U.S. Senate
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(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
20%
Governor
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(D) Joe Neguse
(D) Phil Weiser
(D) Jena Griswold
60%
60%
40%↓
Att. General
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(D) M. Dougherty
(D) Alexis King
(D) Brian Mason
40%
40%
30%
Sec. of State
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(D) George Stern
(D) A. Gonzalez
(R) Sheri Davis
40%
40%
30%
State Treasurer
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(D) Brianna Titone
(R) Kevin Grantham
(D) Jerry DiTullio
60%
30%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(R) Jeff Hurd*
(D) Somebody
80%
40%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert*
(D) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank*
(D) Somebody
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(D) Joe Salazar
50%
40%
40%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
August 15, 2009 03:22 PM UTC
49 Comments
from the HuffPo
Michelle Bachman:
So what has her son done?
Teach for America is a private non-profit. Americorp is a government run service program; Bachman was demonizing the latter. Her son joined the former…
I know, I know, they all look alike.
http://www.teachforamerica.org…
.
lists AmeriCorps as a donor, not a parent.
.
From Ritter’s press announcement today:
If what we have happening here is the model for reform – we’re going to stay in a world of hurt.
Look, I understand a Governor is supposed to brag up a storm about the state. But pick something with at least a little basis in reality. What we have going on in his state right now is applying a couple of bandaids to patient needing critical surgery.
You were right. Congress has not acted on the legislation, yet, but the Senate Finance Committee has taken the option of paying for “end of life” counseling off the table. As a general principle, I don’t like to see lying win. But this is a huge triumph for you and the your political buddies.
Let me tell you in the last fifteen years, we have had three really bad deaths in our family….that I would not wish on my worst enemy. In each case, there were no medically approved “end of life” directives. The dying was prolonged, very painful, and very expensive. One was with the VA; one was on medicare and the other was on medicaid. But you and your political buddies have guaranteed that these kinds of awful deaths can go forward….because there will be no incentative for doctors to counsel patients nor will there be any financial reimbursement if they do. It is going to continue to cost you taxpayers a lot of money.
Right now, LB you all are winning. My family is not. We’ve got those pre-existing conditions….and you all are going to kill this health care reform.
I think I am going to take a break from this blog. The “hail fellow well met” crap is not something I can do right now….I know the price that people are paying for the right- wing victories.
I’ve said several times here that based on my life experiences, we will get universal health care when I qualify for Medicare. That’s in one year, eight months, uh, you get the idea.
Now I can see that I was wrong. It will never happen in the next year and a half. Even if a bill of some improvement over the system is signed, it cannot be implemented fast enough.
When I was born all the major European nations had universal health care. Truman tried when I was a toddler. Nixon tried but there was Watergate. Clinton tried and was derailed by Big Everything Against Good Health Care.
Maybe my kids might get something before they turn 65. And of course, all the predictions are that my Medicare won’t be as generous as my parent’s.
Sigh.
The key is the Senate. Obama will find the final bill to be less than he would prefer so of course he will sign it. When push comes to shove Pelosi will bang heads and get the votes. But the Senate…
In the Senate I see two things that make me optimistic. First Michael Bennet has gone all-in on this. As a political moderate with an upcoming election in a swing state he’s the poster boy for triangulating the hell out of this. Yet he’s very specifically fighting for it. My guess is a lot of the ones being quiet will also vote for it.
Second, Ted Kennedy is clearly hanging on to life and to his seat to do one last thing – vote this bill through. When he is brought in, clearly days away from death, to speak and cast his vote – that alone will swing 5 or 6 votes over to it.
… mainly because of all the cost/benefit trade-offs that have yet to be hashed out.
But I think the Dems have finally got the framing right on the message. As “Health Insurance Reform”, they have identified the weakest link in the Republican strategy (aside from the outrageous FUD tactics).
By forcing the Republicans to defend why it is their priority to, in Mike Coffman’s words: “…fostering the continued prosperity of the private health insurance market…” over and above addressing fundamental issues such as access to healthcare, etc., ‘pubs have given Senator Bennet and others a nice, fat, juicy target to hang around the opposition’s neck.
