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Friday, April 11, 2008
Fred Schwarz on Baseball & Conservatives on National Review Online
It’s time for all you closet conservatives to open the door and come out into the light.
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If gays were allowed to marry, people would want to marry more than one person and corporations and puppies and silverfishes and staplers and an inanimate carbon rod because I'm too ####### stupid to tell the different between a relationship between two people and a person and a whole bunch of people or a person and an inanimate object.
Translation: Some of his best friends are gay guys, he just wouldn't want one to marry his daughter.
The question was "Why?"
Ok, you've just failed parenting 101. You should have your kids taken away. A right to happiness and a constitutional right to "obtain happiness" are not remotely similar.
I would like to respectful attack your dignified argument by reminding you that it's idiotic.
Nice.
It's beyond comical that the same people who see this great connection between Obama and a pastor whose opinions he's repeatedly repudiated, simultaneously see little connection between McCain and a President...
"Being on the same side of the aisle" is not a "connection."
Of course here's the rest of what you just reduced to "being on the same side of the aisle":
It's beyond comical that the same people who see this great connection between Obama and a pastor whose opinions he's repeatedly repudiated, simultaneously see little connection between McCain and a President...
---whose economic policies he's vowed to continue,
---whose type of judges he's vowed to keep appointing,
---and whose war he's vowed to "win."
Funny you should omit the specifics of my last post before trying to "refute" only the general statement.
Some might think that this omission was intentional, and it's true that if you were a horse, your owner would have named you "Duckin' David," since you've never met any uncomfortable fact that you couldn't duck or dodge.
Since I'm not quite that harsh, I'll just chalk it up to your advanced age. But watch out for those ankles---your late colleague Eight Belles might tell you something about that.
Here's CNN: New York TimesWashington PostNBCCBSABC:There are some stories that draw on that initial AP lead, and paint Obama as playing defense - though NBC's headline focuses attention away from the defense. The other stories have focused much more on the substance of Obama's attacks on the Bush/McCain foreign policy.
A note on wording: I'm using the phrase "Bush/McCain foreign policy" because it's an excellent descriptive term - McCain has proposed quite clearly that he will follow Bush's current and desired strategies in foreign policy. The idea that sharing the same principles and goals in foreign policy doesn't count as a "connection" is completely baffling to me.
Instead, we have "Republicans Go to War With Obama Over Foreign Policy Views", and further down the page, the only Obama-centered story is "Barack Obama — One of the Nation’s 25 'Fittest Guys'".
If Fox isn't running with it, I'm guessing it can't be good news for the Republicans.
"Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it."
----G. Costanza
"It's not a connection unless I admit it is"
----D. Nieporent
I consider myself one of those "so-called progressives" that Dan Symborski puts in quotes. I find the policies of libertarians to almost uniformly be terrible ideas.
However, I find myself to be aghast when reading the comments to this post, not at the libertarians, but at the people who, like me, believe that morality and justice sometimes have to come before the abstract notion of liberty. I disagree with almost everything David Nieporent has said (I'm assuming he's DMN?), but the replies to him seem to me to be completely out of proportion to his obviously sarcastic and curt manner. It disappoints me to see some of you, who have written posts that I've read for years and enjoyed, to act like the 6th-graders I teach, casually hurling insult after insult at the kid who is different, while chatting amongst yourselves about how cool you are and how uncool the other kid is, high-fives all around.
I hope that when the neo-conservatives finally go down in flames in November and we take the White House back, that we don't display the same arrogance of power and intolerance for those with different ideological standing that the Republicans in Congress and the big chair have displayed, because we'll rightfully get thrown out of power by the American people as quickly as we got back into it. And it worries me when a group of educated, reasonable Democrats, as most of you seem to be, get so flustered by a handful of people who simply look at the world a different way. I hope none of you are in Washington in November; I'm more interested in electing people who will intelligently balance economic justice, social justice, and liberty than in simply replacing a group of self-righteous ######## with another group of self-righteous ########.
My stance is that if you're going to truncate my last name from 10 letters to 3 or 4 letters, to at least get those 3 or 4 letters right!
I teach high school, and completely admire your post. However, are you telling me that you wouldn't high-five a kid who came up with the IDEA barb?
OK, now you're off your rocker here, David.
If the people building the ramps weren't being compensated, then I would agree with you. But they are being compensated.
Doesn't your supervisor tell you you have to complete certain goals while you're on the job? Is that slavery, him telling you you have to finish the project he just gave you?
Really, David, I understand the concept that having to build a wheelchair ramp places an economic burden on business owners. But that isn't even remotely related to slavery. It's called "the cost of doing business".
Matt:You're misinterpreting that statement of mine. I'm not at all saying that Obama can't or shouldn't try to link Bush and McCain on foreign policy. (The question of whether it's substantively useful depends on whether people oppose Bush's foreign policy because they think it's immoral or because they think it's ineffective. McCain supports the "principles and goals," but he wanted to execute differently.) The use of the "connection" word there is in response Andy's desperate attempt to deflect attention from the Jeremiah Wright issue -- which nobody was talking about when he brought it up -- by throwing around all sorts of red herrings. If you want to call that a political connection, that's fine.
Andy:Andy, you're the one ducking and dodging. You tried to analogize the relationship between Bush and McCain to the relationship between Obama and Wright. Is that relationship at all similar? No. Do the "specifics" you cited, which I summarized appropriately, make their relationships at all similar? No. Those specifics are about Bush and McCain sharing broadly similar policy positions. You've always been desperately attempting to change the Wright-Obama discussion to one about policies, but since we conclusively proved numerous threads ago that this was solely your red herring, there's no point in discussing it now. The complaint about Wright-Obama was not that they shared the same views. The complaint about McCain-Bush is not that they're friends. So the two situations are entirely different.
