So, will this actually change anything for people like me?
Like anything else complicated, it depends. Some things it does that could affect you: * If you have any kids ages 18-26 you have the option of putting them on your group insurance plan, which you couldn't always do before this was passed. * If you work full-time for a company that has more than 25 employees, they have to offer you health insurance benefits. If you don't work for that kind of company, they're setting up an insurance exchange where you can easily compare and buy insurance. * If it does what the people who designed it think it will do, it will reduce the number of people who show up at ERs without insurance, and significantly increase the chance of poorer people getting preventative care. * It prevents your insurance company from refusing to cover something by claiming it's a pre-existing condition, and from cutting you off because you got sick. * The part that people are up in arms about is that if you don't somehow acquire health insurance, you pay a tax penalty. * If you were poor, the government would pay for your health insurance. I doubt this is relevant to you.
This is more-or-less identical to the plan passed in Massachusetts several years ago, and signed into law by one Mitt Romney. The studies vary as to how useful it was (mostly depending on the political slant of those doing the study).
Most criminology studies have demonstrated that it's not actually the punishment that makes much difference in crime rates, it's the risk of getting caught.
So here's my counter-proposal: Take the police resources currently used to prevent people from smoking pot (which has never been shown to harm anybody) and put them towards ensuring that people don't drive drunk (which has been shown to harm thousands of people a year). And I make this proposal as somebody who's never smoked pot and never wanted to.
My argument is this: If somebody with lots of training, experience, awards, published papers, etc in a field can't figure out something that is in that field, how would you reasonably expect your average layperson to be able to figure it out? A similar argument from a different field: If a bunch of theoretical physicists can't provide a deifinitive answer on whether string theory is accurate, what makes you think that the average person is likely to get it right?
This isn't about safety, its about the perception of safety.
This is about safety.
Drunk driving kills approximately 40 times as many people as terrorism, about 8000 drunk drivers and 4000 people that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, making it one of the top causes of death by trauma (the other contenders for this dubious honor being other car accidents, poisoning, suicide, falls, and homicide). It's a serious problem, and is a reasonable area for government to try to do something about it.
I'm not against getting drunk. I'm against drunk people killing and injuring those around them.
That doesn't refute my argument in the least: The English and later American policy was to ruthlessly take the land and everything else of value from the American Indians regardless of the consequences. Which is exactly what your quote refers to doing.
This is a different policy from the Spanish who generally had a goal of enslaving or killing them. The Spanish wanted their lives, the English / Americans wanted their stuff. And the French (and to a lesser degree the Dutch) were showing the entire time that there were much more humane ways of doing things.
Now, where I stand on this politically, so you understand, is that I'm pals with some American Indian community leaders, and consider what happened to their nations to be one of the 2 great national crimes of the United States.
How are the exploited if they are signing up willingly?... I agree companies take things a bit too far at times but like a wise man once said "It's a crime to let a sucker hang on to his money." I feel no worse for people being "exploited" by these companies than I do the banks that gambled on them.
Here's the counterargument put forward by Elizabeth Warren years before she was remotely considering running for political office: As a classroom exercise at Harvard Law, the prof and students took standard EULAs and credit card contracts and tried to analyze them. They couldn't. If a room full of lawyers can't understand a contract, how the heck is an average person supposed to understand what they're signing up for?
The usual response to that is "but the average person could go with the company that doesn't do that, or do without the service". Well, if every company in the market is doing that, they can't get out of it by switching sellers. And if the product is pretty much required for their daily life (e.g. having a bank account with a debit card or using a search engine), doing without the service isn't really viable either.
Why limit ourselves to property crime? I'd really want them more focused on some really dangerous people like:
* Dick Cheney (crime against humanity - ordering waterboarding)
* Barack Obama (murder in the first degree of Anwar Al-Awlaki)
* Rudolph Giuliani and Howard Dean (material support for a designated terrorist organization, the Iranian MEK)
Is there really that much blurring going on between legal and illegal immigrants?
