With due respect, did it ever cross your mind that most Americans believe we're living in the best nation on earth because we do know a thing or two about the rest of the world?
Where would you suggest we should prefer to live? Keep in mind that we already live in the most free, most democratic, and most prosperous nation not only on earth now, but in earth's history?
Typically leftist. Believe it or not, calling someone `right wing' is not an argument in and of itself. If you have a rational point to make civilly about the articles or about my post, go ahead. I'd suggest you read them first, though.
While I agree that it's hard to believe that anyone could be as naive as the poster I replied to, no, that's not me.
And yes, these are very serious allegations. Unfortunately, they are true -- for Chomsky's statements on the Holocaust, see
here or here (warning, the latter site is a neo-fascist site which celebrates Mr. Chomsky's holocaust denial).
Note in particular Chomsky's continuing support of Robert Faurisson, the leading french neo-fascist and holocaust denier. Mr. Chomsky has not only gave Faurisson the French rights to his books, but has written a foreward for Mr. Faurisson's book, and defended him in the press.
It's things like this that are losing Mr. Chomsky even such support on the left as he has enjoyed in the past.
Meaning what, exactly? That we're all citizens of a totalitarian dictatorship who are tricked into sending our children to blow themselves up in childrens areas of restaurants in other countries so that we won't notice how oppressive our own leaders are? Sorry, I'm not buying it...
And, by the way, the site you link to is quite possibly the most braindead, sorry example of false analogies standing in for rational thought that I've ever seen...
You say it is from a conversation in an airport in Chicago. Another
site claims it is from a Republican fundraiser, and plenty of other sites provide no cite or provide other theories.
Now going with your version of where the quote is from, are we to assume that a small Boulder-area newspaper actually had a reporter present, or is it not more likely that the newspaper got the quote from the (Boulder-area) atheism activist who alleges that Bush said that?
And if so doesn't that tend to undermine the quote's credibility, just as it undermines the quote's credibility that it bears no relation to anything else George H. W. Bush ever said?
Heh, what AC said. We've all heard many times about what a utopia communism creates, and yet like all systems which aim to force men to be virtuous, it has always ended in tyranny. How many more tens of millions would have to die before you admit that Communism doesn't work?
If I told you that capitalism in real life creates a perfect utopia for its citizens, and if it fails, that is the fault of the leaders, I don't think you'd buy it. So let's admit that we have to compare each system as they actually exist, and as they actually exist, capitalism has produced liberty, prosperity, and happiness for more people than any other system.
No, merely that Mr. Coppola's movie about the same was, as they say, `based on a true story' -- i.e. was a work of fantasy. There certainly was a Tucker. He made a car which some people still consider to have been way ahead of its time. His business failed, as he tried to break into a crowded market with a new startup.
Surely, on a tech bulletin board in the year 2002, I don't have to remind people that sometimes startups fail, even when they have a good product to sell?
`proven' wrong? Haven't read too many economics textbooks, have you? Never mind actual work in the field...
Of course, you give the game away when you quote Chomsky, who is a holocaust-denier, a general anti-American bigot, and a blithering ideologue whose fantastic claims (7 million dead in Afghanistan? Really? Even the anti-war left only claims a few thousand...) have caused him to lose credibility even on the left. Even his work on linguistics (as opposed to abstract syntax) is generally considered way off base in the field.
For more on Mr. Chomsky, see
here or
here. For more on his absurd claims about Afghanistan, see
here.
Now, to refer to your original claim, why do you think America leads the world in invention, while the old Soviet Union couldn't even keep up with manufacturing stolen technology, never mind inventing new technologies?
So shouldn't we be rushing to defend the ISPs from abusive use of the courts, not creating more court cases? And on the technical front, won't most users benefit from user-side solutions such as
SpamAssassin?