With even the Pharma industry funding pro-reform ads, and many physicians and medical groups speaking out in support, the big health insurance companies will be backed into a corner, and won’t have the luxury of doing “business as usual”, no matter what the final bill’s outcome (or fate, for that matter).
If the insurance companies have to guarantee coverage for pre-existing conditions, maintain coverage for persons in need, and don’t have a free hand to raise rates arbitrarily, they will have to take the lead in “bending the cost curve” as they will be forced to control costs by cutting out the bureaucratic fat the current system encourages on their part.
That will resonate with a large majority of voters, this year and next. I agree with David that we may be surprised by the number of senators, including R’s, that will grow a spine and vote for reform.
Your lips to God’s ears.
We need this, and with a public option.
on its hands than passing health care reform.
Of all developed nations on the planet Earth, we are the most amply endowed with troglodytes. Not just a random sprinkling, harmlessly embedded in an otherwise civilized nation, but rather organized, aggressive, destructive hordes of troglodytes. They are a plague that darkens our sky of aspirations and strips our intellectual fields bare, leaving naked stalks where healthy crops had grown.
There is something in the peculiar mix of gasses in our culturual atmosphere that turns innocent, gurgling babies into ignorant, raging throwbacks. Sure, there are many particular challenges that face us: health care reform, global warming, improving public education, and so on. But underneath them all, obstructing our ability to address any of them effectively, are the troglodytes.
We urgently need to find a vaccine. Few epidemics have been at the root of more human suffering, and more despair.
Please join the Anti-Troglodyte Coalition of America! It’s still not too late to save our country from this infestation.
There’s something that turns ignorant, raging throwbacks into innocent, gurgling babies.
My friend believes technology will destroy us all. I believe it is ego.
Let Bill preach to you for a moment.
Onward to Progress, Myrmidon Hordes! Do what the Hive Mind tells you, care not for your own liberty. For you have none, you have only the Horde and the Horde only has you, Myrmidon! So March onward, March on!
And yet, oddly, I woke up in my home, kissed my children good morning, played with them (games of our choice), taught them lessons (of my choice), brewed and drank the coffee I like best, watched my preferred selection of morning news shows (including our Governor on “Your Show”), read the newspaper, surfed the net and attended to some correspondances there, and generally lived as if I had a degree of personal liberty unknown even to our founding fathers, who lacked many of the options available to me.
So, really, you’re just completely full of shit. Nothing new there. But, hey, as long as it manages to strum the right pre-programmed emotional chords in the right group of unthinking troglodytes (or “Myrmidons,” if you prefer), it’s all in a good day’s work, right? So, congrats, Senior Trog, you’ve done ’em proud!
is if you don’t make exactly the same decisions Yokel makes, then you clearly are under the control of some Hive. Because making truly free decisions would clearly be in lockstep with Yokel 🙂
The Right is busy fighting to restrict the freedom to select the spouse of your choice, the freedom of control concerning one’s own body, the freedom from their particular fanatical religious beliefs, to mention just a few of their greatest hits on the Right’s Freedom Parade. The Left, conversely, fights for freedom of expression, freedom of identity, and freedom of thought through reviled organizations such as The American Civil Liberties Union. Some of the more radical Leftists are opposed to the ritualistic repetition of the pledge of allegiance in elementary schools, arguing that such gross political indoctrination of very young minds is antithetical to freedom (after all, if you control minds from that young age, what real freedom is left?). The Right, on the other hand, is particularly offended by such notions, because “freedom” to them means the severe and absolute political indoctrination (“brainwashing,” really) of children in service to the Right’s ultra-nationalistic ideological tyranny.
When the Right uses the word “Freedom,” they mean the obstruction of the use of government to increase the range of opportunities available to people, and increase the range of people to whom opportunities flow: In other words, they are talking about the obstruction of freedom.
They use the word, with amazing consistency, in diametrical opposition to its literal meaning. Such is the power of ignorance.
Unless it’s the freedom of the Myrmidons.
I find it rather ironical that you claim the first 5 minutes of the school day as slavery and brainwashing, but don’t seem to mind the other 6 hours and 55 minutes that are run by the state.
Also, your first point, that you’re in favor of the freedom to control one’s own body, except when it’s all healthcare and not just one particular procedure. Then it’s okay for the government to tell you what to do with your body.
