“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” --Steinbeck
Of course he wrote that a long time ago. Socialism has since taken root.
There is a positive correlation between religiosity, lack of intelligence and formal education, and conservatism. Why is that so I can only speculate.
Because if you live by the traditional values promoted by most religions, you'll tend to be conservative AND you'll be able to survive even if you lack intelligence. Traditional values are traditional in part because they work. If you live by them, you'll get by. If you don't, you might get by if you're smart enough, born into wealth, or otherwise gifted. But if you don't live by traditional values and aren't gifted, you'll either kill yourself or live off someone else's hard work.
Exactly. The tea parties seem genuinely interested in freedom, which makes everyone who has power - the Republican establishment, the Democrats, the media, the rich rent-seekers - very afraid of them. That's why they get so much bad press causing so many people have become dismissive of them and hateful toward them. It all started with the Big Lie about racism. The tea parties want freedom from government, and when the government isn't doing anything it is very hard to use the government for racist goals. Freedom is for everyone.
You point out a huge dilemma for conservatives. Do we vote for the people who promise to save the country and then try to destroy it? Or do we vote for the people who promise to destroy the country and keep their promise?
This dilemma was made most apparent during the years the Republicans controlled the House and Senate during the Bush the Younger years and spent like Democrats. They were punished at the polls in the mid-term elections by many conservatives staying away or voting third-party.
Fortunately a solution to the problem arose from the grass-roots, we have the tea parties. The Republican establish hates them of course. The Democrats and their media hate them of course. The monied interests who rent-seek from both parties hate them of course. As such they are demonized by all those groups and the ignorant believe those demonizations. But at the moment, they're the only ones who seem to be honestly seeking to expand freedom by limiting government spending and government regulation.
Yes, one of the problems with the heat map is that it doesn't capture population density well. If you look at where the poor are concentrated in large cities in America, you find that they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Detroit hasn't had a Republican administration in ages. Has Chigaco? New York city was a mess until a Republican was elected.
There is another dynamic at work as well.
One should also consider the split personality of what we call "conservative". Many Americans consider themselves conservative because they believe in traditional and family values, and the left has made a huge assault on those values. Many Americans consider themselves conservative because they have libertarian leanings, and the left has made a huge assault on freedom (freedom of sex being their own exception - they seem to hold that one freedom sacred). Some Americans consider themselves conservative because they think that means helping big business against corrupt unions and corrupt government, and the left likes to make big businesses out to be bogeymen and government and unions to be saints.
As the left has largely (though not totally) succeeded in pushing so much of their agenda of the last 70 years (with the obvious exception of unions), they have pushed together diverse groups in to the "conservative" camp.
The group that supports traditional and family values includes a lot of lower middle class because those values are values that help the less capable succeed. It's been pointed out many times that if you graduate from high school, avoid getting pregnant while a teen-ager, avoid getting pregnant until you get married, and stay off drugs and alcohol, you have a very high chance of avoiding poverty in America. This is true even if you have lower-than-average intelligence or aren't a great athlete. It's true even if you don't necessarily understand the reasons for the values you're living by. If you believe in marriage, if you believe in respecting your elders and listen to them when they tell you not to try drugs or alcohol. If you get a job like your parents say you should and work hard at it simply because it is the right thing to do. For many people, this is what their religion tells them to do so they do it regardless of whether they understand the secular benefits.
That's why, absent welfare, WF Buckley was right to say that conservatives aren't stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. Unless the government is there to bail them out, stupid liberals tend to remove themselves from the gene pool, or they figure out that they need to become conservatives.
That's why so many of the less wealthy conservatives are proud of their self-sufficiency and don't want to support programs for the poor. They earned their survival - not by being smart or gifted or lucky or born in to rich families - but by living their values and working hard. They don't see why others can't do the same and they don't want their hard-earned money going to people who don't follow the same values. They're barely scraping by and the last thing they need is for the government to interfere and drag them down.
This is usually the case, and certainly the Chinese view of things. They are now claiming plenty of lands for which they have neither moral nor legal justification to claim. The do look for excuses for their claims, but know that what is really comes down to is bullying.
If they decide they think they can get away with claiming the moon, they'll say Chinese saw the moon first - it was first written about on ancient Chinese turtle shells. And they'll say whatever else they can think of.
Interesting. I normally don't think of bars as a place where the kind of people like to be so serious about their religion hang out.
If you are serious enough about Christianity (and immature enough) that such things will make you super-mad, wouldn't you still be trying very very hard to turn the other cheek?
