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Weak. Very weak.
Another successful Jolly Old St. Nick hijack----Still going strong after nearly three full days! And here's the post that led us down the road to ruin:
You shouldn't be proud of this one, it moved us from the main topic of mocking Dykstra!
Anyway the DMV in Pennsylvania is a breeze and they allow you to do a ton of stuff online or at one of those titling services so at the very least in Penn the DMv (which isn't called DMV) felt very much like a service oriented private company. Wisconsin was a breeze as well and I recall Illinois even way back in its corrupt days of the 90's to be a breeze as well. I just transferred everything to Virgina and that was and still is a pain in the ass. You wait awhile and want a ton more information than any other state I have ever been to and then they try to stick you with a bunch of taxes you have never had to pay before in any other state.
The two governmental things that I have always thought was a huge racket were yealy registration fees and yearly emission tests. Pennsylvania I believe made you get inspected every year and it would cost something like $75 to do and then on top of that you had to register your car which was somewhere around 50 to 75 bucks. A total freakin racket.
"Do you, perhaps, mean me?"
"I certainly do mean you, poor Pinocchio—you who are such a little silly as to believe that gold can be sown in a field just like beans or squash. I, too, believed that once and today I am very sorry for it. Today (but too late!) I have reached the conclusion that, in order to come by money honestly, one must work and know how to earn it with hand or brain."
"I don't know what you are talking about," said the Marionette, who was beginning to tremble with fear.
"2004 and 2005 are the first two years that the USPS showed an actual profit since the Postal Service was reorganized in 1971,” says Strasser. “The prior 32 years all produced deficits."
Now that the economy has been destroyed, we have expensive systems that don't work.
Dan,
The ethical ground of your position is natural right. There is no reason for you to cede the high ground to Morty's metaphysics by grounding your views in yourself. Why play the relativist game? Once the higher grounding of right is lost Morty's conclusion is logically inescapable.
Completely agree with Gaelen here.
Dan, libertarianism falls apart without a reference to at least natural law, and in my opinion recourse to God.
If you take a relativist position, you have no right to yourself, you property, anything. You think you have a right to it, I think I have a right to kill or enslave you. With no absolute moral reference point, whoever has the most force wins.
I'll go back to an old trope, but without a creator of some sort, who established an absolute moral order, nothing can be said to be right or wrong. Hitler's world view is equal to Gandhi's is equal to Mother Teresa's. If Obama woke up today and decided that in his world view it is a good idea to nuke the whole world, b/c it would end all human suffering, how does the relativist refute his position.
Unless humans have an inherent worth and dignity established by something absolute(IMHO the only thing that fills the role adequately is God, but some may differ) than slaughtering or enslaving humans is no different than raising pigs for the slaughter or using oxen as draft animals. Which is why pretty much all the non-Judeo-Christian religions and societies have endorsed slavery. Hell, Islam is still OK with slavery.
Who cares about "very rich". Millions of women who grew up in poverty go on to become middle class and upper class, isn't that more important?
College students today are about 60% female, and this is even higher at the community and state schools where most of the poor are likely to gravitate. For the last 20 years poor females are doing a much better job of working their way out of poverty than males.
so much for random
BBC, as a married woman with children, you already did the most important thing you could do to keep yourself and your kids out of poverty (and your kids out of all sorts of other trouble), you got married. The poverty rate among married couples is shockingly low. Add in what you said about not abusing drugs or alcohol, throw in finishing school, and your husband being willing to work hard to support his family, and you've got a whole ton of stuff that you actively choose to do to improve your lot in life.
My vision for a "just society" is that all the people who make all those major correct choices should be able to have a decent life. So, I'm much more interested in how to restore good blue collar jobs in this country, which probably involves higher tariffs, tax subsidies for manufacturing and other industries that employ blue collar workers, sharply curtailed immigration (mostly illegal) of low skilled workers, etc.
Surely the interpretation of that absolute moral order is just as completely open to relativism, though. I mean, if you and I both agree that a creator of some sort established an absolute moral order, it's a completely meaningless assertion unless we can agree what that absolute moral order actually comprises. Otherwise it's simply shorthand for 'the way things are' viewed through our individual filters.
As a cursory glance at society tells us, expecting any 'absolute moral order' to be clearly and unambiguously specified through texts, oral tradition, or great big beard appearing in the sky is just not realistic.