And here we have a perfect example of what I'm talking about. In but four short paragraphs, the poster manages to:
knock the south -- I don't live in the south either, but I find the poster's scorn for those who he no doubt considers the `great unwashed' of the rest of the country quite grating.
claim that only liberals care about some abstract notion of `humanity' -- as if no one could possibly believe that promoting individual liberty and getting the government off the backs of the individual could be good for humanity. Well, here's a counterpoint: in the forty years from 1950 to 1990, the bottom 20% of American society came to have, own, and consume as much (and yes, that's indexed for inflation) as the middle 20% had in 1950 -- and this happened through economic growth, not the myriad of wasteful social programs which served only to sap the economy, not to provide any long-term help to anyone.
to try to associate conservatives with Osama bin Laden -- I don't think this needs a response, I mention it as an example of how shameful the poster's smears are.
tries to associate a few instances of violence which were condemned unequivocally by conservatives with the entire conservative movement -- and this even as the mainstream liberal media lionizes murderers like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, and writes long essays about how the murder of Pim Fortuyn was understandable due to his conservative views -- a notable contrast from conservatives who decry any who claim to be committing violence in the name of conservative causes.
Which brings us to the only non-smear part of the post, the claim that if slashdot and the media are leftist in bias, it is a reflection of their readership. I can't speak for the political affiliation of slashdot's readers, but I will say that even a predominantly leftist readership which had any respect for reason and for civil discourse would not be modding down posts (or, as is more common, hurling insults and vulgarities) simply because they disagree with the author's opinions. As for the media, to claim that the media are biased left because American society is biased left misses the simple fact that ratings for network news are at an all-time low, as Americans rush to networks like Fox which, while themselves conservative, make an attempt to include both sides of every debate.
There's a reason that Bernard Goldberg's book
Bias is a run-away bestseller, you know.
And if you'll put aside you precious smears of conservatives for a moment, and have some curiosity about what concservatives actually do believe, check out my latest journal entry.
Well, I guess shooting doctors doesn't count. -- the difference, of course, is that while murderers like the man who shot Dr. Slepian are granted no place in the conservative movement, and their actions are roundly decried, the left in this country openly praises thugs like the Black Panthers, and writes long editorials about how the murder of Pim Fortuyn was an understandable response to his conservative views. You have read that Dr. Slepian's murderer has been caught, by the way?
Curbing a citizen's abilities to pursue legal activities because it clashes with religious beliefs -- can you provide a single example of this? This is just a repeat of the same smear we saw repeated so many times in the resent cloning debate here on/. -- any conservative position the left disagrees with, they accuse of being religious in nature.
I think most people that consider themselves center to modestly left of center have no problem with rational discourse. -- don't read many politics threads here on/., do you? Even you are unwilling to accept that people rationally disagree with you without accusing them of reaching their position through religion, not reason.
Unfortunately such a thing hasn't been heard of from our contemporary statue-covering Right -- leaving aside that the statue thing is largely a construction (a decision by a PR type to hang a backdrop behind the AG when he speaks just doesn't make as good a story, I know, but what can you do?)
as long as Less Government only applies to money matters of the established classes and not to meddling with people's morality and curbing of civil liberties -- leaving aside the humor of hearing the party of Waco and of Elian Gonzalez, and of Filegate lecturing me about civil liberties, the fact remains that the right has made a consistent argument for the return of all levels of government to the limits set within the constitution. Long after the ACLU became nothing but a lobbying group for each latest liberal social project, conservative civil liberties groups like the Institute for Justice and the Mountain States Legal Fund soldier on fighting the good fight for the individidual rights and freedoms which are at the heart of the conservative movement.
And finally, every poll has suggested that conservatives are anything but a minority in American society at large. If you see less conservative views on slashdot, this is a reflection of the nastiness with which such views are greeted, and of the large numbers of current college students and recent graduates posting, those who have not yet realized that the hard leftism of our campuses is out of step with reality and with our society. `They'll learn'.
You are correct -- you cannot use the BSDL to make people give you code which they have written. You can use it to freely provide code which you have written while properly disclaiming warranty and requiring that credit be given where credit is due.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the standard liberal arrogance (`I am RIGHT. Any who would disagree with ME cannot possibly have a reasoned difference of opinon, they must be STUPID -- or else in BAD WILL') used throughout your post, let's look at your claims:
The US military has chosen the most difficult method of intercepting an incoming weapon - post boost phase -- Leaving aside amusement at your assumption that only you and other armchair pundits have considered how this system should be constructing it, and that those actually building it have not, you give the game away when you add `It would make more sense to hit the weapon in the boost phase, say from a ship based system ', for that is exactly the problem. Are you really suggesting that we will always know who might attack us in time to have ships off their coast, will always know when they will launch in time to coordinate a strike on the missile's boost phase, and will not cause a diplomatic firestorm by having heavily armed missile defense ships standing constantly off the coasts of other nations -- even if the nations involved do not have the wherewithal to strike these ships before launching their missiles?
