You clearly don't see Internet access as a basic human right
A basic human right is something that is necessary to perpetuate existence. You can construct an argument that access to it is a right*, but prepending "basic" to it is completely nonsensical.
*Like other rights, this does not speak to affordability; you have no right to be provided, at no cost, with pen and paper, a firearm, or a bus ticket to the nearest protest. Your only right to be provided with something is in the event that the government has actively taken something from you, or is attempting to do so.
Yep. You can probably get better, faster, cheaper medical care from a veterinarian, paying cash without insurance.
Not sure if you were being serious or not, so... since vets are trained to work on multiple species in addition to the human aspect of their medical training, you're pretty much spot-on.
Given the increase in very technical veterinary treatments available (surgery, oncology, etc), you could probably go to any well-trained vet and get much cheaper healthcare than a hospital. The only real difference is the bureaucracy and malpractice coverage.
If they are persued for excellence there's an argument for that.
This is exactly what I mean when, and I did pick two things that sound relatively trivial but to enthusiasts are anything but. Particularly for the contrast it provides, but also because they can be used as completely serious examples at the same time.
Not with me it doesn't. The way education improves a person is reward in itself.
That was the reason for the explicit disclaimer, since that appeared to be the case and I did not wish to imply I thought you were (or would). That said, it does interest me where others believe the legitimate cutoff is with regard to publicly subsidizing things that affect quality of life, but were the benefit is extraordinarily hard to quantify in any standardized or categorical fashion.
I never said education was strictly about jobs. I said education was expensive, and doesn't serve everyone for what it costs. The more people pursuing education, the higher the net cost unless there is commensurate opportunity growth afterward. That is true regardless of the reasons particular people choose to pursue education. However, the truth of the matter is that most people who pursue education do so for economic reasons, so discussion of cost/benefit in relation to jobs potential is entirely germane to almost any discussion about the cost of higher education.
People should have the option to be educated. That's not the same as universal higher education. The goal to make sure those who have the drive to pursue education can do so is not the same as the goal to make sure as many people as possible receive a higher education. The latter does not take into account that pushing some people into higher education might not actually serve them well personally. Opening a door is not the same as doing your level best to get someone to step through it. There are a lot of people who seem to believe public policy should emphasize kicking people through the door and slamming it shut behind them, for their "own good."
As for education being for life, the same can be said of any personal endeavor. Education for the sake of its overall effect on your life and outlook is really no different than engaging in hang gliding or stock car racing for their own sake. There is nothing special about it once you have reached the point where your education should reasonably have prepared you to support yourself in some way.
Note: the below is not intended to imply you are advocating anything, but rather are more general thoughts I have regarding how many people, in general, seem to respond to these issues.
Any endeavor can give you skills that enrich your life. Why is one a "right" and the others not? If one talks about earnings, the goal shifts to intangible benefits. If one questions how these intangible benefits work, the topic shifts to increased earnings potential. It seems people want it both ways, but I've never heard someone actually articulate why they believe higher education is fundamentally different from any other earnestly-pursued activity. Almost any description I've heard can apply equally to many other things, most of which would get anyone laughed out of a discussion if they voiced serious support for subsidizing them, or claimed they were fundamental rights which should be paid for, even in part, by society in general.
I'm in agreement with pretty much everything you wrote, but a broken system doesn't invalidate anything I said. You could bring up almost any society in the world that has ever existed, and it would remain true. Short of the technological advances I already mentioned, you can propose any industrialized societal structure you believe to be better and it'll still remain true. So, unless you're advocating turning the US into an Amish nation, or returning to hunter-gatherer tribes, it's all pretty academic. Fixing the system would not end means stratification. It would make it a lot less extreme, but wouldn't even approach ending it.
It's very, very expensive to embark on a lifestyle that is not supported by commodity labor. It's reserved pretty much for the rich, which presents a catch-22 in itself.
I don't think it really matters one way or the other. The system is a badly-healed broken bone. The only way to fix it is to break it again, and the patient has an irrationally extreme phobia to pain. Better to set him loose and let the hyenas run him down, then start over.
Oh, you poor thing, you don't have a college education! It's off to the coal mines with you! Extremist interpretation much? Nice try on the submarine character attack though, since this is not even close to what I actually was talking about.
All my statement means is that not all work requires equal pay, nor does it require the cost of education that will never be relevant to a chosen profession.