It is legitimate (as I say to Matt) to argue that McCain and Bush share similar policy positions. Just as it's legitimate to argue that Obama is dangerously naive. It's not legitimate to argue that McCain and Bush are close friends. (Or, at least, it's certainly not legitimate to argue that they're friends based on the fact that they share similar policy positions, which is what you were trying to do.)
That McCain at one point in time made some criticisms of Bush seems like an "I was against Bush's foreign policy before I was for it" argument. He's for it now, and for it into the future. That's what matters in an election.
Politics is a tough business but Bush has damaged the Republican party worse than Jimmy Carter did the Democratic one back in the late seventies. McCain needs to amputate Bush from himself, cauterize the wound as best he can, and hope the Republican base can rally enough support in their traditional strongholds to eek out a victory.
So, slavery would have been OK if they were only slaves for 4 months out of 12? Because last I checked, David's labors aren't an instance of labor, but a perpetual legal state of being the property of the government 4 months out of 12.
Do you live like a Tibetan monk? If not, you're a hypocritical #######.
Just to be clear, you are making an equivalency between paying ~ 1/3 of income in taxes and being a slave, correct?
Sure. And business owners chose to open the businesses they opened. And as businesses that fail to abide by the regs will suffer fines and closings, if you don't do what your supervisor tells you to do, you'll be fired.
Terrible analogy, David.
Theft of $1.00 and theft of $10,000 are both theft. Nobody is saying that the latter isn't worse than the former. But they're both wrong, and different only in degree.
Trust me, I'm just as offended by your notion that I owe you something merely because I was born.
I am not sure about what you said about the war; I think a lot of people who would not be into Obama otherwise are pretty opposed to it and might be swayed towards him due to it, but we will see.
But I agree, albeit for very different kinds of reasons, that this will be hard to predict in some ways, and I also think that the VP choices on both sides will be more of a factor this time than they normally are.
Stick around for awhile. This isn't really personal at all. In fact some of the most unlikely people you'd imagine (from reading all this) are going to a ballgame together in two weeks. I post here myself because the political forums I've run into on mainstream websites are a hundred times more vituperative (if they're unedited) or way more bland (if they're edited) than this. Mr. Furtado seems to know how to strike the right sort of balance, and at least one of us here appreciates that.
And BTW I've never once referred to anyone here as a "self-righteous #########." I hope you weren't talking about me when you wrote that.
--------------------------------------
Funny you should omit the specifics of my last post before trying to "refute" only the general statement.
Some might think that this omission was intentional, and it's true that if you were a horse, your owner would have named you "Duckin' David," since you've never met any uncomfortable fact that you couldn't duck or dodge.
Andy, you're the one ducking and dodging. You tried to analogize the relationship between Bush and McCain to the relationship between Obama and Wright. Is that relationship at all similar? No. Do the "specifics" you cited, which I summarized appropriately, make their relationships at all similar? No. Those specifics are about Bush and McCain sharing broadly similar policy positions. You've always been desperately attempting to change the Wright-Obama discussion to one about policies, but since we conclusively proved numerous threads ago that this was solely your red herring, there's no point in discussing it now. The complaint about Wright-Obama was not that they shared the same views. The complaint about McCain-Bush is not that they're friends. So the two situations are entirely different.
David, David. For all your Sugar Ray moves, the facts remain that:
1a. Obama has a personal connection to Rev. Wright
1b. Obama's policies are diametrically opposed to Wright's
You've acknowledged this yourself, even as you play down the second part as somehow unimportant. But then....
2a. McCain is running for President under the same Party banner as Bush's; which might be irrelevant (after all, LBJ and Gene McCarthy were both Democrats), other than for the fact that:
2b. McCain has bought into Bush's trickle-down economic policies;
2c. McCain has promised to appoint the same sort of judges and regulatory commissioners as Bush; and
2d. McCain has not only endorsed Bush's current Iraq policy, he has vowed that it will end in "victory."
We'll see whether or not the Republicans are more successful in playing up the relevance of the (former) personal Obama-Wright link than the Democrats are in pointing out the ongoing policy linkage between McCain and Bush. It doesn't appear that the Democrats will win you over on this, but there may be a few others out there who might start paying the "Third Term" suggestion some notice.
It is legitimate (as I say to Matt) to argue that McCain and Bush share similar policy positions. Just as it's legitimate to argue that Obama is dangerously naive.
True and true.
It's not legitimate to argue that McCain and Bush are close friends. (Or, at least, it's certainly not legitimate to argue that they're friends based on the fact that they share similar policy positions, which is what you were trying to do.)
But when did I ever say that McCain and Bush were even friends, let alone "close friends"? In fact, I've always assumed that McCain loathed Bush for what he did to him in the 2000 primaries. I assume that only McCain's Christian spirit prevents him from fantasizing Bush as a permanent resident of Camp Guantanamo.
But that doesn't alter the fact that as of today, McCain and Bush are joined at the hip in the vast majority of their policy preferences. And if you think that McCain's going to be able to run for five and a half more months as some sort of "maverick" Republican, all I can say is: Good luck.
I certainly think that if the economy turns around, McCain has a pretty good shot. This is because he's running as Bush's successor on economic and public policy issues as well as foreign policy issues, and if people like the Bush economy and the Bush domestic programs, they'll be more likely to vote for McCain. I think it's very unlikely that people will want to vote for four more years of Bush because I think it's very unlikely that people will think in November 2008 that they want another four years of the same economy and the same social services.