Except in very heavily jiggered tests, they can't hit anything -- so when you are coding, you never unit test any of your components? And if you do, is this not `heavily jiggering' your tests by working on one component of the system at a time, just as the NMD developers are? More generally, you seem very impressed with the technical difficulties of detecting decoys and such problems, but what of it? Once the problem is reduced to a mere technological problem, we're on our home turf -- we got to the moon, didn't we? We won the cold war didn't we? Why the sudden defeatism now?
The current starwars program assumes ICBM attacks -- there's a very good reason for this, namely that several hostile powers have or will soon have ICBMs. China already has missiles capable of reaching our shores, and has made noises about using them to do so if push comes to shove over Taiwan. North Korea will have these weapons soon, and is ruled by an unstable madman. Any number of other powers or even non-state actors may have these weapons by the middle of the next century. You assert that deterrence will always hold, but why take that chance? And why is threatening to kill millions or billions of civilians preferable to building a strong defense?
As I said above, the attack will not be a missle. It will be a suitcase, or a shipping container, or something else / submarines / biological and chemical weapons -- certainly these are threats worth defending against, and worth developing technologies to confront. But why should we defend ourselves against only one potential attack? Our enemies have missiles, and may use them, either to attack us or to blackmail us. You would have us reduced to nuclear retaliation in a scenario that could be prevented by an adequate defense.
So now we have a program which is a miniscule part of the military budget, would pay for itself by the force reduction in nuclear deterrents which it would make possible, and is within our grasp. Forgive me if I think your objection to it has much more to do with the next part of your post:
We have to stop acting like cowboys and masters of the earth.
And there we have it -- what seemed like a principaled stand on your part at first turns out to be nothing but anti-Americanism. In truth, we are hardly acting like `cowboys' or `masters of the earth'. We have suffered the worst terrorist attack any nation has seen, and met it with a calm and measured effort to prevent it's recurrence. Doesn't make as good a story as your rant, but hey, life rarely does.
... and, of course, you revert to typical liberal arrogance at the end of your post -- never reasoning when you can insult, never entering civil discourse when you can start a pissing match, and always, always sure of yourself to the point of laughability. Disgraceful.
Well, as they say on tv, `we report, you decide'. I would argue that there is a strong liberal bias to much of the moderation which goes on here, you seem to feel that there is not. I dare say the readers of our posts can decide that for themselves, taking this thread and others as their guide.
As to your bit about intolerance, I would argue that it misses a key point. Modern `I feel your pain' liberalism, with its morass of identity politics, anti-Americanism, and subjectivist morality, has little use for rational argument and the respect for civil discourse which was a proud tradition of the liberalism of the past. From our college campuses, to our network news, liberals increasingly see labels and smears as a replacement for reason. Conservatism, with its central emphasis on reason and on individual rights, is less guilty of this.
Hint: when was the last time you saw a small group of conservative protesters use insults, violence or threats of violence to shut down a liberal speech, event, or newspaper? It happens to conservatives all the time -- see here, or here, or here or here or here.
Certainly, we need only concern ourselves with human life for this discussion. Two points, though: at what point is there `enough' brain matter to meet your distinction? When the first neuron forms? The fifth? At the end of development? (remember that much development occurs after birth, even moreso for children born prematurely). So again, we find ourselves somewhat arbitrarily choosing an exact amount of `grey matter' which makes an infant a human life vs. not a human life -- and that's the problem I have with this approach.
As for the fact that a miscarriage is a death (the other examples you choose do not include the creation of an embryo), I would say that yes, it is. The fact that miscarriages occur does not make an embryo less of a life any more than the fact that some children die before growing up makes a born child less of a life.
Leaving aside your resort to insults at the end of your post, the fact remains that expressing a conservative viewpoint is a great way to get modded down. Now you may consider this `good' (and many liberals do, being very intolerant of opposing viewpoints, I could point you to any number of examples right here on slashdot), and I'm not going to tell you not to. Just don't claim it doesn't happen.