Unless, of course, you believe that all work should be paid at exactly the same rate. If it is not all worth the same rate, commodity labor will always be worth less than non-commodity labor. It will be worth less for a very good reason: it requires less investment in time and/or money to achieve that level of proficiency.
As the level of overall proficiency rises, the same tasks need to be completed. Those who are not able and willing to perform at a higher level must necessarily accept less. Claiming that an acknowledgement of that fact is akin to advocating forcing certain classes of people to labor for free, against their will, is some serious intellectual dishonesty.
I did not say we need poor, uneducated people to fill roles. What I said is we have roles that must necessarily be filled. In a free and open society, they will be filled by those who, by choice or circumstance, are at the bottom. Until we have the technology to automate tasks and eliminate the need for the majority of the populace to contribute to their own upkeep, this will remain true. There will continue to be stratification in ability, work ethic, and personal choices even with universal higher education. The only thing that will really change is how much it costs. For those at the bottom and top, it won't change much. There are millions who choose not to pursue a life much different than they grew up with; they won't pay more. There are those at the top who will not care what the cost rises to, because they can afford it or have the aptitude to excel greatly over their peers. It's the people in the middle that this hurts. They pay more for not much chance of advancement. They have the worst risk/reward ratio, and pushing higher education on more people when there is not a commensurate increase in available opportunities is the worst sort of good intention.
"Why should I pay the person who bags my groceries anywhere near what I pay the person who handles the operation of a nuclear generator?" is nowhere close to the same as "Why shouldn't I actively attempt to impoverish someone so that I can get my groceries bagged for far less than the demand for their service is worth?"
On the other hand, why would employers be demanding a college education if they didn't see that it actually makes a significant difference in employee performance?
I think you underestimate the work involved in narrowing a field of candidates for employment. The first couple rounds are simply a checklist to ease the workload. As higher education becomes more common, the checkbox "Has degree?" moves closer to the first round of cuts.
The following is not a judgment call on whether subsidies are positive or negative.
They most certainly are. One class of Federal student loans even has "subsidized" in the title.
Loans at a rate guaranteed lower than comparable private loans are subsidized in some manner.
Honestly, I'd say that the GI Bill is far less of a subsidy than a federal student loan. You were on-call 24/7 for a number of years at an incredibly low hourly rate of pay. And that's coming from someone who believes the military is vastly too large, spends too much, and does too much.
let unaccountable crooks, theives, and frauds run wild with our economy for decades now, and where has it gotten us?
The single largest sector of education uses the Federal student loan system to do exactly this. The education sector funnels over half of Federal student loans to commercial schools which have a default rate double that of public colleges and triple that of private colleges. Since you cannot discharge a Federal education loan short of dying, banks are enriched by loaning money to people who are most likely never going to recoup their losses. For every default, there are dozens of others who cannot get employment from commercial degrees and so have a mortgage on their life.
Haven't you heard? The General Welfare Clause has been expanded to the point where we're about to get subsidies to hire someone to wipe our asses. The rest of the Constitution is meaningless. You could group the GW (well, more generally the Tax and Spend), Supremacy, and Commerce Clauses and Congress could rationalize everything they do now. Just scrap the rest, it's not worth reading.
It's not much use telling people that ending Federal subsidies does not mean the entire system is being put under the axe. The response to advocating ending Federal payment for something is usually along the lines of "You must hate X!" It's not rational, but then again there's rarely rational dialog in the US anymore.
Since you mentioned private industry, someone will probably come by ranting about how it would never happen because of free-market capitalism and how banks control everything as a result. All the while, they'd be completely ignoring the fact that the government is complicit in the consolidation of power within the financial sector by protecting those banks from actual market forces.
Yes, the US can afford to be less educated (secondary education, that is).
Advanced societies still depend on a great deal of work that does not require an advanced education to accomplish. Placing an undue emphasis on secondary education puts vast sums of money into places that don't really benefit anyone (except the education industry and the banks that finance it).
Creating artificial scarcity harms everyone. It inflates the cost for those who would pursue it anyway, and it creates new costs for those who likely will never recoup them.
Universal primary education is a good thing. Universal secondary education, not so much. It's only sustainable as long as you can externalize all the work which doesn't require an advanced education. Smaller countries can do that easier than larger ones, but once opportunities for lower-hanging work disappear, you have marginalization of what's left who can't find work in their native countries. Eventually, all you have left are the service industries and niche businesses for those who do not achieve advanced degrees. Then you have the lowest tier of the higher-educated pushing the un-educated out of the only jobs they have left, all for wages that won't ever pay back the educational investment.
