I live in a theravada buddhist country. Most people really are nice and take care for each other. Yes, even unknown people and even when they don't have much themselves.
As I have learned from my own studies of Buddhism and particularly from the author Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddists understand how people get tied up in emotional knots and through their practice of mindfulness (smrti), they can untie those knots. You are unfortunately cherry-picking a particularly good counterexample that simply isn't representative of most of the world. It is a hard thing that the masses of people do not have this level of consciousness, however attained (through Buddhism or other system if they feel a need for a system). It is not easy to accept, but they must work out their lives according to their understanding just as I do. It is not my place to tell them how they should live, so long as I am afforded the same space.
If that kind of quality is common-as-dirt for you, I wish you well and hope you can experience the joy that comes from genuine gratitude. Understanding just how rare that is can enhance this for you. Some of us are in the trenches having to deal directly with some of the most petty, childish, self-serving behavior imaginable from what are basically a bunch of cowards who lack the integrity to conduct honest introspection.
Everything from the public school system to the media to endless worship of meaningless things like sports and celebrities, obsession with sex and other instant gratifications, to the deceptions of politics, has taught them to be petty and infantile. What remains of their souls (if you like) hasn't the strength of character to see past it. Like animals, they are nothing but products of environmental pressures with no overcoming spirit that can transcend the mold into which they are pressed.
It is most excellent training and has taught me a great deal about myself and generally about how and why people become vulnerable to such entanglements. The only way to avoid becoming like them is to look the evil right in the eye with no resentment, no irritation, and no hatred. Those things are what power the inner decay. I did not ask the masses of men to be manure, but if they insist, I intend to grow and express what is True.
You should sometimes see how the world is outside US.
While I appreciate the condescension inherent in this statement, it comes from self-serving assumptions so you can puff up and feel wiser than me. You know I am telling you the truth. Meanwhile you really have no clue what I've seen. With good reason I did not limit my prior comment to the US only. The US is particularly decadent like Babylon all over again, but it is hardly alone in that. The vast majority of the world is this way or soon to follow. I don't share a desire to escape -- too many otherwise good people doing that is why it does not improve. That is not my way. Mine is to overcome, to transcend, and perhaps to be a living counterexample for those few who would be encouraged by one. This is what supplies me with the sense of purpose that each person must find for themselves.
It is like the way American black people often call each other "nigga". A black person saying it is assumed not to have racist intent. If a white guy goes up to a black stranger and says "wassup nigga!" that really might be perceived as racist.
This is true but shouldn't be. It's either OK or not. It shouldn't matter what race says it. If you determine whether it's OK or not by the color of the persons skin, then that's being racist.
Well yeah. We didn't eliminate institutionalized racism. We just made it politically useful.
Elections these days demand isolated groups who feel persecuted by the other groups, so they demand protection that politicians are only too happy to provide. That's how one wing does it. The other wing demands fearful people who feel threatened by a foreign enemy with unpronouncable names and unknown languages, so they demand protection that politicians are ony too happy to provide.
The professional manipulators who engineer elections depend on one thing: that you will be a sucker for one of these tactics or the other. They really don't like people who can see through both of them. Those people must be marginalized. They must never be given media time or any other solid representation. They are a threat to the status quo.
This is statecraft. Please stop celebrating it and pretending like it's noble. I know that makes some feel patriotic, like some of that nobility transfers to them because they approve of it, but it's a lie. Find your own identity.
No. That is stupid solution to the problem. Our culture should support acceptance (when not hurting others) and not tolerate maljustice and abuse.
I don't think you have ever seen a person who had the grace, courage, and understanding to accept persecution without any kind of emotional reaction. It makes the bully look stupid and embarasses them thoroughly. It creates a contrast between real strength versus the insecurity the bully is trying to cover up by acting tough. Whereas if you fall into the emotional trap laid by the bully, his way works and you look weak while he looks dominant.
If you have never seen this, or better if you have never demonstrated it yourself, you really have no clue how powerful it is. It is not the simple "just take it" and it is not the simple "ignore him hoping he goes away" type of doormat behavior you might be imagining. It's more like being able to walk up to the bully and tell him right to his face how pathetic he is, calmly, and watch him back down with his tail between his legs even if he's much bigger than you.
The bully depends on your reaction to get the energy he needs. Deprive him of that and he's like an engine with no fuel. Believing me on this is not good enough and you'll probably end up in a fistfight if you do it without understanding. You have to see it yourself.
The solution is to lock up people who wish to harm others.
Who wish to harm others? Sir, you are advocating that we prosecute thoughtcrimes. I don't really need to explain why that's a bad idea, do I?
I am sorry that you're so thoroughly identified with being some kind of "outcast" that you cannot separate a rational look at the situation from your emotional knee-jerking and desire for vengence against someone who probably has a lot in common with those who have tormented you. It's like you're still reliving what you went through instead of overcoming it and being better for having endured it. That's too bad.
That also means you're unfit to form a solid, well-founded opinion about this until you stop feeling like a victim and identifying with people who are victims. There are good reasons why judges and other professionals are expected to recuse themselves from cases to which they have emotional attachments. As I like to say, if you want to throw someone a rope you must first make sure you're standing on higher ground. That's why identifying with them will never help them. All you could ever do with that method is teach them to be "better" victims (i.e. become more so).
If every single transgendered person were pesecuted ruthlessly with grave cruelty, that would still do less harm to society than implementing thoughcrimes. You're trying to cure the disease by shooting the patient in the face. That's not so good for the patient. If you care so much about transgendered people, gay people, or any other people, you don't want them to live under the thumb of an Orwellian government.
People in general tend to act nicely towards others.
If by that you mean a phony sort of "niceness" that is not real kindness, okay, but what good is it? Most people are only "nice" because they want to obligate you to like them and make them feel like good people. If they were truly good people they wouldn't need you to feel that way. They'd treat you with kindness and dignity whether or not you appreciated it because it would come from who they are, not who you are.
Instead, every chance they get, most people find opportunity to do something thoughtless, inconsiderate, careless, or something irritating that needles you. Or they'll take some liberty to push you and see if you'll stand up to them -- if you don't they assert a false superiority, and if you do they act hurt.
These kinds of constant, childish games where the object of the game is to puff up with pride and look down your nose at other people is what most human
Nope he's right she has cankles, but hey love is blind right.
She has curves. I really don't understand how you can call her fat (and I really don't like fat chicks). I've seen cankles before and they belong to women significantly heavier than her. Women with cankles don't usually have such a noticable hourglass shape.
At most I'd call her "thick". Feasible, but a bit of a stretch.
Actually she's not fat, and she looks very pretty and sweet. More likely than not, she is also very intelligent. In short, the kind of woman that you will probably never have.
I think she's a "butterface" (everything looks nice... but her face). Like Garner from the show Alias. But she's definitely not obese and anorexia isn't sexy; you're not supposed to be attracted to nutcases. I am in the USA so I really, REALLY wish more women had a BMI like hers. Seriously.