While I'm sympathetic to your point, I don' think that your argument quite floats:
``The purpose of a car is to propel a very large mass of metal at high speeds. Using it to run over people in your path is not a "misuse" any more than using it to drive on a road no one is crossing at the moment.''
So I don't buy your general argument. Now let's look at your specific point: yes, guns are built to be able to kill people, and yes this is integral to their purpose. But this does not mean that guns are meant by their makers to be used in murders. Killing in self defense is not murder, nor should it be considered as such.
Now, with that said, I agree with the reason for your post. It is indeed true that there are many reasons that our Founders, in their wisdom, included the second ammendment in the Constitution. Preventing a government monopoly on deadly force was certainly near the top of their list.
I'd first like to note something about this post which is characteristic of the modern left -- an inability to have a rational discussion of a position they disagree with without resorting to insults and accusations. I tend to think of this as a sign of the bankrupcy of the left's intellectual position in the wake of the massive failure of Socialism, but I'm open to other interpretations.
As for the statistics cited, I did not say `the same dollar amounts' as the middle 20% did in 1950, I said `the same amounts'. These numbers are, of course, adjusted for inflation. That these types of improvements in living standard have occured is obvious to anyone who looks at the percentage of the population who own cars, who own televisions, who own refrigerators, who own homes -- even at the very bottom of society.
And that is the truth of our economic system -- that while the left talks about all the wonderful things which big government could do, if they could only get permission to take away that next dollar of your salary or that next civil liberty, or to create that next sweeping social experiment, American capitalism is actually out there improving people's lives.
As for the drug war and star wars (your pet money wasters), we're close to agreement on the first, but when it comes to the second, I'd suggest you actually look at the programs involved. I'd be the first to admit that wasting federal money to keep adults from doing things which they probably shouldn't do but are none of the government's business is a bad precedent. Fine. We probably both agree, therefore, on the need for a drastic change in Marijuana laws (and I repeat that the only rational level-headed calls for such changes today are coming from the right).
But then we come to missile defense, which you claim is a wasteful expense. The only answer I can give is `gee, it sure costs less than filling in the smoking hole where Los Angeles used to be.' -- which is the real issue. What do you propose we do about nuclear nations which have already threatened us with such weapons, or states such as North Korea, which are on the verge of being able to reach us with them? If we do not build defense, we will have to build deterrence -- and there's a lot worse bang/buck ratio in that course of action.
And another note about missile defense: unlike any other program we've discussed here, it has a key characteristic: it actually falls within the responsibilities of the federal government as defined in the Constitution -- and that's no small distinction.
So, again, if you have a clear argument to make why the government should be involved in funding tattoo removal, or tea tasting, or performance art, or any of a hundred other things which are completely outside its constitutional purview, go ahead. But otherwise, I'm not sure where you're coming from...
Slashdot Mirror
With due respect, did it ever cross your mind that most Americans believe we're living in the best nation on earth because we do know a thing or two about the rest of the world?
Where would you suggest we should prefer to live? Keep in mind that we already live in the most free, most democratic, and most prosperous nation not only on earth now, but in earth's history?
Kinda burns you up thinking about it, doesn't it?
Typically leftist. Believe it or not, calling someone `right wing' is not an argument in and of itself. If you have a rational point to make civilly about the articles or about my post, go ahead. I'd suggest you read them first, though.
While I agree that it's hard to believe that anyone could be as naive as the poster I replied to, no, that's not me.
And yes, these are very serious allegations. Unfortunately, they are true -- for Chomsky's statements on the Holocaust, see here or here (warning, the latter site is a neo-fascist site which celebrates Mr. Chomsky's holocaust denial).
Note in particular Chomsky's continuing support of Robert Faurisson, the leading french neo-fascist and holocaust denier. Mr. Chomsky has not only gave Faurisson the French rights to his books, but has written a foreward for Mr. Faurisson's book, and defended him in the press.
It's things like this that are losing Mr. Chomsky even such support on the left as he has enjoyed in the past.
We're all palestinians
Meaning what, exactly? That we're all citizens of a totalitarian dictatorship who are tricked into sending our children to blow themselves up in childrens areas of restaurants in other countries so that we won't notice how oppressive our own leaders are? Sorry, I'm not buying it...
