So if you sign a contract that sells you into slavery that should be permitted too?
You can't sign up to be a slave any more than you can consent to be raped. That fact that slavery and rape are involuntary is what makes both of them so deeply immoral.
What about the right not to be beaten?
If people can't sign away their right to being beaten, then how can we have boxing matches?
There are certain rights that it should not be possible to sign away. The right to earn a livelihood working in your profession should be one of them.
What if one of my employees does a terrible job and I let other people in the industry know about it - don't I have a right to free speech? What if a doctor nearly kills someone, and hospital asks them to give up their medical license in exchange for keeping their severance pay - is the doctor's "right to make a living in their chosen profession" more important than public safety?
punishing someone for signing something... they probably believed wasn't enforceable
So they signed something with no intention of abiding by the agreement. Isn't that fraud?
How the hell does an AC get modded up for this on slashdot??? What exactly do you moderators do for a living? And why are you wanting to be so harsh about punishing someone for signing something unreasonable they probably believed wasn't enforceable. Shame on you all!
Wow. Some people have opinions that you don't like, and you're completely incapable of handling it. You have a lot of growing up to do.
You seem to be confusing "freedom of religion" with "freedom from religion". The only thing the US federal government is prevented from doing is establishing a state religion or designating a single religion as state-sponsored.
You seem to be misreading the first amendment, when it says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..." translates directly to "Congress shall make no law with regard to a religious organization...". This does not just prevent the government from picking a state religion, it also prevents congress from supporting monotheism in general. And just a s bit of support for this, the Supreme Court has stated that, under the first amendment, "government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion."
Our laws are indeed based on the Ten Commandments, at least on their base level.
Not really - I have yet to find the concepts of "voting" or "rights" anywhere in the Bible. Of the commandments, only six through nine are a significant part of our legal system (the rest are rare exceptions, like "blue laws" preventing alcohol from being sold on Sunday) and those four commandments are such basic concepts that they've been a part of human morality since before we had codified rules at all, and perhaps even before writing existed.
If you want the real basis of American law, start with John Locke. Christianity did influence the American legal system, of course, but the real basis for it (individual rights, restrained government, elections) came from ancient Greek and secular philosophers.
I don't understand the huge emotion involved in purging religion from our history.
And I don't understand why people keep trying to make religion central to everything in our history, even when other influences were clearly greater.
This is a classic example of projection - seeing one's own flaws in another person, but not oneself. Here are just a few of your assumptions:
[Consciousness] certainly won't be found in the physical dimension.
An Universe is a manifestation of God's thought.
[Time is] a dimension of mind quantized or fractalized; hence the reason one can go "outside" or "transcend" time.
Time is a meta-physical buffer so that we may learn how to see the consequences of our actions, instead of all the consequences being immediate available.
[Life is] a transfer of consciousness from one dimension to another. Life is the "entering" into the physical dimension. Death is the "exiting" of the physical dimension.
Everything is "Alive."
Chi, Ki, Prana, Life Force, whatever you want to call it doesn't change its nature or purpose.
Unless you have been dead, you _know_ NOTHING about Life.
And last, but not least,
I already have the answers.
Not only is that an assumption, but it also has to be the most egocentric statement ever made.
Your confusing Evolution with Awareness.
No. Biological evolution (as far as we can tell) is a process built out of inexact reproduction and differential survival, while consciousness (as far as we can tell) is a process that is based on the activity of structures in the brain. Different things, but both processes.
As long as people assume the opposite, "The universe doesn't make any sense, god is illogical, the universe is unfair, poor me", they will never understand reality to any depth, and learn the most important lesson: They are in control of their destiny.
I don't know anyone who thinks that way. To mirror your statement, I would say that: The universe does make sense, but not in a preplanned way that makes human concerns the center of the universe - the physics of a fatal car crash make perfect sense, but don't expect that to comfort anyone. God is a concept best explained by psychology - it has nothing to do with anything outside the human mind. The universe isn't really unfair, it just exists - fairness (like beauty) exists only in the eye of the beholder, and is a purely human concern. As for "poor me" - why?
Well, before then, we were just killing each other.
You take that back! My ancestors didn't spend millennia driving megafauna to extinction so you could claim that they were merely homicidal. Give them the credit that any race of bloodthirsty psychotic apes deserves.
In my very liberal house growing up, handicapped *was* banned.
