The problem with your version of the right-wing utopia is that it's different from the policies pushed for and implemented by politicians who describe themselves and are described by many others as right-wing.
Freedom to practice one's own religion without gov't intereference
Explain, then, why: - Conservatives established the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, that not only funds religious groups only, but disproportionately funds conservative Protestant denominations. - Conservative candidates across the country are falling over themselves emphasizing how Protestant they are. - Mitt Romney was repeatedly questioned by conservatives for being a Mormon rather than Baptist or Pentacostal or something similar. - Most conservative candidates pride themselves on association with religious conservative institutions like Bob Jones "University". - There are exactly 3 Republicans (generally considered a conservative party) in the federal government that is not some variety of Christian. (That 1 Republican is Jewish.) - Several conservative Republican officials are affiliated with organizations that explicitly want the US to be a Christian nation.
Of course humans are the cause of global warming: Any idiot can see that average global temperature is inversely correlated with the number of pirates. There's good news though: libertarian Somalia has taken the lead on increasing piracy in the world, thus proving that rational self-interest will always solve environmental problems.
I'd rather not force people to go to our awful public schools.
1. We don't. Parents who would rather send their child to a private school, or home school their child, are allowed to do so.
2. Whether a law should exist or not is a different question from how a law should be enforced. A law that isn't enforced is usually worse than not having a law at all.
My high school had a powerful teachers union, was serving one of the poorer districts in the state, and on the whole a very good teaching staff. Some things that made a difference: - Teachers had at least a 1-year probationary period in which they could be fired at the will of the administration. This meant that would-be teachers who proved themselves incompetent never made it into the system. That obviously didn't do anything about the established-but-now-doddering teachers, but it did mean that I was able to work with the administration to get rid of a chemistry teacher who couldn't do basic algebra.
- The teacher's union was smart about who it protected and who it didn't. Teachers who deserved to be fired due to gross incompetence or malice or stupid insubordination were not protected by the union. That meant that when the union went to bat for teachers that were getting laid off due to ageism or abusive administrators or politics (e.g. one administrator tried to get a teacher fired for talking about anti-Vietnam activism in a US history class), the city and the public were likely to back them up.
- The district I was in paid better than surrounding districts. That helped attract the best teachers, who (ceteris paribus) prefer getting paid better. In fact, we even had a couple of doctorates teaching high school in part because they could earn more than they would have at nearby colleges.
- Good people attract good people: Good teachers were attracted to that particular school because they knew they would be able to learn from their top-notch colleagues.
- As far as I could tell there was no drug testing. Some of the better teachers were widely known to be potheads, but they were never challenged on that basis.
They're trying to improve attendance in order to increase how much state money they get
I've got a totally unoriginal idea: truant officers.
This problem isn't new: students skipping school is a problem that goes back at least 100 years. The solution involves people empowered to arrest and force truant students to school, fining students and/or their parents if the kid fails to show up, and so on. Sure, that can get expensive, but if you've already decided that you're going to legally require kids to be in school, then you need to use the coercive power of the state to enforce that rule, just like we enforce rules against disorderly conduct.
There seems to be an enormous distrust to experts in general.... I tried to explain to my wife that this was just absolutely impossible. She wouldn't believe it.
That sounds less like a distrust of experts and more like a distrust of husbands!
When the people who know what they're talking about are in widespread agreement about some issue, that's generally an indication that what they're saying is the best understanding of the issue available. If you instead decide to follow the advice of someone who is totally unqualified, that's probably going to point you towards the wrong conclusion. Especially when, as in this case, everything turned out exactly as the experts predicted it would.
So yeah, listening to Jenny McCarthy rather than just about every doctor on the planet about medical issues is stupid. And I'm sorry the kids have to suffer for their parents' stupidity.
And some multinationals continued those business relationships between 1939 and 1945, or nominally severed the relationship with their subsidiaries in those countries and then collected the profits after the war.