TL;DR: Disagreement in the scope of the term "American" exists. That could easily account for the term chosen. Opinion on the validity of the dispute matters zero in trying to understand why a different term might be used. The explanation is rational, even if it is incorrect in this case. Unless all you object to is the term "myopic," in which case it's withdrawn. --- You may believe the US has the sole legitimate claim to the term, but that's not the same thing as being the only people to actually claim the term. It's within the realm of possibility (though not really probable) that the former could be true; the latter is provably not.
Whether you believe it is useful in a context other than to describe a US national or not is irrelevant to my point. The poster was more specific than necessary from a US-centric view, but not necessarily from the view of someone in Central or South America. The poster being aware of the existence of an interpretation which you are not aware of may have been the reason for the phrasing.
You're ascribing to malice ("bigoted moron") what can reasonably be attributed to your ignorance. Language within a given culture can be subjective enough. Add to that cross-language/cross-cultural communication and a certain amount of understanding needs to be applied to account for differences in source views even if you don't agree with the basis for those views.
That's a myopic definition, as the term actually is used by large numbers of people throughout the entire Western Hemisphere (otherwise known as "the Americas").
Anyone who lives in North or South America can correctly be termed "American," even though most of them do not live, nor are citizens of, the USA.
Yes, it's entirely likely that Americans are simply more violent. I've believed for a long time that the problems are rooted in culture, rather than the "sin and temptation" model of why firearm accessibility is bad. It's another social control using the same failed model by targeting an accessory to the problem, rather than the root of the problem.
It's even less applicable than arguments for the illegality of drugs, because there are drugs that are quite simply physically addictive. Firearms, on the other hand, are only addictive to the extent that any activity undertaken obsessively can be addictive. There are legitimate and useful purposes, and there are non-legitimate and destructive purposes. The use of bans provide little more than the appearance of safety, because it is nearly impossible to strictly enforce them on bad actors without completely destroying the fabric of a free society. If it was within my power to blink and eliminate firearms universally and forever, I would. The more fractured the bannings (like we have had with the local/state model in the US), the less effective they are at doing anything other than disarming the most responsible people. It's little more than security theater, and people can already be prosecuted for improper use. Bans add absolutely nothing positive to the equation unless you believe that legal access is the primary source of violent crime. Since they do nothing to stop illegal access, even that is a tenuous position. It's great in theory, but we've had a long history of actual practice to look at and the two don't match up. They never have; it's unlikely they ever will.
I'm not so much an originalist (then again, if that word means anything, few people are; Scalia certainly is not) as someone who views the Constitution as a necessary impediment to changing the way government works. Government brings out extremes in people, and is an invitation to abuse by the worst parts of humanity. The process for changing the way government fundamentally works should be slow and deliberative, because the faster it is the harder it is to highlight and stop abuses of power and/or process before they become institutionalized. By ignoring the process, it legitimizes playing fast and loose with the framework that restrains the worst parts of government. What you end up with is a bipolar model where you have extreme swings of good and bad, rather than stability and consistency. When you throw in extreme partisanship, such as we see in modern US politics, it makes the highs and lows even worse. The good that can be done has the counterpoint of allowing, even encouraging, worse abuses using exactly the same rationalization.
If humanity was fundamentally decent, that sort of model would work fine. Then again, if humanity was fundamentally decent we wouldn't really need the model at all. At the end of the day, it's always about mitigating the bad. When the balance is between mitigating institutionalized abuses and non-institutionalized abuses, the former should always come first.
I didn't say it decreased because of access. The point was it hasn't increased despite access, which has long been the claim of those opposed to firearm sales. The former is incredibly hard to prove conclusively. The latter is still hard to prove, but much more circumstantially reliable. Either way, if the latter is wrong it proves that there are much larger forces at work on crime rates than firearms.
Absent specifics, it's confirmation bias without the chance to even examine the basis of the assertion. Even with specifics, given the nature of how social and cultural research works in the US, it's still probably just confirmation bias. I say that not excluding pro-gun lobby research, just FYI.
While the US is certainly the most violent industrialized nation, it is not in any way closer to Central or South America. 3x our nearest cultural neighbors is a far cry from the 10x violent crime rate that less-developed countries have on the US rate (or 30x our nearest neighbors vs our 3x, to put it more clearly).
