To be fair, it does take a certain amount of intelligence to give the middle finger to your accrediting board and create your own professional board "shell" company. Doesn't say much for his ethics or proficiency at ophthalmology. I guess that's why he went into politics, those traits likely serve him well.
Ok, what does that "say" for his ethics? Providing competition to the state-backed monopoly on a category of medical care sounds ethical to me.
And why should this particular provincial Scandinavian viewpoint hold any more weight than any other viewpoint? For example, you don't have a long history of high immigration (though apparently there are now a bit more foreign born immigrants in Sweden than in the US as a percentage of the population). The US has tragedy of the commons problems and other failure modes that don't manifest as strongly in countries with lower immigration rates and stronger cultural cohesion.
We'll see if Scandinavia can continue to afford to maintain its current political outlooks given its current higher immigration rates.
and then a few idiots who in the naming of their group - the tea party movement - are ass raping the history of the US.
What's with the empty libel? I see no evidence that the original tea party participants wouldn't be quite at home in the modern version.
But that is it. Left wing politicians? I don't see them at all.
Then I guess you just don't see them. For example, you can't get much more leftist in upbringing and career than President Obama, even in Scandinavia, yet that doesn't manifest in his current politics - because he wouldn't get anywhere otherwise.
As to "all politicians being liars", some can lie successfully and others can't be bothered to plan a few days ahead. Here, I believe the original call from Merkel was a way for Obama to save face, to own up to the problem (without taking responsibility for it, I might add) without a lot of fuss.
He didn't take it and lied, once again, even though he should have known the lie would be quickly caught.
The problem here isn't that Obama lies, but that he does so both brazenly and incompetently. He has squandered both a tremendous amount of political capital and credibility.
What surprises me about all of this is that despite being the "most transparent" administration in history, Obama still gets steadfast support from about a quarter to a third of the US voting population.
If we're going to talk of safest drivers, then the safest drivers whether human or automatic are the ones that aren't behind a wheel. You can't hurt anyone with a car unless you're driving it. My point here is that Google is ignoring the style of driving, for example, that of the car sitting in the parking lot.
I imagine the automated driver would lose their safety advantage, if human drivers were to drive like the automated ones.
My example did not claim that a court reporter was fabricating information.
My point remains. There are penalties to a court reporter not getting it right. They can lose their jobs or even go to jail depending on the action and their intent. There were no similar penalties for Plato not getting things right. That's a huge difference.
Removing your opinion that every history has an axe to grind we have a statement that is absolutely incorrect
So why is it a good idea to "remove" evidence of being wrong? I see no point to the rest of your post since it is based on flawed premises and the ignoring of contrary evidence and conflicts of interest.
I'm not going to critique the rest of your writing, because it's all based on two false premises. Socrates not being a person and Plato not being a historian.
Given that information, claiming that Plato should take credit for the works of Socrates is like claiming that a court reporter should take credit for a witness's testimony or a judge's verdict. It's irrational to do so, if you really stop and think about it.
No, the problem here is that it is Plato's works fundamentally. We only know of Socrates and his beliefs and actions through the filter of Plato and others (who had their own axes to grind) - even if Plato really were acting as just "historian" (which I doubt incidentally). Of those, Plato is the one who discusses Socrates's philosophical outlook in great detail (though Xenophon might mention it to some degree).
In your examples above, there's a legal penalty if a court reporter fabricates what is said or ruled in a court room. There was no similar penalty for Plato or his contemporaries.
There are two fundamental problems. First, Plato was rehabilitating the reputation of Socrates and probably as a result libeled the opponents to Socrates to varying degree (for example, the Athenian politicians who attempted to exile Socrates or the Sophists who were a common foil for any philosopher of that time). This is par for the course for any historian of that time.
Second, Plato was using this image of Socrates to further his own beliefs and opinions. Many of Plato's arguments were presented as debates between Socrates and others of the time with Socrates winning the debate in question. Since when has one philosopher never disagreed with a second?
It's not at all unbiased work by Plato and one doesn't need to resort to claiming Socrates didn't exist in order to observe that.
Why this is relevant to the current discussion is that Plato was a considerably different person than Socrates. While the latter was deliberately poor, Plato apparently was wealthy enough to maintain his school, the Academy and was part of what passed for the political elite in Athens.
Plato's criticisms of political systems are informed and biased by both his station and by the political misfortunes he suffered (particularly, the execution of Socrates and the marginalization of the political faction to which Plato and Socrates were aligned at the time).
