Being Liberal means you support people's freedom to do things; socialism means you think society should support its less well off members. The two things are not neccesarily contradictory, but liberalism is usually seen as being against state intervention in any way.
No, being an anarchist means that you're "against state intervention in any way". Liberals have *always* believed that the state should serve the people by protecting their essential freedom from another's dominating control. If the domination is in the form of an oppresive government, then liberals oppose the government. Conversely, if the domination is in the form of robber barons and economic slavery, then liberals typically would encourage the state to intervene in some way.
Most liberal ideas chime better with the right than the left anyway, eg smaller government, lower taxes.
That is one of the most shallow characterizations of liberalism I've ever encountered. Nothing about a small government or low spending directly promotes liberalism. Real liberals believe that the government must have enough funding to protect the people.
Don't get me wrong, there are many things done in the name of liberalism that are antithetical to the liberalism I've just described. But even here in the US, 'liberals' are generally consistent with the spirit of liberalism. While the conservatives try to limit marraige rights and agitate for the prohibition of abortion, the liberals believe in upholding these freedoms.
What the original poster described is a liberal position. It recognizes a supposed area of economic injustice and recommends a solution. A typical conservative position on the same issue is that there is no problem at all and therefore no solution is needed. You might disagree with the effectiveness of the proposed solution, but it is indeed liberal.
Actually, past experience is an important issue here. The trials and issues that one is exposed to inevitably have an effect on a person. Having served Microsoft (and others), Miers has made connections to the corporate world that might call her impartiality into doubt.
More Americans died and more money was spent fighting World War II than at Pearl Harbor.
Others have pointed out how flawed this analogy is, but I'd like to clarify why I mentioned 9/11. I simply chose it as a recent American tragedy that everyone is familiar with; I could easily have chosen Hurricane Katrina. There is no real connection between 9/11 and the Iraq occupation, and I didn't mean to imply that there was. The Iraq occupation is turning into a similar disaster in terms of how much we lose in exchange for nothing at all. As a standard of measuring the magnitude of a disaster, I find 9/11 quite appropriate.
I don't recall Christ having any moral objections to using the tissue of dead people to help living people.
As much as I'd love to chat about good ol' Jesus, he isn't really relevant to the mythology in question. What I'm talking about is the concept of "soul" and the mythological tradition (not in the bible) that holds that these entities have these properties:
1) They are full-blown human beings.
2) Embryos each contain one of them.
Without this concept the ethical case against embryonic stem cell research falls apart.
It's too bad that the OP doesn't understand that umbilical cord blood stem cells are not embryonic stem cells, but rather adult stem cells.
Hasn't this been discussed enough on slashdot already? Yes, the current administration has not specifically outlawed the production of adult stem cells. No, this does not mean that there is no effect on adult stem cell research. Given the choice, the modern stem cell researcher would prefer not to be encumbered by arbitrary rules about stem cell production, even if the rules only apply to a subset of all stem cells. Thus there is now a disincentive to do stem cell research in the US.
(BTW, there are ethics involved in research of all kinds, in engineering, in law, in business, etc. You simply do not agree with the idea that ethics should be a part of stem cell research.)
Now you're beating a Straw Man. Of course there need to be ethical considerations in science. We should follow some sort of ethical system, but there's no reason why this system needs to be based on Judeo-Christian mythology.
That was an intentional skew on my part. Here's what a Nanny State is, according to wikipedia.
From the linked article:
"Policies such as bans on smoking in public places, high taxes on junk food, bans on recreational drug use, and anti-pornography laws are seen by their opponents as an example of a functioning nanny state."
Your definition is indeed part of what "nanny state" has come to mean, but it is certainly not the final word on nannydom.
After all, they know they can't defeat us militarily, so their only recourse is to try and get Americans at home to declare this war a "quagmire" and demand the troops come home. If they succeed at that, they will have won not because they defeated us but because we defeated ourselves.