In this analogy, 'God' is standing in for 'the universe'; 'God' is not standing in for 'the rules'.
Correct. That's one of the reasons we have religion. I'm Catholic, so my moral order is pretty fixed. Through most of our history, this country subscribed to a Christian view of the moral order, and until the mid-20th century, pretty much all Christians and Jews agreed on the basics of personal morality. That has broken down in the past 60 years, as has the Christian consensus.
I'm guessing that what's credible to me is not credible to you. I'm relying on the teachings of Christ, the Scriptures, and a 2000 years tradition of a consistent teaching on morality. If you're not a Christian, that's probably not persuasive to you.
If you take the Thomist/Aristotelean view, all that can be arrived at through reason, but most realtivists would reject that too.
Slavery seems like the obvious elephant in the room with this statement, though - Christians all over both America and Western Europe pretty clearly did not agree on what a 'Christian view of the moral order' was. Surely any moral order needs to be utterly unambiguous on such a subject!
Religion is pretty much infinitely subdivisible, and hence I'm not sure you can really refer to any one strand as a coherent 'moral order', no matter how clearly defined your holy text appears to any one branch. At least not while critiscising a relativist position . . .
In any case, I'm pretty unclear that democracy is any part of a 'Christian moral order', nor capitalism for that matter, based on the parts of the Bible I've been introduced to. If one were to read the New Testament, surely one would infer from that a monarchy, no?
Oh, and also: Couldn't this answer just as easily have been:
In either words, whoever has the weapons makes the rules and if you happen to be a black or a Jew or an atheist in the wrong time or place, well, sucks to be you, but you didn't really have any rights anyway, as your society didn't grant them to you, so FOAD.
As a summary of human history, that's pretty accurate - you only have the rights that are granted to you and enforced by the society that you live in, as based upon that society's notion of what is right, and that which any society considers to be right may change with both time and place.
That's not a comment on whether that's good, proper, or fair, but only a comment that what's good, proper, and fair is also defined and re-defined by the society in which one lives.
Religion is pretty much infinitely subdivisible, and hence I'm not sure you can really refer to any one strand as a coherent 'moral order', no matter how clearly defined your holy text appears to any one branch. At least not while critiscising a relativist position . . .
In any case, I'm pretty unclear that democracy is any part of a 'Christian moral order', nor capitalism for that matter, based on the parts of the Bible I've been introduced to. If one were to read the New Testament, surely one would infer from that a monarchy, no?
I can only speak for Catholicism (that's all I've ever studied), but the Catholic Church condemned chattel slavery from the beginning. In the Roman days, it was highly controversial that the Church baptized slaves. In the 15th century, Popes and Bishops condemned the enslavement of the American Indians, and the African slave trade. Not to say that all Catholics listened, but the Church's position was clear.
You are correct that democracy and capitalism are not necessary parts of the Christian order. Private property is a necessary part (Thou shalt not steal) and socialism is condemned. But Catholic social theory is not pro-unfettered laissez faire capitalism. The most prevalent theory is Distributism, which favors small units of productions and pushing economic power down to the individal/family/small firm level. Distributism would be anti-monopoly, anti-large/multinational corporation, anti-large union, etc. It is pro-"mom and pop" enterprise, for want of a better word, where business is intimately tied to its community, and has reciprocal responsibilities and personal/social ties to its employees, suppliers and customers.
Likewise, democracy is one permissible form of government, as is monarchy, aristocracy, etc. What the Church cares about is the respect of individuals and their innate rights and dignity. Recent thought is that democracy is most likely to protect those rights.
Of course, the Church, and I'm pretty sure all of us, would much prefer a Catholic Monarchy (think Austro-Hungarian Empire circa 1900) to a Fundamentalist Muslim democracy that enshrined Sharia law. Democracy and Capitalism are only tools, not ends in themselves.
That's not a comment on whether that's good, proper, or fair, but only a comment that what's good, proper, and fair is also defined and re-defined by the society in which one lives.
That ignores the epochal changes wrought by religious and intellectual revolutions. Christianity, and the "Enlightenment", to cite just two examples, changed the world through ideas far more than any use of force.
