing.
I still think the cops will have the ability to turn off the camera. One of my first jobs out of high school ('89) was in a company that made, among other things, circuit boards for cop-car cameras. If the lights were on, the camera was rolling. I'd been there a week when we had to change the product, because all of the police departments requested a kill switch for the camera. The first thing that popped out of my mouth was "why would they want to turn off the camera?" That little question was the cornerstone from which my entire political worldview was built, and I've yet to see a reason to change it. Cops want the power and freedom to be able to deal with suspects without leaving any evidence. It's not that I don't trust cops, but that I don't trust people with power. When those people take active steps to keep their exercise of power, their methods, secret, that sends up a whole bucket of red flags.
Sometimes it's impossible to report objective reality when two people don't do equally as well
When Obama has a rally and 20,000 show up, and McCain has a rally on the same day in the same city, and 2,000 show up, there is no way to report that factually without revealing that McCain's campaign has an enthusiasm deficit
When Palin repeatedly say things that are demonstrably false, such as "I campaigned against the bridge to nowhere," or "I said no to earmarks," the press has a responsibility to point out the falsehoods. Same applies to falsehoods and distortions from Obama's campaign, but if Palin's are more frequent and easier to spot, you can't blame reality
The press is supposed to report things as they happened (as best they can), not make sure every story is even-handed. If McCain forgot where he was today and they report that, well, it's reality. If Obama is insanely popular and a good speaker, well, then that's reality.
If the Republicans had won, would they be whining about the media? Grow up. The entire media isn't going to be Fox News.
But the smugness of the Left is fairly sickening. I don't recall the whacky Right being that smug last election when Bush won somewhat comfortably.
Then you have selective memory. I'm not blaming you, per se, nor am I saying that this is a right-wing phenomenon. People seem to have an inability to see their own faults, or those of those in their group, compared to faults of those who are less like them. To see right-wingers who consider themselves the only REAL patriots, the only REAL Christians, and the only REAL Republicans accuse others of smugness and hubris always serves to raise my eyebrows a bit. I see this stuff every single day, and I'm not all that leftish. If you don't think that Coulter and Limbaugh count as smug, you might want to have your meter re-calibrated.
The problem is, in any population of any size, you're going to have idiots, jerks, charlatans, attention whores, etc. This applies to all factions, groups, subcultures, religions, political groups, everything. Human frailty and evil runs pretty evenly across the gamut. But we have a tendency to take these normal outliers to be the norm when it comes to groups to which we don't belong, while we're blind to the same types of individuals in our own group. It's a pretty sad phenomenon.
Look, I like Linux. But if I want to install Truecrypt on OS X or Windows, I have to download one file. Linux is just not that easy. I was in a catch-22 situation for months where I had no internet access and had to rely on Wi-Fi at the library, but my wi-fi wouldn't work out of the box, so I couldn't install the files I needed to run Truecrypt, so I couldn't.... etc. You get the idea. I like Linux, especially Debian, but I'm not going to agree that there are no dependency problems. I've been defeated by them more than once.
Hypocrisy is a normal human trait, and I can forgive that to a degree. Supporting torture and totalitarian government is different. Lying about an affair you had is qualitatively different than lying about torture you've sanctioned and encouraged. One is normal human frailty, while the other is pretty much evil.
Thus, they are not liars, they're just different sets of people.
But I've witnessed these diametrically opposed sentiments advocated by the same person, in the same conversation. It's just that when they say "small government," they don't actually mean small government. If you're a passionate advocate of states' rights when it comes to laws meant to curb racism, but you don't care about states' rights when it comes to medical marijuana, that isn't a conundrum at all. It just means that you oppose the civl rights laws and you support the ban on marijuana. They're just using the "small government" rhetoric to selectively undermine programs that don't fit with their socially conservative agendas, while programs they DO like get a pass. How many conservatives cried "activist judges!" when the SCOTUS stopped the Florida recount and just gave those electoral votes to Bush? None of them. They ARE liars, because they claim to be motivated by a desire for "small government," when in fact they are fine with any degree of big-brotherism as long as it fits with their worldview.