What do you propose we do instead? We're obviously unhappy with the war. Our leaders are being completely unresponsive and unsympathetic. Shall we just sit and wait for the number of American deaths to exceed those of 9/11? Shall we turn the Iraq war into a grater disaster than 9/11, with more lives lost and over ten times the cost to taxpayers? We will lose the war not because the insurgents have won but because we have defeated our own interests.
When was the last time you were attacked in the U.S.?
Don't you mean to ask when the last time the coalition was attacked on domestic soil? I don't see how occupying Iraq protects the US but not Britain. Your logic is flawed.
There's no excuse for the wasteful and incompetent management of the Iraq war. If our leaders weren't so arrogant they would have required real support from the international community as a prerequisite to invasion. They would have gotten informed opinions from real experts (manipulators like Chalabi make me sick), they would have let skilled people manage the war (not idiots like Rumsfeld), and they would have been honest with their own people. The WMD issue is extremely humiliating for the United States because, to the objective observer, it looks like we invaded the wrong country - and at a time when we had just raided the piggy bank in tax giveaways and were still running an operation in Afghanistan!
Now, it's true that Saddam was a nasty dictator. It's true that Iraq could possibly have had a better system in place. I realize that the popular conservative view of the day is that the rest of the world is full of children that need our constant monetary and military support. None of that even comes close to excusing the blunders, incompetence, and arrogance of our leaders. I'm sorry if this sounds overly liberal, but sometimes it's good to be critical of the government.
I doubt he's going to be very sympathetic when it comes to things people like "us" care about given "our" level of support for his administration.
Forget the broadcast flag for a moment. Whether you're a tree-hugging liberal or a Bush-kissing conservative, you're probably opposed to lots of pork in the budget. The reason the President doesn't give a hang has nothing to do with the political alignment of the people and everything to do with helping his friends out. He can't bring himself to punish people who screw up in his own administration, so how do you expect him to deny a little pork to a fellow Republican?
Oh, and here's the disclaimer: This post mentions Bush. All negative associations and statements made, both real and imagined, are not to be taken as personal attacks on either Bush or his supporters. They merely represent the author's (possibly mistaken) interpretation of the relevant facts and data with respect the Bush administration, its policies, and/or its programs.
Building infrastructure with tax dollars is not socialist, unless you consider the interstate system a remnant of soviet america. What is socialist is a nanny-welfare state.
Yes, the interstate system is consistent with socialism. No, the Soviets do not define socialism. Yes, a traditional welfare system is consistent with socialism. No, corporate welfare is not consistent with socialism. No, enforcing moral behavior (as in a "nanny state") is not relevant to socialism.
The tax cuts take money the government would have spent (i.e. wasted, since the choices the government makes have nothing to do with efficiency) and gives it back to the people it came from in the first place.
Wrong. The money has already been spent ("wasted") by the government. Tax cuts are an additional expense, driving the nation even further into debt. The tax cuts have not decreased federal spending ("wasting") at all.
This is better than the government spending the money if you believe that the money will be spent more wisely by the person who earned it and worked for it rather than by some government functionary who decides based on who contributed the most to his re-election campaign.
You're forgetting that the government is already the one spending the money. A tax cut is just another free handout from the government to a targeted selection of people. Follow the money and see who benefits most, and then watch the cycle of publicly funded political contributions continue.
It never fails. Whenever someone dares to criticize the current administration, Clinton's name gets thrown around.
Oh, Clinton made me do it. It's not my fault.
When will conservatives learn that blaming Clinton is NOT an appropriate response to the current administration's incompetence? How many more failures of leadership will it take?
Oh, so the oil barons deserve to get fabulously wealthy while the rest of us pay the bill for their greed in tax dollars and human lives. I understand now. We should be kissing Bush's feet for the privilege of signing our paychecks over to him.
This must be the conservative version of "free market capitalism". The consumer buys the product, the corporation buys the government, and the people's lives and tax money are used to benefit the corporation.