There seems to be some biological revulsion to homosexuality since since the visceral animosity to it cuts across so many cultures. I think that, if anything, the Christian ideas of hating the sin while loving the sinner, not casting the first stone, recognizing that we're all sinners who have fallen short of the glory of God, and forgiveness can make treatment of homosexuals much better in societies based on Christian values than in other societies,
The earlier statement about most arguments against homosexual rights and freedoms coming from religion has some truth (even if sometimes they're attempts to hide simple revulsion), but it also true that most of the arguments for homosexual rights and freedoms come from Christian ideals. For example, one of the most successful arguments has been homosexual rights are similar rights for black people, and civil rights for black people - indeed even the elimination of slavery - had deep religious roots and motivation.
This sounds like Russell's Teapot. You've stated the existence of something difficult to believe, but by doing so anonymously and refusing even to name the educational institution, you've made it impossible for anyone to refute your claim.
My concern wasn't "how many birds were killed by whom?" but rather, "Does Obama really have the authority to do this under the law, or is he yet again ignoring/breaking the law to further one of his pet agenda? In that sense the summary wasn't really biased, it just wasn't informative.
Thanks but people who know Fahrenheit and inches are generally well-educated enough to also know the common lesser measurement system (sort of like how most who speak Elvish also know the common tongue). No translation is necessary for us.
We've seen that the left's solution of throwing money at every problem doesn't work and often causes problems. The right's approach of just letting the poor fend for themselves (once the government gets out of the way) seems to move things in a good direction, but not always quickly. If this study and follow-ups can tell us where the happy middle is that would be a very ggod thing.
Even if the voters are all idiots, it still takes a lot of intelligence to get yourself nominated and elected when there are so many other people trying to do exactly the same thing.
Japan won't order an all-out conquest of islands they already control. The question is how they will deal with these threats by China to infringe on their airspace.
With fighter planes, it isn't just who has more, it's also who has better planes, better pilots, and better situational awareness (and probably a couple other things I'm not thinking of). If China has better planes and better training, then Japan won't go into this alone - America will be involved. At this point America is probably better equipped for aerial combat simply based on experience - America has spent a lot more time in the age of fighter planes.
It seems you have all the answers. Too bad you weren't an advisor to Johnson, Bush, Bush, and the hundreds of Congressmen who voted to support their decisions. Clearly, despite their abilities to get millions of Americans to vote for them, they were all idiots surrounded by idiots.
What potential allies would those be? They can't even get anyone but America to sell them weapons because everyone is so afraid of China. As for letting Taiwan defend itself, you do realize that we pulled all our troops and Naval bases out of Taiwan back in the 70s, don't you?
I do agree with you though that Taiwan should do more to defend itself.
I would be very very surprised if Japan just lets China enforce this airspace claim. If diplomacy fails Japan will have to send a plane into the area to flaunt the rules China has stated.
It will be interesting to see how it is done. Will it be a single civilian plane? A single fighter? A large squadron of fighters? A civilian plane with a large military escort? Will an American carrier be nearby to provide support of needed?
It's hard to guess the exact details, but Japan will find it hard not to challenge China's power grab if the issue can't be resolved diplomatically.
The Chinese are winning now, in preparation for the war later. By using our military now and running huge deficits, we're fighting the war now so we can lose later.
Keeping a strong military presence can and will work for America in the short term. But China is playing the long game and unless America can fix her fiscal mess that military will become affordable we'll be sucking Chinese by the 2050s, if not sooner.
If we charged nations for the protection we provide, how much income might that produce? Taiwan hasn't been invaded yet, would they be (by China) if we left and said "sorry, you're on your own now... unless you want to start paying us to be here of course".
But we aren't "here" in Taiwan. We pulled out in the 70s because China wouldn't establish relations with us otherwise.
As for Taiwan "paying" us, they spend quite a bit of money on American weapons and technology (though in recent years we brilliantly encouraged the success of a pro-China president in Tawian who is busily creating economic dependencies on China, refusing to buy American military equipment, and promising the Taiwanese that they'll be part of Chiana eventually whether they like it or not (of course he changes his tune at election time - apparantly the Taiwanese have just as bad a long-term memory as Americans)).
Our Navy has 12 aircraft carriers, equal to every other country on Earth, and our carriers are actually good, compared to countries like Spain that have a small little jump jet carrier that is actually smaller than our old WWII carriers.
What do we have that for, if not to use it?
Ideally the point of having them is so we don't have to use it. Unfortunately we seem to have become very poor at diplomacy and very poor at following through on both promises and threats. Were we more consistent, troublesome countries could be dissuaded by us simply making a comment about their behavior. But inconsistent follow through means troublemakers are always willing to test us to see if we really mean what we say. And inconsistency also means we may resort to force when it isn't called for.