For example, he had the conceit that the wise could somehow rule the rest of humanity better than the rest of humanity could rule itself. Or that rulers should isolate themselves off from society by divesting of all wealth and relinquishing any trade they might have practiced.
I don't believe these assertions make any sense at all because they don't consider human nature, which doesn't go away merely because you've picked up a little philosophy.
Now you may disagree with these examples, but that doesn't mean that at 226 years the document doesn't need some heavy revision. If you were to select any 226 years in human history, none would be as drastic in change as the last.
End of the Second World War in 1945 definitely was the big year for change.
But having that, I do disagree with these examples. You're not actually showing anything significant. Contrary to your assertion, the killing of human beings at the civilian level isn't significantly different now than it was more than two hundred years ago. Similarly, there are less homeless people now than then. Vaccines aren't a big difference since we can address whatever issues with laws.
I would add the speed and nature of voting as well. There is no need for the electoral college. We have many new, modern ideas for voting that allow for greater representation [and I don't just mean third parties].
There's the only thing you've indicated so far which would be worth addressing at the constitutional level. And it can be addressed with a constitutional amendment.
Somehow I believe there is substance to the idea that a document written before the automobile, automatic weapons, missiles, mass communication, computers, vaccines, etc. may not be the same document to form the best basis for a government in a country existing after the discovery of all of that, and the great many technological wonders to soon follow.
You have to show relevance first. Just because there have been technology wonders doesn't mean that anything politically fundamental has to change.
Yes, I quite agree with this. I wonder if a more appropriate name for the current era in terms of politics and demographics would be the Age of Migration?
For example, on my father's side, he and his three siblings were born and raised in Maine, US. His parents lived their entire life in Maine except near the end of their lives when they moved to a nursing home near Boston to be near one of their children. None of the children stayed in the state after college. And their kids in turn moved around even more than the parents did.
Now, we're seeing similar effects on the global scale with people moving easily between states (the obstacles being by far more political than physical). I think one very big effect will be the decline of nationalism. If you hop between nations relatively frequently, then you're less likely to be tied to any of them.
The most obvious are the US colonial possessions and US territories as covered by wikipedia, but less obvious are, well, I'd say almost anywhere with a combination of strong US military + strong US corporate presence.
I wouldn't call them "less obvious", but simply "aren't". You're diluting the word "colonization" to the point of uselessness.
Do you have a point? Because I'm seeing any contradictions in any of the posts to that point. Seems a pretty sane argument to this point by all parties concerned. The original poster claimed Obama was attempting to sabotage oil drilling. "Attempting" not "succeeding". To that, I'll note that he's obstructed off shore oil drilling and a pipeline from the northern US to the Gulf of Mexico. I believe that demonstrates intent, though we also have some people in the administration hostile to oil drilling and the like.
Then a replier to that noted that oil and natural gas production is up, which it is. The person you replied to noted that Obama doesn't actually have the power to stop oil and natural gas drilling just because he might want to. In support of that is fracking which has completely changed the oil game both economically and politically, allowing a large bunch of US oil to be extracted which was formerly not economically viable.
That huge gold mine creates politically powerful parties willing to defend their interests.
So I don't see that anyone is wrong here. They're all describing an aspect of the same phenomena, an out of touch administration more interested in ideological goals than in economic ones fighting a losing battle to prevent new oil drilling.
There are two things to observe here. First, state and local governments have considerable latitude under the constitution. A number of things which would be unconstitutional for the federal government are allowed for them. Second, public lighting is one such allowed task.
And are you going to pay to put and maintain telescopes in those places? The problem here is that we're discarding existing infrastructure without adequately building replacement infrastructure. The US government is notorious for underfunding such things.
They've been pushing a cheaper version that's bout 30-50 percent less for a while now. The problem is that the life is literally 5-8 years instead of 15-20.
You should mean roughly 50-70 percent less. Because that's what you're claiming with the lifespan. That's a big difference.
Again, "People will do bad things if we don't do unjust thing X." is not a very good reason to do something unjust, or at least to me.
Well, those people didn't think it was just.
Will it? Because people are already fed up with governments in many ways, yet they don't do anything. I seriously doubt this is true; most people are apathetic imbeciles to begin with.
Like healthcare, specifying that hospital capacity/income requires them to provide so many hours of staffed free clinical care spread out over so much area around the hospital, with the area and the clinical care hours increasing as capacity increases.