This is correct. All that matters, and all that has ever mattered, is power. Fortunately, there are many kinds of power, and the form it takes doesn't matter nearly as much as we may think. One of the strongest powers is belief, and that's why I stand with the libertarians on the concept of self ownership. Despite the best efforts of the Treders and Andys of the world, most people still believe that humans have a right to not be slaves, and that belief has had great power in shaping our world for the better.
I cannot speak on behalf of any Christian order, but I'm pretty sure I'm right in that many, many prominent Christians supported slavery as the 'natural order' of things, at least in the US. In which case it's very hard to argue that there is a 'Christian moral order' at work that is consistent and clear. Catholicism may or may not be clear on this issue - I'll trust you on this - but since:
a) You quite rightly didn't argue that there was a 'Catholic moral order' that dominanted US society, since slavery was legal for so long, and
b) I think I've demonstrated sufficiently that any 'Christian' moral order was riven by a fundamental difference of opinion over slavery
my feeling is that your earlier statement of
simply isn't correct. There may have been a dominant affiliation to Christianity, but if so that unit of identification ('Christian') is so vague or divided in terms of 'moral order' as to be nearly useless in identifying a philosophy that can be used to combat relativism. No? Americans' Christian moral underpinnings were clearly so different from each other's in this case as to be nearly useless as an aggregate term.
I might also go on about works versus faith, the place of women in society, contraception, prohibition, etc., but of course I don't need to. If religion/faith were unambiguous ways of avoiding relativist interpretations of morality, surely they would have to be unified in interpretation of their source material, and I can't see how they are to a useful extent.
Do you not have 'recorded delivery' in the States? Works pretty well in the UK.
I do. I've had much better luck using them and one of their registered services than I have had with most of the private entities available. DHL is particularly comical in their ability to both be late and lose things.
Of course, we do deal with different postal agencies.
By "personal morality", I was referring to personal behavior, i.e. 10 commandments stuff. Christianity was largely uniform on these sorts of things, adultery, divorce, theft, etc., until the mid-20th century.
On broader societal issues, you are correct in that there is more disagreement. Part of this issue is that most Protestant groups don't have any central authority on doctrinal matters. So, the Presbyterians, for example, never had a corporate view on anything not strictly biblical. Nowadays, even the consensus on Biblical things has broken down among many Christian groups.
I make no claim that religion is a foolproof way to avoid relativism, just that it is a necessary attempt. Without some moral absolutes, no social order is defesnible or possible, except through coersion.
It's like the old joke: "But enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think about me?"
but if you want to guarantee that your item gets there, you don't use the post office, do you? I don't.
I do.
People still use DHL?
Not voluntarily. I used to have to deal with them because both the company I worked for, and many of that company's suppliers, used DHL. It was always fun - they'd give you an estimated date of delivery, and then half the stuff would show up a couple days late, and the other half would only show up once you called to ask where the hell it was.
And then you'd get to see just how badly they'd managed to damage that other half.
In my experience, Fed Ex is quite good at what they do, but no more reliable than the Canadian Post Office, while being 5 times as expensive. Their only advantage is international speed, and I'm very rarely in the situation where I really need a package or letter delivered overseas overnight.
We do, and they're very reliable for actually getting stuff there. The USPS is not as reliable for getting stuff there by a certain time or day though, so if your package needs to get there early tomorrow morning you're better off sending it UPS or FedEx.
In other news, who would have guessed that all the Tea Partiers in Washington to protest excess taxes and government programs they don't like would get mad because government didn't do enough for them while they were there?
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/09/16/tea-party-protesters-protest-dc-metro-service/
UPS and FedEx are great for businesses, and I used to use them in my book shop, but for an individual they're usually both more expensive and time consuming. But between the subsidized Post Office that serves everyone, and the private delivery companies that cater to businesses and individuals who don't factor in price, you've got a pretty good mix. Doing away with either of these models would be a disaster.
One of the hazards of sola scriptura ...
Okay, I see your point. Still, wouldn't owning a slave be a matter of personal morality? I mean, I have no problem interpreting slavery as a violation of one or more of the 10 commandments, but apparently thousands upon thousand of Christians didn't, at least in the South. Domestic violence? Child labor? All these things seem as much personal as societal, in that Christians were doing them as much as opining on them. (As was everyone else, of course.)