But not by the government. You may feel like you grew up under the control of big brother, but unless your parents used torture to enforce their speech code, it's a bit of a stretch to say they're using the same tactics, and even more of one to include the left in general.
The problem I have with doublespeak is that it comes about as a result of someone out there... deciding that I don't know how best to speak; that I am not smart enough to know if I'm being racist or insensitive
They make judgments about you, you make judgments about them - that's life. It's almost impossible for a person to avoid having some kind of agenda, to never want to affect how other people do things. They may be elitist, or just plain silly, but unless it's an attempt, by government decree, to make certain thoughts impossible, then it's not the same things as 1984.
And corporate control is better than government control how?
First, that's a false dichotomy. Why not gripe about religious control, or the uncontrolled cultural drift of the masses?
Second, isn't it better to split up power between two groups, rather than putting all of it under the control of one? No matter how wonky a company gets, if the government still has the guns, you at least have a chance of getting help from them.
While I don't think that it causes that much damage, I can at least see a connection between "family continuity" and divorce law, but I can't make any real connection with social security. So old people can mooch through taxes rather than by guilt-tripping their kids... how does that harm family continuity?
* NewSpeak, the changing of language to make certain thoughts impossible (ala the politically correct language redefinition we experienced in the 70s/80s e.g. "differently abled" for "handicapped", in Sweden "husmor" replaced by "hemmafru" or their English cognates "housewife" with "stay-at-home-mom")
1984 was against government control over culture, not just cultural change in general. Changes in the way people express themselves is just part of life - "nigger" became "Negro", which became "colored", and then "black". Until the word "handicapped" is banned in some way, through the legal system, it has nothing to do with 1984.
* The Ministry of Truth, the media manipulation of news and history (ala the recent Reugter's Photoshopping of pictures from the Israel/Lebanon war; Dan Rather's falsification of documents)
Again, if it wasn't part of a government plan to control the population, then it isn't 1984 - "No Ministry, no Orwell" if you will. On the other hand, Bush's staged landing on an aircraft carrier is at least a lot closer to government controlling the news.
* DoubleThink, the simultaneous holding of two or more mutually exclusive ideas (e.g. "homosexuality is something you are born with" and "homosexuality is a personal and private decision"; or "racism is always wrong" and "affirmative action is the right thing to do")
As for the first part I doubt that any one person holds both views, but people with either view can come to the conclusion that it isn't the government business who they hook up with/date/marry. In this way they my become political allies, but there's no doublethink needed.
As for the second part, many people dislike killing, but accept that it's sometimes necessary to protect innocent lives. In the same vein, there's no inherent contradiction in saying that racism is bad, but limited racism to counter racism that already exists is acceptable. (I should point out that I'm against affirmative action - I just don't see blatant cognitive dissonance on the other side.)
* also the breakdown of the family and sexual relationships (which has less obvious parallels but "PolPot & the child turns their parents in" (like Winston's neighbor) would be an example)
Again, where is the government enforcement of this?
* ThoughtCrime, making the mere ability of thinking something a crime. You see this all the time in Hate Crime legislation (what murder wasn't already a crime... with a life penalty?) and University speech codes (University "Free Speech Zones" are a wonderful example of NewSpeak, DoubleThink, and ThoughtCrime wrapped into one)
You got me there. I can no more defend speech codes than I can defend the movement to put creationism in science classes. On the other hand, finding one parallel in a single context (just speech, just at universities) isn't enough to make a meaningful connection.
* furthermore the mild anti-semitism, the hatred of Goldsteinism, today you see this all the time however this is mostly thinly veiled as an attack on "Zionism"
Maybe I wasn't clear; what I was trying to convey was that it is not in any way settled.
Well, between your Rob Paul jab and your "no evidence" statement, you seemed rather dismissive.
I still stand by my assertion that minarchists, of both the Chicago and Austrian orthodoxy, frequently fall prey to that logical fallacy.
They tend to, yes. And their opposition has a similar set of fallacies that they use to defend their reflexive "more intervention (of some kind) is needed" answer to everything. Of course, the fact that both sides have biases and sometimes use fallacious reasoning doesn't mean that they're wrong, either.
Even to this day and to this administration.
You think this administration has been against intervention? Where have you been for the last eight years?
The people running these surveys either have an agenda or are inept at trying to remove bias.
I was responding to a "there is no evidence" statement. Since quality didn't matter, I just copied a bit of what Wikipedia had on the page for the topic at hand.