How about we don't do that? Instead, I imagine you get an income somewhere, somehow? How about you donate some portion of your income to charities that provide free medical care to the people you care about?
How did you end up yacking about healthcare anyway?
Note that I wasn't replying to the previous poster. I was replying to your question "Is the health and property of the cabbie not important?"
So what? I was. My comment there was justification for why I said what I said.
But on the topic of dangerous neighborhoods, that is not due to social policy.
Whatever. I think I can summarize the rest of any debate as - you think it's capitalism, I think you're just blind to reality.
No it does not. In practice, self-centered behavior often does not strengthen the business model. Thus, my quotes are very insightful and not straw mans at all.
Stupid. To consider the original example, if the cabbie never takes rides into a bad area, they get two huge benefits: a) less risk to themselves and their primary business asset, their cab, and b) they get to make more high margin (and tip) rides to the better parts of NYC.
See, one characteristic of self-centered behavior is disregarding providing value to others. Sometimes the self-centered even actively try to take value away from others. This runs opposite to how most businesses work - by providing value to their customers.
A breezy assertion which was easily deflated by pointing to the real life example in question. If you ever want to use reason on this part of your thought process, you can start by reading my previous paragraph.
Claiming that requiring people to take off their shoes once before boarding a plane is a movement down the "slippery slope" to genocide is ludicrous.
Ok, why is it ludicrous? Twelve years ago Richard Reed tried to blow up a plane with plastic explosives which were fashioned into the soles of his shoes. Since then several hundred million people in the US have had to take off their shoes a few billion times. A small event led to a vast, harmful reaction that hasn't stopped.
I see it as a haphazard acclimation to tyranny. There isn't a deliberate move to authoritarianism, it's just a natural consequence of these increasing constraints on our freedoms wordwide, with new constraints created as the public becomes accustomed to the older ones. Since the shoe thing, we have in addition, the backscattering x ray which effectively images us in the nude (and which incidentally has no security justification) and the unlawful NSA spying on all electronic communication worldwide.
That's what makes slippery slope a real, live argument. We see here that the step historically is part of a huge landslide that is still sliding.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, it does take a certain amount of intelligence to give the middle finger to your accrediting board and create your own professional board "shell" company. Doesn't say much for his ethics or proficiency at ophthalmology. I guess that's why he went into politics, those traits likely serve him well.
Ok, what does that "say" for his ethics? Providing competition to the state-backed monopoly on a category of medical care sounds ethical to me.
What about music? Sculpture? Painting? Even theater and cinema? All of those are in the crossroads
What of them? I don't see any of them in the "crossroads". Architecture requires considerable appreciation of engineering or people die.
so arguably
Anything is arguable.
Computing sciences is simply applied Mathematics and THAT my friend... is art, not science.
Science is not science. Got it.
We'll see if Scandinavia can continue to afford to maintain its current political outlooks given its current higher immigration rates.
and then a few idiots who in the naming of their group - the tea party movement - are ass raping the history of the US.
What's with the empty libel? I see no evidence that the original tea party participants wouldn't be quite at home in the modern version.
But that is it. Left wing politicians? I don't see them at all.
Then I guess you just don't see them. For example, you can't get much more leftist in upbringing and career than President Obama, even in Scandinavia, yet that doesn't manifest in his current politics - because he wouldn't get anywhere otherwise.
Good theory, but do you have an example of that working in the 21st century?
I see you chose to exclude the 20th century where health insurance did work.
You could get most of that by dropping the tax subsidy for employer insurance plans.
Which departments did those Nobel laureates come out of again?
As to "all politicians being liars", some can lie successfully and others can't be bothered to plan a few days ahead. Here, I believe the original call from Merkel was a way for Obama to save face, to own up to the problem (without taking responsibility for it, I might add) without a lot of fuss.
He didn't take it and lied, once again, even though he should have known the lie would be quickly caught.
The problem here isn't that Obama lies, but that he does so both brazenly and incompetently. He has squandered both a tremendous amount of political capital and credibility.
What surprises me about all of this is that despite being the "most transparent" administration in history, Obama still gets steadfast support from about a quarter to a third of the US voting population.
The Tea Party movement seemed promising, until it was hijacked by the religious right.
That's the problem with good ideas. People start agreeing on them. We can't have agreement with people I don't like.
If we're going to talk of safest drivers, then the safest drivers whether human or automatic are the ones that aren't behind a wheel. You can't hurt anyone with a car unless you're driving it. My point here is that Google is ignoring the style of driving, for example, that of the car sitting in the parking lot.