Conservatives, with very few exceptions, are not conservative. The worldview is supposed to be based on awareness of man's fallibility and a skepticism of government power, but they were behind GWB the entire time as he gutted habeas corpus, insisted that he could not be bound by any written law, and so on. The people who were ostensibly committed to small government are the ones most passionately advocating government secrecy, the Unitary Executive theory, indefinite detention, torture-induced confessions, abandonment of the Geneva Conventions, preemptive war, legal immunity for US troops and mercenaries, etc. These are not the actions of someone who is suspicious of government power. They have utmost trust in government as long as a Republican is running the show.
Believing that government can rightly keep anyone they want for as long as they want, in secret and without having to press charges or present evidence, and that government employees and contractors should be shielded from legal consequences when they torture someone to death, are not in any way compatible with a commitment to small government. These are not "oopsies." These positions are not aberrations, but in actuality reveal exactly what type of people they are.
Aside from President Bush's actions, the Republican party generally favors far less government than the Democrats.
I've heard this statement many, many times. I have seen zero evidence that it's an accurate assessment. I can flush these people out with two words: medical marijuana. Add in prostitution, pornography, gay marriage, stem cell research, and you have a handful of areas in which their preferred government is far from small or non-intrusive. The "conservative" approach to habeas corpus, torture, and secret prisons is the opposite of small government--it's flat-out totalitarian. So my problem, in a nutshell, with conservatives is not that they are conservative, but that they are liars.
Ps. I'm a guy that makes about 11 bucks an hour. I'll succeed and fail on my own hard work, initiative, and ambition. I don't want your entitlements now, and I don't want to compulsorily pay for someone else's entitlements later.
Then don't use the roads, water system, septic system, fire department, police department, courts, schools, or anything else that has been funded by taxpayer money. You don't need those stinking government handouts. I completely respect that.
The idea, and whether it works or not is debatable, is to not discourage kids from trying.
I disagree. I think the idea is to pad the performance scores of the school to protect funding and prestige. If students fail, the school fails, ergo the students must not fail. Learning would be nice, but is secondary to protecting the existence and funding of the organization that pays those teachers and administrators.
Look, I'm techically a liberal, but I loathe the way this stuff is done. What's more, I don't think it's for the reasons stated, most of the time. I think teachers moved to the self-esteem every-child-is-a-potential-genius model not because they think all kids have that much latent intelligence, but because if you shift how we evaluate the efficacy of education from hard, testable skills, to nebulous terms like "emotional intelligence" or self-esteem, then you can no longer quantify how well the teachers are doing.
But to go out and outright start insulting people based on their beliefs is where I and countless others take offense. It's my belief.
What does "belief" have to do with science? Science is the effort to best understand objective reality. The speed of light doesn't change based on your beliefs, and if you consider your beliefs to have primacy over science, you are going to be ridiculed. This expectation that people have of science accommodating their beliefs about human origins, the age of the earth/universe, human-exacerbated global warming, etc is a bit silly. If your beliefs don't mesh well with science, then either change your beliefs or thicken your skin. If you believe the earth is flat, you are going to be laughed at. If you reject evolution because it doesn't sit well with a literal reading of Genesis, you are going to be laughed at. It isn't bigotry to point out that someone prefers a set of bronze-age magic stories to the modern science that gave us medicine and the space shuttle. The problem isn't that evolutionists are mean, but that creationists can't accommodate science.