But that’s a myrmidon for you. Freedom is Slavery, and Slavery is Freedom.
Signed,
Your Humble Trogdorite
It is a mechanism used by people. A school curriculum is designed to increase the liberty of the students by increasing the nimbleness of their minds. Of course, the curriculum inevitably contains certain prevalent biases, thus reinforcing rather than eliminating liberty-diminishing assumptions, a process which occurs at home as well as at school. But at school, these assumptions are embedded in a much more salient concoction of liberty-cultivating lessons in how to most effectively use the mind to increase the range of opportunities available to oneself and to others. The pledge of allegiance, conversely, has the sole purpose of molding the mind to a set of reflexive emotional responses, which is purely liberty-reducing in nature. You defend the one thing at school whose purpose is to reduce liberty, and arbitrarily denounce the educational process solely on the basis of it being performed through a mechanism called “the state.”
Health care run by “the state” is similar: The state is a mechanism through which people act. If the state can deliver health care services more effectively for more people than alternative systems, then liberty is increased by recourse to it (healthy people having a wider range of opportunities of action than unhealthy people).
Your arguments involve reducing complex social systems to oversimplistic categories, attaching arbitrary assumptions and value-judgments to those categories, and then restating your principle arbitrary assumption in the form of a conclusion. Liberty is the freedom of action and choice: That which increases the range of people’s freedom to act and choose, and extends such freedoms to more people, increases liberty, regardless of whether the mechanism for doing so is something called “the state” or something called “the market.”
Without the state there is no liberty, because there is no enforcement of the laws which protect one’s liberty against agents other than the state which would deprive people of those rights. To judge whether a policy increases or decreases liberty, one must measure the actual consequences to people’s liberty of the policy, not the degree to which the state is involved in its implementation.
I believe liberty is based in natural law and independent of social constructs, you believe that “without the state there is no liberty.”
“A government is a body of people, usually, notably, ungoverned.”
Beliefs are arbitrary. What matters is what reason applied to observation indicate are the best ways to improve human well-being, including the well-being of actual liberty. If you want the “liberty” of a stateless world, in which thugs form predatory gangs which eventually become the most brutal of primitive states anyway, that’s your choice. But I will continue to oppose your efforts to import such nonsense into the world I and others actually live in. The real challenge involves dealing with the real world, not arbitrary beliefs that are conveniently detached from it.
You sure believe in your own powers of observation and reason quite thoroughly.
I didn’t say a stateless world is “liberty,” and I’ll thank you for not putting words into my mouth. I said “liberty” is independent of the state. It’s a function of the human person, not a function of the government (or lack thereof) under which he happens to live.
A just government’s job is to secure liberty. On that we agree. “Securing liberty” does not include babysitting our children or controlling our bodies (as you like to say), and, in fact, is quite the opposite.
reliance on observation and reason on the one hand, and reliance on arbitrary assumptions on the other, then, yes, observation and reason is preferable, regardless of how limited my powers are.
Platitudes such as yours inform a shallow set of policies that produces much suffering and little well-being. You say that liberty is independent of the state, but criticize state-run health care as a diminuation of liberty simply because it is state run: My, my, my, how you like to play fast and loose with words in order to defend your inconsistent assumptions! If liberty is independent of the state, as you say, then the fact that the state is the provider of something does not imply that there is necessarily any threat to liberty, exactly as I argued. You can’t have it both ways.
Or you’re intentionally missing the point. If liberty is a function of humanity by natural law, the state doesn’t create it. It can only shield it or restrict it. It shields liberty through justice and maintaining the rule of law, and it restricts it by, well, everything else you can think of the state doing. Government is not unlike fire in that sense: Good for lighting a cigarette or candle, bad for painting the walls in your house. It must be carefully guarded, lest its utility be be allowed to be overrun by its energy.
Though your point is taken that some policies can produce suffering and little well-being. After all, for someone who first got on the high-horse about evil anti-liberty conservatives, you sure seem to care a lot more about making people feel better than about their liberty. I’ve got a solution, though, if government protections of liberty aren’t making you happy or healthy:
Life is tough. Wear a helmet.
One is argument from dogmatically adhered to abstraction and definition, and the other is empirically and historically informed analysis. I completely understand what you’re saying, and completely understand why it is fundamentally flawed, especially when employed as a basis for policy decisions.