A lot of the hatred towards the "illegals" is about things that have nothing to do with legal status at all. For example, "English-only" laws have been passed in many states with their proponents making quite clear that their purpose is to ensure that Spanish does not become more widely spoken in the United States.
It's true that the US policy wasn't to intentionally wipe out all the American Indians (although they certainly had no qualms about doing so), just to take all their stuff and force them further west until they had nothing to live on. This was different from the policy of, say, Christopher Columbus, who just wiped out all the Indians living in Hispaniola, or the French who generally set up trading posts along the rivers and left the Indian societies intact (which was a major reason the Indians tended to side with the French during the 6 Years War).
Here's some actual comparison. First, PBS Newshour reporting on the Arizona immigration law ruling:
The U.S. Supreme Court delivered its judgment today on the 2010 Arizona immigration law that sparked a national debate. The outcome left both sides claiming at least partial victories. The decision came after two years of protests and legal challenges to the Arizona law, then the April arguments before the Supreme Court, today, the decision,5-3, with Justice Elena Kagan recusing herself because she worked on the issue in the Obama administration. The court ruled Arizona may not force immigrants to carry immigration papers or make it a crime for an illegal immigrant to hold a job or let police arrest suspected illegals without warrant.
This was followed by reactions from Arizona governor Jan Brewer, President Obama's statement, and analysis by someone from The National Law Journal.
Tonight, both sides of the aisle are claiming victory after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a split decision on the Arizona immigration law. Now, three aspects of SB-1070 was struck down by the high court in the five to three ruling. However, the cornerstone of that law was upheld. Now, that critical provision is the one that requires police officers to verify the legal status of anybody that they suspect to be in the country illegally. And liberals from President Obama to the Attorney General Eric Holder have long claimed that this measure would somehow lead to widespread racial profiling. And that line of attack was revisited today on the Senate floor by Harry Reid just moments after the ruling was in fact handed down.
After the clip of Harry Reid, Hannity states "Now, it's unfortunate that Harry Reid would rather play politics than protect the border." and follows up with
Please explain to me exactly what bias PBS demonstrated in this report, and explain why the last comment by Hannity isn't an example of a very clear political slant.
The key point, and the reason it's very popular in the Arab world, is that Al Jazeera can and does go after every government other than the Qatar government even though it broadcasts in those areas. For instance, Saudi journalists who criticized the king would likely end up dead, in prison, or at least out of a job, while Al Jazeera doesn't have that problem.
I immediately signed on to the NYTimes pay service without even bothering with the one month free trial. It buys very good journalism (as opposed to Fox).
The reason I don't support the New York Times financially is because, by its own admission, it runs its political news by whatever presidential administration is in charge at the moment, and suppresses or delays stories just because the government asks it to (for example Wikileaks Collateral Murder video was delayed a year at the request of the Bush administration). They aren't alone: Cenk Uenger quit his job at MSNBC because his bosses told him to stop annoying people in Washington D.C., and Fox takes its orders from the same guys who really run the Republican Party.
Actually, Stephen Colbert summed it up brilliantly years ago:
But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The President makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!
Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, so technically it's "state-owned". However, throughout most of the Middle East, its primary role is as a media outlet not controlled by either the national government or western business interests. And if you actually watch some of its reporting, you'll see that on issues outside of Qatar, its slant is different but certainly no more pronounced than your average western news outlet.
Interestingly enough, the fact that the literal interpretation of the Bible isn't in any way intellectually consistent with itself, much less with reality, is also not proof enough that it can't be true.
The theoretical reasons for rules of war are: 1. War is a nasty business, but soldiers should not just be wiping out people that aren't a threat to them. Most people have a pretty strong moral aversion to killing people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (it happens, but that doesn't make it ok). In your examples, are you ok with killing off the people who are in that church praying while their country is being invaded? How about the family of civilians that was unable to escape and now is looking for water to drink? How many random bystanders are you willing to kill in order to get the one bad guy you're after?
2. By following rules, it increases the chance that the other guys will follow the rules too, which means our soldiers are less likely to be killed when they can't defend themselves and decide to surrender.