And, by the way, the site you link to is quite possibly the most braindead, sorry example of false analogies standing in for rational thought that I've ever seen...
You say it is from a conversation in an airport in Chicago. Another site claims it is from a Republican fundraiser, and plenty of other sites provide no cite or provide other theories.
Now going with your version of where the quote is from, are we to assume that a small Boulder-area newspaper actually had a reporter present, or is it not more likely that the newspaper got the quote from the (Boulder-area) atheism activist who alleges that Bush said that?
And if so doesn't that tend to undermine the quote's credibility, just as it undermines the quote's credibility that it bears no relation to anything else George H. W. Bush ever said?
Heh, what AC said. We've all heard many times about what a utopia communism creates, and yet like all systems which aim to force men to be virtuous, it has always ended in tyranny. How many more tens of millions would have to die before you admit that Communism doesn't work?
If I told you that capitalism in real life creates a perfect utopia for its citizens, and if it fails, that is the fault of the leaders, I don't think you'd buy it. So let's admit that we have to compare each system as they actually exist, and as they actually exist, capitalism has produced liberty, prosperity, and happiness for more people than any other system.
No, merely that Mr. Coppola's movie about the same was, as they say, `based on a true story' -- i.e. was a work of fantasy. There certainly was a Tucker. He made a car which some people still consider to have been way ahead of its time. His business failed, as he tried to break into a crowded market with a new startup.
Surely, on a tech bulletin board in the year 2002, I don't have to remind people that sometimes startups fail, even when they have a good product to sell?
Not that there's anything wrong with communism? You mean aside from the millions killed, the mass starvations, and so forth?
`proven' wrong? Haven't read too many economics textbooks, have you? Never mind actual work in the field...
Of course, you give the game away when you quote Chomsky, who is a holocaust-denier, a general anti-American bigot, and a blithering ideologue whose fantastic claims (7 million dead in Afghanistan? Really? Even the anti-war left only claims a few thousand...) have caused him to lose credibility even on the left. Even his work on linguistics (as opposed to abstract syntax) is generally considered way off base in the field.
For more on Mr. Chomsky, see here or here. For more on his absurd claims about Afghanistan, see here.
Now, to refer to your original claim, why do you think America leads the world in invention, while the old Soviet Union couldn't even keep up with manufacturing stolen technology, never mind inventing new technologies?
However, just as many fuel saving engines may have been quietly put away in dusty little closets in the back of some big-manufacturer's back room,
Ooh! Ooh! Urban Legend! Urban Legend!
So shouldn't we be rushing to defend the ISPs from abusive use of the courts, not creating more court cases? And on the technical front, won't most users benefit from user-side solutions such as SpamAssassin?
Umm yeah, okay. Did you actually check to see who Shell Oil give money to? Like most big corporations, they give heavily to both parties.
Now, if we wanted to talk about Global Crossing...
Since when do slashdot'ers favor going to the courts instead of seeking technical solutions?
And here we have a perfect example of what I'm talking about. In but four short paragraphs, the poster manages to:
- knock the south -- I don't live in the south either, but I find the poster's scorn for those who he no doubt considers the `great unwashed' of the rest of the country quite grating.
- claim that only liberals care about some abstract notion of `humanity' -- as if no one could possibly believe that promoting individual liberty and getting the government off the backs of the individual could be good for humanity. Well, here's a counterpoint: in the forty years from 1950 to 1990, the bottom 20% of American society came to have, own, and consume as much (and yes, that's indexed for inflation) as the middle 20% had in 1950 -- and this happened through economic growth, not the myriad of wasteful social programs which served only to sap the economy, not to provide any long-term help to anyone.
- to try to associate conservatives with Osama bin Laden -- I don't think this needs a response, I mention it as an example of how shameful the poster's smears are.
- tries to associate a few instances of violence which were condemned unequivocally by conservatives with the entire conservative movement -- and this even as the mainstream liberal media lionizes murderers like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, and writes long essays about how the murder of Pim Fortuyn was understandable due to his conservative views -- a notable contrast from conservatives who decry any who claim to be committing violence in the name of conservative causes.