Build army base, use it for US Army, when US finally leaves, hand over base to Iraqi army. Sounds logical to me.
So you expect the US to abandon military bases in an oil-rich country. You're probably one of those people who thinks that Iraq was invaded to promote Freedom and Democracy.
They'd rather not be forced to pay for it, via taxes.
We're paying MUCH more for their war than we're asking them to pay for our medical research. It's a shame that greed in the US has gotten so out of control.
Imagine large facilities that do nothing but farm embryos for stem cells. Ebay "Selling embryo!" and many other horrible things.
So instead of outlawing the "horrible" things they decide to outlaw medical research? Either they're trying to impede science or they're just plain dumb. The truth is probably somewhere between those two extremes.
Then again someone will find something objectionable.
Exactly. Some of these politicians don't get elected for their ability to come together and find solutions. They get elected and reelected in order to prove the superiority of christian religion over objective science.
Yes, it's well within the powers of the federal government to create and administer such programs at the national level. This may not jive with your utopian ideals, but there you have it.
You mean they're playing to emotions in the wake of a national tragedy? Oh my god, I'd never have expected that from a news organization. You've totally uncovered the liberal media conspiracy.
I can't agree that this robot is too human-like to be in the Uncanny Valley. Perhaps it is just to the left of the valley, where an obviously non-human entity is pretending to be human in a completely non-threatening way (and is therefore adorable), but I think it's more likely that it is just on the border.
The claim that the robot could fool someone for 10 seconds is not made in the article; it's a speculative statement about androids in general, presumably in the future:
"An android could get away with it for a short time, 5-10 seconds."
Now look at this quote from the same person:
"Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously, we react to the android as if she were a woman."
By some reasoning, this ought to place the robot in the middle of the Uncanny Valley, as the grandparent post claimed. On the other hand, the human-like aspects include a female appearance, breathing, and fluttering eyelids, which sound more like a robotic pet than a real human android. Give it an assertive human presence and then we'll see what's Uncanny.
similarly, there is a LOT of evidence for god all around us.
No, there is not a single phenomenon that can be predicted from the premise that God exists. (This easily follows from the undisputed definition of God as an omnipotent entity.)
If you disagree with the above statement then you must believe that there are some potential universes that cannot exist in the presence of God. Thus, the fact that we do not live in such a universe is evidence that God exists. However, this violates the assumption of omnipotence.
On the whole, I like the US Constitution. I just wish people would amend it rather than attempting to get the judiciary to pretend it says things it doesn't.
We're trying to amend it! This will fix the two most obvious flaws in the Constitution; namely:
1) Homosexuals have too many rights
2) People who disagree with the government have too many rights
Here's the LIBERAL MEDIA ANTI-CHRISTIAN CONSPIRACY OH MY GOD THINK OF THE CHILDREN side of the story:
1) she wasn't Secret Squirrel. She was an officer that worked at LANGLEY. You know, the HQ of the CIA? Know a lot of non-CIA employees that work there do you?
2) the law states that she has to have been a covert operative within the last 5 years. I gather she was employed with a 'cover' 9 years ago.
Well, point #2 invalidates point #1. This brings us to your claim that her identification was not classified. I gather that this claim is not true.
3) the law states that Rove needs to reveal her identity with intent to expose her - it's a huge stretch to suggest that the identification that was made was an intent to reveal.
Do you trust your govenment so much that you cannot imagine a Republican leader abusing his power to punish someone who made a politically damaging revelation. No one who knows about Rove and his history is surprised that he would do something like this, especially at a time when the administration was caught lying during the rush to war.
Please, the Libocrats are so busy building strawmen on this one, they seem to have lost what little reason they evidently had left.
Of course, the name-calling must commence. I hope you feel better about yourself and your political positions now.