The philosophical questions regarding “natural law” and “natural rights” v. political law and political rights make for a very interesting philosophical conversation, and such conversations do help to form well-rounded minds. But trying to inform policy positions with such unmediated abstractions is dysfunctional even when done by the most nimble of minds, and that much more dysfunctional when done by pedantic thinkers like you.
This is precisely what I mean by “Troglodytism”. It is the encumbrance on society of highly motivated narrow-minded participants in the body politic, who attempt to impose doctrines independently of the nuts-and-bolts analyses of what actually serves humanity’s interests. What you get are Bolshevicks, fascists, tea-baggers, and other aggressive and destructive political mobs, sometimes basing their aggression on very elaborate and sophisticated philosophical doctrines (and sometimes not-so-much). The end-product is the same in either case: A force dedicated to obstructing the efforts of thoughtful and reasonable people to gradually improve the human condition.
You give no thought to the machine, merely that the nuts and bolts are secure.
I will give you one thing, though. For claiming to be so rational and pragmatic, you sure put a lot of faith in the concept that the human condition can be improved. It’s refreshing, in a way, to see you throwing reason and caution to the wind for the linchpin of your pragmatic philosophy. It turns out you do believe in something more than the snugness of the nuts and bolts of social machinery: You believe that it is the objective of government to improve upon “the human condition.”
I will warn you, though, that, considering that the human condition is as a result of humanity, you’ll have to resort to improving upon humans to reach your goal. You might be able to make a better person within the bounds of possible pragmatic policy. Hell, you might even be able to do it while using the word “liberty” without cracking up. But there will be a few Trogdorites who refuse to be improved upon, and we’ll toss our shoes into the gears of social progress until the machine burns down. You’ll accuse us of close-mindedly destroying civilization for our silly concepts of liberty and humanity. But we don’t sabotage social progress because we don’t want society at all. We just don’t want your society that seeks to use its force to make better people. You leave us no choice, dear Myrmidon.
Long before I ever gave thought to the nuts and bolts, I gave decades of thought to the machine in the abstract, from every conceivable point of view.
I learned many things in that process, such as that humanity is more than the sum of its parts, and so, while “improving human beings” may be a laudable and useful goal, it is not the only way to improve the human condition, and certainly not the proper role of government: Improving the social arrangements by which we live has a positive effect independent of any improvements in the moral quality of the individual human beings involved. We not only can improve ourselves inividually, but can also refine the extent to which we each, pursuing our own self-interest, incidentally serves one another’s interests to an ever greater degree.
It is not your “silly concepts” of liberty and humanity that are at fault: I adhere to those concepts as well. We are, after all, “endowed with unalienable rights”, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In an age when access to health care has become essential to securing those unalienable rights, denying it to some is the denial of their most sacred rights defined under our founding documents. It is a hopelessly twisted mind, so like the inquisitioner torturing in the name of Christ, that claims to be the defendent of “humanity” by striving to deny the less fortunate among us recourse to the resources that help to sustain life!
The question of whether the human condition can be improved or not requires many subjective judgments. But one thing is clear: It is the essence of being human, our defining quality, that we transmit and refine packets of information such that we alter the context of our lives in ways that suit our needs and interests. But it is never a fait accompli; it is forever a work in progress: To be yet more humane, we would take the step of ensuring that all of our members enjoy the same benefits that the more fortunate among us enjoy. We would establish a system of universal health care, as more civilized nations already have.
You are smug in your ignorance, “warning” me from the depth of a wisdom you so clearly lack. And that is why I treat you ungently. You are not merely a harmless fool, but rather, en masse with others like you, a very dangerous and costly fool, one who obstructs improvements in the quality of life on the basis of a blind ideology poorly understood and barely examined.
To save our lives, you must control them. To make us free, you must take away the freedom over our bodies with government healthcare. Thanks, George.
It’s the fluoride! That’s how the government gets ya!
to move to Somalia, where government knows its place. Here in America, we long ago realized that helping everyone out helps us all out. The only zero-sum here is your capacity to let go of your adolescent posturing.
you share the same basic defect that defined movements such as Bolshevism and fascism: You apply an abstract concept with totalitarian fervor to a complex and subtle world, striving to imprison humanity in your bloodless conceptualization of utopia. As so often happens, you are precisely what you claim to oppose, while those you oppose are not.