Surely a moral order is societal as well as personal, too? Christian abolitionists were notably vehement in wanting to end slavery, but presumably that would be a societal impulse more than personal if they themselves didn't own slaves? I'm not sure you can draw a dividing line.
I'm by no means trying to pick holes in your faith, of course (as if I could; it's faith) - I just think this idea of set of handed-down moral laws from a deity, codified by religion and tradition, is no less relativist - and probably actually more so - than those natural laws that philosophers attempt to arrive at by logical means.
No, I'm not. I won't be living here much longer so it won't affect me after I move to an urban area. I was pointing out that there are millions of people in this country who live in rural areas who won't have adequate or affordable service without the USPS, and using myself as an example. There are many people in the western states who are far more extreme examples, I could have just as easily used them. But screw em all, they should move to cities if they can't afford an extra $20 or $30 a month for mail service.
No, I'm not. I won't be living here much longer so it won't affect me after I move to an urban area. I was pointing out that there are millions of people in this country who live in rural areas who won't have adequate or affordable service without the USPS, and using myself as an example. There are many people in the western states who are far more extreme examples, I could have just as easily used them. But screw em all, they should move to cities if they can't afford an extra $20 or $30 a month for mail service.
Nieporentism in a nutshell, through the eyes of his late idol.
Judging by the privatized transportation services I experience in the UK, this is a very, very ambitious hope. Privatized bus monopolies have arisen in most major cities, London Underground services are suspended almost every weekend thanks to privately-financed maintenace, and as for the trains . . .
I know your philosophy states that privitization must by definition make services more responsive to customer needs, but my experience, at least in major cities, runs so totally contrary to that as to make that statement appear, well, funny. Public transport is almost always a de-facto monopoly even if it isn't a legal one in industrialized nations, due to space constraints if nothing else. Introducing further privitization is almost always a choice between chronic underinvestment in order to pad the near-term bottom line at the expense of long-term support (all our shareholders will be dead in 50 years anyway!), or massive public subsidies in order to force the owner to restrain fare increases and, well, invest. Followed by the mutual blame game when services are suspended and trains crash.
Concur.
I agree with David.
I think it was criminal that the establishment of DC Metro abolished taxis and prohibited one from driving their own vehicle... or walking.... or riding a bike... or chartering a private bus company...
Such tyranny must not stand!
Concur.
The software company I worked for used USPS to ship about 25-50 items a day for about 3 years (until most everything went to download) and I recall about two packages getting lost. (I was the one who was responsible for the shipping.)
You're also leaving out the long, proud history of anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic bigotry and codified discrimination in this country during most of the supposed period of values "consensus."
When I had a store I used UPS almost exclusively, and it was great. Since then, I've used the Post Office to ship hundreds of posters and order well over a hundred books from Amazon and abebooks, and nothing has ever been lost or damaged. And UPS would have been much more expensive. The bottom line is that they're both very reliable, and your packages are much safer with either of them than you are driving home after a frat party.
The one problem I've ever had is in ordering oversize poster paper, which is sent via UPS and shows up damaged about every fourth or fifth time. But EVERY time, the fault was with the packaging and not UPS. Fortunately the company replaced it every time and right away.
Having services provided by private companies is no panacea. It is not being private that makes the companies provide better service, it is competition. Once you remove the competitive aspect, private companies provide no better or worse service. Natural monopolies are a problem not addressed by David.
Surely a moral order is societal as well as personal, too? Christian abolitionists were notably vehement in wanting to end slavery, but presumably that would be a societal impulse more than personal if they themselves didn't own slaves? I'm not sure you can draw a dividing line.
I'm by no means trying to pick holes in your faith, of course (as if I could; it's faith) - I just think this idea of set of handed-down moral laws from a deity, codified by religion and tradition, is no less relativist - and probably actually more so - than those natural laws that philosophers attempt to arrive at by logical means.
Sure. Lot's of Christians violate the moral law all the time. It's a consequence of the Fall of Man, known as concupisence (theologically); man has the tendancy to sin, and to justify his sin.
However, it is certainly not relativist. My faith says adultery is wrong. It's not wrong or right depending on my feelings. It's not right for me and wrong for you. We may not agree on the "laws", but they are absolute laws.