The US dating pool is drastically reduced by too many people who seem hardcore determined to commit suicide-by-food. That's both sexes, for my lady friends complain about this too. Barring a physical cause like a thyroid disorder, which is very rare, it's just not possible to be obese and emotionally healthy at the same time. And believe me, you really don't want to be yoked to a woman who is an emotional disaster. Obesity is one of those things that's unattractive for good reason, it is not merely a matter of taste. I wouldn't want to be with a food-aholic any more than I'd like to be with an alcoholic. Both are self-destructive.
It depends on how many samples they are handling. Assume that 10 forms can be processed per hour. (Between contacting the individual, getting it signed, scanning and filing.) Assume staff cost $10/hour. That is a mean cost of $1/sample. Need a large sample for statistical purposes and the costs will mount. This estimate is also low balling it. Staff costs will be at least double. Even paying near minimum wage still involves payroll taxes. The processing time assumes permissive donors who need minimal explanation. Auditing records for compliance, auditing research for compliance, and administrative overhead to access those records were not included in my estimate. So yes, regulations are costly.
Yeah. All of that, just to avoid giving you a license to take someone's DNA information against their will and probably without compensation, even though you plan to benefit in some way from doing it. The nerve! In fact, anyone I select should be forced to submit to me anything of theirs that I decide I want, however intimate and personal. Otherwise, why, we might not be able to cut corners and forgo all those expensive "ethics" and shit when we do some research. Clearly you see the dilemma.
So it should be obvious, we must oppose a DNA privacy law. If such a law gets passed, the terrorists win! We can't have people thinking that you need their consent to harvest whatever you like from them.
Let's say you're the parent of a young teenager. You discover that your teenager has started smoking crack cocaine. You have an obligation to take the crack away from that teen and, if necessary, to get them some treatment so they can beat the habit. The teen is not going to like that -- it will happen against his or her will. You had to resort to coercion because self-destruction cannot be reasoned with.
It's easy to justify statements like "some coercion is necessary" if you accept as a premise that situations like you describe can just materialize out of nowhere, with no prior warning signs and with no way to detect and prevent them from occuring in the first place.
I'm not sure that teenagers who have grown up in a healthy and rational environment starting from good attachment in infancy and growing up with parental relationships which allow them to communicate openly and honestly will all of a sudden turn into crack addicts out of the blue.
That occurred to me when writing the example, which is why I described it as extreme. I left out the part you mention because I was hoping it should be obvious that things don't happen in a vacuum. At least, to any would-be parent I really hope this is "well duh" type of territory.
Are you saying you have honestly never seen small children want things that are bad for them to have? You think they understand perfectly and 100% of the time why those things are denied to them? You think they never, ever get out of line and require a consequence? Can you imagine a child coming to you and saying "hey I just abused this privilege so it should be taken away now" or did you have to do that yourself?
You have to have some rules and at least once in a while they might not like them. That is de facto coercion. This isn't always evil though. Murder is illegal in my state. If someone commits murder, you bet that the police are going to coerce them into a jail cell. I consider this a legitimate use of coercion. A minimal government would confine such things to where they are genuinely legitimate. See where I'm going with that?
There comes a point where you either give a certain benefit of doubt and understand where the guy's coming from, and if you don't, you split hairs about the lack of a Totally Perfect Absolutely Objection-Proof analogy or example. This is not a technical discussion.
Do you seriously think there is no connection between this desire to separate adult people from the consequences they earn, and all the idiots who are everywhere? How do you think they got to be that way? Do you really believe they were born that way? This is one of those organic common-sense questions, not so much of a "mystery of life" question.
What if it's the case that people never learn, even if you allow them to make bad decisions?
As the saying goes... if you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning.
For the technocrat, it ends when the things being banned cause less harm than the ban itself does.
Yes, and creating a nation of overgrown 4-year-olds who need to have every aspect of their lives micromanaged by the State is a greater harm overall. We don't have to be like so many corporations, looking at only the next quarter and giving no thought to the long-term consequences.
Obviously such a policy would be more harmful than the lack of such a policy. Therefore no technocrat would back such a policy. See how that works?
So you barely managed to grasp the point I was making and then decide to use a condescending tone? Interesting. At any rate, the fact that no technocrat would back such a policy was my precise point.
Put another way, it isn't "I want politicians who think like me", it's "I want politicians who think".
This was beautifully stated.
A technocracy or meritocracy can have division over what is the correct course of action, just like you can have two software engineers who are both experts in their field disagree about the best way to solve a problem. It isn't about finding the one true path forward, it's about evaluating the possible paths based on reality instead of ideology.
Those two engineers may debate each other about which of (let's say) 3 good solutions is the best one. They would agree that the other possible solutions (which could number in the millions) are all faulty and wouldn't waste time and resources trying to implement them. That's the important part. We'd end up with either The Very Best Possible Solution EVER... or at least a very good one. That sounds good to me!
If politics worked this way, we'd have all learned the lesson of Prohibition and tried something that might work, rather than reimplementing Prohibition for substances other than ethanol.
So it's ok for religious people who think like you do to vote
Yes, it is.
but we should disallow any religious people who DON'T think like you do?
No, we should not. We should promote reason. We should not persecute narrowmindedness. I honestly believe in the superiority of Reason over narrow-mindedness, which is why I feel no need to make laws against the latter. It's called being a secure person.
I know that's not what you're meaning (believe me, this reply is not aimed solely at your comment), but it is what you're implying. You place your trust in what you consider to be "reason", and they place their trust in what they consider to be "truth".
I trust what is trustworthy. That's why you are incorrect about the implications of my prior post.
Why? That's easy. If I reason incorrectly, you could come along and point out exactly where I made a mistake, what kind of error I made, and how it may be corrected. If I said "all cats are mammals, therefore all mammals are cats" you could correct me and it would be more than just your opinion. If we disagreed about that, my position would not merely be "different" from yours; it would be wrong. All you would have to do is find a single mammal that is not a cat and my statement would be objectively falsified and anyone could confirm that to their own satisfaction.
Religion doesn't work this way. That's why reason is better than religion when it comes to making decisions that can affect millions of people. That's when the ability to objectively confirm the correctness of a position is obviously desirable. In this context, which is public policy, reason and religion are not merely "different". One is clearly superior.
In almost any worldview (religious, scientific, philosophic), you are nothing but a mound of sand telling yourself that you know better than another mound of sand, and the other mound of sand strongly believes that they know better than you.
Actually I am both Reasonable and Spiritual. For me those two are not in conflict, not even slightly, but then I never did like organized religion and have always viewed spirituality as a personal thing. Even if I am certain that the way I live is better than the way you live, it would be wrong to force you to conform to my ways. Perhaps I would try to persuade you, but we're talking about government here. Laws are not intended to persuade. They are enforced by the threat of violence.
The only legitimate reason to outlaw something you want to do would be if that activity infringed on the rights of other people to make their own decisions about how they wish to live. For example, murder is illegal and should be illegal because if you murder someone, you're definitely interfering with the way they wish to live.
To borrow your terms, I am more like a mound of sand that isn't worried about how the other mounds of sand live their lives. I do not wish to place restrictions on them or to shove an agenda down their throats (supposing sand dunes have throats...). Consenting adults should be able to do whatever they like. What other people want to read, watch, think, say, and practice is none of my damned business unless they choose to share. What's that saying, that those who need the force of law to support their religion must not believe in the power of its message? It's true.