To you, if government is the agent, it is “control”. So, the provision of Medicare and Medicaid are in your topsy-turvy mind agents of a demonic government seeking to control all aspects of our lives. Oh no! Horrors! I’m receiving government subsidized health care! I can no longer think for myself, nor choose my own destiny, because my doctor gets a check paid by the public via the government!
Huh?! You repeat these inane idiocies as though they are the most brilliant insights imaginable. You can keep doing so forever, but, unlike fine cheese, they don’t improve with age. They just keep right on stinking up the place.
Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building filled with innocent people, including numerous children, following a logic excruciatingly similar to yours: If it is “government,” it is the enemy. The building was a federal building, but it was just a shell containing ordinary people living ordinary lives. And that, in essence, is what modern democratic government is: Just a shell containing ordinary people living ordinary lives. Government is nothing more than an agent of the will of the polity that pays its bills and employs its personnel. Sure, those agents have interests of their own, and directing them to serve the interests of the principle requires institutionalizing mechanisms for doing so, but it’s no different than hiring any other agent, such as a gardner or an accountant.
The ONLY thing that distinguishes government from other agents is that it has a monopoly on the use of “legitimate” force, domestically in the form of police, and internationally in the form of military. Is it your fear, then, that if government provides health insurance they will back its provision with guns? Anyone who refuses to receive these benefits will find a jack-booted cop at their door forcing them to go to the doctor for their annual check-up? Is this what terrifies you so much about government involvement?
I got news for you: government provided health insurance doesn’t deprive anyone of any freedom over their bodies! It just provides health care. Get…a…grip!
You keep using the words “control,” and “liberty,” and “slavery,” all completely stripped of any real meaning, arbitrarily employed to defend a blind and fanatical ideological certainty utterly divorced from reality.
So blather on, my friend, and tell us why the public effort to provide a certain basic level of health care to the one-in-six Americans who currently are deprived it is a slight against all things good and decent, while making sure that we preserve a system that eats a rapidly growing bite out of our GDP while failing to ensure everyone, and leaving many others bankrupt due to illness, is The American Way.
Like I said at the beginning of this thread: There is a problem facing America far more profound and threatening than the current derailment of health care reform. And that problem, that cultural plague, that destruction from within, is You.
How would an Enlightened Society deal with the Yokels in that society? Would a Yokel even be a possibility? Is ignorance bacterial or viral?
I am in complete agreement with you. There is a rot in the society that grows more complex, and inhabits deeper and deeper strata on all levels…..social, psycho-social, economic, religious.
I can rail against the military industrial complex, the shallowness of our media, or the profound intellectual and emotional rot absorbed through television, but for the life of me I cannot explain how personal conscience can be so quickly dimmed so as to not bear important consequence in our thinking, our souls and our choices.
There are those so splintered from the root of their humanity, they have lost sight of meaning and purpose. I shudder at what such an existence must be like.
Keep up your excellent posts here. You are a bright light.
Tell us more, if you care to, of your intellectual evolution.
I’ve always considered the growth of human consciousness, which is far more a collective than an individual enterprise, to be the essential challenge: Politics is just a thin veneer on top of that, that both emanates from and affects the evolution of human consciousness. But the ultimate field on which the aspirations and genius and applied imagination of humanity plays out is the field of consciousness (or, like the Kevin Costner movie that almost was, “The Field of Memes”).
And, really, the cultivation of human consciousness is an ongoing struggle, advanced marginally by the best novels and movies and discourses and teachers and tomes, but simultaneously inhibited and obstructed by the Troglodytes and their droning jingoism, jamming the transmission of transformative ideas.
I do believe in progress, including the progress of human consciousness, and I believe that, in the long-run, we are gradually advancing. The “Yokels” of the world (or “Yahoos,” as Jonathan Swift named them over two hundred years ago, meaning exactly what we are meaning right now in this conversation) will dwindle both in number and in extremity of absurdity, though they will always appear, as Yokel does now, infinitely absurd to their more rational contemporaries.