Big business is only loyal to profits. Flags, ideals, countries, and people are secondary concerns at best.
but if you look at McCarthyism (which was pretty bad) it just ended overnight
Actually, it didn't. My grandfather (or more exactly, his career) was one of the victims of McCarthyism, and it kept him from working for about 15 years, long after McCarthy was out of the headlines. You're right it could have been a lot worse, but it was quite real and quite lasting.
And we're also in agreement that SWAT teams busting down civilian's doors and sometimes killing them over non-violent offenses is something no citizen should support.
But the real question becomes one of authoritarianism vs libertarianism. This is the true divide in North America, not left wing and right wing. There are those who believe that we should be exposed to no risk and aim to impose some kind of perfect Disney society.
The authoritarianism vs libertarianism divide is quite real, but so is the left-wing vs right-wing divide. The left-wing and right-wing have significantly different visions of what "some kind of perfect Disney society" looks like, and push for significantly different sets of rules to achieve them.
In the left-wing utopia, you'd find: (1) legal and social equality between races, genders, sexual orientations, religions etc. (2) little-to-no violence. (3) limits on how rich or poor someone can get (This may all come at a high cost in efficiency and productivity). (4) little-to-no environmental disasters. (5) pot is legal. (6) consensual sex is always legal.
In the right-wing utopia, you'd find: (1) everyone is a white born-again Christian. (2) violence is acceptable in defense of property. (3) no limits whatsoever on enterprise and business (this has costs like environmental messes and government corruption). (4) resources are used as quickly as possible to produce as much as possible. (5) if you can't take care of yourself, tough luck. (6) The only kind of sex that is OK is within a marriage.
That's a pretty big divide, and it is reflected in the policy proposals of the 2 largest US political parties. There are authoritarian and libertarian principles embedded in each of those visions, but you can't legitimately argue that they're basically the same thing.
Cheye Calvo, then mayor of Berwyn Heights, MD: His crime was bringing a package inside his home. It turned out that this was a package of pot that the police had been tracking and put on his porch, and as soon as the package was inside the SWAT team stormed his house, shooting his dogs, nearly shooting his mother-in-law (cue jokes), no knocking or announcing. It turned out that the only reason that the package had been addressed to his home was that some drug dealer had gotten his wife's name and address at random, and then have the local UPS delivery guy just take the packages to whoever was really supposed to get them. There was also an obvious entrapment issue, as Calvo would never have seen the package without the police putting it there.
Nowadays Calvo spends most of his time traveling the country giving talks about out of control SWAT teams. He also points out that there are lots of people who this happens to that nobody paid attention to because they were poor and/or not-white, rather than relatively well-to-do, white, and the local mayor.
Are you talking about the risk of a politician doing that which he's never talked about doing, or never tried to do?
Yes, that risk is there. There's absolutely no way to mitigate it: you can't stop plans you don't know about. But you simply can't make good decisions based on what you're afraid will happen with no evidence whatsoever, because all that really amounts to is your prejudices coming to light.
I should be the one asking: do minorities not count? Tyranny of the majority is a-ok?
Electoral minorities count only insofar as their constitutional rights must be respected, and the majority should not be treating that minority any differently than anyone else. Losing an election and having the winners implement the policies they campaigned on is not tyranny of the majority, it's just losing an election.
For example, let's say 1/3 of Americans think murder should be legal, and 2/3 think it should be illegal. By your arguments, in that society murder should be legal, because the significant-enough minority thinks it ought to be, and anyone trying to pass and enforce a law to the contrary is tyranny of the majority.
As I said above, the south didn't secede on a whim. After the first shots were fired, Lincoln asked for volunteers.
Ok, so let me get this straight: A state declares itself independent, some other states join them, and they shoot at troops the federal government and a US Navy vessel, forcing their surrender.
If we cannot resolve our differences, the nobler course to take is the same as if marriage or labor negotiations fail: you step away.