The absolutist statements that it's 100% about firearms is flawed because the US is different in a number of fundamental ways from other industrialized nations. Ignoring the social, cultural, and economic differences that set the US apart just further shows intent to confirm a bias, rather than true interest in getting to the root causes of the problems facing the country.
If by "1980s" you actually meant to say "1880s," you'd be much closer to correct. Anyway, if you bothered to look at the vote records for the initial amendments proposed, and changes to those proposals, you'd see that any of those whose purpose was to more strictly clarify the 2nd Amendment were voted down. That includes wording to specify a strictly individual right and those that clearly denoted it as a collective right (specifically, the phrase "for the common defense" after "bear arms").
Yes, Scalia holds some stupid opinions. All of the Justices do. Like Stephens, who believes that other explanatory clauses regarding government powers do nothing to restrain Congress from uses not covered in the scope of the explanation, but believes the explanatory clause of a specifically-guaranteed right does for individuals.
Stephens believes something different. That definitely shows I learned all this from Wikipedia and didn't read all the text available. I take it everyone with a different interpretation is automatically a parroting moron? Not the best way to back up your argument.
There are inconsistencies, yes, all of which were pretty clearly acknowledged at the time as the compromises they were in order to get the document out the door. There's also a process for fixing them, which has been used successfully in the past. As for redundancies, not so much. Redundancies and inconsistencies are not really the same class of creature either, but grouping them together and then explaining away the half I wasn't talking about is called something when used to rebut a position... what was that again? Or, perhaps, your original assertion that the Founders were very specific and thoughtful only means they were specific and thoughtful when it supports your preconceived notions?
I suppose it's somewhat admirable that you're able to admit you advocate for ignoring the process when it's convenient for ends you support; most people aren't willing to do that even if it's clear that's what they believe. All that really does, though, is open the door for it being ignored for the ends supported by whoever is in control at the time. Sometimes failure via a set process is better than scrapping the process and occasionally getting good results (at the cost of being much more subject to the whims of political fancy). That's because there are many people who are not fundamentally decent people, and they ruin it for everyone else.
As for handgun access being slow suicide, I guess suicide means violent crime rates that have been nearly in free fall for the last 20 years.
It's interesting to note that, if the 2nd Amendment does not protect an individual right, it is the single largest example of redundancy in the Constitution due to the powers granted to Congress regarding regulation of military forces. It would be like adding an amendment that says "A well regulated economy, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to engage in interstate commerce shall not be infringed." Guess that would be used to ban interstate commerce while intruding on the previously codified Commerce Clause (and other notable sections), but it really should be in the Bill of Powe^H^H^H^HRights so that we can be sure it's regul^H^H^H^H^Hprotected. That view makes absolutely no sense, since such redundancy appears nowhere else and is completely contradictory to the well-documented purpose of the original Amendments to the Constitution. "The right of the people" is used repeatedly, and yet this one instance it's purported to mean something completely different from every other usage in the document. In simple English, it reads "In order that goal A may be accomplished whenever it becomes necessary, right B must be continually protected from infringement." Conveniently left out is any clause invalidating the right should goal A be accomplished via other means.
Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 (1886) is actually the more pertinent case (tangentially, even the Dred Scott case is more pertinent than Miller), and specifically touches on the Amendment protecting an individual right. Miller simply declared that a firearm must have some military purpose to be specifically protected, and completely sidestepped discussing the actual meaning of the 2nd Amendment.
Most of the rest of the arguments have as much factual integrity as Bellesiles' great book of historical fiction.
Yes, it was sloppy with what was explicit vs. what was implicit, but the link made it quite clear what was intended even if the wording was decidedly not a stellar choice.
Not everyone belongs in college, and a society that tells everyone they should be has the result of millions of people who will live the rest of their life in debt for little return. Those who excel will still excel and get the jobs they would've gotten anyway. Those who rely on nepotism will still have their family connections. Those who make up the rest will take up the rest of the jobs in proportion to what is available.
The only real difference is that college costs more, the dollar is worth less, there are fewer jobs, and the jobs that exist pay less. That ultimately means the people at the bottom of the class are more likely to end up with a lifetime of debt, rather than less.
Most of the people posting knee-jerk responses immediately assume Federal government == all government, and then proceed to spew straw man arguments based on that assumption.
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You clearly don't see Internet access as a basic human right
A basic human right is something that is necessary to perpetuate existence. You can construct an argument that access to it is a right*, but prepending "basic" to it is completely nonsensical.