I'm puzzled that people insist that the hybrid vs. non-hybrid choice is purely economics. When I buy gas, I'm sending money to Wahhabi terrorists who want to kill me, and oppressive regimes like Saudi Arabia. I am directly sponsoring torture, terrorism, etc. If I divert that expenditure to a hybrid vehicle, some of my money at least is going to paying for better engineering, and funding a program meant to lower our dependence on oil, and thus our funding of terrorism etc. No, I don't have a Prius. My '91 Subaru, with the $200 per month of gas I use, are sufficient for my needs. I have more money tied up in bicycles than I do in automobiles. But if I were looking for a new car, my eyes would be on the plug-in hybrids. I wish I weren't so convinced that the major automakers and petroleum companies are sabotaging the development of electric cars. Yes, I've watched "Who Killed the Electric Car." Pretty nauseating.
Look man, it didn't start with Katrina. Back in covered-wagon times our entire expansion westward consisted of white guys trekking west and expecting the army to come get rid of the indians so they could live safely on this empty (cough cough) land. They didn't do it themselves--it was all done on the government teat. The growth of the railroads similarly dependent on government largesse. Our entire national identity, that of tough self-sufficiency, is a lie we tell ourselves. When we overthrew Saddam, the explosives and nuclear material was left unguarded, and US Marines were put on post guarding oil wells. Why don't Chevron and Exxon fight their own wars? Same reason people expect to live where they want, and have the taxpayer bail them out when things to badly. It's no different, and the saps in New Orleans (who I agree are dense for living below sea level) are no more guilty of that feeling of entitlement than Chevron or Exxon management.
Actually, you COULD travel inside the USSR without showing papers. Train and airplane tickets were anonymous and you did not need to show ID to board a train or an airplane.
My mom remembers holding me in her lap and watching the moon landing on TV. She remembers what I was wearing, and several other things from that day. The fact that I was born in Dec 69 doesn't change the fact that she does sincerely remember what she remembers.
A friend of mine and I went to Cambodia, and took some good pictures on a trip. When we got back, I showed him how to edit the photos with his crappy bundled photo software. He was amazed that you could take people, litter, etc out of photographs. I created a monster. He was up all night deleting the other tourists from the pictures so the picture would reflect how he remembered the experience. Is there anything wrong with that? It's an interesting philosophical question.
Anything cops can do without a warrant (except in emergencies of course) is something private citizens should be able to do with no problems, even to cops themselves. If I can legally plant a GPS device in a cop's private automobile, then I have no problem with them having the same powers. If I can't do it, that means they can't do it without a warrant.
Either that, or we get rid of warrants altogether and let cops do whatever they want. If we as a society decide that the inconvenience of warrants are an excessive impediment to law enforcement, then we should just remove due process and oversight altogether. Having the need for warrants in place, via the constitution and accepted law, and then ignoring that need, only undermines respect for law and for the police. Either respect freedom, which requires putting cops to some inconvenience, or just defer to cops to do the right thing, and hope for the best.
The only thingn worse than democracy is everything else. No single person or even group of people is smart enough to know everything, and even very insightful people (Edward Gibbon, for example) make bad or inneffectual legislators. Even the ancient Greeks had problems with democracy, and Athens had what, about 10K people at the time? Problem is, every other system sucks worse. Democracy is the way it is because we are the way we are, and if people didn't suck, you wouldn't need government in the first place.
All I said was that the fighter pilots aren't going to want to give up their perks and position. I think the organization will have to change to accomodate the new realities of UAVs being cheaper/better/whatever. But that change will have to be pushed from outside, from the DoD or whatever.
Right now, fighter pilots are sitting at the top, and they decide who gets the thumbs-up or thumbs-down for the assignments/jobs that build the career of a future general. Change will not come from within the culture. UAV pilots are not in the club, and it will be a long long time before one is made wing commander, much less Numbered AF or MAJCOM. You might have one as commander of a UAV-only wing, which will be looked at, career-wise, as a junior jamboree.
I'm not saying that change won't happen, only that the fighter pilots will balk, complain, sabotage, foot-drag, and all but revolt all the way down the line.
Put anyone in a position of privelege, and they'll in short order think that the privelege is natural, and do everything in their power to keep it. It's human nature.