The American people seem to have become very immature over the years, and our leadership (from both parties) has come to reflect that.
It would nice if there were someone else to hand the job of peacemaker too, but what country could do it, would do it, and would do it well? China? Russia? I wouldn't want them in charge. Germany? Unwilling. Switzerland? Unable. I'm afraid that for the foreseeable future we may be stuck with America. And if America can't get its budget in order we may end up in a worst case scenario of having to placate the Chinese or the Islamic countries and their oppressive ways.
Japan "nationalize" those islands just last year. Are you calling the one that just annexed new land the victim?
Japan nationalized them to try to avoid actions that might annoy China. China chose to get annoyed anyway.
In addition to being part of Japan, the islands had been the private property of a Japanese citizen. He decided to sell the islands. There was fear that some Japanese zealot might buy the islands and use them for propaganda purposes. A new owner might plant Japanese flags all over the islands or do something else as a private citizen that would highlight Japanese sovereignty. Japan nationalized the islands to keep them out of the hands of such zealots and to avoid hurting China's feelings. China decided to get its feelings hurt anyway because it makes great propaganda both at home and abroad.
People talking just like that have been running our foreign policy for the last century and have bee proven wrong time after time after time, always with disastrous consequences for the country as a whole. Yet they keep getting promoted.
The problem is that you don't know that. Vietnam is widely regarded as a huge mistake, but Thailand never became communist. Had we not fought in Vietnam, where would the momentum of communism have carried it? Would a newly communist Vietnam, without the economic and military ruin of a long war have felt emboldened both by success and by ideology to invade Thailand? Malaysia? Would leaders there have dared resist communism if America had not tried to support Vietnam? Would revolutionaries around the world have gained more support as people saw how easy it was to join the communist bloc?
Would Saddam Hussein have used oil profits from both Kuwait and Iraq to build a larger military to subdue Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon and with enough money even Iran?
In international events we don't get to do controlled experiments. We don't get to more than one option on Vietnam. Some say we shouldn't have gotten involved. Some say the mistake was failing to support the South Vietnam government we had put in place after the war. But neither option can be proven to be correct because neither option was ever tried or will ever be tried.
Slashdot Mirror
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” --Steinbeck
Of course he wrote that a long time ago. Socialism has since taken root.
There is a positive correlation between religiosity, lack of intelligence and formal education, and conservatism. Why is that so I can only speculate.
Because if you live by the traditional values promoted by most religions, you'll tend to be conservative AND you'll be able to survive even if you lack intelligence. Traditional values are traditional in part because they work. If you live by them, you'll get by. If you don't, you might get by if you're smart enough, born into wealth, or otherwise gifted. But if you don't live by traditional values and aren't gifted, you'll either kill yourself or live off someone else's hard work.
Exactly. The tea parties seem genuinely interested in freedom, which makes everyone who has power - the Republican establishment, the Democrats, the media, the rich rent-seekers - very afraid of them. That's why they get so much bad press causing so many people have become dismissive of them and hateful toward them. It all started with the Big Lie about racism. The tea parties want freedom from government, and when the government isn't doing anything it is very hard to use the government for racist goals. Freedom is for everyone.
Ok, so if you believe contraception is immoral, why are you forced by the Obama administration to violate your religion?
You point out a huge dilemma for conservatives. Do we vote for the people who promise to save the country and then try to destroy it? Or do we vote for the people who promise to destroy the country and keep their promise?
This dilemma was made most apparent during the years the Republicans controlled the House and Senate during the Bush the Younger years and spent like Democrats. They were punished at the polls in the mid-term elections by many conservatives staying away or voting third-party.
Fortunately a solution to the problem arose from the grass-roots, we have the tea parties. The Republican establish hates them of course. The Democrats and their media hate them of course. The monied interests who rent-seek from both parties hate them of course. As such they are demonized by all those groups and the ignorant believe those demonizations. But at the moment, they're the only ones who seem to be honestly seeking to expand freedom by limiting government spending and government regulation.
Yes, one of the problems with the heat map is that it doesn't capture population density well. If you look at where the poor are concentrated in large cities in America, you find that they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Detroit hasn't had a Republican administration in ages. Has Chigaco? New York city was a mess until a Republican was elected.
There is another dynamic at work as well.
One should also consider the split personality of what we call "conservative". Many Americans consider themselves conservative because they believe in traditional and family values, and the left has made a huge assault on those values. Many Americans consider themselves conservative because they have libertarian leanings, and the left has made a huge assault on freedom (freedom of sex being their own exception - they seem to hold that one freedom sacred). Some Americans consider themselves conservative because they think that means helping big business against corrupt unions and corrupt government, and the left likes to make big businesses out to be bogeymen and government and unions to be saints.