I'm a Catholic. Believe me, I have no use for most of our founding fathers views on religion, or much else beyond the narrow area of government. John Adams was a bigot, Jefferson a lecherous hypocrite. Washington is about the only admirable one in the bunch.
My point was a narrow one about personal morality. I can think Mormonism is a bunch of kooky nonsense, and still admire the perosnal morality of its members.
You mean tightly regulated, right?
As fellow New Yorkers will know, NYC has forced their cabbies to put televisions in the back of the cabs (and credit card machines). The cabbies I've spoken to about this aren't very happy about it. One guy said it cost $3,000 to put the tv in and comply with the regulations.
I know as a customer I don't want the tv there. It comes on automatically with sound, starts in with the local news/weather/sports, and is just a nuisance if you're trying to have a conversation or listen to your i-pod or just sit there in peace. So you have to reach down and mute the damned thing or shut it off.
(Cue the people who will now mock me for complaining about having to move my arm to turn the tv off.)
I know as a customer I don't want the tv there. It comes on automatically with sound, starts in with the local news/weather/sports, and is just a nuisance if you're trying to have a conversation or listen to your i-pod or just sit there in peace. So you have to reach down and mute the damned thing or shut it off.
(Cue the people who will now mock me for complaining about having to move my arm to turn the tv off.)
The big problem with NYC taxis is the medallion/lease system. It transfers all the risk to the drivers. In the old days the driver split the revenue for the shift with the owner (usually a taxi garage). That changed to the driver paying a flat fee to lease the car for the shift. At that point a lot of investors started buying medallions and the price skyrocketed. Now the drivers can actually take a loss on their shift.
This drove all the professional cabbies out of the business (except for the few that owned the medallion0 and turnedit into a sucky job for recent immigrants. Londo has a much better system. No limt on the number of cabs, but a real hard test for drivers.
Teabagging is only done by gays? I think the term "teabagging" is sexually ambiguous and even if it wasn't and it truly was a homosexual act how is using it as a slur mean one is afraid of homosexuals?
Please ignore the comment if you are not talking about teabagging and Andy said something else that made you believe he is afraid of gays.
The only manner in which I've ever heard the term "teabagging" used is in the context of something that frat boys and jocks do to their friends when they pass out after a night of excessive drinking.
I've only heard it used to insult homosexuals.
EDIT: Though I guess I'm wrong because the wikipedia entry doesn't seem to say that.
Apparently, you hang out with the wrong sort of people.
EDIT: There's a wikipedia entry on the act of teabagging?
You having no idea what you're talking about may have something to do with this.
(Cue the people who will now mock me for complaining about having to move my arm to turn the tv off.)
It's no fun when you already know what you said is ridiculous.
I don't know what this is, and I think I would be extremely happy if you don't explain what it is.
Straddling the Bag
Twin Killing
Urban Shocker
Daisy Cutter
Texas Leaguer
Dialing Nine
Four Seamer
Doug Mientkiewicz
Now these may sound Sugdestive but they are wholesome activities and enjoyed by Opposite Attracting Americans and Light in the Loafer Americans and Mullet Wearing Women Americans and all stripes in Between you know me Al I throw no 1 out of the Club House for eating crackers in bed with some other Male individual if both are of age and Consisting Adults.
I would place the odds at a near certainty that Petco will fall - except Repoz has started a Pavement specific thread.... so we won't be able to milk a few pages from that.
edit...wait, no it could be bbc's mom, so, the PERSON is a genius. Just in case.
Further non-ironic news: http://singcitychronicles.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-fools.html
"Back in July HR3288, a Transportation and HUD appropriations bill, came up for a vote. It included $150 million for emergency maintenance funding for the DC Metro.
Brady voted against it."
That has to be the most bizarre thing I've ever read here. What on Earth are you talking about? Does this have something to do with Ty Cobb's old crack that baseball is not a Pink Tea? Or is my man Joe Willie still hung over from this Monday Night Football incident?
EDIT: Of course the Keefester said it a lot better than I ever could.
I read the teabagging entry on wikipedia and wish I didn't. Thank god there were no pictures.
What has been seen cannot be unseen. In honor of Jack Keefe's latest, I'm going to try to start popularizing the "Urban Shocker". That one works on so many levels...
That’s interesting for what it leaves out, for where it stops short, for where it refuses to go.