I imagine the automated driver would lose their safety advantage, if human drivers were to drive like the automated ones.
My example did not claim that a court reporter was fabricating information.
My point remains. There are penalties to a court reporter not getting it right. They can lose their jobs or even go to jail depending on the action and their intent. There were no similar penalties for Plato not getting things right. That's a huge difference.
Removing your opinion that every history has an axe to grind we have a statement that is absolutely incorrect
So why is it a good idea to "remove" evidence of being wrong? I see no point to the rest of your post since it is based on flawed premises and the ignoring of contrary evidence and conflicts of interest.
I'm not going to critique the rest of your writing, because it's all based on two false premises. Socrates not being a person and Plato not being a historian.
I asserted neither.
Given that information, claiming that Plato should take credit for the works of Socrates is like claiming that a court reporter should take credit for a witness's testimony or a judge's verdict. It's irrational to do so, if you really stop and think about it.
No, the problem here is that it is Plato's works fundamentally. We only know of Socrates and his beliefs and actions through the filter of Plato and others (who had their own axes to grind) - even if Plato really were acting as just "historian" (which I doubt incidentally). Of those, Plato is the one who discusses Socrates's philosophical outlook in great detail (though Xenophon might mention it to some degree).
In your examples above, there's a legal penalty if a court reporter fabricates what is said or ruled in a court room. There was no similar penalty for Plato or his contemporaries.
There are two fundamental problems. First, Plato was rehabilitating the reputation of Socrates and probably as a result libeled the opponents to Socrates to varying degree (for example, the Athenian politicians who attempted to exile Socrates or the Sophists who were a common foil for any philosopher of that time). This is par for the course for any historian of that time.
Second, Plato was using this image of Socrates to further his own beliefs and opinions. Many of Plato's arguments were presented as debates between Socrates and others of the time with Socrates winning the debate in question. Since when has one philosopher never disagreed with a second?
It's not at all unbiased work by Plato and one doesn't need to resort to claiming Socrates didn't exist in order to observe that.
Why this is relevant to the current discussion is that Plato was a considerably different person than Socrates. While the latter was deliberately poor, Plato apparently was wealthy enough to maintain his school, the Academy and was part of what passed for the political elite in Athens.
Plato's criticisms of political systems are informed and biased by both his station and by the political misfortunes he suffered (particularly, the execution of Socrates and the marginalization of the political faction to which Plato and Socrates were aligned at the time).
For example, he had the conceit that the wise could somehow rule the rest of humanity better than the rest of humanity could rule itself. Or that rulers should isolate themselves off from society by divesting of all wealth and relinquishing any trade they might have practiced.
I don't believe these assertions make any sense at all because they don't consider human nature, which doesn't go away merely because you've picked up a little philosophy.
Now you may disagree with these examples, but that doesn't mean that at 226 years the document doesn't need some heavy revision. If you were to select any 226 years in human history, none would be as drastic in change as the last.
End of the Second World War in 1945 definitely was the big year for change.
But having that, I do disagree with these examples. You're not actually showing anything significant. Contrary to your assertion, the killing of human beings at the civilian level isn't significantly different now than it was more than two hundred years ago. Similarly, there are less homeless people now than then. Vaccines aren't a big difference since we can address whatever issues with laws.
I would add the speed and nature of voting as well. There is no need for the electoral college. We have many new, modern ideas for voting that allow for greater representation [and I don't just mean third parties].
There's the only thing you've indicated so far which would be worth addressing at the constitutional level. And it can be addressed with a constitutional amendment.
Somehow I believe there is substance to the idea that a document written before the automobile, automatic weapons, missiles, mass communication, computers, vaccines, etc. may not be the same document to form the best basis for a government in a country existing after the discovery of all of that, and the great many technological wonders to soon follow.
You have to show relevance first. Just because there have been technology wonders doesn't mean that anything politically fundamental has to change.
Yes, I quite agree with this. I wonder if a more appropriate name for the current era in terms of politics and demographics would be the Age of Migration?
For example, on my father's side, he and his three siblings were born and raised in Maine, US. His parents lived their entire life in Maine except near the end of their lives when they moved to a nursing home near Boston to be near one of their children. None of the children stayed in the state after college. And their kids in turn moved around even more than the parents did.
Now, we're seeing similar effects on the global scale with people moving easily between states (the obstacles being by far more political than physical). I think one very big effect will be the decline of nationalism. If you hop between nations relatively frequently, then you're less likely to be tied to any of them.