McCain can turn the race around if he breaks from Bush on one of three issues - war, taxes, health care. He hasn't, and he can't now. He might still win if objective conditions change significantly and people come to want another four years of Bush, but that seems like a very poor bet.
And, yes, I am very confident. I'm certainly going to work hard, and not get "complacent", but I am perfectly willing to stand behind my analysis that given the candidates' basic positions and the objective conditions in America, Barack Obama is highly likely to win the presidency in November. I think calling it a toss-up is simply incorrect at this point - Obama is at least a 2-1 favorite.
Trying for a joke. Probably should have used more letters...swung and missed on that one, sorry.
Dave, I appreciate where you're coming from. The problem isn't that Nieporent so consistently mocks and ridicules every position held by liberals, it's that he does so as if his position had some obvious intellectual weight that the rest of us are missing. So when he mocks disabled rights activist as being "selfish" and advocating a forced labor akin to slavery, I want to know the basic underpinnings of his philosophy. I want him to see that the position he claims comes from nature and is self-evident is actually completely the opposite. I respect where you're coming from, just know that he brings a lot of this on himself when he uses tactic like claiming a deaf person wants the law changed to accommodate them the deaf person, not deaf people as class. This moralizing is a strategy to delegitimate the claims of a disadvantaged group by making them appear as solitary selfish individuals. So yeah, I react strongly to it, because it has consequences...
Kevin, McCain's "100 years" comment is going to make it tough for him to distance himself from Bush.
Do you live like a Tibetan monk?
Brian, I'm not the one claiming absolute dominion to the products of "my" labor. Labor is social; it involves mixing my labor with other peoples'. What part of that mixture one side claims as their own isn't a natural given. I'm claiming that that social process creates a set of mutual obligations beyond the simple formal contract, b/c those parties are almost always never equal, and it is very easy for those in power to set the terms so they take advantage of those without power. David thinks that this is a moot point, because everyone just knows what a fair arrangement is, or that if they don't, too bad for them, this is just the strong/smart (also those skilled in contract negotiation...no setting the rules that best benefit him in play here at all) preying on the weak.
Yes, it's too simplistic an argument and that's why I'm attacking it.
The question is indeed why the difference it relevant.
Why not polygamy is also a fair question, but completely irrelevant to the question of "Why not a man and a woman?" or "Why not a woman and a woman or a man and a man?"
The default right now is that we have marriage as a recognized state. If you don't think the government should get involved or facilitate that, make your argument. You might sway me--I'm not too zealously behind the concept.
If you think that there should be no limits at all--carbon rods and the like, then make that argument.
It's disingenuous to use polygamy as an argument against same-sex marriage unless you are arguing that they are identical.
You can't just use it to say, "That's weird and this is weird so let's not do either!"
To be honest, I have no idea what you are trying to argue here, but the above argument was clearly made by the person I was responding to, and that's why I responded.
If you need some positive supports for a wider definition of marriage, it's easy--just look at any of the arguments for the current existence of marriage: shared financial goals, strong family unit, blah blah blah.
(Saying that changing his views on the war would help him makes superficial sense, in that the war is unpopular, but somehow I think it's far too late. That would be a Kerryesqe supporting-the-war-before opposing-it thing. McCain has spent years making an aggressive foreign policy one of his key selling points. There is no possible way he could convince people he was sincere in changing his position, and even if he did (a) this would alienate those who agreed with his aggressive views, and (b) would simply call into question his judgment for everyone else. Even if you thought he was sincere, you'd say, "Why would I want the guy who just figured out now that the war was wrong when I could have the guy who thought it was wrong all along?")
As for health care, I can see the point, but I think liberals overestimate how popular this is. McCain can't win by being a Democrat. On health care, he needs to convince people that things aren't as bad as liberals pretend -- not that hard, since things aren't as bad as liberals pretend -- and that liberal proposals are scary -- not that hard, since liberal proposals are scary. He'll need to make it sound like he has proposals, because politics are biased in favor of politicians who say that they'll do something.
McCain, IMO, wins by (a) painting Obama as extremely liberal, (b) repeating the word "taxes" many many many times, (c) shaming his admirers in the media into stopping scaring people on the economy (such as by preemptively reporting nonexistent recessions), (d) distancing himself from Bush strongly on trivial but highly symbolic things like Guantanamo, and (e) distancing himself from Bush as much as possible on the war by conceding that Bush screwed it very badly but arguing that the war itself is still right.
But whether he can actually win will depend on the economy itself, I think. (Obviously the most visible thing would be for the price of gas to drop.)
Just to be clear, you are making an equivalency between paying ~ 1/3 of income in taxes and being a slave, correct?
Difference of degree, not form. For 4 months of the year, I have all the sum of my labors taken away from me. It may not be slavery of the type of slavery that we had in America, but it's certainly similar to the concept of serfdom. I "agree" to do my feudal service and my feudal superior "agrees" to defend me from the French.
That we're villeins instead of slaves is hardly a distinction.
I think you may be misreading him, as the issue of taxes doesn't have to be a straight raise or drop issue. As an example, let's say McCain comes out and states that taxes for the rich are too low, and offers to introduce legislation to raise them, while simultaneously offering to lower them for the middle and lower classes - to no net overall change in the revenue generated. That would be a break from Bush's policy which would likely be popular and wouldn't require the across the board increase which you've interpreted in Andy's comment.
Edited to add: Whether or not it would be fair is another thing which I'm choosing not to address.
I mean, I see your point? But really? It's hardly a distinction? Really?