You have a minority view of the causes of the Great Depression.
Which of course doesn't mean that he's wrong. I find it amusing that after correcting a logical fallacy, you decide to include one in your very next sentence. Even if it weren't for that, he is citing one of the three major theories being discussed in academia today, so it's absurd to blow him off as a kook.
There is no evidence at all for your statements about the New Deal (dogma notwithstanding).
Since you seem to be swayed by popularity, here are some quotes from slashdot's favorite source:
When the Gallup poll in 1939 asked, 'Do you think the attitude of the Roosevelt administration toward business is delaying business recovery?' the American people responded 'yes' by a margin of more than two-to-one. The business community felt even more strongly so.
Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, 1939 - "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and now if I am wrong somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosper. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And enormous debt to boot."
A 1995 survey of economic historians asked whether "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression." Of those in economics departments 27% agreed, 22% agreed 'with provisos' (what provisos the survey does not state) and 51% disagreed. Of those in history departments, only 27% agreed and 73% disagreed.
You know that whole sub prime thing, you're saying that less regulation would have prevented that? You know the entire reason that happened was becuase the financial companies were giving credit to people that couldn't pay.
You're quite correct, but very incomplete. The only reason that credit was given to people that couldn't pay was that the government went out of it's way to make that kind loan look more attractive. Isn't it likely that if the government had made more regulations that they would have made the situation even worse?
With no government interference, Freddy Mac and Franny Mae would have gone under and a lot of Americans would be royally fucked right now (more than there are already). I can't believe anyone would suggest unregulated capitalism.
If it weren't government interference, we wouldn't have Freddy and Fannie, and if it weren't for them, we wouldn't be in this mess at all. I can't believe that someone can take the total failure of two government-created entities and suggest that we just need to add more government - especially with a conspicuous lack of detail about what kind of regulation and why.
There's a natural tendency for corporations to screw people over, or rather, no incentive not to.
Government has the same tendency to screw people over, and has even fewer incentives not to than corporations have.
But I can't see how you'd do that so for now, regulation regulation regulation!
Even if I found your argument compelling, I'd still need to know what regulations and why those are the important ones. Of course if it was 1937, you would probably say that banks are too stingy with home loans, and we needed to create a government-sponsored enterprise to help more people own their own home...
Businesses are not people, and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution were not intended for them.
No, but every business is made up of people. When you regulate a business, you are regulating the people that make up that business - which can infringe on their freedom. If the government made it illegal for chess clubs to host tournaments in the US, wouldn't that be a loss of freedom - even though clubs aren't people, and don't have rights?
At first I thought you were dividing progressive/conservative along the new/old line. But that couldn't be true because anti-abortion and prohibition were fairly radical, new ideas when they came out. Then based on "was a Seventh-Day Adventist" and "many of these 19th century utopian communities were extremely Christian", I thought you were dividing between religious and secular. But they weren't any more religious than the abolitionist movement or the civil rights movement.
Kellogg for example, was a Seventh-Day Adventist who favored segregation. (Of course, his ideas that a vegetarian diet and execise are good for you are hardly crazy. He was even right about probiotics; but his love of enemas, plus his extreme views about sex, let us file him in the "crazy" bin.)
Then I saw the above, and realized that, when it comes to the past, anything successful you label "progressive", and anything that's become unpopular you label "conservative". Thus, progressive ideas always win, because if they won it must be progressive. The problem is that you can't use that to predict the future - environmentalism is seen as liberal right now, but in 50 years it might seem like some old-fashioned conservative idea that's now out of style. You might see a large, secular movement to ban abortion some day - which would then be progressive. The content of the ideas haven't changed, but you would end up relabeling them based on how successful they are.
So give at least 10 examples of times when the modern (post-1955) conservative movement has been right on a major issue. Should be easy if you're right.
I can't, because you get to decide what shall be considered "right". If you want political success:
Kelo vs New London - liberal supreme court judges rule one way, backlash alters law in 42 states
DC gun law - won supreme court case
Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act - also won in the supreme court
Defense of Marriage Act - plus 26 states with constitutional "traditional marriage" amendments
Regan tax leveling - still in effect
And if you really want to go nuts, democracy and laws against murder are quite old ideas that we still use.
imagine that one day you found out that 90% of what you do happened to coincide exactly with what a monkey colony wanted. And further imagine...