Slashdot Mirror
Being Liberal means you support people's freedom to do things; socialism means you think society should support its less well off members. The two things are not neccesarily contradictory, but liberalism is usually seen as being against state intervention in any way.
No, being an anarchist means that you're "against state intervention in any way". Liberals have *always* believed that the state should serve the people by protecting their essential freedom from another's dominating control. If the domination is in the form of an oppresive government, then liberals oppose the government. Conversely, if the domination is in the form of robber barons and economic slavery, then liberals typically would encourage the state to intervene in some way.
Most liberal ideas chime better with the right than the left anyway, eg smaller government, lower taxes.
That is one of the most shallow characterizations of liberalism I've ever encountered. Nothing about a small government or low spending directly promotes liberalism. Real liberals believe that the government must have enough funding to protect the people.
Don't get me wrong, there are many things done in the name of liberalism that are antithetical to the liberalism I've just described. But even here in the US, 'liberals' are generally consistent with the spirit of liberalism. While the conservatives try to limit marraige rights and agitate for the prohibition of abortion, the liberals believe in upholding these freedoms.
What the original poster described is a liberal position. It recognizes a supposed area of economic injustice and recommends a solution. A typical conservative position on the same issue is that there is no problem at all and therefore no solution is needed. You might disagree with the effectiveness of the proposed solution, but it is indeed liberal.
Actually, past experience is an important issue here. The trials and issues that one is exposed to inevitably have an effect on a person. Having served Microsoft (and others), Miers has made connections to the corporate world that might call her impartiality into doubt.
More Americans died and more money was spent fighting World War II than at Pearl Harbor.
Others have pointed out how flawed this analogy is, but I'd like to clarify why I mentioned 9/11. I simply chose it as a recent American tragedy that everyone is familiar with; I could easily have chosen Hurricane Katrina. There is no real connection between 9/11 and the Iraq occupation, and I didn't mean to imply that there was. The Iraq occupation is turning into a similar disaster in terms of how much we lose in exchange for nothing at all. As a standard of measuring the magnitude of a disaster, I find 9/11 quite appropriate.
I don't recall Christ having any moral objections to using the tissue of dead people to help living people.
As much as I'd love to chat about good ol' Jesus, he isn't really relevant to the mythology in question. What I'm talking about is the concept of "soul" and the mythological tradition (not in the bible) that holds that these entities have these properties:
1) They are full-blown human beings.
2) Embryos each contain one of them.
Without this concept the ethical case against embryonic stem cell research falls apart.
It's too bad that the OP doesn't understand that umbilical cord blood stem cells are not embryonic stem cells, but rather adult stem cells.
Hasn't this been discussed enough on slashdot already? Yes, the current administration has not specifically outlawed the production of adult stem cells. No, this does not mean that there is no effect on adult stem cell research. Given the choice, the modern stem cell researcher would prefer not to be encumbered by arbitrary rules about stem cell production, even if the rules only apply to a subset of all stem cells. Thus there is now a disincentive to do stem cell research in the US.
(BTW, there are ethics involved in research of all kinds, in engineering, in law, in business, etc. You simply do not agree with the idea that ethics should be a part of stem cell research.)
Now you're beating a Straw Man. Of course there need to be ethical considerations in science. We should follow some sort of ethical system, but there's no reason why this system needs to be based on Judeo-Christian mythology.
That was an intentional skew on my part. Here's what a Nanny State is, according to wikipedia.
From the linked article:
"Policies such as bans on smoking in public places, high taxes on junk food, bans on recreational drug use, and anti-pornography laws are seen by their opponents as an example of a functioning nanny state."
Your definition is indeed part of what "nanny state" has come to mean, but it is certainly not the final word on nannydom.
After all, they know they can't defeat us militarily, so their only recourse is to try and get Americans at home to declare this war a "quagmire" and demand the troops come home. If they succeed at that, they will have won not because they defeated us but because we defeated ourselves.