Wow.
Personally, I think you should be allowed to take your property and leave the union if you want as long as you agree to pay exorbitant rates to use any civic services. But to say that it's similar in form to being not allowed to decide where you live or who you love or what job you choose to live out your serfdom under seems patently ridiculous.
He's backpedaling on that now, Matt. There was an article in the Wash Post yesterday that he's now looking to get out by 2013.
Or, in other words, just in time for the next election.
And if the people still want the government to continue to confer benefits to associations of people rather than merely to individuals, then partnerships of any number of people (2, 3, 100, whatever, so long as each partner is considered "a consenting adult") may be recognized for legal/tax/whatever purposes if, in replacing "marriage" with "partnership," it feels it still wants to confer those benefits and the people want to allow it to do so.
So who gets pissed off by such a proposition? Who thinks it's (more or less) the direction to head? (One need not answer simply for oneself. I can imagine there are plenty of people who would like some bits of the above but not others. About the only group that leaps to mind as hating every bit of the above are the ones who believe that the government is responsible for maintaining a moral code that does not allow for certain sorts of "partnerships" between consenting adults. Who else?)
Let the "The senile old man is a flip-flopper" comments begin.
By your "logic" -- and by "logic" I mean "word games" -- Mildred Loving had a choice because the state of Virginia said, "If you leave the state we won't send you to jail," so therefore she wasn't being forced. I don't know what all those civil rights advocates were complaining about; if she wanted to marry a white person, she had the choice to go marry him somewhere else.Serfdom may be a less virulent form of slavery, but it's still slavery. Yes, I can use my money rather than my personal labor to perform the work, but my money is my labor -- converted into a different form, yes, but so what? Taking the sweater knitted with my yarn is no different than taking my yarn. Telling me that I can buy a different sweater and give that to you is not mitigating. Telling me that if a friend is willing to give me a sweater to give to you is not mitigating.
The state of nature is a lot less mythologized than the veil of ignorance, and we certainly are equal in that state.No, it's because all your questions are completely misplaced, because they're based on the mistaken underlying assumption that words are the issue. You think that if someone "defines" property (or equality or liberty or whatever) differently that it changes what property is; as Orwell said, there are some ideas so absurd that only an "intellectual" could believe them. So, basically, "I know you are, but what am I?" (Which trumps "pwned.")
We're talking about moral equality, not physical or intellectual equality. The latter might be utopian; the former is not.
1) stay the course
2) ???
3) victory!
He has not changed his policy on Iraq one iota, he's simply started talking about how, once wonderful things happen in Iraq via no means that he has ever explained, he will take (some) troops out of combat. He has not changed his basic proposal to stay in Iraq and fight as long as a peaceful, stable democracy has not arisen from the civil war. It's the same perpetual war, but with a spin designed to mislead both the media and the American people.
Neither statement contradicts the other, and the second does not constitute "backpedaling." There is a perfectly legitimate line of attack on McCain's 2013 statement: it's unrealistic. There's no reason to believe it will happen that way. It doesn't offer a new plan, just a continuation of the existing plan which isn't working, and it's based solely on wishful thinking. (I'm not discussing whether this line of attack is correct; I'm saying it's legitimate, and addresses McCain's actual statements rather than words out of context.)
Right in post 4773, where you said, "It's beyond comical that the same people who see this great connection between Obama and a pastor whose opinions he's repeatedly repudiated, simultaneously see little connection between McCain and a President...."* In other words, you analogized the relationship between Obama and his pastor to the relationship between McCain and Bush; if Bush-McCain are not friends, then your statement I just quoted makes no sense, because it's not "comical" to see a difference between a friendship and merely sharing the same policy views without being friends.
David, once again you omit the key words from that post of mine, which continues nonstop from the ones you quoted above:
Where on Earth do you see any references here to any kind of personal relationship, let alone friendship, let alone "close" friendship? These are solely references to POLICY similarities, and I've never once said that they were anything beyond that, other than in your vivid imagination. There are plenty of politicians whose policy views are even more closely matched than McCain's and Bush's, and yet who positively loathe each other. Just as there are politicians with close personal friendships who never agree on any political issue.
It's truly amazing the way you seem to exude such such utter self-confidence in your ideas, and yet repeatedly find it necessary to remove words from my posts, stripping them out of context, in order to put thoughts in my mind which I've never once actually expressed. It's not exactly the mark of someone whose confidence in his case is more than skin deep.
If you agree that there's no personal relationship between Bush and McCain, then why is it 'comical' -- your word -- to treat the Obama-Wright relationship differently than the Bush-McCain non-relationship?
No one is threatening you send you to jail. They're threatening to not let you do business in their community if you don't adhere to their standards. Again, we can debate about the reasonableness of those standards. And specific to this situation, ADA works best when it doesn't have to be invoked- when people make reasonable accommodations without state intervention. Personally, the times we've used it as a club have been when someone's been willfully unaccommodating- when they haven't tried to meet us halfway with our needs, and basically said we'd rather not have handicapped people in here. Most of the time it isn't an issue- if people have made a good-faith effort at providing access, then there's no reason to make an issue. But when my sister wasn't able to get to class at a private school because they haven't serviced the elevator in a year, that is a violation of a right to access that we've fought for, and as the weaker party in the situation (yes David, power exists- you can't will it out of the equation), it is good to be able to point to the ADA for some leverage.
but my money is my labor -- converted into a different form, yes, but so what? Taking the sweater knitted with my yarn is no different than taking my yarn.