Attempting to build a system that provides health care to all people is evil? Fuck that.
Is reading comprehension truly that hard? It comes quite easily for me, but then I don't make the mistake of entangling my personal emotions with simple discussion.
I clearly said that what is evil is to deliberately blur the distinction between inalienable human rights and entitlements. I actually made no statement about health care at all. I neither supported universal health care, nor opposed it. Re-read my post.
Does anyone else wish to mod me "Troll" and put words in my mouth, or can we all be adults here? Honestly some of you are just plain infantile and you really, truly don't have to be.
The only thing a real technocrat would be concerned about is that milk of any kind is labelled accurately so that customers know what they're buying.
Unless there's evidence that people dont' read warning labels (they don't), and if there's evidence that banning has a superior outcome than labeling.
If the technocrat's mandate is "keep as many people healthy as possible", then he could easily eschew labeling for a ban if the evidence indicates that's more productive.
For one, it wouldn't be a warning label. It would be a description of the contents.
Two, I have no sympathy whatsoever for a literate adult who suffers harm because he disregarded a label.
Three, if your ultimate goal is the best benefit for the largest number of people, then you allow adults who make bad decisions to suffer the consequences because that's the only way some people ever learn. It's called reaping what you sow, or laying in the bed you have made.
Four, if people are hurting themselves now with milk of all things, where does this end? Do you outlaw hammers because someone might accidentally strike his fingers? How then do you justify the automobile, with its often severe consequences for error? Do you outlaw walking because some people are clumsy and might fall and hurt themselves? Electricity because someone might get electrocuted? Stoves because someone might touch them when they're hot? Eating because there is a chance of choking?
The only way to really do this is to have everyone strapped to a hospital bed from birth and fed by an IV, by law. How much of a technocrat must you be in order to realize how unreasonable this is? The desire to protect people not from those who would victimize them (by force or fraud), but from themselves, does not come from reason. It comes from emotion.
I agree with this definition of good parents. My experience is lacking in real examples of parents who make more than a token effort to live up to that as a standard, however.
I am fortunate enough to have friends who are this kind of parent. They would freely admit that they are not perfect, and in the face of such an awesome task and tremendous responsibility like raising a child, I cannot fault them for that. But they love and cherish Reason and gently instill this in their children by showing them why Reason is beautiful. The result is that their children are calmer and more well-behaved than most, and tend to follow the rules even when the parents aren't watching their every move.
Necessary to achive what, specifically?
I'll make up an extreme example in order to clarify the point, though much milder examples would not be hard to conceive. Let's say you're the parent of a young teenager. You discover that your teenager has started smoking crack cocaine. You have an obligation to take the crack away from that teen and, if necessary, to get them some treatment so they can beat the habit. The teen is not going to like that -- it will happen against his or her will. You had to resort to coercion because self-destruction cannot be reasoned with.
and there are no spending reductions required for tax breaks for the ballot initatives either
This makes sense, actually. It often happens that a reduction in the tax rate actually results in more tax revenue. Because that may or may not be the case for a given proposal, it makes sense not to have a blanket rule that tries to cover all scenarios.
When they start arresting people for choosing to drink natural milk, then they've gone too far and need to be downsized.
A few years ago I'd have agreed with you on that - raw milk's perfectly legal in the UK, you can even get cheese made with unpasteurised milk in the supermarkets, and it doesn't seem to do us any harm. Then I got some idea of the kinds of people who were deliberately flouting the law in the US, realised that they were marketing it as some kind of healthy natural option that was actually safer than pasteurised milk, and decided that you know what? Maybe banning it's not such a bad idea after all.
Then their solution is wrong and it "solves" the wrong problem.
If marketers are making false claims, go after them for false advertising. This is no reason to stop honest businesses from selling that product.
If treating all businesses the way these dairies have been treated were standard practice, can you imagine the Joe Jobs that would become possible? A doctor makes a false statement and then what, we outlaw all medicine?
If you want governments to start basis decisions on logic and sense, you'll need to remove all influence from the religious types first. Until then, we're stuck with some pretty depressingly stupid laws.
Yes, because things like "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not steal" are just horrible public policy. Damned zealots.
Some people seem to think that taking religion away will lead to a utopia for humanity. I think it'll just be replaced with something else... communism, fascism, some new-ism. And it would be hellish.
The main reason why hardcore Communists and National Socialists have tried to stamp out religion and kill religious people is easy to understand. A religious person recognizes a higher authority than the State. That's perceived as a threat to totalitarian types.
I have always considered Statism itself to be a type of religion. It's a secular religion, but it has its articles of faith, its priesthood, and its zealots all the same.
you'll need to remove all influence from the religious types first
While I agree that we'd be better off without "religous types" such as Pat Robertson and Rick Santorum, I'd like to remind you that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi were also "religious types."
They understood the difference between having your personal faith and respecting that others have the right to do (or not do) the same, versus implementing a theocracy.
Gandhi had no problem with the teachings of Christ even though he was thoroughly Hindu. His only complaint about Christianity was that the Christians who practice it are not enough like the Christ they claim to follow.
I personally admire the teachings of Christ. I believe he was better and more advanced than myself, and therefore I should listen to him (as I do with anyone meeting that criteria). I believe that practicing his teachings makes me a better, more loving, more forgiving person. But I cannot stand the way it's paraded around like it's a political issue.
One's faith should be a personal thing. I am spiritual, but spirituality is not something I can give to another person. If they want it, they have to find it themselves in their own terms. If they don't want it, I respect that even though I don't personally agree. In either case, telling someone else how they should live goes against everything I believe in. Selling one's faith in exchange for votes makes that person a sort of whore and calls into question the sincerity of their faith.
Not only do I not care what religion a candidate practices, I don't even want to know. Candidates should be judged on whether they promote freedom and prosperity, not whether they're in the same denominational club as oneself.
Stating that coercion is immoral would challenge the very foundation of families, wherein for nearly off human history children have been considered effectively the property of adults.
A parent is supposed to be a benevolent dictator. This is not something you could ever realistically expect from the State.
That's why it's so hard to spread political freedom - because people have been conditioned from infancy to obey the arbitrary dictates of someone more powerful. They learned from an early age that the rules they were forced to abide by didn't apply to the people making the rules. The existence of governments is merely a side effect of this early conditioning.
It depends. Truly good parents don't condition; they reason. They convince their children to obey their rules by showing that their own rules are good enough for them as well. In other words, they are not hypocrites. They correct rather than punish because they don't get angry easily. They see a need to earn respect by being respectable and personally upholding every virtue they expect from their children, rather than demanding respect just-because.
It's the difference between authority and dominance. Too many parents have no authority, so all they have left is "I'm bigger than you" and "I can take things away from you" and "I can make you miserable". They actually blame the child for this rather than seeing it as their own failing. They're basically bullies to their children, but they feel justified in their destructive methods because their goals are decent enough. Standard bullies want your lunch money; parent-bullies want you to succeed in life. It's typical consequentialism (ends justify the means) justification.
Yes, some coercion is necessary, just like some government is necessary. The idea is for both to be minimal and appropriate.