You will find some way not to give something a fair reading. I thought that’s what you held? It’s not what I say. I say we, as Individuals and as COLLECTIVE, can do better, and we will, because it’s in our interest. Being altruistic can be to our individual selfish interest. We need to find and showcase where those points meet. It will lead to our betterment, individually and collectively, but you need a process, which choose by voicing preferences individually and ceding power to a COLLECTIVE agency to effect.
Thank you. You know, it’s not all that monolithic. Power matters, and power brokers need mediation so they don’t devour themselves. That’s why we have social institutions and political structures. It can’t be just about the individual or the individual versus other individuals, one on one. That doesn’t even account for elemental tribalism.
I am not falling for that again. I'd rather be Albright rolled.
Or the impossibility of boring a new Metro line through an urban center. Multiple private enterprises are almost never going to be able to compete for the same customers in the realm of public transport; the infrastructure and up-front investment alone make it a mind-boggling proposition.
Thought experiment - try to build a new Underground line in London with no government assistance. 100 years? Maybe. Modern urban living makes it impossible.
Anyway the moment for me when I actively stopped looking for new and wonderous things on the internet is when I happened to come across a video of two naked asian girls puking into each other's mouths and bodies. Just made myself gag thinking about it again.
The funny thing about that is that about 6 months after I found out what shrimpin was Gordon Fish sticks ran a TV ad campaign that starts off by asking where the Gordon Fisherman was. The next shot is the Gordon Fisherman proudly standing on his fishing boat firmly holding the wheel and he exlcaims with great pride, "Gone shrimpin". It cracked us up for months.
On that note, one of my favorite things on the internet was a flickr page filled with images of people's expressions when they were exposed to goatse for the first time.
A friend of mine was "thoughtful" enough to send me a link to a similar video - the vomitee was trying to guess what the vomiter had eaten before filming.
It was at that point that I realised that I hated the Internet.
Gaelan:
I'll have to think about that before I attempt really fine distinctions.
But some random notes and observations:
I think we’re stuck with an old contraption, a the mindset that incorporates frame of references created by worn-out creeds without ever much thinking about whether the trappings of these creeds are still apropos. I try to avoid that as much as I can in my use of language and in my thinking, but I am of course a creature of my time and place just like everybody else. Not to mention, I’m stuck with that mind, too.
Simply because I don't think things like self and morality/immorality/amorality exist outside of nature (they aren’t plugged into us from some-vague-amorphous-generalized-where by some-undefined-thing doesn't mean that I think they're invalid concepts. They just have real natural causes. If you don't start off from the right place you may not ever know why you aren't getting where you want to be. And if you don’t know that, how can you begin to address change.
For what it’s worth, I believe you have to take facts, experience, empiricism all into your philosophizing accounts. These things have changed. We know things now that Aristotle/Plato didn’t. Why this insistence on trying to retain them in all their pristine purity as some matter of conceptual thought experiment that has validity. This smacks of not just metaphysics, but of just plain old religion. It isn’t just wrong, it is a wrong way of looking as to sources and will lead to many problems in thinking, not the least of which is, as we saw, libertarians extolling self while berating others for being selfish. Unless you do this, expunge the old litany, you will be wrong because you are technically and in fact not engage in pursuing what’s true. You’re simply not on the trail, so I don’t know what it is your smelling.
You’re hedging your bets when you don’t just plain have it ass-backwards.
Might as well go whole hog:
The Selfish Gene.
Perhaps Dawkins, and Simpson, are being a little bit the provocateurs. Nevertheless, without a Neo-Darwinian (and I’m using this very broadly) synthesis of many aspects of old time philosophy, like with old-time religion, they just don’t wash. Trying to make them scan and compute in these times is getting on a treadmill to nowhere.
They have that for 2 girls 1 cup. Which unfortunately is how I came to hear about 2 girls 1 cup and got curious as to what it was. My favorite one was the one where some teenage boy has his grandma sit down at the computer to watch it and she is horrified but she doesn't turn it off or leave. She watches the whole damn thing! Which is far more than what I did. I think I got about a minute into it before I clicked away.
Isn't that what happened to Forrest Gump's shrimpin' operation when it got bought out by that large Japanese industrial sushi supplier?