I get frustrated and enraged when confronted by Troglodyte-logic, but that’s my error: We have to accept what is, before we can create what will be. I don’t mean “accept” in the sense of complacency, but rather in the sense of unrattled recognition. Things are as they are: A certain Zen-like calm is the healthiest foundation from which to address the world, even while assertively striving to change it.
Seriously. It’s psychotic, yet funny at the same time.
You complain of fascist utopias, yet ignore the fact that by your own admission, you seek to create a utopia that can only become so by the elimination of those whom you deem intellectually impure. It’s mind-bogglingly bass-ackwards, absurdly close-minded, and so honestly-self-righteous that the only explanation is that you two are certifiable.
between believing that it is possible to make incremental improvements in the arrangments through which human welfare is pursued and attained on both the individual and collective level (something thoroughly proven by human history, and thoroughly accepted by everyone who, for instance, thinks highly of the U.S. Constitution, which is an example of just such an incremental improvement), and universally applying vague abstractions stripped of any attachment to how such applications affect actual human welfare. “Fascist utopias” aren’t a function of any particular ideology, but rather of overly applied over-simplistic ideologies of all kinds, zealously held and defended in the absence of any micro-dynamical analysis of their actual effects on the situations to which they are being applied.
What your doctrine lacks is precisely what those past dysfunctional doctrines lacked: subtlety and nuance. Implacable advocates of unsublte, unnuanced doctrines do far more harm than good, over and over again, throughout human history.
There is nothing inherently dysfunctional, and there is much laudable, about lofty ideals such as “liberty” and “humanity” (the two you have cited, I believe). But then those ideals must be translated into precise, functional, analytically informed policies, which seek to advance those ideals in the context of a complex reality. In the hands of people who fail to take this step, they become buzz-words that serve the cause of vague assumptions and blind emotional reactions resulting from past indoctrination.
Similarly, there’s a difference between pursuing those incremental advancements in part by seeking to marginalize the ignorant dysfunctionalism which obstructs them, and “seeking to eliminate those whom [we] deem intellectually impure.” (Or, perhaps more accurately, the latter formulation is a rhetorical obfuscation of a completely justifiable goal). After all, we have sought to marginalize racists as well, which few consider to have been an inappropriate social goal. There are hateful and destructive ideas in the world, and rational people of good will are well-advised to seek to pitch those ideas onto the garbage heap of history.
Reason and evidence militate against your “arguments,” consistently and relentlessly. That your miasma-like ideology is so thoroughly insulated from those challenges, so thoroughly entrenched as false certainties that you repeat and defend them endlessly, is a testament to how daunting is the challenge of cultivating an intelligent, rational, functional polity.
The only kind of person capable of mistaking the above line of precise, detailed, grounded argumentation as “psychotic” is a person whose fragile reality is threatened by it.
If you do say so yourself. You never could help patting yourself on the back, could you, Steve? You’re going to get a repetitive stress injury in your shoulder if you’re not careful.
Seems to me yours is the unsubtle, unnuanced belief: the belief in making a better world. After all, everyone in Huxley’s world was perfectly happy, weren’t they? But there were also neither free, nor humane. I accept that any form of government is going to be imperfect, because it will be made of imperfect people in an imperfect world. That will never change. You can’t “progress” beyond that simple, fundamental fact of nature. Or, rather, at least without stomping on those other ideals of “humanity” and “liberty” in the process.
All human creations are and will always be imperfect; you don’t seem to find it hard to believe when it comes to corporations, but you fail to note that governments are not immune. The point of American government is to retain as much liberty as possible while enforcing just enough justice to stabilize society. As soon as you step beyond that purpose, you begin to tread down darker paths of using that special authority of government to whatever end you deem is justified, whether it’s making me pay for your health care, or making you pay for my neocon permanent war.
It could be that we’ve already gone too far from that subtle and nuanced balance between liberty and justice down the road toward economic and social and happiness justice for all. It would be a shame. That such a continuation of the path is viewed as “nuanced” and “enlightened,” while the more reactionary preference for the old way is, well, not so much, it doesn’t give me much hope that we can come back.
But I’ll not despair, but keep fighting my Trogdoritic fight while you keep blowing out your shoulder.
And if there were, your reference would be considered completely inappropriate by all standards accepted on this blog.