Why do all of that imagining when you can just look at how parents interact with children? People will give up money, time, sleep, freedom, they'll even deal with ex-spouses - all in order to serve the interests of their children. How many people train themselves to treat children the same way they treat other adults?
a hypothetical sentient robot factory
But why does it have to be sentient if merely intelligent will do? I know all sorts of mental activity comes as a package deal when it comes to humans, but that might not be true for all "minds". Deep Blue doesn't like to play chess, and the genetic algorithms that design new circuits don't want to make people's lives better, so why would a "slave" AI need to have feelings either?
In the first of these, the FDA was more murderous than the Vietnam War; in the second, they were responsible for more torture than the Spanish Inquisition.
I believe your passion has caused you to engage in hyperbole, but I applaud you for mentioning these FDA actions.
More to the point, they usually come from people who have never put the work in to create a game themselves, have no idea how hard it is
cheap bastards who want to leach on other people's creativity without paying for it
You went from a rational argument of "they don't understand the situation" to a more emotional attack on their motives - "leaching bastards". I'm not disagreeing with either post, but they do seem to be different arguments, rather than one being an expansion the other.
It's the same substance, yes, but we pumped out the easy stuff first, so every year it gets a little more expensive to keep it flowing.
b) No shortage = fast and easy to find/get
There's no shortage because the price rose, and caused demand to fall. Shortages generally only happen when prices are kept artificially low (like in the 1970s) - the gas stations sell all the have at the maximum price they can charge, and then there isn't any more - a shortage. Without the price caps the price might have tripled, but there'd be no lines because people would be forced to cut back on their usage, and the station wouldn't sell out by noon every day.
c) Oil companies have been making record profits, above and beyond anything we have ever seen
So what? They can sell slightly less, at a much higher price, and make much more money. That doesn't mean that there's no supply problem.
i don't believe your tall tale of economics 101. It's a lot easier to believe that something else is driving the price up
Well, when you don't understand a science, it's easy to just blow it off and believe in whatever your inner child wishes were true.
Slashdot Mirror
So if you sign a contract that sells you into slavery that should be permitted too?
You can't sign up to be a slave any more than you can consent to be raped. That fact that slavery and rape are involuntary is what makes both of them so deeply immoral.
What about the right not to be beaten?
If people can't sign away their right to being beaten, then how can we have boxing matches?
There are certain rights that it should not be possible to sign away. The right to earn a livelihood working in your profession should be one of them.
What if one of my employees does a terrible job and I let other people in the industry know about it - don't I have a right to free speech? What if a doctor nearly kills someone, and hospital asks them to give up their medical license in exchange for keeping their severance pay - is the doctor's "right to make a living in their chosen profession" more important than public safety?
punishing someone for signing something ... they probably believed wasn't enforceable
So they signed something with no intention of abiding by the agreement. Isn't that fraud?
How the hell does an AC get modded up for this on slashdot??? What exactly do you moderators do for a living? And why are you wanting to be so harsh about punishing someone for signing something unreasonable they probably believed wasn't enforceable. Shame on you all!
Wow. Some people have opinions that you don't like, and you're completely incapable of handling it. You have a lot of growing up to do.
You seem to be confusing "freedom of religion" with "freedom from religion". The only thing the US federal government is prevented from doing is establishing a state religion or designating a single religion as state-sponsored.
You seem to be misreading the first amendment, when it says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..." translates directly to "Congress shall make no law with regard to a religious organization...". This does not just prevent the government from picking a state religion, it also prevents congress from supporting monotheism in general. And just a s bit of support for this, the Supreme Court has stated that, under the first amendment, "government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion."
Our laws are indeed based on the Ten Commandments, at least on their base level.
Not really - I have yet to find the concepts of "voting" or "rights" anywhere in the Bible. Of the commandments, only six through nine are a significant part of our legal system (the rest are rare exceptions, like "blue laws" preventing alcohol from being sold on Sunday) and those four commandments are such basic concepts that they've been a part of human morality since before we had codified rules at all, and perhaps even before writing existed.
If you want the real basis of American law, start with John Locke. Christianity did influence the American legal system, of course, but the real basis for it (individual rights, restrained government, elections) came from ancient Greek and secular philosophers.
I don't understand the huge emotion involved in purging religion from our history.
And I don't understand why people keep trying to make religion central to everything in our history, even when other influences were clearly greater.