Which brings us to the only non-smear part of the post, the claim that if slashdot and the media are leftist in bias, it is a reflection of their readership. I can't speak for the political affiliation of slashdot's readers, but I will say that even a predominantly leftist readership which had any respect for reason and for civil discourse would not be modding down posts (or, as is more common, hurling insults and vulgarities) simply because they disagree with the author's opinions. As for the media, to claim that the media are biased left because American society is biased left misses the simple fact that ratings for network news are at an all-time low, as Americans rush to networks like Fox which, while themselves conservative, make an attempt to include both sides of every debate.There's a reason that Bernard Goldberg's book Bias is a run-away bestseller, you know.
And if you'll put aside you precious smears of conservatives for a moment, and have some curiosity about what concservatives actually do believe, check out my latest journal entry.
OK, let's look at those claims:
You are correct -- you cannot use the BSDL to make people give you code which they have written. You can use it to freely provide code which you have written while properly disclaiming warranty and requiring that credit be given where credit is due.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the standard liberal arrogance (`I am RIGHT. Any who would disagree with ME cannot possibly have a reasoned difference of opinon, they must be STUPID -- or else in BAD WILL') used throughout your post, let's look at your claims:
- The US military has chosen the most difficult method of intercepting an incoming weapon - post boost phase -- Leaving aside amusement at your assumption that only you and other armchair pundits have considered how this system should be constructing it, and that those actually building it have not, you give the game away when you add `It would make more sense to hit the weapon in the boost phase, say from a ship based system ', for that is exactly the problem. Are you really suggesting that we will always know who might attack us in time to have ships off their coast, will always know when they will launch in time to coordinate a strike on the missile's boost phase, and will not cause a diplomatic firestorm by having heavily armed missile defense ships standing constantly off the coasts of other nations -- even if the nations involved do not have the wherewithal to strike these ships before launching their missiles?
- Except in very heavily jiggered tests, they can't hit anything -- so when you are coding, you never unit test any of your components? And if you do, is this not `heavily jiggering' your tests by working on one component of the system at a time, just as the NMD developers are? More generally, you seem very impressed with the technical difficulties of detecting decoys and such problems, but what of it? Once the problem is reduced to a mere technological problem, we're on our home turf -- we got to the moon, didn't we? We won the cold war didn't we? Why the sudden defeatism now?
- The current starwars program assumes ICBM attacks -- there's a very good reason for this, namely that several hostile powers have or will soon have ICBMs. China already has missiles capable of reaching our shores, and has made noises about using them to do so if push comes to shove over Taiwan. North Korea will have these weapons soon, and is ruled by an unstable madman. Any number of other powers or even non-state actors may have these weapons by the middle of the next century. You assert that deterrence will always hold, but why take that chance? And why is threatening to kill millions or billions of civilians preferable to building a strong defense?
- As I said above, the attack will not be a missle. It will be a suitcase, or a shipping container, or something else / submarines / biological and chemical weapons -- certainly these are threats worth defending against, and worth developing technologies to confront. But why should we defend ourselves against only one potential attack? Our enemies have missiles, and may use them, either to attack us or to blackmail us. You would have us reduced to nuclear retaliation in a scenario that could be prevented by an adequate defense.
So now we have a program which is a miniscule part of the military budget, would pay for itself by the force reduction in nuclear deterrents which it would make possible, and is within our grasp. Forgive me if I think your objection to it has much more to do with the next part of your post:We have to stop acting like cowboys and masters of the earth.
And there we have it -- what seemed like a principaled stand on your part at first turns out to be nothing but anti-Americanism. In truth, we are hardly acting like `cowboys' or `masters of the earth'. We have suffered the worst terrorist attack any nation has seen, and met it with a calm and measured effort to prevent it's recurrence. Doesn't make as good a story as your rant, but hey, life rarely does.
... and, of course, you revert to typical liberal arrogance at the end of your post -- never reasoning when you can insult, never entering civil discourse when you can start a pissing match, and always, always sure of yourself to the point of laughability. Disgraceful.
Well, as they say on tv, `we report, you decide'. I would argue that there is a strong liberal bias to much of the moderation which goes on here, you seem to feel that there is not. I dare say the readers of our posts can decide that for themselves, taking this thread and others as their guide.