If there's no fundamental human right to healthcare, food, and shelter, then there's no fundamental human right to free speech, or association, or any of the those other negative rights
How do you figure that?
I can exercise my free speech without forcing you to do anything. I don't need to take your money (through government as a proxy). I don't need to force you to listen, though I can hope you will choose to. At no point does my free speech require that armed men (police) use threats of violence to force you to do anything.
That is the difference between an inalienable human right and an entitlement. If you believe they are the same, you could not be more misguided. Be careful, because there are a lot of monied interests that view both the Constitution and the entire notion of inalienable human rights as pesky obstacles to their goals. For that reason, these things (rights and entitlements) are often conflated deliberately in order to cause the very confusion you manifest. It is not done to strengthen the perceived value of entitlements, but to weaken the perceived value of rights.
Technocratically-minded people idealize such a system until that system starts dictating their lives. Good for thee, but not for me is what it would be if you want to be honest about it.
How do you figure? There is no technical evidence-based reason to tell other people how to manage their personal lives. Such a one-size-fits-all plan for everyone is easily shown to be problematic. Just one person who didn't fit the plan would be enough to falsify it entirely.
We already have a system that wants to dictate more and more of daily life. The War on (some) Drugs is a great example, but it's not nearly the only behavior among consenting adults that can result in prison. This isn't coming from overwhelming evidence. It's coming from a certain Puritannical desire to stamp out everything that isn't approved of. I'll take evidence-based any day.
Except that they feed that natural milk to their kids, and it has a tendency to do severe and permanent damage. Enough damage that we, as a society, say you have to clean that milk up before you sell it.
The solution to that is to prosecute the parents for being negligent, not the farmers for selling milk that was honestly described to the customer.
Any way you care to look at it, going after the farmers makes no sense. If the milk were being sold as "pasteurized" when it was not pasteurized, that would be a reason to prosecute the farmers. But they would be prosecuted for fraud by local law enforcement, not for selling natural milk by the feds.
Of course we need agencies like OSHA to protect the workers, and the EPA to stop dumping of chemicals in waterways, and FTC to keep investment banks (gambling houses) separate from savings banks..... but we should try to keep these things as minimal as possible. When they start arresting people for choosing to drink natural milk, then they've gone too far and need to be downsized.
A technocrat in the real sense wouldn't ever do that, because there is no evidence that drinking natural milk is a law-enforcement problem. The only thing a real technocrat would be concerned about is that milk of any kind is labelled accurately so that customers know what they're buying. There'd be nothing for them to do unless misrepresentation/fraud were taking place.
Oh, it was a poem? I think you need to preface it by saying something like, "Yes, Fat Mike is literate - this is just a poem, which is why it has only the most tenuous connection with English grammar." Otherwise it just looks like any other idiot on the internet who can't put more than two words together coherently. It would be especially helpful for those of us who have no idea who Fat Mike is, what NOFX is, or what The Idiots Are Taking Over is (nearly everyone).
NOFX is a band with a singer. Bands with singers tend to write lyrics. Lyrics tend not to resemble the composition and structure of dissertations.
What would be especially helpful would be for you to recognize when you are unfamiliar with something being referenced, and respond to that by taking the seconds needed to Google it. That's if you care enough about it to complain.
Re-read your post I quoted. You're too prideful to admit you had no idea what you were talking about when you could have easily found out, so you try the "stick to my guns" tactic. This is how a simple error escalates into outright asshattery. You can do better. At least, I hope so.
You can still have Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians... but it is about using fact-based arguments over appeals to emotion.
They derive opposite conclusions from the same facts, so I don't see where that gets us.
That's his precise point. They do that because they are ideologies. For example, libertarianism is the ideology that consenting adults should be free to do whatever they want unless there is a necessary and compelling reason to forbid something. The only necessary and compelling reasons it recognizes are those things which infringe on the freedoms of other people who do not consent. For example, you are free to drink alcohol whether or not I think that's a good idea, because it is your body; but you are not free to drive drunk and put me in danger I didn't ask for.
Whereas a few extremely conservative people may feel that drinking is always wrong. They cannot be satisfied with simply not doing it themselves, because that gives no cause for controlling their neighbors, so they want alcohol to be illegal. They lost that battle a long time ago, and banning alcohol outright is no longer politically possible. So instead they implement local laws that make no sense, such as forbidding the sale of alcohol on Sundays (as though one couldn't stock up on Saturday).
Both of them are looking at the same thing: the act of consuming alcohol. All competent observers who watched you drink a beer would report the same data. It is the ideology that drives their responses to it. This is the difference between a conclusion and a response.
I also have wanted evidence-based politics for a very long time. Under such a system, we could not have a War on (some) Drugs without first demonstrating that it is a law-enforcement issue and not a medical issue. It would also have to be demonstrated that there is no such thing as responsible use and therefore all use of certain substances is always undesirable. Finally, it would also have to be proven that making drugs illegal prevents users from easily acquiring them through the black market, otherwise there is no point. Because all of those things are easily falsified, such a policy would not exist under that system.
The real frustration of modern politics is that so many people are at such an immature emotional level that they insist on continuing policies in the face of contradictory facts. It's as though they think that if you just try hard enough you can divide by zero. When you show them contradictory evidence in abundance, they get angry instead of saying "perhaps I should change my mind." For emotionally immature people, that would mean a victory for you and a loss for them, because they honestly believe they would be submitting to you personally for pointing something out and not to the truth. Thus politics is reduced to popularity because that's a form of brute force -- you have more numbers than me so it doesn't matter if you're wrong, you still get your way.
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
-- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address (emphasis mine)
In theory, the poor may collectively be more powerful than the rich, but because there's more of them the costs associated with actually organising and exercising that power are higher. For instance, suppose a handful of wealthy billionaires think that they want the law changed in a particular way that benefits them. Because their individual benefits from the change are high and they each have lots of resources, they can rationally afford to carry out their own in-depth analysis of what the law change does and whether it will benefit them and to follow it as it passes through Congress to make sure that it doesn't get amended in detrimental ways. It'd be irrational for poor individuals to each carry out this kind of in-depth analysis of whether laws benefit them because their individual expected gain from expending the time and resources required to do so is so much smaller than the cost, leaving them reliant on third-party sources of information like Fox News which have their own - often conflicting - interests.
Old thread I know.. but wanted to weigh in here all the same.
The poor and the middle class are their own worst enemies. Do you know why? Because when monied interests air advertising, TV interviews, and press releases to try and convince everyone else to vote their way, the average person (who is not wealthy) just eats that shit up. You know what the average person does not do, not even when the issue is important to them? They don't inform themselves. They don't take a hard look at who benefits from the suggested action, what the consequences could be, or whether other societies which did similar things lived to regret it. They think that's someone else's job.
In the Information Age they have absolutely no excuse for this. You don't even have to drive to your library anymore. It's as though they sincerely believe that political agendas and monied interests are going to be completely honest with them and truthfully tell them all about the downsides of their proposals. They do not seem to comprehend that advertising is the most biased information source imaginable, and that not all advertising is clearly labelled as such. Much of it tries to pass for legitimate news.