Pilots in the AF want to grow up to be generals one day. Do you think a UAV pilot has the same shot at being Chief of Staff (with the subsequent job on the board of Boeing or whoever) as the YF-22 pilot? Neither do I, and neither do they.
The fighter pilots are the aristocracy of the aristocracy of the AF. Even aside from the love of flying that drove them into that job, the perks of being a fighter pilot, the status and career path that conveys, are not things they're going to surrender willingly.
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Few things are intrinsically bad. Yes, it can be done safely, but if anyone could build a hydrogen bomb in their garage with off-the-shelf parts, we would recognize this as a danger. The more common, cheap, and accessible genetic tinkering gets, the more script kiddies you will have, and the higher the probability of something bad happening. If anyone can do it on the cheap, doomsday cults will start looking into it. Will they do so in a half-witted, incompetent manner? Yes, just as they have with nerve agents and explosives. But nerve agents and explosives are not biological creatures that go on to reproduce and evolve.
Joy's article was not supposed to be a PhD thesis in the subjects involved. It was published in a layman's magazine as food for thought. His musings on robotics left me cold, but as far as the nanotechnology angle, K. Eric Drexler also wrote about the "gray goo" problem in Engines of Creation some time earlier. Joy isn't (or wasn't in that article) a hair-on-fire radical. The idea that our technology could spell the end of us is not a new subject. I'm not saying we should ban the technology and bury our heads in the sand, only that we could kill ourselves in the process of discovery. That intelligence might be a self-limiting phenomenon is also not a new idea.
Just like Bill Joy wrote in Wired ever so long ago. I have thar article printed out here somewhere, and I force it on everyone who will read it. I really think biotech will kill us all, or at least enough of us where the distinction is academic. I'm not worried about nuclear winter, or overcrowding, but the dang microbes. All it takes is one pissed-off bacterium or virus, and we get Stephen King's The Stand. No, I'm not a microbiologist, so I can't tell you, using the correct terminology, why we're all doomed, but I can't help but think that tinkering with life is bad. It might be an accident, but there are also quite a few well-heeled doomsday cults on the planet. Couple that with normal evil and quasi-evil government biowar research, and this freelance crap isn't going to help the situation. We're just too convinced that nothing bad can happen to little old us. The bacteria will win, I tell you.
You probably got a dirty look just because you were a northerner criticizing southern weather. Pretty much anything you say, apart from "Man, I wish I was born down here--it's much better!" is going to be taken as disrespectful, insulting, and so on. The south has a huge inferiority complex (well-earned, IMO), and they'll assume you're talking down to them even if you aren't. I was born/raised in Texas, BTW. Now where did I leave that Dr. Pepper...
It isn't just that you are stereotyping, but that the stereotypes themselves are off-base. I'd wager that Che Guevara and Trotsky put in some serious work doing what they believed in. The "OSS giants" swipe is asinine, since they're just programmers, which is the same activity whether you're being paid or not.
Pop stars also work hard, even though some of us may be indifferent to their accomplishments. What's with your Obama issue? He was a professor of constitutional law, then a state state Senator and then a US Senator. Do you consider McCain's 25+ years of service in the US Senate to not be "real work?" Do you have a thing against teachers, or just professors, or just professors of consitutional law? Or just professors of constitutional law who later run for president?
Even if we flip the political polarity of your post, I'd argue that Rush Limbaugh, Grover Norquist, and Tom Delay do (or have) worked hard at what they do. What they do may not be good for the country, but that isn't the same thing as being lazy. Many people spend their time on advocacy, and I'd be cautious in assuming that they're all doing so just because they're a failure in other areas. Or do you only think that left-leaning advocates are abject failures, while right-wing advocates are all motivated by a love of truth and justice?