*Like other rights, this does not speak to affordability; you have no right to be provided, at no cost, with pen and paper, a firearm, or a bus ticket to the nearest protest. Your only right to be provided with something is in the event that the government has actively taken something from you, or is attempting to do so.
Yep. You can probably get better, faster, cheaper medical care from a veterinarian, paying cash without insurance.
Not sure if you were being serious or not, so ... since vets are trained to work on multiple species in addition to the human aspect of their medical training, you're pretty much spot-on.
Given the increase in very technical veterinary treatments available (surgery, oncology, etc), you could probably go to any well-trained vet and get much cheaper healthcare than a hospital. The only real difference is the bureaucracy and malpractice coverage.
Ah, I missed that TB was mentioned in the original post. My mistake.
I think you have bigger problems if your 3 week old son is sexually active. :)
If they are persued for excellence there's an argument for that.
This is exactly what I mean when, and I did pick two things that sound relatively trivial but to enthusiasts are anything but. Particularly for the contrast it provides, but also because they can be used as completely serious examples at the same time.
Not with me it doesn't. The way education improves a person is reward in itself.
That was the reason for the explicit disclaimer, since that appeared to be the case and I did not wish to imply I thought you were (or would). That said, it does interest me where others believe the legitimate cutoff is with regard to publicly subsidizing things that affect quality of life, but were the benefit is extraordinarily hard to quantify in any standardized or categorical fashion.
I never said education was strictly about jobs. I said education was expensive, and doesn't serve everyone for what it costs. The more people pursuing education, the higher the net cost unless there is commensurate opportunity growth afterward. That is true regardless of the reasons particular people choose to pursue education. However, the truth of the matter is that most people who pursue education do so for economic reasons, so discussion of cost/benefit in relation to jobs potential is entirely germane to almost any discussion about the cost of higher education.
People should have the option to be educated. That's not the same as universal higher education. The goal to make sure those who have the drive to pursue education can do so is not the same as the goal to make sure as many people as possible receive a higher education. The latter does not take into account that pushing some people into higher education might not actually serve them well personally. Opening a door is not the same as doing your level best to get someone to step through it. There are a lot of people who seem to believe public policy should emphasize kicking people through the door and slamming it shut behind them, for their "own good."
As for education being for life, the same can be said of any personal endeavor. Education for the sake of its overall effect on your life and outlook is really no different than engaging in hang gliding or stock car racing for their own sake. There is nothing special about it once you have reached the point where your education should reasonably have prepared you to support yourself in some way.
Note: the below is not intended to imply you are advocating anything, but rather are more general thoughts I have regarding how many people, in general, seem to respond to these issues.
Any endeavor can give you skills that enrich your life. Why is one a "right" and the others not? If one talks about earnings, the goal shifts to intangible benefits. If one questions how these intangible benefits work, the topic shifts to increased earnings potential. It seems people want it both ways, but I've never heard someone actually articulate why they believe higher education is fundamentally different from any other earnestly-pursued activity. Almost any description I've heard can apply equally to many other things, most of which would get anyone laughed out of a discussion if they voiced serious support for subsidizing them, or claimed they were fundamental rights which should be paid for, even in part, by society in general.
I'm in agreement with pretty much everything you wrote, but a broken system doesn't invalidate anything I said. You could bring up almost any society in the world that has ever existed, and it would remain true. Short of the technological advances I already mentioned, you can propose any industrialized societal structure you believe to be better and it'll still remain true. So, unless you're advocating turning the US into an Amish nation, or returning to hunter-gatherer tribes, it's all pretty academic. Fixing the system would not end means stratification. It would make it a lot less extreme, but wouldn't even approach ending it.
It's very, very expensive to embark on a lifestyle that is not supported by commodity labor. It's reserved pretty much for the rich, which presents a catch-22 in itself.
I don't think it really matters one way or the other. The system is a badly-healed broken bone. The only way to fix it is to break it again, and the patient has an irrationally extreme phobia to pain. Better to set him loose and let the hyenas run him down, then start over.
Oh, you poor thing, you don't have a college education! It's off to the coal mines with you!
Extremist interpretation much? Nice try on the submarine character attack though, since this is not even close to what I actually was talking about.
All my statement means is that not all work requires equal pay, nor does it require the cost of education that will never be relevant to a chosen profession.