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I live in a theravada buddhist country. Most people really are nice and take care for each other. Yes, even unknown people and even when they don't have much themselves.
As I have learned from my own studies of Buddhism and particularly from the author Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddists understand how people get tied up in emotional knots and through their practice of mindfulness (smrti), they can untie those knots. You are unfortunately cherry-picking a particularly good counterexample that simply isn't representative of most of the world. It is a hard thing that the masses of people do not have this level of consciousness, however attained (through Buddhism or other system if they feel a need for a system). It is not easy to accept, but they must work out their lives according to their understanding just as I do. It is not my place to tell them how they should live, so long as I am afforded the same space.
If that kind of quality is common-as-dirt for you, I wish you well and hope you can experience the joy that comes from genuine gratitude. Understanding just how rare that is can enhance this for you. Some of us are in the trenches having to deal directly with some of the most petty, childish, self-serving behavior imaginable from what are basically a bunch of cowards who lack the integrity to conduct honest introspection.
Everything from the public school system to the media to endless worship of meaningless things like sports and celebrities, obsession with sex and other instant gratifications, to the deceptions of politics, has taught them to be petty and infantile. What remains of their souls (if you like) hasn't the strength of character to see past it. Like animals, they are nothing but products of environmental pressures with no overcoming spirit that can transcend the mold into which they are pressed.
It is most excellent training and has taught me a great deal about myself and generally about how and why people become vulnerable to such entanglements. The only way to avoid becoming like them is to look the evil right in the eye with no resentment, no irritation, and no hatred. Those things are what power the inner decay. I did not ask the masses of men to be manure, but if they insist, I intend to grow and express what is True.
You should sometimes see how the world is outside US.
While I appreciate the condescension inherent in this statement, it comes from self-serving assumptions so you can puff up and feel wiser than me. You know I am telling you the truth. Meanwhile you really have no clue what I've seen. With good reason I did not limit my prior comment to the US only. The US is particularly decadent like Babylon all over again, but it is hardly alone in that. The vast majority of the world is this way or soon to follow. I don't share a desire to escape -- too many otherwise good people doing that is why it does not improve. That is not my way. Mine is to overcome, to transcend, and perhaps to be a living counterexample for those few who would be encouraged by one. This is what supplies me with the sense of purpose that each person must find for themselves.
It is like the way American black people often call each other "nigga". A black person saying it is assumed not to have racist intent. If a white guy goes up to a black stranger and says "wassup nigga!" that really might be perceived as racist.
This is true but shouldn't be. It's either OK or not. It shouldn't matter what race says it. If you determine whether it's OK or not by the color of the persons skin, then that's being racist.
Well yeah. We didn't eliminate institutionalized racism. We just made it politically useful.
Elections these days demand isolated groups who feel persecuted by the other groups, so they demand protection that politicians are only too happy to provide. That's how one wing does it. The other wing demands fearful people who feel threatened by a foreign enemy with unpronouncable names and unknown languages, so they demand protection that politicians are ony too happy to provide.
The professional manipulators who engineer elections depend on one thing: that you will be a sucker for one of these tactics or the other. They really don't like people who can see through both of them. Those people must be marginalized. They must never be given media time or any other solid representation. They are a threat to the status quo.
This is statecraft. Please stop celebrating it and pretending like it's noble. I know that makes some feel patriotic, like some of that nobility transfers to them because they approve of it, but it's a lie. Find your own identity.
No. That is stupid solution to the problem. Our culture should support acceptance (when not hurting others) and not tolerate maljustice and abuse.
I don't think you have ever seen a person who had the grace, courage, and understanding to accept persecution without any kind of emotional reaction. It makes the bully look stupid and embarasses them thoroughly. It creates a contrast between real strength versus the insecurity the bully is trying to cover up by acting tough. Whereas if you fall into the emotional trap laid by the bully, his way works and you look weak while he looks dominant.
If you have never seen this, or better if you have never demonstrated it yourself, you really have no clue how powerful it is. It is not the simple "just take it" and it is not the simple "ignore him hoping he goes away" type of doormat behavior you might be imagining. It's more like being able to walk up to the bully and tell him right to his face how pathetic he is, calmly, and watch him back down with his tail between his legs even if he's much bigger than you.
The bully depends on your reaction to get the energy he needs. Deprive him of that and he's like an engine with no fuel. Believing me on this is not good enough and you'll probably end up in a fistfight if you do it without understanding. You have to see it yourself.
The solution is to lock up people who wish to harm others.
Who wish to harm others? Sir, you are advocating that we prosecute thoughtcrimes. I don't really need to explain why that's a bad idea, do I?
I am sorry that you're so thoroughly identified with being some kind of "outcast" that you cannot separate a rational look at the situation from your emotional knee-jerking and desire for vengence against someone who probably has a lot in common with those who have tormented you. It's like you're still reliving what you went through instead of overcoming it and being better for having endured it. That's too bad.
That also means you're unfit to form a solid, well-founded opinion about this until you stop feeling like a victim and identifying with people who are victims. There are good reasons why judges and other professionals are expected to recuse themselves from cases to which they have emotional attachments. As I like to say, if you want to throw someone a rope you must first make sure you're standing on higher ground. That's why identifying with them will never help them. All you could ever do with that method is teach them to be "better" victims (i.e. become more so).
If every single transgendered person were pesecuted ruthlessly with grave cruelty, that would still do less harm to society than implementing thoughcrimes. You're trying to cure the disease by shooting the patient in the face. That's not so good for the patient. If you care so much about transgendered people, gay people, or any other people, you don't want them to live under the thumb of an Orwellian government.
People in general tend to act nicely towards others.
If by that you mean a phony sort of "niceness" that is not real kindness, okay, but what good is it? Most people are only "nice" because they want to obligate you to like them and make them feel like good people. If they were truly good people they wouldn't need you to feel that way. They'd treat you with kindness and dignity whether or not you appreciated it because it would come from who they are, not who you are.
Instead, every chance they get, most people find opportunity to do something thoughtless, inconsiderate, careless, or something irritating that needles you. Or they'll take some liberty to push you and see if you'll stand up to them -- if you don't they assert a false superiority, and if you do they act hurt.
These kinds of constant, childish games where the object of the game is to puff up with pride and look down your nose at other people is what most human
Nope he's right she has cankles, but hey love is blind right.
She has curves. I really don't understand how you can call her fat (and I really don't like fat chicks). I've seen cankles before and they belong to women significantly heavier than her. Women with cankles don't usually have such a noticable hourglass shape.
At most I'd call her "thick". Feasible, but a bit of a stretch.
Actually she's not fat, and she looks very pretty and sweet. More likely than not, she is also very intelligent. In short, the kind of woman that you will probably never have.
I think she's a "butterface" (everything looks nice ... but her face). Like Garner from the show Alias. But she's definitely not obese and anorexia isn't sexy; you're not supposed to be attracted to nutcases. I am in the USA so I really, REALLY wish more women had a BMI like hers. Seriously.