3. By following rules around the treatment of prisoners, it increases the chance that the enemy will surrender rather than fight to the death. That reduces the number of "last stands" where people tend to fight desperately and kill a lot of our guys because they have nothing to lose.
I didn't say a word about spending, I said they got a lousy education. Which, as you argued quite thoroughly, they do.
I also know that discipline and motivation can come from a lot of sources, not just from parenting: If it didn't, no child of lazy and undisciplined parents could have ever accomplished anything, which is plainly false. Anecdotally, my dad did his student teaching in South Boston High (about 50% failure rate, 30% dropout rate, just a mess) - many of his students were just trouble, but a few joined Junior ROTC and were the most motivated and disciplined kids he ever worked with, and many of them didn't get that at all from their homes.
And it won't be for decades. These are top-notch spies we're talking about here, with the most powerful military in human history defending them. There's as much proof that the US was involved in Stuxnet as there is that the US was involved in the Venezuela coup: They had the means and the motivation, and left some evidence behind that sure looks suspicious, but no definitive proof.
Actually, according to the Constitution, the US has fought no wars since 1945. We stopped declaring war at about the same time as we renamed our War Department the Department of Defense (after which we continued to attack foreign nations just like we've been doing throughout history).
Cyberwar, at least as it's currently conducted, doesn't kill people.
Also, what makes them think that regulations matter when you're talking about war? Look at the nuclear weapons treaties - North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Israel have all flaunted them by making nuclear weapons, and the US and Israel have flaunted them by attempting to prevent Iran from researching nuclear power for civilian purposes (which is allowed under non-proliferation treaties).
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So, will this actually change anything for people like me?
Like anything else complicated, it depends. Some things it does that could affect you:
* If you have any kids ages 18-26 you have the option of putting them on your group insurance plan, which you couldn't always do before this was passed.
* If you work full-time for a company that has more than 25 employees, they have to offer you health insurance benefits. If you don't work for that kind of company, they're setting up an insurance exchange where you can easily compare and buy insurance.
* If it does what the people who designed it think it will do, it will reduce the number of people who show up at ERs without insurance, and significantly increase the chance of poorer people getting preventative care.
* It prevents your insurance company from refusing to cover something by claiming it's a pre-existing condition, and from cutting you off because you got sick.
* The part that people are up in arms about is that if you don't somehow acquire health insurance, you pay a tax penalty.
* If you were poor, the government would pay for your health insurance. I doubt this is relevant to you.
This is more-or-less identical to the plan passed in Massachusetts several years ago, and signed into law by one Mitt Romney. The studies vary as to how useful it was (mostly depending on the political slant of those doing the study).
Most criminology studies have demonstrated that it's not actually the punishment that makes much difference in crime rates, it's the risk of getting caught.
So here's my counter-proposal: Take the police resources currently used to prevent people from smoking pot (which has never been shown to harm anybody) and put them towards ensuring that people don't drive drunk (which has been shown to harm thousands of people a year). And I make this proposal as somebody who's never smoked pot and never wanted to.
My argument is this: If somebody with lots of training, experience, awards, published papers, etc in a field can't figure out something that is in that field, how would you reasonably expect your average layperson to be able to figure it out? A similar argument from a different field: If a bunch of theoretical physicists can't provide a deifinitive answer on whether string theory is accurate, what makes you think that the average person is likely to get it right?
the penalty for waiting until sober is the same as the penalty for driving drunk
Which penalty are we talking about, the one where you pay a fine or the one where you end up killed or maimed?
This isn't about safety, its about the perception of safety.
This is about safety.
Drunk driving kills approximately 40 times as many people as terrorism, about 8000 drunk drivers and 4000 people that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, making it one of the top causes of death by trauma (the other contenders for this dubious honor being other car accidents, poisoning, suicide, falls, and homicide). It's a serious problem, and is a reasonable area for government to try to do something about it.
I'm not against getting drunk. I'm against drunk people killing and injuring those around them.