As the left has largely (though not totally) succeeded in pushing so much of their agenda of the last 70 years (with the obvious exception of unions), they have pushed together diverse groups in to the "conservative" camp.
The group that supports traditional and family values includes a lot of lower middle class because those values are values that help the less capable succeed. It's been pointed out many times that if you graduate from high school, avoid getting pregnant while a teen-ager, avoid getting pregnant until you get married, and stay off drugs and alcohol, you have a very high chance of avoiding poverty in America. This is true even if you have lower-than-average intelligence or aren't a great athlete. It's true even if you don't necessarily understand the reasons for the values you're living by. If you believe in marriage, if you believe in respecting your elders and listen to them when they tell you not to try drugs or alcohol. If you get a job like your parents say you should and work hard at it simply because it is the right thing to do. For many people, this is what their religion tells them to do so they do it regardless of whether they understand the secular benefits.
That's why, absent welfare, WF Buckley was right to say that conservatives aren't stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. Unless the government is there to bail them out, stupid liberals tend to remove themselves from the gene pool, or they figure out that they need to become conservatives.
That's why so many of the less wealthy conservatives are proud of their self-sufficiency and don't want to support programs for the poor. They earned their survival - not by being smart or gifted or lucky or born in to rich families - but by living their values and working hard. They don't see why others can't do the same and they don't want their hard-earned money going to people who don't follow the same values. They're barely scraping by and the last thing they need is for the government to interfere and drag them down.
This is usually the case, and certainly the Chinese view of things. They are now claiming plenty of lands for which they have neither moral nor legal justification to claim. The do look for excuses for their claims, but know that what is really comes down to is bullying.
If they decide they think they can get away with claiming the moon, they'll say Chinese saw the moon first - it was first written about on ancient Chinese turtle shells. And they'll say whatever else they can think of.
Interesting. I normally don't think of bars as a place where the kind of people like to be so serious about their religion hang out.
If you are serious enough about Christianity (and immature enough) that such things will make you super-mad, wouldn't you still be trying very very hard to turn the other cheek?
Your faith despite contrary evidence is admirable :/
There seems to be some biological revulsion to homosexuality since since the visceral animosity to it cuts across so many cultures. I think that, if anything, the Christian ideas of hating the sin while loving the sinner, not casting the first stone, recognizing that we're all sinners who have fallen short of the glory of God, and forgiveness can make treatment of homosexuals much better in societies based on Christian values than in other societies,
The earlier statement about most arguments against homosexual rights and freedoms coming from religion has some truth (even if sometimes they're attempts to hide simple revulsion), but it also true that most of the arguments for homosexual rights and freedoms come from Christian ideals. For example, one of the most successful arguments has been homosexual rights are similar rights for black people, and civil rights for black people - indeed even the elimination of slavery - had deep religious roots and motivation.
This sounds like Russell's Teapot. You've stated the existence of something difficult to believe, but by doing so anonymously and refusing even to name the educational institution, you've made it impossible for anyone to refute your claim.
My concern wasn't "how many birds were killed by whom?" but rather, "Does Obama really have the authority to do this under the law, or is he yet again ignoring/breaking the law to further one of his pet agenda? In that sense the summary wasn't really biased, it just wasn't informative.
7 degrees Celsius = 44.6 degrees Fahrenheit 61 centimeters of rain = 24.0157 inches
Thanks but people who know Fahrenheit and inches are generally well-educated enough to also know the common lesser measurement system (sort of like how most who speak Elvish also know the common tongue). No translation is necessary for us.
We've seen that the left's solution of throwing money at every problem doesn't work and often causes problems. The right's approach of just letting the poor fend for themselves (once the government gets out of the way) seems to move things in a good direction, but not always quickly. If this study and follow-ups can tell us where the happy middle is that would be a very ggod thing.
Even if the voters are all idiots, it still takes a lot of intelligence to get yourself nominated and elected when there are so many other people trying to do exactly the same thing.
Japan won't order an all-out conquest of islands they already control. The question is how they will deal with these threats by China to infringe on their airspace. With fighter planes, it isn't just who has more, it's also who has better planes, better pilots, and better situational awareness (and probably a couple other things I'm not thinking of). If China has better planes and better training, then Japan won't go into this alone - America will be involved. At this point America is probably better equipped for aerial combat simply based on experience - America has spent a lot more time in the age of fighter planes.
It seems you have all the answers. Too bad you weren't an advisor to Johnson, Bush, Bush, and the hundreds of Congressmen who voted to support their decisions. Clearly, despite their abilities to get millions of Americans to vote for them, they were all idiots surrounded by idiots.