I've antagonized peers. People in my own age group, income group, and approximate mental status. As an adult, I don't antagonize young teenagers, or those subordinate to me at work, or people who I just think can't handle it mentally. Picking on my peer at work isn't the same thing as me, as an adult, targeting a young teenager to torment. What she did is unconscionable. What's more, she didn't just make a mean one-off statement in a fit of anger; she systematically set out to destroy this young girl's mental status. The thought of someone my age picking on a kid that age is no less repulsive than that of a person exploiting another kid's insecurities and need for love for sex. She got her kicks at tormenting a young teenager.
I'm 39, and every time I can't quite remember a name, word, date, whatever, I attribute it to age. But then again, it's not as if I wasn't absentminded in my early 20s as well. Heck, I was an absentminded child who didn't know how to get anywhere because all our time in the car I spent daydreaming. I'm sure there has been scientific study done on memory and I'm not saying that age has no affect, but I'd wonder if part of it isn't just that we increasingly attribute the forgetfulness we already had to advancing age, while forgetting (aha!) that we also forgot stuff in our youth. I think many people have a disproportionate memory of exactly how sharp they were in their youth. Me, I'm fully aware that I was a dumb-ass. If I'm less of one now, it's only because I've learned to shut the hell up and keep it slightly more of a secret.
Well, other than being in the Illinois state and then the US Senate, and along the way sponsoring many bills, etc... you know, doing that stuff that legislators do. And since the US Senate is, well, not anything, and McCain has worked there for almost 30 years, that means McCain doesn't have any experience doing, well, anything. He was in the military, but since we don't cede much to Murtha, Cleland, Kerry, or Gore over military service, I don't see why we should get misty-eyed over McCain's service.
I too doubt that Obama is going to turn America into a paradise of milk and honey. But then again, I never expected him to. Few did. The ecstatic happiness you see concerning Obama is not because people consider him so great, but because people consider the status quo so bad. If he ends waterboarding and reinstates full habeas corpus, observation of the Geneva Conventions, closes the black site secret prisons, etc, I'll have gotten all I really wanted. And you might want to stop pissing all over hope and optimism. In the long term hope and optimism are usually unwarranted, but it motivates people to try, to get involved, to care. If everyone concluded that none of the candidates would or could do anything good, no one would vote. I don't consider that a good thing.
I still think the cops will have the ability to turn off the camera. One of my first jobs out of high school ('89) was in a company that made, among other things, circuit boards for cop-car cameras. If the lights were on, the camera was rolling. I'd been there a week when we had to change the product, because all of the police departments requested a kill switch for the camera. The first thing that popped out of my mouth was "why would they want to turn off the camera?" That little question was the cornerstone from which my entire political worldview was built, and I've yet to see a reason to change it. Cops want the power and freedom to be able to deal with suspects without leaving any evidence. It's not that I don't trust cops, but that I don't trust people with power. When those people take active steps to keep their exercise of power, their methods, secret, that sends up a whole bucket of red flags.
Then you have selective memory. I'm not blaming you, per se, nor am I saying that this is a right-wing phenomenon. People seem to have an inability to see their own faults, or those of those in their group, compared to faults of those who are less like them. To see right-wingers who consider themselves the only REAL patriots, the only REAL Christians, and the only REAL Republicans accuse others of smugness and hubris always serves to raise my eyebrows a bit. I see this stuff every single day, and I'm not all that leftish. If you don't think that Coulter and Limbaugh count as smug, you might want to have your meter re-calibrated.
The problem is, in any population of any size, you're going to have idiots, jerks, charlatans, attention whores, etc. This applies to all factions, groups, subcultures, religions, political groups, everything. Human frailty and evil runs pretty evenly across the gamut. But we have a tendency to take these normal outliers to be the norm when it comes to groups to which we don't belong, while we're blind to the same types of individuals in our own group. It's a pretty sad phenomenon.