That is an assumption on many levels.
This is a classic example of projection - seeing one's own flaws in another person, but not oneself. Here are just a few of your assumptions:
[Consciousness] certainly won't be found in the physical dimension.
An Universe is a manifestation of God's thought.
[Time is] a dimension of mind quantized or fractalized; hence the reason one can go "outside" or "transcend" time.
Time is a meta-physical buffer so that we may learn how to see the consequences of our actions, instead of all the consequences being immediate available.
[Life is] a transfer of consciousness from one dimension to another. Life is the "entering" into the physical dimension. Death is the "exiting" of the physical dimension.
Everything is "Alive."
Chi, Ki, Prana, Life Force, whatever you want to call it doesn't change its nature or purpose.
Unless you have been dead, you _know_ NOTHING about Life.
And last, but not least,
I already have the answers.
Not only is that an assumption, but it also has to be the most egocentric statement ever made.
Your confusing Evolution with Awareness.
No. Biological evolution (as far as we can tell) is a process built out of inexact reproduction and differential survival, while consciousness (as far as we can tell) is a process that is based on the activity of structures in the brain. Different things, but both processes.
As long as people assume the opposite, "The universe doesn't make any sense, god is illogical, the universe is unfair, poor me", they will never understand reality to any depth, and learn the most important lesson: They are in control of their destiny.
I don't know anyone who thinks that way. To mirror your statement, I would say that: The universe does make sense, but not in a preplanned way that makes human concerns the center of the universe - the physics of a fatal car crash make perfect sense, but don't expect that to comfort anyone. God is a concept best explained by psychology - it has nothing to do with anything outside the human mind. The universe isn't really unfair, it just exists - fairness (like beauty) exists only in the eye of the beholder, and is a purely human concern. As for "poor me" - why?
Well, before then, we were just killing each other.
You take that back! My ancestors didn't spend millennia driving megafauna to extinction so you could claim that they were merely homicidal. Give them the credit that any race of bloodthirsty psychotic apes deserves.
life goes on
unless it doesn't. :)
But because he doesn't think mathematical theory is important, he'll talk to a few dozen people and he'll have "11111".
In my very liberal house growing up, handicapped *was* banned.
But not by the government. You may feel like you grew up under the control of big brother, but unless your parents used torture to enforce their speech code, it's a bit of a stretch to say they're using the same tactics, and even more of one to include the left in general.
The problem I have with doublespeak is that it comes about as a result of someone out there ... deciding that I don't know how best to speak; that I am not smart enough to know if I'm being racist or insensitive
They make judgments about you, you make judgments about them - that's life. It's almost impossible for a person to avoid having some kind of agenda, to never want to affect how other people do things. They may be elitist, or just plain silly, but unless it's an attempt, by government decree, to make certain thoughts impossible, then it's not the same things as 1984.
And corporate control is better than government control how?
First, that's a false dichotomy. Why not gripe about religious control, or the uncontrolled cultural drift of the masses?
Second, isn't it better to split up power between two groups, rather than putting all of it under the control of one? No matter how wonky a company gets, if the government still has the guns, you at least have a chance of getting help from them.
While I don't think that it causes that much damage, I can at least see a connection between "family continuity" and divorce law, but I can't make any real connection with social security. So old people can mooch through taxes rather than by guilt-tripping their kids ... how does that harm family continuity?
* NewSpeak, the changing of language to make certain thoughts impossible (ala the politically correct language redefinition we experienced in the 70s/80s e.g. "differently abled" for "handicapped", in Sweden "husmor" replaced by "hemmafru" or their English cognates "housewife" with "stay-at-home-mom")
1984 was against government control over culture, not just cultural change in general. Changes in the way people express themselves is just part of life - "nigger" became "Negro", which became "colored", and then "black". Until the word "handicapped" is banned in some way, through the legal system, it has nothing to do with 1984.
* The Ministry of Truth, the media manipulation of news and history (ala the recent Reugter's Photoshopping of pictures from the Israel/Lebanon war; Dan Rather's falsification of documents)
Again, if it wasn't part of a government plan to control the population, then it isn't 1984 - "No Ministry, no Orwell" if you will. On the other hand, Bush's staged landing on an aircraft carrier is at least a lot closer to government controlling the news.