Where did the yarn come from? Did your slaves make it for you? Did workers who you've coerced into surrendering more than their fair share of the product make it? Again, when you stop asking questions where it's convenient for you, your argument makes total sense. Pushed even a little bit, if falls. Even in the most privative system, labor is still social. And especially with our restaurant owner, it isn't just his labor. It's the labor of everyone who works there that produces value for him, and the labor of all those that produce the ingredients that go into the food he assembles. Your labor only attains this abstract value through its circulation; that value is not naturally inherent in it. So once it's social, we've got a society that can mobilize different conceptions of worth, and standards of value that trump what you've asserted to be the only value that must be universally respected.
and we certainly are equal in that state.
Under what definition of equality? You might assume these definitions are self-evident, but they're not.
You think that if someone "defines" property (or equality or liberty or whatever) differently that it changes what property is
Because it does. Because property isn't whatever you say it is. This is what you refuse to engage. It does not come from nowhere. A contractual definition of property is one of a competing set of definitions. There are many different ways of conceiving property; different society have drawn these boundaries differently, so unless you're dealing with a totally homogenously educated society, the word is absolutely the issue because there will be different ways of defining it, all vying for dominance. If you think your definition of property is hard-wired into the genes of all humans, that's one thing. If not, it has to come from somewhere. You can quote Orwell all you want, but you've done nothing to address the substance of this claim other than to dismiss it. Pluralism isn't going away anytime soon, no matter how hard you will it to. You can insist that your definitions are the only viable ones, but every shred of cross-cultural research suggests otherwise. Different cultures define these things differently, so you've got to justify why your definition is better than theirs, or else you're going to fight a lot of wars b/c you refuse to at least engage with their competing value systems that don't acknowledge your myopic conception of sovereignty. Ask the various Native American tribes how well their conception of "private property" squared with the European one, and how conflicts over those conceptions were resolved. So pwned. Still.
We're talking about moral equality, not physical or intellectual equality. The latter might be utopian; the former is not.
I have no idea what that means.
Well, I never said he did either so why don't you polish your monocle and read what I did say?
Even if the 100 years quote has been taken out of context, he is still advocating an extended stay until things stabilize and we leave a viable democracy behind (in other words, he likes to nation-build based on western values).
That is not a viable plan, and even just remaining until 2013 will needlessly waste more American lives.
The sooner we get out of there and start to use the resources allocated for that fiasco to instead repair the damage that 8 years of bad and irresponsible leadership has produced, the better.
Where on Earth do you see any references here to any kind of personal relationship, let alone friendship, let alone "close" friendship?
Right here: "connection between Obama and a pastor."
That's funny, but right where? All I'm seeing are references to Bush and McCain, who are joined at the hip on matters of policy.
Obama and Wright indeed have (or had) a close personal "connection," which even you've admitted had no bearing on Obama's policy views. On this we're in total agreement on both counts.
But what's comical is the fact that many people who've twisted themselves into pretzels trying to stretch the Obama-Wright personal connection into something of great political significance, are often the same people who seem to think that McCain can position himself as some sort of a "maverick" Republican, and be able to somehow separate himself from Bush, in spite of being so supportive of most all of his major policies.
To summarize all this once again:
The Wright-Obama connection is (or was) real, but it is (or was) personal and not political.
The Bush-McCain connection is real, but it's purely political. It's never been personal.
And we'll see which one of those connections matters more to independent voters in the general election.
Let's all get along, please, even though we may disagree.
EDIT: Incidentally the adverts are now getting more and more bizarre. I now have a link to an "Indian Matrimonial Website," which proclaims the following endorsement on its front page:I'm scared.
Thanks, Kev, for leading me to the Nieporent Family Album.
As someone who is truly not sure where my vote will be placed in the presidential election, both of these bother me. Obama Called his pastor a mentor, so is his separating himself from his pastor strictly political and he actually shares these beliefs? I don't know but that is why I am hesitant.
McCain spent a lot of time criticizing Bush and now seems to want to ride the conservative Christian vote to the white house. Again not sure who the real McCain is either.
Biscuit, if you'll check Obama's entire public record, you'll see that nothing he's ever said or done corresponds in any way with Rev. Wright's rantings. I'm not just talking about in the past few months, I'm talking about that whole time he was attending Wright's church. There is absolutely no evidence in Obama's record that indicates that Wright's extremist views influenced Obama's thinking one iota. It's purely the sort of conjecture that his two major rivals (or their surrogates) have been throwing out there to try to scare people who don't want to take the time or effort to learn the actual truth. They've fired barrel after barrel of innuendo, but with nothing but blanks for bullets.
I'm not sure about how literally to take this. I do certainly believe that the notion of control of one's environment is hard-wired into the genes of practically all living creatures, not just humans, and property rights are an essential component of control of one's environment. The hard-wired definition of property is probably something as basic as "something which exists in limited quantity which I choose to control and for which I am able to prevent another being from utilizing as a resource."
There's also a hard-wired condition in certain creatures to form some sort of ordered society. I don't think this changes the definition. Wolves establish a hierarchy so that they are not constantly battling each other for control. It's hard enough to survive without constantly needing to engage in contests against others in your community. Humans, with the capacity to reason, form more complicated social networks, but for the same reason. The rules of a given society govern the when and where and how a member should/may exert control, but fundamentally, every society acknowledges pretty much the same basic definition.
Because a minister can be a mentor in many ways that have absolutely nothing to do with politics. Rev. Wright's work does consist of more than his YouTube appearances and political rantings. And on many occasions he's worked with whites with absolutely no problems.