What do you propose we do instead? We're obviously unhappy with the war. Our leaders are being completely unresponsive and unsympathetic. Shall we just sit and wait for the number of American deaths to exceed those of 9/11? Shall we turn the Iraq war into a grater disaster than 9/11, with more lives lost and over ten times the cost to taxpayers? We will lose the war not because the insurgents have won but because we have defeated our own interests.
When was the last time you were attacked in the U.S.?
Don't you mean to ask when the last time the coalition was attacked on domestic soil? I don't see how occupying Iraq protects the US but not Britain. Your logic is flawed.
There's no excuse for the wasteful and incompetent management of the Iraq war. If our leaders weren't so arrogant they would have required real support from the international community as a prerequisite to invasion. They would have gotten informed opinions from real experts (manipulators like Chalabi make me sick), they would have let skilled people manage the war (not idiots like Rumsfeld), and they would have been honest with their own people. The WMD issue is extremely humiliating for the United States because, to the objective observer, it looks like we invaded the wrong country - and at a time when we had just raided the piggy bank in tax giveaways and were still running an operation in Afghanistan!
Now, it's true that Saddam was a nasty dictator. It's true that Iraq could possibly have had a better system in place. I realize that the popular conservative view of the day is that the rest of the world is full of children that need our constant monetary and military support. None of that even comes close to excusing the blunders, incompetence, and arrogance of our leaders. I'm sorry if this sounds overly liberal, but sometimes it's good to be critical of the government.
And then they wonder why we think politicians suck....
They do? I've never heard anyone defend the integrity of politicians in general.
I doubt he's going to be very sympathetic when it comes to things people like "us" care about given "our" level of support for his administration.
Forget the broadcast flag for a moment. Whether you're a tree-hugging liberal or a Bush-kissing conservative, you're probably opposed to lots of pork in the budget. The reason the President doesn't give a hang has nothing to do with the political alignment of the people and everything to do with helping his friends out. He can't bring himself to punish people who screw up in his own administration, so how do you expect him to deny a little pork to a fellow Republican?
Oh, and here's the disclaimer:
This post mentions Bush. All negative associations and statements made, both real and imagined, are not to be taken as personal attacks on either Bush or his supporters. They merely represent the author's (possibly mistaken) interpretation of the relevant facts and data with respect the Bush administration, its policies, and/or its programs.
Building infrastructure with tax dollars is not socialist, unless you consider the interstate system a remnant of soviet america. What is socialist is a nanny-welfare state.
Yes, the interstate system is consistent with socialism. No, the Soviets do not define socialism. Yes, a traditional welfare system is consistent with socialism. No, corporate welfare is not consistent with socialism. No, enforcing moral behavior (as in a "nanny state") is not relevant to socialism.
Sigh. Here we go again.
The tax cuts take money the government would have spent (i.e. wasted, since the choices the government makes have nothing to do with efficiency) and gives it back to the people it came from in the first place.
Wrong. The money has already been spent ("wasted") by the government. Tax cuts are an additional expense, driving the nation even further into debt. The tax cuts have not decreased federal spending ("wasting") at all.
This is better than the government spending the money if you believe that the money will be spent more wisely by the person who earned it and worked for it rather than by some government functionary who decides based on who contributed the most to his re-election campaign.
You're forgetting that the government is already the one spending the money. A tax cut is just another free handout from the government to a targeted selection of people. Follow the money and see who benefits most, and then watch the cycle of publicly funded political contributions continue.
It never fails. Whenever someone dares to criticize the current administration, Clinton's name gets thrown around.
Oh, Clinton made me do it. It's not my fault.
When will conservatives learn that blaming Clinton is NOT an appropriate response to the current administration's incompetence? How many more failures of leadership will it take?
Oh, so the oil barons deserve to get fabulously wealthy while the rest of us pay the bill for their greed in tax dollars and human lives. I understand now. We should be kissing Bush's feet for the privilege of signing our paychecks over to him.