The US dating pool is drastically reduced by too many people who seem hardcore determined to commit suicide-by-food. That's both sexes, for my lady friends complain about this too. Barring a physical cause like a thyroid disorder, which is very rare, it's just not possible to be obese and emotionally healthy at the same time. And believe me, you really don't want to be yoked to a woman who is an emotional disaster. Obesity is one of those things that's unattractive for good reason, it is not merely a matter of taste. I wouldn't want to be with a food-aholic any more than I'd like to be with an alcoholic. Both are self-destructive.
It depends on how many samples they are handling. Assume that 10 forms can be processed per hour. (Between contacting the individual, getting it signed, scanning and filing.) Assume staff cost $10/hour. That is a mean cost of $1/sample. Need a large sample for statistical purposes and the costs will mount. This estimate is also low balling it. Staff costs will be at least double. Even paying near minimum wage still involves payroll taxes. The processing time assumes permissive donors who need minimal explanation. Auditing records for compliance, auditing research for compliance, and administrative overhead to access those records were not included in my estimate. So yes, regulations are costly.
Yeah. All of that, just to avoid giving you a license to take someone's DNA information against their will and probably without compensation, even though you plan to benefit in some way from doing it. The nerve! In fact, anyone I select should be forced to submit to me anything of theirs that I decide I want, however intimate and personal. Otherwise, why, we might not be able to cut corners and forgo all those expensive "ethics" and shit when we do some research. Clearly you see the dilemma.
So it should be obvious, we must oppose a DNA privacy law. If such a law gets passed, the terrorists win! We can't have people thinking that you need their consent to harvest whatever you like from them.
It's easy to justify statements like "some coercion is necessary" if you accept as a premise that situations like you describe can just materialize out of nowhere, with no prior warning signs and with no way to detect and prevent them from occuring in the first place.
I'm not sure that teenagers who have grown up in a healthy and rational environment starting from good attachment in infancy and growing up with parental relationships which allow them to communicate openly and honestly will all of a sudden turn into crack addicts out of the blue.
That occurred to me when writing the example, which is why I described it as extreme. I left out the part you mention because I was hoping it should be obvious that things don't happen in a vacuum. At least, to any would-be parent I really hope this is "well duh" type of territory.
Are you saying you have honestly never seen small children want things that are bad for them to have? You think they understand perfectly and 100% of the time why those things are denied to them? You think they never, ever get out of line and require a consequence? Can you imagine a child coming to you and saying "hey I just abused this privilege so it should be taken away now" or did you have to do that yourself?
You have to have some rules and at least once in a while they might not like them. That is de facto coercion. This isn't always evil though. Murder is illegal in my state. If someone commits murder, you bet that the police are going to coerce them into a jail cell. I consider this a legitimate use of coercion. A minimal government would confine such things to where they are genuinely legitimate. See where I'm going with that?
There comes a point where you either give a certain benefit of doubt and understand where the guy's coming from, and if you don't, you split hairs about the lack of a Totally Perfect Absolutely Objection-Proof analogy or example. This is not a technical discussion.
Do you have data to support this assertion?
Do you seriously think there is no connection between this desire to separate adult people from the consequences they earn, and all the idiots who are everywhere? How do you think they got to be that way? Do you really believe they were born that way? This is one of those organic common-sense questions, not so much of a "mystery of life" question.
What if it's the case that people never learn, even if you allow them to make bad decisions?
As the saying goes... if you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning.
For the technocrat, it ends when the things being banned cause less harm than the ban itself does.
Yes, and creating a nation of overgrown 4-year-olds who need to have every aspect of their lives micromanaged by the State is a greater harm overall. We don't have to be like so many corporations, looking at only the next quarter and giving no thought to the long-term consequences.
Obviously such a policy would be more harmful than the lack of such a policy. Therefore no technocrat would back such a policy. See how that works?
So you barely managed to grasp the point I was making and then decide to use a condescending tone? Interesting. At any rate, the fact that no technocrat would back such a policy was my precise point.
Put another way, it isn't "I want politicians who think like me", it's "I want politicians who think".
This was beautifully stated.
A technocracy or meritocracy can have division over what is the correct course of action, just like you can have two software engineers who are both experts in their field disagree about the best way to solve a problem. It isn't about finding the one true path forward, it's about evaluating the possible paths based on reality instead of ideology.
Those two engineers may debate each other about which of (let's say) 3 good solutions is the best one. They would agree that the other possible solutions (which could number in the millions) are all faulty and wouldn't waste time and resources trying to implement them. That's the important part. We'd end up with either The Very Best Possible Solution EVER ... or at least a very good one. That sounds good to me!
If politics worked this way, we'd have all learned the lesson of Prohibition and tried something that might work, rather than reimplementing Prohibition for substances other than ethanol.
So it's ok for religious people who think like you do to vote
Yes, it is.
but we should disallow any religious people who DON'T think like you do?
No, we should not. We should promote reason. We should not persecute narrowmindedness. I honestly believe in the superiority of Reason over narrow-mindedness, which is why I feel no need to make laws against the latter. It's called being a secure person.
I know that's not what you're meaning (believe me, this reply is not aimed solely at your comment), but it is what you're implying. You place your trust in what you consider to be "reason", and they place their trust in what they consider to be "truth".
I trust what is trustworthy. That's why you are incorrect about the implications of my prior post.
Why? That's easy. If I reason incorrectly, you could come along and point out exactly where I made a mistake, what kind of error I made, and how it may be corrected. If I said "all cats are mammals, therefore all mammals are cats" you could correct me and it would be more than just your opinion. If we disagreed about that, my position would not merely be "different" from yours; it would be wrong. All you would have to do is find a single mammal that is not a cat and my statement would be objectively falsified and anyone could confirm that to their own satisfaction.
Religion doesn't work this way. That's why reason is better than religion when it comes to making decisions that can affect millions of people. That's when the ability to objectively confirm the correctness of a position is obviously desirable. In this context, which is public policy, reason and religion are not merely "different". One is clearly superior.
In almost any worldview (religious, scientific, philosophic), you are nothing but a mound of sand telling yourself that you know better than another mound of sand, and the other mound of sand strongly believes that they know better than you.
Actually I am both Reasonable and Spiritual. For me those two are not in conflict, not even slightly, but then I never did like organized religion and have always viewed spirituality as a personal thing. Even if I am certain that the way I live is better than the way you live, it would be wrong to force you to conform to my ways. Perhaps I would try to persuade you, but we're talking about government here. Laws are not intended to persuade. They are enforced by the threat of violence.
The only legitimate reason to outlaw something you want to do would be if that activity infringed on the rights of other people to make their own decisions about how they wish to live. For example, murder is illegal and should be illegal because if you murder someone, you're definitely interfering with the way they wish to live.
To borrow your terms, I am more like a mound of sand that isn't worried about how the other mounds of sand live their lives. I do not wish to place restrictions on them or to shove an agenda down their throats (supposing sand dunes have throats...). Consenting adults should be able to do whatever they like. What other people want to read, watch, think, say, and practice is none of my damned business unless they choose to share. What's that saying, that those who need the force of law to support their religion must not believe in the power of its message? It's true.
I would go so far as to say it is plain evil.
Attempting to build a system that provides health care to all people is evil? Fuck that.
Is reading comprehension truly that hard? It comes quite easily for me, but then I don't make the mistake of entangling my personal emotions with simple discussion.