No, I'm calling him a fizzle. And I'm getting away with it.
That doesn't refute my argument in the least: The English and later American policy was to ruthlessly take the land and everything else of value from the American Indians regardless of the consequences. Which is exactly what your quote refers to doing.
This is a different policy from the Spanish who generally had a goal of enslaving or killing them. The Spanish wanted their lives, the English / Americans wanted their stuff. And the French (and to a lesser degree the Dutch) were showing the entire time that there were much more humane ways of doing things.
Now, where I stand on this politically, so you understand, is that I'm pals with some American Indian community leaders, and consider what happened to their nations to be one of the 2 great national crimes of the United States.
How are the exploited if they are signing up willingly? ... I agree companies take things a bit too far at times but like a wise man once said "It's a crime to let a sucker hang on to his money." I feel no worse for people being "exploited" by these companies than I do the banks that gambled on them.
Here's the counterargument put forward by Elizabeth Warren years before she was remotely considering running for political office: As a classroom exercise at Harvard Law, the prof and students took standard EULAs and credit card contracts and tried to analyze them. They couldn't. If a room full of lawyers can't understand a contract, how the heck is an average person supposed to understand what they're signing up for?
The usual response to that is "but the average person could go with the company that doesn't do that, or do without the service". Well, if every company in the market is doing that, they can't get out of it by switching sellers. And if the product is pretty much required for their daily life (e.g. having a bank account with a debit card or using a search engine), doing without the service isn't really viable either.
Actually, it's a new film genre, along with blaxsploitation, sexsploitation, mexsploitation, etc.
If you have a sudden urge to go visit Piglet ... it might be a hunny pot.
Why limit ourselves to property crime? I'd really want them more focused on some really dangerous people like:
* Dick Cheney (crime against humanity - ordering waterboarding)
* Barack Obama (murder in the first degree of Anwar Al-Awlaki)
* Rudolph Giuliani and Howard Dean (material support for a designated terrorist organization, the Iranian MEK)
Is there really that much blurring going on between legal and illegal immigrants?
A lot of the hatred towards the "illegals" is about things that have nothing to do with legal status at all. For example, "English-only" laws have been passed in many states with their proponents making quite clear that their purpose is to ensure that Spanish does not become more widely spoken in the United States.
It's true that the US policy wasn't to intentionally wipe out all the American Indians (although they certainly had no qualms about doing so), just to take all their stuff and force them further west until they had nothing to live on. This was different from the policy of, say, Christopher Columbus, who just wiped out all the Indians living in Hispaniola, or the French who generally set up trading posts along the rivers and left the Indian societies intact (which was a major reason the Indians tended to side with the French during the 6 Years War).
Here's some actual comparison. First, PBS Newshour reporting on the Arizona immigration law ruling:
The U.S. Supreme Court delivered its judgment today on the 2010 Arizona immigration law that sparked a national debate. The outcome left both sides claiming at least partial victories. The decision came after two years of protests and legal challenges to the Arizona law, then the April arguments before the Supreme Court, today, the decision,5-3, with Justice Elena Kagan recusing herself because she worked on the issue in the Obama administration. The court ruled Arizona may not force immigrants to carry immigration papers or make it a crime for an illegal immigrant to hold a job or let police arrest suspected illegals without warrant.
This was followed by reactions from Arizona governor Jan Brewer, President Obama's statement, and analysis by someone from The National Law Journal.
Now Fox News reporting the same thing:
Tonight, both sides of the aisle are claiming victory after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a split decision on the Arizona immigration law. Now, three aspects of SB-1070 was struck down by the high court in the five to three ruling. However, the cornerstone of that law was upheld. Now, that critical provision is the one that requires police officers to verify the legal status of anybody that they suspect to be in the country illegally. And liberals from President Obama to the Attorney General Eric Holder have long claimed that this measure would somehow lead to widespread racial profiling. And that line of attack was revisited today on the Senate floor by Harry Reid just moments after the ruling was in fact handed down.