This must be the conservative version of "free market capitalism". The consumer buys the product, the corporation buys the government, and the people's lives and tax money are used to benefit the corporation.
Build army base, use it for US Army, when US finally leaves, hand over base to Iraqi army. Sounds logical to me.
So you expect the US to abandon military bases in an oil-rich country. You're probably one of those people who thinks that Iraq was invaded to promote Freedom and Democracy.
They'd rather not be forced to pay for it, via taxes.
We're paying MUCH more for their war than we're asking them to pay for our medical research. It's a shame that greed in the US has gotten so out of control.
Imagine large facilities that do nothing but farm embryos for stem cells. Ebay "Selling embryo!" and many other horrible things.
So instead of outlawing the "horrible" things they decide to outlaw medical research? Either they're trying to impede science or they're just plain dumb. The truth is probably somewhere between those two extremes.
Then again someone will find something objectionable.
Exactly. Some of these politicians don't get elected for their ability to come together and find solutions. They get elected and reelected in order to prove the superiority of christian religion over objective science.
Yes, it's well within the powers of the federal government to create and administer such programs at the national level. This may not jive with your utopian ideals, but there you have it.
You mean they're playing to emotions in the wake of a national tragedy? Oh my god, I'd never have expected that from a news organization. You've totally uncovered the liberal media conspiracy.
I can't agree that this robot is too human-like to be in the Uncanny Valley. Perhaps it is just to the left of the valley, where an obviously non-human entity is pretending to be human in a completely non-threatening way (and is therefore adorable), but I think it's more likely that it is just on the border.
The claim that the robot could fool someone for 10 seconds is not made in the article; it's a speculative statement about androids in general, presumably in the future:
"An android could get away with it for a short time, 5-10 seconds."
Now look at this quote from the same person:
"Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously, we react to the android as if she were a woman."
By some reasoning, this ought to place the robot in the middle of the Uncanny Valley, as the grandparent post claimed. On the other hand, the human-like aspects include a female appearance, breathing, and fluttering eyelids, which sound more like a robotic pet than a real human android. Give it an assertive human presence and then we'll see what's Uncanny.
similarly, there is a LOT of evidence for god all around us.
No, there is not a single phenomenon that can be predicted from the premise that God exists. (This easily follows from the undisputed definition of God as an omnipotent entity.)
If you disagree with the above statement then you must believe that there are some potential universes that cannot exist in the presence of God. Thus, the fact that we do not live in such a universe is evidence that God exists. However, this violates the assumption of omnipotence.
On the whole, I like the US Constitution. I just wish people would amend it rather than attempting to get the judiciary to pretend it says things it doesn't.
We're trying to amend it! This will fix the two most obvious flaws in the Constitution; namely:
1) Homosexuals have too many rights
2) People who disagree with the government have too many rights
Now won't that be nice?
Here's the LIBERAL MEDIA ANTI-CHRISTIAN CONSPIRACY OH MY GOD THINK OF THE CHILDREN side of the story:
1) she wasn't Secret Squirrel. She was an officer that worked at LANGLEY. You know, the HQ of the CIA? Know a lot of non-CIA employees that work there do you?
2) the law states that she has to have been a covert operative within the last 5 years. I gather she was employed with a 'cover' 9 years ago.
Well, point #2 invalidates point #1. This brings us to your claim that her identification was not classified. I gather that this claim is not true.
3) the law states that Rove needs to reveal her identity with intent to expose her - it's a huge stretch to suggest that the identification that was made was an intent to reveal.
Do you trust your govenment so much that you cannot imagine a Republican leader abusing his power to punish someone who made a politically damaging revelation. No one who knows about Rove and his history is surprised that he would do something like this, especially at a time when the administration was caught lying during the rush to war.
Please, the Libocrats are so busy building strawmen on this one, they seem to have lost what little reason they evidently had left.
Of course, the name-calling must commence. I hope you feel better about yourself and your political positions now.