It comes down to the simple question of whether or not you trust Barack Obama not to be some sort of a stealth extremist more than you trust John McCain not to follow George Bush's policies in most important aspects---which he's repeatedly promised to do. The Republicans will be playing on those very (unfounded) fears for the next five and a half months to try to convince you of just the opposite. It's about all they've got.
I can't see how it can be stated any more plainly than that. Of course if George Bush's policies don't bother you, then McCain would indeed be your logical choice.
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Alougoodbye, as I understand it (and this goes for anything I say hereon -- you or others should feel free to correct what may be my myriad misimpressions), you do not see a way of defining "marriage" between two people of the same sex which does not drastically alter the definition of marriage. The argument that "marriage is defined to be between a man and a woman" is circular. If we define it otherwise, then there would be no 'problem.' The question (as I see it) is WHY should we define it that way. "Because that's how it always has been" is one I find unconvincing -- many things have been bad for many years and have still been changed. This may or may not be one of them, but if an idea has no merit other than tradition, I'm hesitant to suggest it should continue if there are reasonable arguments against it. What reason is there to continue to define marriage as being between a man and a woman?
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Anyone in particular, why shouldn't polygamy be allowed (so long as all participants are considered "consenting adults" for whatever that means to you. For that matter, why shouldn't "incest" (again, "consenting adults" is assumed here) be allowed?
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formerly_dp: I've read your exchanges with David but have gotten lost. I mean no offense to you or to anyone "differently abled," but I have questions about your position.
Am I correct in stating that you believe that a (private) business owner (let's say, it's a restaurant) has an obligation to the community to provide reasonable access into his restaurant and his restrooms? Reasonable access would include (but not necessarily be limited to) a wheelchair ramp, room within the restaurant for a wheelchair-occupying person to move, and a bathroom that a wheelchair-occupying person can reasonably be expected to be able to use, yes?
Another of your arguments (perhaps related, perhaps tangential) is that not providing access to these things amounts to discrimination against a section of the population who, while not quite as capable of maneuver as a 25-year-old, are still worthy of having their capabilities considered given that they are a nontrivial part of the population and to deny them access to the restuarnat and/or the facilities amounts (in your opinion) to calling them sub-people (or something else similarly derogatory if not quite as outright awful as that), yes?
Specifically, I've seen you use "reasonable" a few times recently. In post 4845 you say "we can debate about the reasonableness of those standards" and "ADA works best when it doesn't have to be invoked- when people make reasonable accommodations without state intervention," for instance. I think David is very specifically debating with you on the reasonableness of the standards imposed on the putative restaurant owner -- if we can debate them, then why is David's position out-and-out wrong? Unless you hold the position (and maybe you do?) that every member of the world community (including the incredibly obese, the incredibly tall, the incredibly short, the incredibly immobile, the boy in the bubble, the man in the iron lung, the man in the iron mask, etc, ad absurdum) should be able to use every aspect of the restaurant's facility, then you yourself are allowing that a line may be drawn beyond which no restaurant owner should be forced to accommodate those on the other side. But if a line may be drawn, who is to determine where it is drawn? It would appear you would suggest "the community" (rather than the owner of the restaurant), but doesn't that invite a tyranny of the majority? Do you want the majority's views to really control who can eat in which restaurant? But if not "the community/the majority," then which smaller group/minority gets to decide what the individual owner has to do? And why that particular group/minority?
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I probably have other questions about other positions/arguments being made here (some of which would go to people arguing the other sides from those being argued above), but those are enough for now. Time to post this and go back to watching movies and getting over being sick. (Please pardon typos -- I'm not going to go back and re-edit this right now).
I suspect Obama meant "mentor" in the sense that Wright was the man who brought Obama to Christ. I do look favorably on the idea of an Obama presidency, so my reading of "mentor" may be bent by that. Here's another possibility: years ago I started talking to a older fellow whom, over time, I came to regard as a father figure and spiritual mentor. He's a great guy, but he is a Democrat, and his thinking on politics is fairly conventional. Since it contributed nothing to what I was able to learn from him, we rarely discussed politics, and I'm certain that when it comes to politics, he and I would agree on almost nothing. Perhaps something like that is true for Obama with regard to Wright.
As to a couple of earlier posts, Nieporent gets a hard time because he so freely gives it. He does seem a little schizy in that regard: I do recall, a couple of months ago, that DMN's posts, for about a week, were smart, to the point, didn't twist his opponents' meanings, and contributed a great deal. I was greatly impressed. This was so uncharacteristic I assumed someone else was using his handle. Then, in too short order, we were subject again to the bombast, the chronic mean-spiritedness, the inability of David to examine any of his basic assumptions, and so on. My experience of him is that while he's obviously intelligent, he's not nearly as intelligent as he thinks he is: It's a combustible combination in anyone, especially so when combined with David's relentless, unthinking, self-righteousness. YMMV, of course.
The power relationships of a family dynamic raise serious issues of the ability to truly consent. That's my only objection, really.
If a line may be drawn, who is to determine where it is drawn? It would appear you would suggest "the community" (rather than the owner of the restaurant), but doesn't that invite a tyranny of the majority? Do you want the majority's views to really control who can eat in which restaurant? But if not "the community/the majority," then which smaller group/minority gets to decide what the individual owner has to do? And why that particular group/minority?
I wish I had written those questions, because of how perfectly they represent why I am a libertarian.
Actually, you were equal in that situation. And it was because you were equal that you couldn't force them to do what you wanted. So instead, you accumulated some power, got some guns and did compel them to do so.