Unless, of course, you believe that all work should be paid at exactly the same rate. If it is not all worth the same rate, commodity labor will always be worth less than non-commodity labor. It will be worth less for a very good reason: it requires less investment in time and/or money to achieve that level of proficiency.
As the level of overall proficiency rises, the same tasks need to be completed. Those who are not able and willing to perform at a higher level must necessarily accept less. Claiming that an acknowledgement of that fact is akin to advocating forcing certain classes of people to labor for free, against their will, is some serious intellectual dishonesty.
I did not say we need poor, uneducated people to fill roles. What I said is we have roles that must necessarily be filled. In a free and open society, they will be filled by those who, by choice or circumstance, are at the bottom. Until we have the technology to automate tasks and eliminate the need for the majority of the populace to contribute to their own upkeep, this will remain true. There will continue to be stratification in ability, work ethic, and personal choices even with universal higher education. The only thing that will really change is how much it costs. For those at the bottom and top, it won't change much. There are millions who choose not to pursue a life much different than they grew up with; they won't pay more. There are those at the top who will not care what the cost rises to, because they can afford it or have the aptitude to excel greatly over their peers. It's the people in the middle that this hurts. They pay more for not much chance of advancement. They have the worst risk/reward ratio, and pushing higher education on more people when there is not a commensurate increase in available opportunities is the worst sort of good intention.
"Why should I pay the person who bags my groceries anywhere near what I pay the person who handles the operation of a nuclear generator?" is nowhere close to the same as "Why shouldn't I actively attempt to impoverish someone so that I can get my groceries bagged for far less than the demand for their service is worth?"
On the other hand, why would employers be demanding a college education if they didn't see that it actually makes a significant difference in employee performance?
I think you underestimate the work involved in narrowing a field of candidates for employment. The first couple rounds are simply a checklist to ease the workload. As higher education becomes more common, the checkbox "Has degree?" moves closer to the first round of cuts.
The following is not a judgment call on whether subsidies are positive or negative.
They most certainly are. One class of Federal student loans even has "subsidized" in the title.
Loans at a rate guaranteed lower than comparable private loans are subsidized in some manner.
Honestly, I'd say that the GI Bill is far less of a subsidy than a federal student loan. You were on-call 24/7 for a number of years at an incredibly low hourly rate of pay. And that's coming from someone who believes the military is vastly too large, spends too much, and does too much.
Please forward the name of the bank that'll do this, so I can get credit with them. :)
let unaccountable crooks, theives, and frauds run wild with our economy for decades now, and where has it gotten us?
The single largest sector of education uses the Federal student loan system to do exactly this. The education sector funnels over half of Federal student loans to commercial schools which have a default rate double that of public colleges and triple that of private colleges. Since you cannot discharge a Federal education loan short of dying, banks are enriched by loaning money to people who are most likely never going to recoup their losses. For every default, there are dozens of others who cannot get employment from commercial degrees and so have a mortgage on their life.
Haven't you heard? The General Welfare Clause has been expanded to the point where we're about to get subsidies to hire someone to wipe our asses. The rest of the Constitution is meaningless. You could group the GW (well, more generally the Tax and Spend), Supremacy, and Commerce Clauses and Congress could rationalize everything they do now. Just scrap the rest, it's not worth reading.
It's not much use telling people that ending Federal subsidies does not mean the entire system is being put under the axe. The response to advocating ending Federal payment for something is usually along the lines of "You must hate X!" It's not rational, but then again there's rarely rational dialog in the US anymore.
Since you mentioned private industry, someone will probably come by ranting about how it would never happen because of free-market capitalism and how banks control everything as a result. All the while, they'd be completely ignoring the fact that the government is complicit in the consolidation of power within the financial sector by protecting those banks from actual market forces.
Yes, the US can afford to be less educated (secondary education, that is).
Advanced societies still depend on a great deal of work that does not require an advanced education to accomplish. Placing an undue emphasis on secondary education puts vast sums of money into places that don't really benefit anyone (except the education industry and the banks that finance it).
Creating artificial scarcity harms everyone. It inflates the cost for those who would pursue it anyway, and it creates new costs for those who likely will never recoup them.
Universal primary education is a good thing. Universal secondary education, not so much. It's only sustainable as long as you can externalize all the work which doesn't require an advanced education. Smaller countries can do that easier than larger ones, but once opportunities for lower-hanging work disappear, you have marginalization of what's left who can't find work in their native countries. Eventually, all you have left are the service industries and niche businesses for those who do not achieve advanced degrees. Then you have the lowest tier of the higher-educated pushing the un-educated out of the only jobs they have left, all for wages that won't ever pay back the educational investment.