* DoubleThink, the simultaneous holding of two or more mutually exclusive ideas (e.g. "homosexuality is something you are born with" and "homosexuality is a personal and private decision"; or "racism is always wrong" and "affirmative action is the right thing to do")
As for the first part I doubt that any one person holds both views, but people with either view can come to the conclusion that it isn't the government business who they hook up with/date/marry. In this way they my become political allies, but there's no doublethink needed.
As for the second part, many people dislike killing, but accept that it's sometimes necessary to protect innocent lives. In the same vein, there's no inherent contradiction in saying that racism is bad, but limited racism to counter racism that already exists is acceptable. (I should point out that I'm against affirmative action - I just don't see blatant cognitive dissonance on the other side.)
* also the breakdown of the family and sexual relationships (which has less obvious parallels but "PolPot & the child turns their parents in" (like Winston's neighbor) would be an example)
Again, where is the government enforcement of this?
* ThoughtCrime, making the mere ability of thinking something a crime. You see this all the time in Hate Crime legislation (what murder wasn't already a crime ... with a life penalty?) and University speech codes (University "Free Speech Zones" are a wonderful example of NewSpeak, DoubleThink, and ThoughtCrime wrapped into one)
You got me there. I can no more defend speech codes than I can defend the movement to put creationism in science classes. On the other hand, finding one parallel in a single context (just speech, just at universities) isn't enough to make a meaningful connection.
* furthermore the mild anti-semitism, the hatred of Goldsteinism, today you see this all the time however this is mostly thinly veiled as an attack on "Zionism"
I have no idea what you're referring to here.
Maybe I wasn't clear; what I was trying to convey was that it is not in any way settled.
Well, between your Rob Paul jab and your "no evidence" statement, you seemed rather dismissive.
I still stand by my assertion that minarchists, of both the Chicago and Austrian orthodoxy, frequently fall prey to that logical fallacy.
They tend to, yes. And their opposition has a similar set of fallacies that they use to defend their reflexive "more intervention (of some kind) is needed" answer to everything. Of course, the fact that both sides have biases and sometimes use fallacious reasoning doesn't mean that they're wrong, either.
Even to this day and to this administration.
You think this administration has been against intervention? Where have you been for the last eight years?
The people running these surveys either have an agenda or are inept at trying to remove bias.
I was responding to a "there is no evidence" statement. Since quality didn't matter, I just copied a bit of what Wikipedia had on the page for the topic at hand.
You have a minority view of the causes of the Great Depression.
Which of course doesn't mean that he's wrong. I find it amusing that after correcting a logical fallacy, you decide to include one in your very next sentence. Even if it weren't for that, he is citing one of the three major theories being discussed in academia today, so it's absurd to blow him off as a kook.
There is no evidence at all for your statements about the New Deal (dogma notwithstanding).
Since you seem to be swayed by popularity, here are some quotes from slashdot's favorite source:
When the Gallup poll in 1939 asked, 'Do you think the attitude of the Roosevelt administration toward business is delaying business recovery?' the American people responded 'yes' by a margin of more than two-to-one. The business community felt even more strongly so.
Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, 1939 - "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and now if I am wrong somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosper. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And enormous debt to boot."
A 1995 survey of economic historians asked whether "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression." Of those in economics departments 27% agreed, 22% agreed 'with provisos' (what provisos the survey does not state) and 51% disagreed. Of those in history departments, only 27% agreed and 73% disagreed.
You know that whole sub prime thing, you're saying that less regulation would have prevented that? You know the entire reason that happened was becuase the financial companies were giving credit to people that couldn't pay.
You're quite correct, but very incomplete. The only reason that credit was given to people that couldn't pay was that the government went out of it's way to make that kind loan look more attractive. Isn't it likely that if the government had made more regulations that they would have made the situation even worse?
With no government interference, Freddy Mac and Franny Mae would have gone under and a lot of Americans would be royally fucked right now (more than there are already). I can't believe anyone would suggest unregulated capitalism.
If it weren't government interference, we wouldn't have Freddy and Fannie, and if it weren't for them, we wouldn't be in this mess at all. I can't believe that someone can take the total failure of two government-created entities and suggest that we just need to add more government - especially with a conspicuous lack of detail about what kind of regulation and why.
There's a natural tendency for corporations to screw people over, or rather, no incentive not to.
Government has the same tendency to screw people over, and has even fewer incentives not to than corporations have.
But I can't see how you'd do that so for now, regulation regulation regulation!