After the clip of Harry Reid, Hannity states "Now, it's unfortunate that Harry Reid would rather play politics than protect the border." and follows up with
Please explain to me exactly what bias PBS demonstrated in this report, and explain why the last comment by Hannity isn't an example of a very clear political slant.
The key point, and the reason it's very popular in the Arab world, is that Al Jazeera can and does go after every government other than the Qatar government even though it broadcasts in those areas. For instance, Saudi journalists who criticized the king would likely end up dead, in prison, or at least out of a job, while Al Jazeera doesn't have that problem.
I immediately signed on to the NYTimes pay service without even bothering with the one month free trial. It buys very good journalism (as opposed to Fox).
The reason I don't support the New York Times financially is because, by its own admission, it runs its political news by whatever presidential administration is in charge at the moment, and suppresses or delays stories just because the government asks it to (for example Wikileaks Collateral Murder video was delayed a year at the request of the Bush administration). They aren't alone: Cenk Uenger quit his job at MSNBC because his bosses told him to stop annoying people in Washington D.C., and Fox takes its orders from the same guys who really run the Republican Party.
Actually, Stephen Colbert summed it up brilliantly years ago:
But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The President makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!
I read GP as trusting the BBC rather than the US media or RT.
Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, so technically it's "state-owned". However, throughout most of the Middle East, its primary role is as a media outlet not controlled by either the national government or western business interests. And if you actually watch some of its reporting, you'll see that on issues outside of Qatar, its slant is different but certainly no more pronounced than your average western news outlet.
Interestingly enough, the fact that the literal interpretation of the Bible isn't in any way intellectually consistent with itself, much less with reality, is also not proof enough that it can't be true.
Would you areee that in a million years it is possible, via the mechanism of evolution, that a housecat will teach mathematics at a college level.
No, but he could dress in nice suits.
The theoretical reasons for rules of war are:
1. War is a nasty business, but soldiers should not just be wiping out people that aren't a threat to them. Most people have a pretty strong moral aversion to killing people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (it happens, but that doesn't make it ok). In your examples, are you ok with killing off the people who are in that church praying while their country is being invaded? How about the family of civilians that was unable to escape and now is looking for water to drink? How many random bystanders are you willing to kill in order to get the one bad guy you're after?
2. By following rules, it increases the chance that the other guys will follow the rules too, which means our soldiers are less likely to be killed when they can't defend themselves and decide to surrender.
3. By following rules around the treatment of prisoners, it increases the chance that the enemy will surrender rather than fight to the death. That reduces the number of "last stands" where people tend to fight desperately and kill a lot of our guys because they have nothing to lose.
I didn't say a word about spending, I said they got a lousy education. Which, as you argued quite thoroughly, they do.
I also know that discipline and motivation can come from a lot of sources, not just from parenting: If it didn't, no child of lazy and undisciplined parents could have ever accomplished anything, which is plainly false. Anecdotally, my dad did his student teaching in South Boston High (about 50% failure rate, 30% dropout rate, just a mess) - many of his students were just trouble, but a few joined Junior ROTC and were the most motivated and disciplined kids he ever worked with, and many of them didn't get that at all from their homes.
This hasn't been proven beyond reasonable doubt.
And it won't be for decades. These are top-notch spies we're talking about here, with the most powerful military in human history defending them. There's as much proof that the US was involved in Stuxnet as there is that the US was involved in the Venezuela coup: They had the means and the motivation, and left some evidence behind that sure looks suspicious, but no definitive proof.
Actually, according to the Constitution, the US has fought no wars since 1945. We stopped declaring war at about the same time as we renamed our War Department the Department of Defense (after which we continued to attack foreign nations just like we've been doing throughout history).
Cyberwar, at least as it's currently conducted, doesn't kill people.
Also, what makes them think that regulations matter when you're talking about war? Look at the nuclear weapons treaties - North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Israel have all flaunted them by making nuclear weapons, and the US and Israel have flaunted them by attempting to prevent Iran from researching nuclear power for civilian purposes (which is allowed under non-proliferation treaties).