Since the yarn in the analogy is my labor, it came from the sweat of my brow. So that provides the answer to these questions:No. You're the one interested in slaves, to build you ramps you don't want to pay for, not me.No again, and I didn't coerce anyone. If I have workers, I pay them -- not coerce them -- and since they have to agree (because I don't use the power of government), there's no basis for claiming that it's "more than their fair share."...which he buys....which he buys.The only "standard of value" is what a willing buyer and willing seller agree to.
Speaking of "underpants gnomes," we've got just a slight amount of handwaving going on here. "You bought some lettuce from a farmer" ⇒ "You have to build a ramp for someone who wants to eat at your restaurant." There's an awful lot of underpants gnomes in that arrow.
Interesting questions. Polygamy should be allowed or, rather, there should be, assuming consenting adults, no restrictions on polygamy. It's not the government's business who or how many marry, and the fact that some will find it distasteful is simply too bad, and unactionable. Having witnessed group marriages play out (all participants were in their 20s, or older), I can tell you they seem not to work for the same reasons conventional marriages between two people tend not to work. Incest is different, to me, and subject to restrictions, only on the grounds that the children of an incestuous relationship are more likely to be born "differently abled", if you will. Thus, restrictions on incestuous marriages, if any, would have to be on the grounds of protecting the issue of that marriage. I do realize I may have to cede this ground as I don't believe we ought to prohibit would-be parents from having children just because those parents might have a higher than average likelihood of having, say, diabetic children, nor would I prohibit women over 40 from having children on the grounds that those children are more likely than on average to be born with Down's Syndrome.
btw, my general advice is that people who oppose gay marriage should definitely not get married to people of their own sex.
McCain on the other hand has had a ton of political experiance and it seems that in the last 2 or 3 years he is a different person, I don't trust him right now at all.
If it weren't for the good Rev and to a minor extent Mrs. Obama's comments on her pride in the US I would be voting for Obama. While neither is huge I also have 6 months to figure it out.
I actually don't think it is as simple as if I like Bush's decisions then vote for McCain. We are stuck with the decisions that Bush has already made and I think doing the opposite could cause more damage in a lot of cases. We are in Iraq because of Bush, leaving as soon as possible may not be the best choice. We made a mess and just walking away from it would be irresponsible in my estimation. I am curious as to how the next administration is going to clean it up is more important than how quickly we get out.
Managing one relationship that intimate is difficult enough. Add one more person and there's three intimate relationships. Add one more and there are seven. I don't think I could handle that, but I'm not for standing in front of anyone who thinks they can.
But you could just as easily say that about just about every President we've had from FDR on up. The only exceptions would be the "accidental" presidencies of Truman and Ford, who were career politicians with no higher ambitions than Senator and Representative; and to a lesser extent Eisenhower, who was so popular (and the Korean War so unpopular) that he didn't even really need to campaign. Nearly all presidents are insanely driven people; the only differences are how well they manage to conceal it, with degrees of sucess ranging from FDR and Reagan to the Clintons and Nixon.
(Completely off the topic: Just saw one of the best war flicks of my life last night, one which I'm ashamed to say I'd never even heard of: Samuel Fuller's Korean War feature, The Steel Helmet, which was made in 1951, when the war was only a year old. Gene Evans should have walked away with the Oscar for his performance as Sgt. Zack. Easily the best war movie ever made while the war in question was still going on.)
B_p, while we haven't had a long look at Obama on the national stage, we do have a twenty year record of him on the law review, working for firms, as a community organizer, as an author, as a state senator... while I agree, of course, that that's not the same as 20-plus years in the US Senate, it should be indicative of who Obama is. My best guess is that a steath extremist would have taken real pains to avoid an association with a man of Rev. Wright's views. I'd also like more on each candidate's histories: what did McCain's military service actually consist of? What did Obama do, day to day, as a community organizer?
I do agree on this count. He does seem to now be willing to do pretty much whatever it takes to win, almost without regard for priniciple or previous stands. I suspect that once the Democrats do a John Kerry on McCain ("he was against Bush's tax cuts before he was for them..."), he'll be in real trouble. I also believe that his willingness to hire smear artists to run his campaign is an unprincipled and sad portent.
You bet. While it's important to know how we got here, it's important to still do what's right by the Iraqis, if such is possible. My feeling is that since we can't afford to stay much longer, that an orderly withdrawal at least puts the Iraqis on notice that we're leaving, which has to be better for them than the otherwise inevitably chaotic, late retreat. In addition to that I want an extremely liberal immigration policy. If we need to take in two million Iraqi refugees, then that's what we do. My concern with McCain on Iraq is that he seems either not to know, of not be concerned with, the nuances of Iraqi politics. If I'm right about him on this, he can't succeed there. fwiw, I didn't think that ousting Saddam was a bad idea, but I was certain that Bush was not the guy to do it. That's my feeling with McCain. It's possible that staying in Iraq past 2010 is the right thing to do, but since he won't do it correctly (he'll treat it as a conventional us v. them conflict, among other things), staying past 2010 is not a good option.
S/he also wrote: Thanks. I'm not sure that I'd call myself a libertarian, but I certainly find some of their arguments difficult to dismiss. Quakers deal with the "tyranny of the majority" with consensus. (Literally everyone in the community has to agree with any important decision, and if anyone "has a concern," the decision is put off until the concern is addressed. Yes, this means that one person's obstinance can #### everything up for everyone else. Somehow Quakers work around that much of the time -- though not before some irritatingly long discussions take place). I find it interesting that libertarians seem to have the same concern, though they approach the problem in a different (and usually more practical way -- by taking the power away from the group when possible).