Look, I know that in Dixie white kids are taught that it was all the damn Yankee's fault, and that their ancestors didn't fight for slavery, that everything would have been OK if the north had just left them alone, and that the federal government was a happy club of gentlemen before 1860. And I know that this sentiment runs very very deep. The problem is that none of the available historical evidence (including anything from the Confederate side written before the Confederate surrender) suggests that any of that is true.
Moving all your data and/or application to "the cloud" does not eliminate the need for it to be stored on and served from a physical machine.
All it does is make the server it is stored on part of some giant datacenter owned by Amazon or Rackspace or something, rather than part of some smaller data center owned by you. Oh, and that for a fee.
It is Lincoln who needs to prove his legitimacy. A government is legitimate if it has the consent of the people, and what the south basically was saying they do NOT consent to rule by Lincoln.
Lincoln did have the consent of the people, as determined by the election. He didn't have the consent of southern white people, but those people didn't come close to constituting a majority in 1860. Unless you believe those are the only people that counted.
Well, Congress as a whole can't lose 20 or 30 percentage points: Its current approval rating is at somewhere around 10%. According to the available polling data, Americans think this is the worst Congress in at least 40 years.
Another interesting trend from Gallup on this: If you ask Americans whether their Congressman is doing a good job, 46% say yes (also lowest number since the 1970's). If you ask Americans who know the name of the Congressman if that Congressman is doing a good job, 62% say yes. Let's just say there's a civics education problem in America.
That's certainly putting it poorly, given that the South seceded not because of what Lincoln had done (he wasn't president yet, and hadn't implemented any kind of policy), nor because of what Lincoln and his party said he was going to do (namely make the new states forming in the west free soil). South Carolina in particular seceded because of what the Glenn Beck's of the age feared Lincoln might do some time down the road, because despite all his protestations and tangible evidence otherwise they thought he had a secret plan to take all their slaves away.
In the most charitable interpretation, secession was a massive overreaction: Lincoln stood for gradual changes and a moderate change in course, but the secessionists reacted like Abe Lincoln was like Nat Turner coming to kill them. And it backfired, because the Civil War pushed Lincoln towards emancipation in a way that mere political resistance probably wouldn't have. The Radical Republican faction that pushed in the 13th Amendment wasn't even an important political force in 1860, but by 1866 it dominated Washington.
There's a lesson to be learned here: Focus on what a politician proposes and/or implements, not on what you fear he might do.
Bill Clinton also negotiated a peace settlement between Israel and Jordan in 1994 that has continued to hold up for almost 20 years now.
The primary reasons the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations fell apart were (1) Arafat wasn't willing to sign a deal without a right of return, and (2) Yitzak Rabin was killed by an Israeli Jew who believed that the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza should be part of Israel. Since then, peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine have been mostly a joke - Al Jazeera got their hands on some video of one of the sessions, where the Israelis walk in, demand a bunch of concessions, and Fatah gives them almost everything they ask for.
No it isn't: It's one of the few jobs that involves tanks in any way!
As far as his conservation efforts go, he had solar panels put up on the White House. Ronald Reagan took them down again, solely because he didn't want to look like a hippie.
Some more presidents that were significantly worse than Jimmy Carter: * Herbert Hoover (1929 made 2008 look like a picnic) * Andrew Johnson (never won an election, basically tried to undo everything the Union had won in the Civil War, and was nearly removed from office by impeachment) * James Madison (started an ill-advised war with the British that the US was in no position to fight, nearly destroying the country) * Gerald Ford (also never elected, and his pardon of Nixon firmly established the precedent that the president was above the law) * Warren Harding (probably the most corrupt president in the history of the US, also a notorious womanizer) * Franklin Pierce (basically created Bleeding Kansas, which pushed the country towards civil war)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with your version of the right-wing utopia is that it's different from the policies pushed for and implemented by politicians who describe themselves and are described by many others as right-wing.
Freedom to practice one's own religion without gov't intereference
Explain, then, why:
- Conservatives established the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, that not only funds religious groups only, but disproportionately funds conservative Protestant denominations.