I clearly said that what is evil is to deliberately blur the distinction between inalienable human rights and entitlements. I actually made no statement about health care at all. I neither supported universal health care, nor opposed it. Re-read my post.
Does anyone else wish to mod me "Troll" and put words in my mouth, or can we all be adults here? Honestly some of you are just plain infantile and you really, truly don't have to be.
The only thing a real technocrat would be concerned about is that milk of any kind is labelled accurately so that customers know what they're buying.
Unless there's evidence that people dont' read warning labels (they don't), and if there's evidence that banning has a superior outcome than labeling.
If the technocrat's mandate is "keep as many people healthy as possible", then he could easily eschew labeling for a ban if the evidence indicates that's more productive.
For one, it wouldn't be a warning label. It would be a description of the contents.
Two, I have no sympathy whatsoever for a literate adult who suffers harm because he disregarded a label.
Three, if your ultimate goal is the best benefit for the largest number of people, then you allow adults who make bad decisions to suffer the consequences because that's the only way some people ever learn. It's called reaping what you sow, or laying in the bed you have made.
Four, if people are hurting themselves now with milk of all things, where does this end? Do you outlaw hammers because someone might accidentally strike his fingers? How then do you justify the automobile, with its often severe consequences for error? Do you outlaw walking because some people are clumsy and might fall and hurt themselves? Electricity because someone might get electrocuted? Stoves because someone might touch them when they're hot? Eating because there is a chance of choking?
The only way to really do this is to have everyone strapped to a hospital bed from birth and fed by an IV, by law. How much of a technocrat must you be in order to realize how unreasonable this is? The desire to protect people not from those who would victimize them (by force or fraud), but from themselves, does not come from reason. It comes from emotion.
I agree with this definition of good parents. My experience is lacking in real examples of parents who make more than a token effort to live up to that as a standard, however.
I am fortunate enough to have friends who are this kind of parent. They would freely admit that they are not perfect, and in the face of such an awesome task and tremendous responsibility like raising a child, I cannot fault them for that. But they love and cherish Reason and gently instill this in their children by showing them why Reason is beautiful. The result is that their children are calmer and more well-behaved than most, and tend to follow the rules even when the parents aren't watching their every move.
Necessary to achive what, specifically?
I'll make up an extreme example in order to clarify the point, though much milder examples would not be hard to conceive. Let's say you're the parent of a young teenager. You discover that your teenager has started smoking crack cocaine. You have an obligation to take the crack away from that teen and, if necessary, to get them some treatment so they can beat the habit. The teen is not going to like that -- it will happen against his or her will. You had to resort to coercion because self-destruction cannot be reasoned with.
and there are no spending reductions required for tax breaks for the ballot initatives either
This makes sense, actually. It often happens that a reduction in the tax rate actually results in more tax revenue. Because that may or may not be the case for a given proposal, it makes sense not to have a blanket rule that tries to cover all scenarios.
When they start arresting people for choosing to drink natural milk, then they've gone too far and need to be downsized.
A few years ago I'd have agreed with you on that - raw milk's perfectly legal in the UK, you can even get cheese made with unpasteurised milk in the supermarkets, and it doesn't seem to do us any harm. Then I got some idea of the kinds of people who were deliberately flouting the law in the US, realised that they were marketing it as some kind of healthy natural option that was actually safer than pasteurised milk, and decided that you know what? Maybe banning it's not such a bad idea after all.
Then their solution is wrong and it "solves" the wrong problem.
If marketers are making false claims, go after them for false advertising. This is no reason to stop honest businesses from selling that product.
If treating all businesses the way these dairies have been treated were standard practice, can you imagine the Joe Jobs that would become possible? A doctor makes a false statement and then what, we outlaw all medicine?
If you want governments to start basis decisions on logic and sense, you'll need to remove all influence from the religious types first. Until then, we're stuck with some pretty depressingly stupid laws.
Yes, because things like "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not steal" are just horrible public policy. Damned zealots.
Some people seem to think that taking religion away will lead to a utopia for humanity. I think it'll just be replaced with something else... communism, fascism, some new-ism. And it would be hellish.
The main reason why hardcore Communists and National Socialists have tried to stamp out religion and kill religious people is easy to understand. A religious person recognizes a higher authority than the State. That's perceived as a threat to totalitarian types.
I have always considered Statism itself to be a type of religion. It's a secular religion, but it has its articles of faith, its priesthood, and its zealots all the same.
While I agree that we'd be better off without "religous types" such as Pat Robertson and Rick Santorum, I'd like to remind you that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi were also "religious types."
They understood the difference between having your personal faith and respecting that others have the right to do (or not do) the same, versus implementing a theocracy.
Gandhi had no problem with the teachings of Christ even though he was thoroughly Hindu. His only complaint about Christianity was that the Christians who practice it are not enough like the Christ they claim to follow.
I personally admire the teachings of Christ. I believe he was better and more advanced than myself, and therefore I should listen to him (as I do with anyone meeting that criteria). I believe that practicing his teachings makes me a better, more loving, more forgiving person. But I cannot stand the way it's paraded around like it's a political issue.
One's faith should be a personal thing. I am spiritual, but spirituality is not something I can give to another person. If they want it, they have to find it themselves in their own terms. If they don't want it, I respect that even though I don't personally agree. In either case, telling someone else how they should live goes against everything I believe in. Selling one's faith in exchange for votes makes that person a sort of whore and calls into question the sincerity of their faith.
Not only do I not care what religion a candidate practices, I don't even want to know. Candidates should be judged on whether they promote freedom and prosperity, not whether they're in the same denominational club as oneself.
Stating that coercion is immoral would challenge the very foundation of families, wherein for nearly off human history children have been considered effectively the property of adults.
A parent is supposed to be a benevolent dictator. This is not something you could ever realistically expect from the State.
That's why it's so hard to spread political freedom - because people have been conditioned from infancy to obey the arbitrary dictates of someone more powerful. They learned from an early age that the rules they were forced to abide by didn't apply to the people making the rules. The existence of governments is merely a side effect of this early conditioning.
It depends. Truly good parents don't condition; they reason. They convince their children to obey their rules by showing that their own rules are good enough for them as well. In other words, they are not hypocrites. They correct rather than punish because they don't get angry easily. They see a need to earn respect by being respectable and personally upholding every virtue they expect from their children, rather than demanding respect just-because.
It's the difference between authority and dominance. Too many parents have no authority, so all they have left is "I'm bigger than you" and "I can take things away from you" and "I can make you miserable". They actually blame the child for this rather than seeing it as their own failing. They're basically bullies to their children, but they feel justified in their destructive methods because their goals are decent enough. Standard bullies want your lunch money; parent-bullies want you to succeed in life. It's typical consequentialism (ends justify the means) justification.
Yes, some coercion is necessary, just like some government is necessary. The idea is for both to be minimal and appropriate.
If there's no fundamental human right to healthcare, food, and shelter, then there's no fundamental human right to free speech, or association, or any of the those other negative rights
How do you figure that?