Look, I like Linux. But if I want to install Truecrypt on OS X or Windows, I have to download one file. Linux is just not that easy. I was in a catch-22 situation for months where I had no internet access and had to rely on Wi-Fi at the library, but my wi-fi wouldn't work out of the box, so I couldn't install the files I needed to run Truecrypt, so I couldn't.... etc. You get the idea. I like Linux, especially Debian, but I'm not going to agree that there are no dependency problems. I've been defeated by them more than once.
Hypocrisy is a normal human trait, and I can forgive that to a degree. Supporting torture and totalitarian government is different. Lying about an affair you had is qualitatively different than lying about torture you've sanctioned and encouraged. One is normal human frailty, while the other is pretty much evil.
But I've witnessed these diametrically opposed sentiments advocated by the same person, in the same conversation. It's just that when they say "small government," they don't actually mean small government. If you're a passionate advocate of states' rights when it comes to laws meant to curb racism, but you don't care about states' rights when it comes to medical marijuana, that isn't a conundrum at all. It just means that you oppose the civl rights laws and you support the ban on marijuana. They're just using the "small government" rhetoric to selectively undermine programs that don't fit with their socially conservative agendas, while programs they DO like get a pass. How many conservatives cried "activist judges!" when the SCOTUS stopped the Florida recount and just gave those electoral votes to Bush? None of them. They ARE liars, because they claim to be motivated by a desire for "small government," when in fact they are fine with any degree of big-brotherism as long as it fits with their worldview.
Conservatives, with very few exceptions, are not conservative. The worldview is supposed to be based on awareness of man's fallibility and a skepticism of government power, but they were behind GWB the entire time as he gutted habeas corpus, insisted that he could not be bound by any written law, and so on. The people who were ostensibly committed to small government are the ones most passionately advocating government secrecy, the Unitary Executive theory, indefinite detention, torture-induced confessions, abandonment of the Geneva Conventions, preemptive war, legal immunity for US troops and mercenaries, etc. These are not the actions of someone who is suspicious of government power. They have utmost trust in government as long as a Republican is running the show.
Believing that government can rightly keep anyone they want for as long as they want, in secret and without having to press charges or present evidence, and that government employees and contractors should be shielded from legal consequences when they torture someone to death, are not in any way compatible with a commitment to small government. These are not "oopsies." These positions are not aberrations, but in actuality reveal exactly what type of people they are.
I've heard this statement many, many times. I have seen zero evidence that it's an accurate assessment. I can flush these people out with two words: medical marijuana. Add in prostitution, pornography, gay marriage, stem cell research, and you have a handful of areas in which their preferred government is far from small or non-intrusive. The "conservative" approach to habeas corpus, torture, and secret prisons is the opposite of small government--it's flat-out totalitarian. So my problem, in a nutshell, with conservatives is not that they are conservative, but that they are liars.
Then don't use the roads, water system, septic system, fire department, police department, courts, schools, or anything else that has been funded by taxpayer money. You don't need those stinking government handouts. I completely respect that.
I disagree. I think the idea is to pad the performance scores of the school to protect funding and prestige. If students fail, the school fails, ergo the students must not fail. Learning would be nice, but is secondary to protecting the existence and funding of the organization that pays those teachers and administrators.
Look, I'm techically a liberal, but I loathe the way this stuff is done. What's more, I don't think it's for the reasons stated, most of the time. I think teachers moved to the self-esteem every-child-is-a-potential-genius model not because they think all kids have that much latent intelligence, but because if you shift how we evaluate the efficacy of education from hard, testable skills, to nebulous terms like "emotional intelligence" or self-esteem, then you can no longer quantify how well the teachers are doing.
What does "belief" have to do with science? Science is the effort to best understand objective reality. The speed of light doesn't change based on your beliefs, and if you consider your beliefs to have primacy over science, you are going to be ridiculed. This expectation that people have of science accommodating their beliefs about human origins, the age of the earth/universe, human-exacerbated global warming, etc is a bit silly. If your beliefs don't mesh well with science, then either change your beliefs or thicken your skin. If you believe the earth is flat, you are going to be laughed at. If you reject evolution because it doesn't sit well with a literal reading of Genesis, you are going to be laughed at. It isn't bigotry to point out that someone prefers a set of bronze-age magic stories to the modern science that gave us medicine and the space shuttle. The problem isn't that evolutionists are mean, but that creationists can't accommodate science.