- Conservative candidates across the country are falling over themselves emphasizing how Protestant they are.
- Mitt Romney was repeatedly questioned by conservatives for being a Mormon rather than Baptist or Pentacostal or something similar.
- Most conservative candidates pride themselves on association with religious conservative institutions like Bob Jones "University".
- There are exactly 3 Republicans (generally considered a conservative party) in the federal government that is not some variety of Christian. (That 1 Republican is Jewish.)
- Several conservative Republican officials are affiliated with organizations that explicitly want the US to be a Christian nation.
Of course humans are the cause of global warming: Any idiot can see that average global temperature is inversely correlated with the number of pirates. There's good news though: libertarian Somalia has taken the lead on increasing piracy in the world, thus proving that rational self-interest will always solve environmental problems.
I'd rather not force people to go to our awful public schools.
1. We don't. Parents who would rather send their child to a private school, or home school their child, are allowed to do so.
2. Whether a law should exist or not is a different question from how a law should be enforced. A law that isn't enforced is usually worse than not having a law at all.
My high school had a powerful teachers union, was serving one of the poorer districts in the state, and on the whole a very good teaching staff. Some things that made a difference:
- Teachers had at least a 1-year probationary period in which they could be fired at the will of the administration. This meant that would-be teachers who proved themselves incompetent never made it into the system. That obviously didn't do anything about the established-but-now-doddering teachers, but it did mean that I was able to work with the administration to get rid of a chemistry teacher who couldn't do basic algebra.
- The teacher's union was smart about who it protected and who it didn't. Teachers who deserved to be fired due to gross incompetence or malice or stupid insubordination were not protected by the union. That meant that when the union went to bat for teachers that were getting laid off due to ageism or abusive administrators or politics (e.g. one administrator tried to get a teacher fired for talking about anti-Vietnam activism in a US history class), the city and the public were likely to back them up.
- The district I was in paid better than surrounding districts. That helped attract the best teachers, who (ceteris paribus) prefer getting paid better. In fact, we even had a couple of doctorates teaching high school in part because they could earn more than they would have at nearby colleges.
- Good people attract good people: Good teachers were attracted to that particular school because they knew they would be able to learn from their top-notch colleagues.
- As far as I could tell there was no drug testing. Some of the better teachers were widely known to be potheads, but they were never challenged on that basis.
They're trying to improve attendance in order to increase how much state money they get
I've got a totally unoriginal idea: truant officers.
This problem isn't new: students skipping school is a problem that goes back at least 100 years. The solution involves people empowered to arrest and force truant students to school, fining students and/or their parents if the kid fails to show up, and so on. Sure, that can get expensive, but if you've already decided that you're going to legally require kids to be in school, then you need to use the coercive power of the state to enforce that rule, just like we enforce rules against disorderly conduct.
There seems to be an enormous distrust to experts in general. ... I tried to explain to my wife that this was just absolutely impossible. She wouldn't believe it.
That sounds less like a distrust of experts and more like a distrust of husbands!
When the people who know what they're talking about are in widespread agreement about some issue, that's generally an indication that what they're saying is the best understanding of the issue available. If you instead decide to follow the advice of someone who is totally unqualified, that's probably going to point you towards the wrong conclusion. Especially when, as in this case, everything turned out exactly as the experts predicted it would.
So yeah, listening to Jenny McCarthy rather than just about every doctor on the planet about medical issues is stupid. And I'm sorry the kids have to suffer for their parents' stupidity.
So were Germans and Japanese in 1939.
And some multinationals continued those business relationships between 1939 and 1945, or nominally severed the relationship with their subsidiaries in those countries and then collected the profits after the war.
Big business is only loyal to profits. Flags, ideals, countries, and people are secondary concerns at best.
but if you look at McCarthyism (which was pretty bad) it just ended overnight
Actually, it didn't. My grandfather (or more exactly, his career) was one of the victims of McCarthyism, and it kept him from working for about 15 years, long after McCarthy was out of the headlines. You're right it could have been a lot worse, but it was quite real and quite lasting.