Sad, sad story... Forrest ended up penniless, living in an alley, indistinguishable from the hundreds of other dirty Sanchezes aimlessly wandering about... a real Urban Shocker.
See, and I say that if millions of Christians, reading from the same (ish) source material, fundamentally disagree on what those absolute laws are, then they're not absolute. By definition, everyone is creating their own interpretation of the source material, and then appending the word 'absolute' to add significance.
In terms of absolute application of whatever thee lawsare, even the Bible doesn't conform to that. Different lawsare applied in the Old and New Testaments. Ipso facto: not absolute.
Here's a better way of putting it - in what way can the moral laws of Catholicism be said to be absolute in a way that is more consistent than that of a libertarian who uses an atomistic view of sentient individuals as a starting point for a series of precepts that apply to everyone, whether or not they choose to abide by them?
Just to take one small example, when you go to a doctor, you don't see a wall of patient files, or a phlanx of receptionists. You (meaning any French citizen) simply hand them your "carte vitale", which seems like a credit card but has your entire (securely encrypted) medical history on it. The doctor scans it and is immediately brought up to date. When it comes to billing, one swipe of the card does all that. No insane amount of paperwork will flood your mails as it does here. The payment to doctors is completed within three days. And though the patients are required to pay the full cost of a visit up front (which goes to the government), within a month they're reimbursed nearly in full, minus a tiny co-pay. And of course the cost of these visits is but a fraction of what it is here.
Here's one particularly choice quote (p. 59 of the book):
Of course this matters little to doctrinaire government-bashers, who will think of a hundred reasons to block out the thought that a taxpayer-financed payment system could possibly be better and fairer than our byzantine mix of private and public.
But to anyone who's actually interested in learning something new, as opposed to just spitting out meaningless ideological catchphrases, this Reid book is an eye-opener.
Yeah, and even after all that the French system still lets you go outside what the government provides and buy your own care. I would trade our healthcare system for theirs in a heartbeat.
Yep, and to puncture another cherished right wing myth, the French have a far greater choice of doctors than we do, including specialists. There's no such thing in France as an "out of network" doctor, and everyone chooses his own physician, with no bureaucrat telling you that you can't.
Which is to say that for Aristotle we have the word dog only because behind this particular dog there is the eternal species of the dog. By contrast for Hegel we have the word dog precisely because this particular dog is not eternal (it is going to die) and hence it is the word dog that endures in time not the species dog. This second interpretation is entirely consistent with evolution. Which is why:
However if Aristotle is wrong about dogs that doesn’t mean he is also wrong about humans. By contrast science is necessarily wrong about human reality.
If that didn’t make sense I can try and explain another way. The problem is that to the scientific method everything that can be known is reduced to spatio-temporal phenomena (i.e historical, exists in time.) The classical dualism between eternity and temporality is replaced by essences and appearances where the essence of the thing is identified with its mathematical properties. As Stanley Rosen explains:
Which is another way of saying that science can never find what it’s looking for. It seeks to describe with mathematical precision the object. However the tools with which it describes the object (the scientific method) do not exist within the object but rather come from the subject that is doing the describing. Thus the scientific method does not reveal the object as it is but rather the interaction between the object and subject. Moreover it does this in such a way that the role of the subject is unacknowledged or denied and it never finds what it is looking for, the object in-itself. Modern science cannot turn its study on its self because the source of science, the intellect, has already been historicized by the creation of science and hence it cannot find a stable subject matter. It makes no sense to study human beings scientifically if there is no stable creature called a human being. Or as Rosen describes it:
That's all. As is often the case, I have nothing to add, but do so anyway.
That doesn't quite make sense to me. What happens if you, I, and 1000 other people all want to go to the same doctor because we heard she's awesome? She can't possibly see all of us. How are her services rationed?
Minor correction that BC might want to note, in case she's reading this: People living below the poverty line are billed only $7.80 for a doctor's visit; the "poorest of the poor" pay nothing; and anyone certified as suffering a chronic illness is also exempt. And a pregnant woman is exempted from payment in her last five months of pregnancy and for four months after delivery.
Oh, the horror....
It becomes a matter of doctor discretion. If they feel they can handle the workload, then they set you up with an appointment. If not, they tell you they're too busy, and you either wait until they aren't, or you head on down to the next doctor.
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