TL;DR:
Disagreement in the scope of the term "American" exists. That could easily account for the term chosen. Opinion on the validity of the dispute matters zero in trying to understand why a different term might be used. The explanation is rational, even if it is incorrect in this case. Unless all you object to is the term "myopic," in which case it's withdrawn.
---
You may believe the US has the sole legitimate claim to the term, but that's not the same thing as being the only people to actually claim the term. It's within the realm of possibility (though not really probable) that the former could be true; the latter is provably not.
Whether you believe it is useful in a context other than to describe a US national or not is irrelevant to my point. The poster was more specific than necessary from a US-centric view, but not necessarily from the view of someone in Central or South America. The poster being aware of the existence of an interpretation which you are not aware of may have been the reason for the phrasing.
You're ascribing to malice ("bigoted moron") what can reasonably be attributed to your ignorance. Language within a given culture can be subjective enough. Add to that cross-language/cross-cultural communication and a certain amount of understanding needs to be applied to account for differences in source views even if you don't agree with the basis for those views.
Bleh. ... live in, nor...
That's a myopic definition, as the term actually is used by large numbers of people throughout the entire Western Hemisphere (otherwise known as "the Americas").
Anyone who lives in North or South America can correctly be termed "American," even though most of them do not live, nor are citizens of, the USA.
Yes, it's entirely likely that Americans are simply more violent. I've believed for a long time that the problems are rooted in culture, rather than the "sin and temptation" model of why firearm accessibility is bad. It's another social control using the same failed model by targeting an accessory to the problem, rather than the root of the problem.
It's even less applicable than arguments for the illegality of drugs, because there are drugs that are quite simply physically addictive. Firearms, on the other hand, are only addictive to the extent that any activity undertaken obsessively can be addictive. There are legitimate and useful purposes, and there are non-legitimate and destructive purposes. The use of bans provide little more than the appearance of safety, because it is nearly impossible to strictly enforce them on bad actors without completely destroying the fabric of a free society. If it was within my power to blink and eliminate firearms universally and forever, I would. The more fractured the bannings (like we have had with the local/state model in the US), the less effective they are at doing anything other than disarming the most responsible people. It's little more than security theater, and people can already be prosecuted for improper use. Bans add absolutely nothing positive to the equation unless you believe that legal access is the primary source of violent crime. Since they do nothing to stop illegal access, even that is a tenuous position. It's great in theory, but we've had a long history of actual practice to look at and the two don't match up. They never have; it's unlikely they ever will.
I'm not so much an originalist (then again, if that word means anything, few people are; Scalia certainly is not) as someone who views the Constitution as a necessary impediment to changing the way government works. Government brings out extremes in people, and is an invitation to abuse by the worst parts of humanity. The process for changing the way government fundamentally works should be slow and deliberative, because the faster it is the harder it is to highlight and stop abuses of power and/or process before they become institutionalized. By ignoring the process, it legitimizes playing fast and loose with the framework that restrains the worst parts of government. What you end up with is a bipolar model where you have extreme swings of good and bad, rather than stability and consistency. When you throw in extreme partisanship, such as we see in modern US politics, it makes the highs and lows even worse. The good that can be done has the counterpoint of allowing, even encouraging, worse abuses using exactly the same rationalization.
If humanity was fundamentally decent, that sort of model would work fine. Then again, if humanity was fundamentally decent we wouldn't really need the model at all. At the end of the day, it's always about mitigating the bad. When the balance is between mitigating institutionalized abuses and non-institutionalized abuses, the former should always come first.
I didn't say it decreased because of access. The point was it hasn't increased despite access, which has long been the claim of those opposed to firearm sales. The former is incredibly hard to prove conclusively. The latter is still hard to prove, but much more circumstantially reliable. Either way, if the latter is wrong it proves that there are much larger forces at work on crime rates than firearms.
Absent specifics, it's confirmation bias without the chance to even examine the basis of the assertion. Even with specifics, given the nature of how social and cultural research works in the US, it's still probably just confirmation bias. I say that not excluding pro-gun lobby research, just FYI.
While the US is certainly the most violent industrialized nation, it is not in any way closer to Central or South America. 3x our nearest cultural neighbors is a far cry from the 10x violent crime rate that less-developed countries have on the US rate (or 30x our nearest neighbors vs our 3x, to put it more clearly).