And we're also in agreement that SWAT teams busting down civilian's doors and sometimes killing them over non-violent offenses is something no citizen should support.
But the real question becomes one of authoritarianism vs libertarianism. This is the true divide in North America, not left wing and right wing. There are those who believe that we should be exposed to no risk and aim to impose some kind of perfect Disney society.
The authoritarianism vs libertarianism divide is quite real, but so is the left-wing vs right-wing divide. The left-wing and right-wing have significantly different visions of what "some kind of perfect Disney society" looks like, and push for significantly different sets of rules to achieve them.
In the left-wing utopia, you'd find: (1) legal and social equality between races, genders, sexual orientations, religions etc. (2) little-to-no violence. (3) limits on how rich or poor someone can get (This may all come at a high cost in efficiency and productivity). (4) little-to-no environmental disasters. (5) pot is legal. (6) consensual sex is always legal.
In the right-wing utopia, you'd find: (1) everyone is a white born-again Christian. (2) violence is acceptable in defense of property. (3) no limits whatsoever on enterprise and business (this has costs like environmental messes and government corruption). (4) resources are used as quickly as possible to produce as much as possible. (5) if you can't take care of yourself, tough luck. (6) The only kind of sex that is OK is within a marriage.
That's a pretty big divide, and it is reflected in the policy proposals of the 2 largest US political parties. There are authoritarian and libertarian principles embedded in each of those visions, but you can't legitimately argue that they're basically the same thing.
Cheye Calvo, then mayor of Berwyn Heights, MD: His crime was bringing a package inside his home. It turned out that this was a package of pot that the police had been tracking and put on his porch, and as soon as the package was inside the SWAT team stormed his house, shooting his dogs, nearly shooting his mother-in-law (cue jokes), no knocking or announcing. It turned out that the only reason that the package had been addressed to his home was that some drug dealer had gotten his wife's name and address at random, and then have the local UPS delivery guy just take the packages to whoever was really supposed to get them. There was also an obvious entrapment issue, as Calvo would never have seen the package without the police putting it there.
Nowadays Calvo spends most of his time traveling the country giving talks about out of control SWAT teams. He also points out that there are lots of people who this happens to that nobody paid attention to because they were poor and/or not-white, rather than relatively well-to-do, white, and the local mayor.
By your logic, apparently atomic scientists were responsible for the creation of atoms!
How about the problem of me not having a can of beer in my hands right now?
Are you talking about the risk of a politician doing that which he's never talked about doing, or never tried to do?
Yes, that risk is there. There's absolutely no way to mitigate it: you can't stop plans you don't know about. But you simply can't make good decisions based on what you're afraid will happen with no evidence whatsoever, because all that really amounts to is your prejudices coming to light.
I should be the one asking: do minorities not count? Tyranny of the majority is a-ok?
Electoral minorities count only insofar as their constitutional rights must be respected, and the majority should not be treating that minority any differently than anyone else. Losing an election and having the winners implement the policies they campaigned on is not tyranny of the majority, it's just losing an election.
For example, let's say 1/3 of Americans think murder should be legal, and 2/3 think it should be illegal. By your arguments, in that society murder should be legal, because the significant-enough minority thinks it ought to be, and anyone trying to pass and enforce a law to the contrary is tyranny of the majority.
As I said above, the south didn't secede on a whim. After the first shots were fired, Lincoln asked for volunteers.
Ok, so let me get this straight: A state declares itself independent, some other states join them, and they shoot at troops the federal government and a US Navy vessel, forcing their surrender.
If we cannot resolve our differences, the nobler course to take is the same as if marriage or labor negotiations fail: you step away.