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arkitekton wrote: *nods* I've known polyamorous people. I think it makes logical sense to allow it, but they/I recognize that most people aren't able to function healthily in such relationships. Jealousy is too strong in most people. *shrugs*
S/he also wrote: *nods* I considered raising those as putatively reasonable objections to allowing incestuous marriages (between consenting adults), but then it opens the door for way too many abuses (some of which you name) as our scientists become more familiar with the genetic processes that lead to unwanted traits/diseases/etc.. Besides, again, who are we to say that the Downs Syndrome children are "unwanted" by our society? Like I say, many cans of worms appear if we start rationalizing a formal ban on incestuous relationships.
On the other hand, at least some of the other big taboos that are occasionally brought up in these sorts of discussions still don't qualify, namely, bestial and/or necrophiliac ones. "Consenting adults" does open some floodgates, but not all.
That doesn't mean the government should prevent it, but it's the reason polygamy as a societal practice is a problem.
I never knew that about the Quakers, and in a sufficiently small and narrow cultural band, it makes a lot of sense. I'm sure people learn to pick their battles very carefully, in recognition of the system's dependence on cooperation. I don't know that such a thing can work when you're in a large society of people with distinct and disparate values. There needs to be some way to adjudicate conflict when people simply cannot agree to disagree and the decision can't be put off.
In my opinion, the simplest and the fairest solution in these cases is giving neither side the power to dictate what is appropriate for the other, and giving each side the power to dictate what is appropriate for its own. I acknowledge that it is a first principle, but practically every position I hold extends from that principle.
In Poland, this was known as the liberum veto, and led to the disintegration of the country in the late 18th century, as neighboring powers each bought off a member of parliament to veto any legislation deemed harmful to them. All it took was one objection to a proposal to strengthen the fortifications along the border with Prussia to quash the action.
1. Children. A stable, traditional marriage is the best environment for bringing up a child. Yes, some marriages would be bad circumstances for a child and no, not all married couples want children. I do not say that all marriages should have children. I do say though that all children should, as far as possible, be brought up in a stable, loving marriage of one man and one woman. Yes yes I know not everyone agrees on that but that's another 4864-post thread. Government sanction of a form of marriage which by it's nature is incapable of childbirth undermines that necessary connection.
2. Seriousness.Would you get married on a dare, or as a practical joke? Would you, as a lark, try and break the world record for getting married and divorced the most times in a month? I'm guessing no. But OK, you just met a member of the opposite sex at a party and you are infatuated with each other. Would you get married that night? Why not? What about after two dates? I'm guessing still no, but why?
There are very strong cultural taboos against not taking marriage seriously. And they are strong social consequences for disrespecting those taboos. If I got married and divorced as a practical joke, for a start my mother would never forgive me. For a second pretty much everyone I know would think considerably less of me (if possible :) ). I would probably lose friends over it. Thirdly any girl who I did plan on proposing to would be deeply, deeply unimpressed. So even if an individual doesn't personally think marriage iss particularly important, they are still inclined to take it seriously just to fit in with cultural conventions. No, there are no hard-and-fast rules as to exactly how long you should have known someone before you should get married or exactly how confident you need to be that it will last until death do you part, but that does not mean that the taboos are not present. And of course these lines are culturally determined, somewhat arbitrary, and subject to change.
Now suppose that these taboos were to weaken. Suppose it were a widespread practice to get married as soon as you started dating, not taking the long-term nature of marriage seriously at all. Suppose it were a widespread practice to treat the act of getting married as a joke. I'm not really talking about some huge absurd shift - I'm just saying suppose there were a group of people for whom the taboo of seriousness about marriage was fundamentally much weaker. By having many people going around having less serious marriages, it weakens the "seriousness" taboo within society at large. And so marriage becomes a less serious thing for everyone.
And I would suggest that the taboos around marriage are far, far weaker in the homosexual community than in the traditional community, for obvious reasons. Perhaps if gays had always been allowed to get married then the taboos there would be equally strong (although I doubt it, and anyway we have no way of knowing). But the fact is we are where we are in 2008.
The first time I made this argument people said I was being far-fetched. But then I pointed out that this has already happened - with the liberalisation of divorce laws. When divorce laws were liberalised, divorce was thought of as a shocking, shameful thing, that no-one would undergo except in extremes - the reforms were intended to solve the sufferings of a very small percentage of married couples. But by liberalising divorce for those people, it weakened the taboo on divorce for the next group, and so on, and so the taboo on divorce has been hugely weakened, as has the "seriousness" taboo on marriage. Many, many people get married today thinking "Well, if things don't work out we can get divorced." This was unthinkable for my grandparents' generation. Now you may well say that on balance the gains outweigh the losses with respect to divorce liberalisation, and I might well agree. But those losses are very real.
To be continued...
I will say that a lot of the Quakers I've known tended to gather towards one particular side of the political spectrum (think Robert Moses Grove). Communities of very like-minded individuals find it less difficult to decide matters than would groups with more diverse political thinking. (I myself have not had to deal with consensus more than maybe a handful of times -- my parents, who teach in the Quaker school I attended, would be more eloquent on its strengths and weaknesses than I).
*When asked to describe Quakerism to people, I tell people that it can be a very individually-defined religion, one that grew out of what I would describe as an anti-authoritarianism, and that my own description of the religion might be one with which exactly no other Quakers agree. (My description then goes into the very few "first principles" I think are necessary to allow one to describe oneself as a Quaker, and these principles tend to be vaguely enough worded that many religious and a-religious people might well agree with them. It's handy having a "self-definable" religion sometimes :) To be fair though, there are branches of Quakerism which are less anti-authoritarian than what I perceive to be the logical extension of the Hicksites).