What potential allies would those be? They can't even get anyone but America to sell them weapons because everyone is so afraid of China. As for letting Taiwan defend itself, you do realize that we pulled all our troops and Naval bases out of Taiwan back in the 70s, don't you?
I do agree with you though that Taiwan should do more to defend itself.
I would be very very surprised if Japan just lets China enforce this airspace claim. If diplomacy fails Japan will have to send a plane into the area to flaunt the rules China has stated.
It will be interesting to see how it is done. Will it be a single civilian plane? A single fighter? A large squadron of fighters? A civilian plane with a large military escort? Will an American carrier be nearby to provide support of needed?
It's hard to guess the exact details, but Japan will find it hard not to challenge China's power grab if the issue can't be resolved diplomatically.
The Chinese are winning now, in preparation for the war later. By using our military now and running huge deficits, we're fighting the war now so we can lose later.
Keeping a strong military presence can and will work for America in the short term. But China is playing the long game and unless America can fix her fiscal mess that military will become affordable we'll be sucking Chinese by the 2050s, if not sooner.
If we charged nations for the protection we provide, how much income might that produce? Taiwan hasn't been invaded yet, would they be (by China) if we left and said "sorry, you're on your own now... unless you want to start paying us to be here of course".
But we aren't "here" in Taiwan. We pulled out in the 70s because China wouldn't establish relations with us otherwise.
As for Taiwan "paying" us, they spend quite a bit of money on American weapons and technology (though in recent years we brilliantly encouraged the success of a pro-China president in Tawian who is busily creating economic dependencies on China, refusing to buy American military equipment, and promising the Taiwanese that they'll be part of Chiana eventually whether they like it or not (of course he changes his tune at election time - apparantly the Taiwanese have just as bad a long-term memory as Americans)).
Our Navy has 12 aircraft carriers, equal to every other country on Earth, and our carriers are actually good, compared to countries like Spain that have a small little jump jet carrier that is actually smaller than our old WWII carriers.
What do we have that for, if not to use it?
Ideally the point of having them is so we don't have to use it. Unfortunately we seem to have become very poor at diplomacy and very poor at following through on both promises and threats. Were we more consistent, troublesome countries could be dissuaded by us simply making a comment about their behavior. But inconsistent follow through means troublemakers are always willing to test us to see if we really mean what we say. And inconsistency also means we may resort to force when it isn't called for.
The American people seem to have become very immature over the years, and our leadership (from both parties) has come to reflect that.
It would nice if there were someone else to hand the job of peacemaker too, but what country could do it, would do it, and would do it well? China? Russia? I wouldn't want them in charge. Germany? Unwilling. Switzerland? Unable. I'm afraid that for the foreseeable future we may be stuck with America. And if America can't get its budget in order we may end up in a worst case scenario of having to placate the Chinese or the Islamic countries and their oppressive ways.
Japan "nationalize" those islands just last year. Are you calling the one that just annexed new land the victim?
Japan nationalized them to try to avoid actions that might annoy China. China chose to get annoyed anyway.
In addition to being part of Japan, the islands had been the private property of a Japanese citizen. He decided to sell the islands. There was fear that some Japanese zealot might buy the islands and use them for propaganda purposes. A new owner might plant Japanese flags all over the islands or do something else as a private citizen that would highlight Japanese sovereignty. Japan nationalized the islands to keep them out of the hands of such zealots and to avoid hurting China's feelings. China decided to get its feelings hurt anyway because it makes great propaganda both at home and abroad.
People talking just like that have been running our foreign policy for the last century and have bee proven wrong time after time after time, always with disastrous consequences for the country as a whole. Yet they keep getting promoted.
The problem is that you don't know that. Vietnam is widely regarded as a huge mistake, but Thailand never became communist. Had we not fought in Vietnam, where would the momentum of communism have carried it? Would a newly communist Vietnam, without the economic and military ruin of a long war have felt emboldened both by success and by ideology to invade Thailand? Malaysia? Would leaders there have dared resist communism if America had not tried to support Vietnam? Would revolutionaries around the world have gained more support as people saw how easy it was to join the communist bloc?
Would Saddam Hussein have used oil profits from both Kuwait and Iraq to build a larger military to subdue Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon and with enough money even Iran?
In international events we don't get to do controlled experiments. We don't get to more than one option on Vietnam. Some say we shouldn't have gotten involved. Some say the mistake was failing to support the South Vietnam government we had put in place after the war. But neither option can be proven to be correct because neither option was ever tried or will ever be tried.