As to your bit about intolerance, I would argue that it misses a key point. Modern `I feel your pain' liberalism, with its morass of identity politics, anti-Americanism, and subjectivist morality, has little use for rational argument and the respect for civil discourse which was a proud tradition of the liberalism of the past. From our college campuses, to our network news, liberals increasingly see labels and smears as a replacement for reason. Conservatism, with its central emphasis on reason and on individual rights, is less guilty of this.
Hint: when was the last time you saw a small group of conservative protesters use insults, violence or threats of violence to shut down a liberal speech, event, or newspaper? It happens to conservatives all the time -- see here, or here, or here or here or here.
Hmm, yes. George Bush and Ariel Sharon are just like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Whoops, no, sorry they're not at all.
What were you thinking?
Certainly, we need only concern ourselves with human life for this discussion. Two points, though: at what point is there `enough' brain matter to meet your distinction? When the first neuron forms? The fifth? At the end of development? (remember that much development occurs after birth, even moreso for children born prematurely). So again, we find ourselves somewhat arbitrarily choosing an exact amount of `grey matter' which makes an infant a human life vs. not a human life -- and that's the problem I have with this approach.
As for the fact that a miscarriage is a death (the other examples you choose do not include the creation of an embryo), I would say that yes, it is. The fact that miscarriages occur does not make an embryo less of a life any more than the fact that some children die before growing up makes a born child less of a life.
Leaving aside your resort to insults at the end of your post, the fact remains that expressing a conservative viewpoint is a great way to get modded down. Now you may consider this `good' (and many liberals do, being very intolerant of opposing viewpoints, I could point you to any number of examples right here on slashdot), and I'm not going to tell you not to. Just don't claim it doesn't happen.
While I'm sympathetic to your point, I don' think that your argument quite floats:
So I don't buy your general argument. Now let's look at your specific point: yes, guns are built to be able to kill people, and yes this is integral to their purpose. But this does not mean that guns are meant by their makers to be used in murders. Killing in self defense is not murder, nor should it be considered as such.Now, with that said, I agree with the reason for your post. It is indeed true that there are many reasons that our Founders, in their wisdom, included the second ammendment in the Constitution. Preventing a government monopoly on deadly force was certainly near the top of their list.
I'd first like to note something about this post which is characteristic of the modern left -- an inability to have a rational discussion of a position they disagree with without resorting to insults and accusations. I tend to think of this as a sign of the bankrupcy of the left's intellectual position in the wake of the massive failure of Socialism, but I'm open to other interpretations.
As for the statistics cited, I did not say `the same dollar amounts' as the middle 20% did in 1950, I said `the same amounts'. These numbers are, of course, adjusted for inflation. That these types of improvements in living standard have occured is obvious to anyone who looks at the percentage of the population who own cars, who own televisions, who own refrigerators, who own homes -- even at the very bottom of society.
And that is the truth of our economic system -- that while the left talks about all the wonderful things which big government could do, if they could only get permission to take away that next dollar of your salary or that next civil liberty, or to create that next sweeping social experiment, American capitalism is actually out there improving people's lives.
As for the drug war and star wars (your pet money wasters), we're close to agreement on the first, but when it comes to the second, I'd suggest you actually look at the programs involved. I'd be the first to admit that wasting federal money to keep adults from doing things which they probably shouldn't do but are none of the government's business is a bad precedent. Fine. We probably both agree, therefore, on the need for a drastic change in Marijuana laws (and I repeat that the only rational level-headed calls for such changes today are coming from the right).
But then we come to missile defense, which you claim is a wasteful expense. The only answer I can give is `gee, it sure costs less than filling in the smoking hole where Los Angeles used to be.' -- which is the real issue. What do you propose we do about nuclear nations which have already threatened us with such weapons, or states such as North Korea, which are on the verge of being able to reach us with them? If we do not build defense, we will have to build deterrence -- and there's a lot worse bang/buck ratio in that course of action.
And another note about missile defense: unlike any other program we've discussed here, it has a key characteristic: it actually falls within the responsibilities of the federal government as defined in the Constitution -- and that's no small distinction.
So, again, if you have a clear argument to make why the government should be involved in funding tattoo removal, or tea tasting, or performance art, or any of a hundred other things which are completely outside its constitutional purview, go ahead. But otherwise, I'm not sure where you're coming from...
Moderator: please mod parent down. It is an insult with no content relevant to the current discussion.