I'm puzzled that people insist that the hybrid vs. non-hybrid choice is purely economics. When I buy gas, I'm sending money to Wahhabi terrorists who want to kill me, and oppressive regimes like Saudi Arabia. I am directly sponsoring torture, terrorism, etc. If I divert that expenditure to a hybrid vehicle, some of my money at least is going to paying for better engineering, and funding a program meant to lower our dependence on oil, and thus our funding of terrorism etc. No, I don't have a Prius. My '91 Subaru, with the $200 per month of gas I use, are sufficient for my needs. I have more money tied up in bicycles than I do in automobiles. But if I were looking for a new car, my eyes would be on the plug-in hybrids. I wish I weren't so convinced that the major automakers and petroleum companies are sabotaging the development of electric cars. Yes, I've watched "Who Killed the Electric Car." Pretty nauseating.
Look man, it didn't start with Katrina. Back in covered-wagon times our entire expansion westward consisted of white guys trekking west and expecting the army to come get rid of the indians so they could live safely on this empty (cough cough) land. They didn't do it themselves--it was all done on the government teat. The growth of the railroads similarly dependent on government largesse. Our entire national identity, that of tough self-sufficiency, is a lie we tell ourselves. When we overthrew Saddam, the explosives and nuclear material was left unguarded, and US Marines were put on post guarding oil wells. Why don't Chevron and Exxon fight their own wars? Same reason people expect to live where they want, and have the taxpayer bail them out when things to badly. It's no different, and the saps in New Orleans (who I agree are dense for living below sea level) are no more guilty of that feeling of entitlement than Chevron or Exxon management.
Damn hippie communists.
A friend of mine and I went to Cambodia, and took some good pictures on a trip. When we got back, I showed him how to edit the photos with his crappy bundled photo software. He was amazed that you could take people, litter, etc out of photographs. I created a monster. He was up all night deleting the other tourists from the pictures so the picture would reflect how he remembered the experience. Is there anything wrong with that? It's an interesting philosophical question.
Either that, or we get rid of warrants altogether and let cops do whatever they want. If we as a society decide that the inconvenience of warrants are an excessive impediment to law enforcement, then we should just remove due process and oversight altogether. Having the need for warrants in place, via the constitution and accepted law, and then ignoring that need, only undermines respect for law and for the police. Either respect freedom, which requires putting cops to some inconvenience, or just defer to cops to do the right thing, and hope for the best.
The only thingn worse than democracy is everything else. No single person or even group of people is smart enough to know everything, and even very insightful people (Edward Gibbon, for example) make bad or inneffectual legislators. Even the ancient Greeks had problems with democracy, and Athens had what, about 10K people at the time? Problem is, every other system sucks worse. Democracy is the way it is because we are the way we are, and if people didn't suck, you wouldn't need government in the first place.
Right now, fighter pilots are sitting at the top, and they decide who gets the thumbs-up or thumbs-down for the assignments/jobs that build the career of a future general. Change will not come from within the culture. UAV pilots are not in the club, and it will be a long long time before one is made wing commander, much less Numbered AF or MAJCOM. You might have one as commander of a UAV-only wing, which will be looked at, career-wise, as a junior jamboree.
I'm not saying that change won't happen, only that the fighter pilots will balk, complain, sabotage, foot-drag, and all but revolt all the way down the line.
Put anyone in a position of privelege, and they'll in short order think that the privelege is natural, and do everything in their power to keep it. It's human nature.
The fighter pilots are the aristocracy of the aristocracy of the AF. Even aside from the love of flying that drove them into that job, the perks of being a fighter pilot, the status and career path that conveys, are not things they're going to surrender willingly.