I can exercise my free speech without forcing you to do anything. I don't need to take your money (through government as a proxy). I don't need to force you to listen, though I can hope you will choose to. At no point does my free speech require that armed men (police) use threats of violence to force you to do anything.
That is the difference between an inalienable human right and an entitlement. If you believe they are the same, you could not be more misguided. Be careful, because there are a lot of monied interests that view both the Constitution and the entire notion of inalienable human rights as pesky obstacles to their goals. For that reason, these things (rights and entitlements) are often conflated deliberately in order to cause the very confusion you manifest. It is not done to strengthen the perceived value of entitlements, but to weaken the perceived value of rights.
I would go so far as to say it is plain evil.
Technocratically-minded people idealize such a system until that system starts dictating their lives. Good for thee, but not for me is what it would be if you want to be honest about it.
How do you figure? There is no technical evidence-based reason to tell other people how to manage their personal lives. Such a one-size-fits-all plan for everyone is easily shown to be problematic. Just one person who didn't fit the plan would be enough to falsify it entirely.
We already have a system that wants to dictate more and more of daily life. The War on (some) Drugs is a great example, but it's not nearly the only behavior among consenting adults that can result in prison. This isn't coming from overwhelming evidence. It's coming from a certain Puritannical desire to stamp out everything that isn't approved of. I'll take evidence-based any day.
Except that they feed that natural milk to their kids, and it has a tendency to do severe and permanent damage. Enough damage that we, as a society, say you have to clean that milk up before you sell it.
The solution to that is to prosecute the parents for being negligent, not the farmers for selling milk that was honestly described to the customer.
Any way you care to look at it, going after the farmers makes no sense. If the milk were being sold as "pasteurized" when it was not pasteurized, that would be a reason to prosecute the farmers. But they would be prosecuted for fraud by local law enforcement, not for selling natural milk by the feds.
Of course we need agencies like OSHA to protect the workers, and the EPA to stop dumping of chemicals in waterways, and FTC to keep investment banks (gambling houses) separate from savings banks..... but we should try to keep these things as minimal as possible. When they start arresting people for choosing to drink natural milk, then they've gone too far and need to be downsized.
A technocrat in the real sense wouldn't ever do that, because there is no evidence that drinking natural milk is a law-enforcement problem. The only thing a real technocrat would be concerned about is that milk of any kind is labelled accurately so that customers know what they're buying. There'd be nothing for them to do unless misrepresentation/fraud were taking place.
If Fat Mike would like to make statements decrying anti-intellectualism, he should first learn to compose a coherent sentence.
No argument against what the poet said, so you resort to lowest-common-denominator, ad hominem attacks on his sentence structure?
Ever hear of artistic license? Obviously not.
Oh, it was a poem? I think you need to preface it by saying something like, "Yes, Fat Mike is literate - this is just a poem, which is why it has only the most tenuous connection with English grammar." Otherwise it just looks like any other idiot on the internet who can't put more than two words together coherently. It would be especially helpful for those of us who have no idea who Fat Mike is, what NOFX is, or what The Idiots Are Taking Over is (nearly everyone).
NOFX is a band with a singer. Bands with singers tend to write lyrics. Lyrics tend not to resemble the composition and structure of dissertations.
What would be especially helpful would be for you to recognize when you are unfamiliar with something being referenced, and respond to that by taking the seconds needed to Google it. That's if you care enough about it to complain.
Re-read your post I quoted. You're too prideful to admit you had no idea what you were talking about when you could have easily found out, so you try the "stick to my guns" tactic. This is how a simple error escalates into outright asshattery. You can do better. At least, I hope so.
You can still have Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians... but it is about using fact-based arguments over appeals to emotion.
They derive opposite conclusions from the same facts, so I don't see where that gets us.
That's his precise point. They do that because they are ideologies. For example, libertarianism is the ideology that consenting adults should be free to do whatever they want unless there is a necessary and compelling reason to forbid something. The only necessary and compelling reasons it recognizes are those things which infringe on the freedoms of other people who do not consent. For example, you are free to drink alcohol whether or not I think that's a good idea, because it is your body; but you are not free to drive drunk and put me in danger I didn't ask for.
Whereas a few extremely conservative people may feel that drinking is always wrong. They cannot be satisfied with simply not doing it themselves, because that gives no cause for controlling their neighbors, so they want alcohol to be illegal. They lost that battle a long time ago, and banning alcohol outright is no longer politically possible. So instead they implement local laws that make no sense, such as forbidding the sale of alcohol on Sundays (as though one couldn't stock up on Saturday).
Both of them are looking at the same thing: the act of consuming alcohol. All competent observers who watched you drink a beer would report the same data. It is the ideology that drives their responses to it. This is the difference between a conclusion and a response.
I also have wanted evidence-based politics for a very long time. Under such a system, we could not have a War on (some) Drugs without first demonstrating that it is a law-enforcement issue and not a medical issue. It would also have to be demonstrated that there is no such thing as responsible use and therefore all use of certain substances is always undesirable. Finally, it would also have to be proven that making drugs illegal prevents users from easily acquiring them through the black market, otherwise there is no point. Because all of those things are easily falsified, such a policy would not exist under that system.
The real frustration of modern politics is that so many people are at such an immature emotional level that they insist on continuing policies in the face of contradictory facts. It's as though they think that if you just try hard enough you can divide by zero. When you show them contradictory evidence in abundance, they get angry instead of saying "perhaps I should change my mind." For emotionally immature people, that would mean a victory for you and a loss for them, because they honestly believe they would be submitting to you personally for pointing something out and not to the truth. Thus politics is reduced to popularity because that's a form of brute force -- you have more numbers than me so it doesn't matter if you're wrong, you still get your way.
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
-- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address (emphasis mine)
In theory, the poor may collectively be more powerful than the rich, but because there's more of them the costs associated with actually organising and exercising that power are higher. For instance, suppose a handful of wealthy billionaires think that they want the law changed in a particular way that benefits them. Because their individual benefits from the change are high and they each have lots of resources, they can rationally afford to carry out their own in-depth analysis of what the law change does and whether it will benefit them and to follow it as it passes through Congress to make sure that it doesn't get amended in detrimental ways. It'd be irrational for poor individuals to each carry out this kind of in-depth analysis of whether laws benefit them because their individual expected gain from expending the time and resources required to do so is so much smaller than the cost, leaving them reliant on third-party sources of information like Fox News which have their own - often conflicting - interests.
Old thread I know.. but wanted to weigh in here all the same.
The poor and the middle class are their own worst enemies. Do you know why? Because when monied interests air advertising, TV interviews, and press releases to try and convince everyone else to vote their way, the average person (who is not wealthy) just eats that shit up. You know what the average person does not do, not even when the issue is important to them? They don't inform themselves. They don't take a hard look at who benefits from the suggested action, what the consequences could be, or whether other societies which did similar things lived to regret it. They think that's someone else's job.
In the Information Age they have absolutely no excuse for this. You don't even have to drive to your library anymore. It's as though they sincerely believe that political agendas and monied interests are going to be completely honest with them and truthfully tell them all about the downsides of their proposals. They do not seem to comprehend that advertising is the most biased information source imaginable, and that not all advertising is clearly labelled as such. Much of it tries to pass for legitimate news.