Look, I know that in Dixie white kids are taught that it was all the damn Yankee's fault, and that their ancestors didn't fight for slavery, that everything would have been OK if the north had just left them alone, and that the federal government was a happy club of gentlemen before 1860. And I know that this sentiment runs very very deep. The problem is that none of the available historical evidence (including anything from the Confederate side written before the Confederate surrender) suggests that any of that is true.
Oh, I like billiards, particularly when I'm losing badly but then my opponent scratches on the 8-ball.
Moving all your data and/or application to "the cloud" does not eliminate the need for it to be stored on and served from a physical machine.
All it does is make the server it is stored on part of some giant datacenter owned by Amazon or Rackspace or something, rather than part of some smaller data center owned by you. Oh, and that for a fee.
It is Lincoln who needs to prove his legitimacy. A government is legitimate if it has the consent of the people, and what the south basically was saying they do NOT consent to rule by Lincoln.
Lincoln did have the consent of the people, as determined by the election. He didn't have the consent of southern white people, but those people didn't come close to constituting a majority in 1860. Unless you believe those are the only people that counted.
Well, Congress as a whole can't lose 20 or 30 percentage points: Its current approval rating is at somewhere around 10%. According to the available polling data, Americans think this is the worst Congress in at least 40 years.
Another interesting trend from Gallup on this: If you ask Americans whether their Congressman is doing a good job, 46% say yes (also lowest number since the 1970's). If you ask Americans who know the name of the Congressman if that Congressman is doing a good job, 62% say yes. Let's just say there's a civics education problem in America.
To put it poorly, he helped start it.
That's certainly putting it poorly, given that the South seceded not because of what Lincoln had done (he wasn't president yet, and hadn't implemented any kind of policy), nor because of what Lincoln and his party said he was going to do (namely make the new states forming in the west free soil). South Carolina in particular seceded because of what the Glenn Beck's of the age feared Lincoln might do some time down the road, because despite all his protestations and tangible evidence otherwise they thought he had a secret plan to take all their slaves away.
In the most charitable interpretation, secession was a massive overreaction: Lincoln stood for gradual changes and a moderate change in course, but the secessionists reacted like Abe Lincoln was like Nat Turner coming to kill them. And it backfired, because the Civil War pushed Lincoln towards emancipation in a way that mere political resistance probably wouldn't have. The Radical Republican faction that pushed in the 13th Amendment wasn't even an important political force in 1860, but by 1866 it dominated Washington.
There's a lesson to be learned here: Focus on what a politician proposes and/or implements, not on what you fear he might do.
Bill Clinton also negotiated a peace settlement between Israel and Jordan in 1994 that has continued to hold up for almost 20 years now.
The primary reasons the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations fell apart were (1) Arafat wasn't willing to sign a deal without a right of return, and (2) Yitzak Rabin was killed by an Israeli Jew who believed that the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza should be part of Israel. Since then, peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine have been mostly a joke - Al Jazeera got their hands on some video of one of the sessions, where the Israelis walk in, demand a bunch of concessions, and Fatah gives them almost everything they ask for.
It is a tankless job
No it isn't: It's one of the few jobs that involves tanks in any way!
As far as his conservation efforts go, he had solar panels put up on the White House. Ronald Reagan took them down again, solely because he didn't want to look like a hippie.
Some more presidents that were significantly worse than Jimmy Carter:
* Herbert Hoover (1929 made 2008 look like a picnic)
* Andrew Johnson (never won an election, basically tried to undo everything the Union had won in the Civil War, and was nearly removed from office by impeachment)
* James Madison (started an ill-advised war with the British that the US was in no position to fight, nearly destroying the country)
* Gerald Ford (also never elected, and his pardon of Nixon firmly established the precedent that the president was above the law)
* Warren Harding (probably the most corrupt president in the history of the US, also a notorious womanizer)
* Franklin Pierce (basically created Bleeding Kansas, which pushed the country towards civil war)
No it doesn't: packet sniffers.
1. A complete disdain or hatred of lusers.
2. A collection of blackmail materials.
3. Homicidal rage.