Even if I found your argument compelling, I'd still need to know what regulations and why those are the important ones. Of course if it was 1937, you would probably say that banks are too stingy with home loans, and we needed to create a government-sponsored enterprise to help more people own their own home...
More disease, death and destruction brought to you by our good friends at Monsanto.
What does BSE have to do with Monsanto?
By the way, if there is anyone here who works for Monsanto - kill yourselves.
Not until you give me a reason to do so.
Businesses are not people, and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution were not intended for them.
No, but every business is made up of people. When you regulate a business, you are regulating the people that make up that business - which can infringe on their freedom. If the government made it illegal for chess clubs to host tournaments in the US, wouldn't that be a loss of freedom - even though clubs aren't people, and don't have rights?
May I see what's in your trunk?
No.
Kellogg for example, was a Seventh-Day Adventist who favored segregation. (Of course, his ideas that a vegetarian diet and execise are good for you are hardly crazy. He was even right about probiotics; but his love of enemas, plus his extreme views about sex, let us file him in the "crazy" bin.)
Then I saw the above, and realized that, when it comes to the past, anything successful you label "progressive", and anything that's become unpopular you label "conservative". Thus, progressive ideas always win, because if they won it must be progressive. The problem is that you can't use that to predict the future - environmentalism is seen as liberal right now, but in 50 years it might seem like some old-fashioned conservative idea that's now out of style. You might see a large, secular movement to ban abortion some day - which would then be progressive. The content of the ideas haven't changed, but you would end up relabeling them based on how successful they are.
So give at least 10 examples of times when the modern (post-1955) conservative movement has been right on a major issue. Should be easy if you're right.
I can't, because you get to decide what shall be considered "right". If you want political success:
Kelo vs New London - liberal supreme court judges rule one way, backlash alters law in 42 states
DC gun law - won supreme court case
Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act - also won in the supreme court
Defense of Marriage Act - plus 26 states with constitutional "traditional marriage" amendments
Regan tax leveling - still in effect
And if you really want to go nuts, democracy and laws against murder are quite old ideas that we still use.
imagine that one day you found out that 90% of what you do happened to coincide exactly with what a monkey colony wanted. And further imagine...
Why do all of that imagining when you can just look at how parents interact with children? People will give up money, time, sleep, freedom, they'll even deal with ex-spouses - all in order to serve the interests of their children. How many people train themselves to treat children the same way they treat other adults?
a hypothetical sentient robot factory
But why does it have to be sentient if merely intelligent will do? I know all sorts of mental activity comes as a package deal when it comes to humans, but that might not be true for all "minds". Deep Blue doesn't like to play chess, and the genetic algorithms that design new circuits don't want to make people's lives better, so why would a "slave" AI need to have feelings either?
In the first of these, the FDA was more murderous than the Vietnam War; in the second, they were responsible for more torture than the Spanish Inquisition.
I believe your passion has caused you to engage in hyperbole, but I applaud you for mentioning these FDA actions.
More to the point, they usually come from people who have never put the work in to create a game themselves, have no idea how hard it is
cheap bastards who want to leach on other people's creativity without paying for it
You went from a rational argument of "they don't understand the situation" to a more emotional attack on their motives - "leaching bastards". I'm not disagreeing with either post, but they do seem to be different arguments, rather than one being an expansion the other.
... you do NOT want to fuck around with vikings.
But I like athletic blonds!
So if something was created with good intentions, then it can't have flaws? I question your logic.
a) It's the same gas that was 1.50 5 years ago
It's the same substance, yes, but we pumped out the easy stuff first, so every year it gets a little more expensive to keep it flowing.
b) No shortage = fast and easy to find/get
There's no shortage because the price rose, and caused demand to fall. Shortages generally only happen when prices are kept artificially low (like in the 1970s) - the gas stations sell all the have at the maximum price they can charge, and then there isn't any more - a shortage. Without the price caps the price might have tripled, but there'd be no lines because people would be forced to cut back on their usage, and the station wouldn't sell out by noon every day.
c) Oil companies have been making record profits, above and beyond anything we have ever seen
So what? They can sell slightly less, at a much higher price, and make much more money. That doesn't mean that there's no supply problem.
i don't believe your tall tale of economics 101. It's a lot easier to believe that something else is driving the price up
Well, when you don't understand a science, it's easy to just blow it off and believe in whatever your inner child wishes were true.
He could have meant "shite".