The most obvious are the US colonial possessions and US territories as covered by wikipedia, but less obvious are, well, I'd say almost anywhere with a combination of strong US military + strong US corporate presence.
I wouldn't call them "less obvious", but simply "aren't". You're diluting the word "colonization" to the point of uselessness.
Do you have a point? Because I'm seeing any contradictions in any of the posts to that point. Seems a pretty sane argument to this point by all parties concerned. The original poster claimed Obama was attempting to sabotage oil drilling. "Attempting" not "succeeding". To that, I'll note that he's obstructed off shore oil drilling and a pipeline from the northern US to the Gulf of Mexico. I believe that demonstrates intent, though we also have some people in the administration hostile to oil drilling and the like.
Then a replier to that noted that oil and natural gas production is up, which it is. The person you replied to noted that Obama doesn't actually have the power to stop oil and natural gas drilling just because he might want to. In support of that is fracking which has completely changed the oil game both economically and politically, allowing a large bunch of US oil to be extracted which was formerly not economically viable.
That huge gold mine creates politically powerful parties willing to defend their interests.
So I don't see that anyone is wrong here. They're all describing an aspect of the same phenomena, an out of touch administration more interested in ideological goals than in economic ones fighting a losing battle to prevent new oil drilling.
There are two things to observe here. First, state and local governments have considerable latitude under the constitution. A number of things which would be unconstitutional for the federal government are allowed for them. Second, public lighting is one such allowed task.
And are you going to pay to put and maintain telescopes in those places? The problem here is that we're discarding existing infrastructure without adequately building replacement infrastructure. The US government is notorious for underfunding such things.
They've been pushing a cheaper version that's bout 30-50 percent less for a while now. The problem is that the life is literally 5-8 years instead of 15-20.
You should mean roughly 50-70 percent less. Because that's what you're claiming with the lifespan. That's a big difference.
Again, "People will do bad things if we don't do unjust thing X." is not a very good reason to do something unjust, or at least to me.
Well, those people didn't think it was just.
Will it? Because people are already fed up with governments in many ways, yet they don't do anything. I seriously doubt this is true; most people are apathetic imbeciles to begin with.
Actually, they often do.
Like healthcare, specifying that hospital capacity/income requires them to provide so many hours of staffed free clinical care spread out over so much area around the hospital, with the area and the clinical care hours increasing as capacity increases.
How about we don't do that? Instead, I imagine you get an income somewhere, somehow? How about you donate some portion of your income to charities that provide free medical care to the people you care about?
How did you end up yacking about healthcare anyway?
Note that I wasn't replying to the previous poster. I was replying to your question "Is the health and property of the cabbie not important?"
So what? I was. My comment there was justification for why I said what I said.
But on the topic of dangerous neighborhoods, that is not due to social policy.
Whatever. I think I can summarize the rest of any debate as - you think it's capitalism, I think you're just blind to reality.
No it does not. In practice, self-centered behavior often does not strengthen the business model. Thus, my quotes are very insightful and not straw mans at all.
Stupid. To consider the original example, if the cabbie never takes rides into a bad area, they get two huge benefits: a) less risk to themselves and their primary business asset, their cab, and b) they get to make more high margin (and tip) rides to the better parts of NYC.
See, one characteristic of self-centered behavior is disregarding providing value to others. Sometimes the self-centered even actively try to take value away from others. This runs opposite to how most businesses work - by providing value to their customers.
A breezy assertion which was easily deflated by pointing to the real life example in question. If you ever want to use reason on this part of your thought process, you can start by reading my previous paragraph.
Claiming that requiring people to take off their shoes once before boarding a plane is a movement down the "slippery slope" to genocide is ludicrous.
Ok, why is it ludicrous? Twelve years ago Richard Reed tried to blow up a plane with plastic explosives which were fashioned into the soles of his shoes. Since then several hundred million people in the US have had to take off their shoes a few billion times. A small event led to a vast, harmful reaction that hasn't stopped.
I see it as a haphazard acclimation to tyranny. There isn't a deliberate move to authoritarianism, it's just a natural consequence of these increasing constraints on our freedoms wordwide, with new constraints created as the public becomes accustomed to the older ones. Since the shoe thing, we have in addition, the backscattering x ray which effectively images us in the nude (and which incidentally has no security justification) and the unlawful NSA spying on all electronic communication worldwide.
That's what makes slippery slope a real, live argument. We see here that the step historically is part of a huge landslide that is still sliding.