The absolutist statements that it's 100% about firearms is flawed because the US is different in a number of fundamental ways from other industrialized nations. Ignoring the social, cultural, and economic differences that set the US apart just further shows intent to confirm a bias, rather than true interest in getting to the root causes of the problems facing the country.
If by "1980s" you actually meant to say "1880s," you'd be much closer to correct. Anyway, if you bothered to look at the vote records for the initial amendments proposed, and changes to those proposals, you'd see that any of those whose purpose was to more strictly clarify the 2nd Amendment were voted down. That includes wording to specify a strictly individual right and those that clearly denoted it as a collective right (specifically, the phrase "for the common defense" after "bear arms").
Yes, Scalia holds some stupid opinions. All of the Justices do. Like Stephens, who believes that other explanatory clauses regarding government powers do nothing to restrain Congress from uses not covered in the scope of the explanation, but believes the explanatory clause of a specifically-guaranteed right does for individuals.
Stephens believes something different. That definitely shows I learned all this from Wikipedia and didn't read all the text available. I take it everyone with a different interpretation is automatically a parroting moron? Not the best way to back up your argument.
There are inconsistencies, yes, all of which were pretty clearly acknowledged at the time as the compromises they were in order to get the document out the door. There's also a process for fixing them, which has been used successfully in the past. As for redundancies, not so much. Redundancies and inconsistencies are not really the same class of creature either, but grouping them together and then explaining away the half I wasn't talking about is called something when used to rebut a position ... what was that again? Or, perhaps, your original assertion that the Founders were very specific and thoughtful only means they were specific and thoughtful when it supports your preconceived notions?
I suppose it's somewhat admirable that you're able to admit you advocate for ignoring the process when it's convenient for ends you support; most people aren't willing to do that even if it's clear that's what they believe. All that really does, though, is open the door for it being ignored for the ends supported by whoever is in control at the time. Sometimes failure via a set process is better than scrapping the process and occasionally getting good results (at the cost of being much more subject to the whims of political fancy). That's because there are many people who are not fundamentally decent people, and they ruin it for everyone else.
As for handgun access being slow suicide, I guess suicide means violent crime rates that have been nearly in free fall for the last 20 years.
It's interesting to note that, if the 2nd Amendment does not protect an individual right, it is the single largest example of redundancy in the Constitution due to the powers granted to Congress regarding regulation of military forces. It would be like adding an amendment that says "A well regulated economy, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to engage in interstate commerce shall not be infringed." Guess that would be used to ban interstate commerce while intruding on the previously codified Commerce Clause (and other notable sections), but it really should be in the Bill of Powe^H^H^H^HRights so that we can be sure it's regul^H^H^H^H^Hprotected. That view makes absolutely no sense, since such redundancy appears nowhere else and is completely contradictory to the well-documented purpose of the original Amendments to the Constitution. "The right of the people" is used repeatedly, and yet this one instance it's purported to mean something completely different from every other usage in the document. In simple English, it reads "In order that goal A may be accomplished whenever it becomes necessary, right B must be continually protected from infringement." Conveniently left out is any clause invalidating the right should goal A be accomplished via other means.
Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 (1886) is actually the more pertinent case (tangentially, even the Dred Scott case is more pertinent than Miller), and specifically touches on the Amendment protecting an individual right. Miller simply declared that a firearm must have some military purpose to be specifically protected, and completely sidestepped discussing the actual meaning of the 2nd Amendment.
Most of the rest of the arguments have as much factual integrity as Bellesiles' great book of historical fiction.
Yes, it was sloppy with what was explicit vs. what was implicit, but the link made it quite clear what was intended even if the wording was decidedly not a stellar choice.
This, right here.
Not everyone belongs in college, and a society that tells everyone they should be has the result of millions of people who will live the rest of their life in debt for little return. Those who excel will still excel and get the jobs they would've gotten anyway. Those who rely on nepotism will still have their family connections. Those who make up the rest will take up the rest of the jobs in proportion to what is available.
The only real difference is that college costs more, the dollar is worth less, there are fewer jobs, and the jobs that exist pay less. That ultimately means the people at the bottom of the class are more likely to end up with a lifetime of debt, rather than less.
Most of the people posting knee-jerk responses immediately assume Federal government == all government, and then proceed to spew straw man arguments based on that assumption.