I get that you’re angry. I get that in your tidy little world all you have to do is say “Huxley,” “Orwell,” “Myrmidons,” and, regardless of the irrelevance of the references, that’s all it takes to be right. I get that you can’t understand how perpetual imperfection can coexist with continual improvement (as simple to understand as it may be: It simply involves an asymptope, or a mathematical limit). I get that you really don’t understand much of anything at all, but, what you lack in insight, you make up for in the vigor of your assertions and the poverty of your aim.
And I get that those who cannot prevail on the merits start looking for ways to distract from that fact, as you have done in so many ways above. What my name is or isn’t, whether I pat myself on the back or not, really has no relevance whatsoever to anything we are debating. But, staying focused on what we’re debating is clearly a losing strategy for you.
your argument, and the fact that you are arguing at all. If human efforts were irrelevant, due to our imperfections, than you would have no reason to participate in this debate, or care what the government’s policy is or isn’t. Clearly, you believe that there are better and worse policies, better and worse social arrangements. Also, you claimed, with great indignation, that you have not made any a priori argument that the use of government is necessarily bad in any given instance (you are emphatically not, after all, arguing in favor of a stateless society) Therefore, how we use government matters, and that we use government to some extent and in some ways is a given. Thus, it is reasonable to debate whether a particular use of government will serve our values and goals, or whether it will undermine them, not by vague literary and philosophical references, but rather by examining the actual implications and effects of the policy in question.
That’s what a grounded, precise argument is, and my hands are in my pockets as I say so (which, of course, makes typing this rather difficult…).
of your incredibly oversimplistic set of assumptions:
I don’t make any moral distinction between corporations and government, or between the human beings that populate them. In fact, government is a corporation, in the sense that it is a corporate entity. I apply the same analysis to both, assuming that human beings everywhere are primarily motivated by self and local interests, but that increasing knowledge of how those self and local interests can be served through cooperative arrangements with others motivates creating such arrangements, and designing them to address the various challenges involved (e.g., bargaining, monitoring, and enforcement costs).
Starting from an assumption that is basically least generous toward human beings on a moral level (that they are primarily self-interested), and never incorporating any assumptions or aspirations of ever changing that, one produces a discipline called Economics. And that is precisely the form of analysis that I apply, at all levels and toward all facets. I assume that government actors are self-interested as well, as I even mentioned in an earlier post.
You just have no grasp of anything at all, starting and ending with the fact that a pedantic, moralistic, imprecise fog of an ideology is not, after all is said and done, a superior form of analysis to a micro-economic examination of the issues and implications involved.
I certainly never did. Keep making shit up, Yokel. The jokes on you.
You said:
“I didn’t say a stateless world is ‘liberty,’ and I’ll thank you for not putting words into my mouth. I said ‘liberty’ is independent of the state. It’s a function of the human person, not a function of the government (or lack thereof) under which he happens to live.”
Now, if liberty were truly independent of the state, the state not only could not grant it, but neither could the state take it away. All of your arguments are based on the assumption that liberty is not independent of the state, but that the state is only able to take it away. If liberty were truly a function of the human person, and not of the government, then what the government does or doesn’t do is irrelevant to whether one is or is not “free.”
Neither of us believes that. All of your arguments assume the contrary of what you yourself have said. I recognize, as well, that what the government does is relevant, but on both sides of the equation: The government can facilitate individual freedom (by, for instance, contributing to the health and education of individuals), or it can obstruct individual freedom (by, for instance, passing laws actually prohibiting freedom over one’s own body, freedom to make end-of-life decisions, freedom to marry the spouse of one’s choice, freedom of thought and expression, and so forth).
True champions of freedom oppose people like you, who legitimate real infringements on individual liberty via internally inconsistent and conveniently applied abstractions, which serve nothing more than to impose a blind and destructive ideological tyranny.
In your form of argumentation, the state is irrelevant to liberty, unless it does something you disagree with, and then, regardless of the real implications of the policy in question, it is automatically an affront to “liberty,” because that’s your only rhetorical weapon, slashing at everything that does not appeal to your completely uninformed emotional predisposition.
Sarah Palin Spits on the Legacy of Eunice Shriver
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…
I posted a short tribute to Mrs. Shriver on my blog, http://agonzoblog.blogspot.com/. It’s not much, certainly not enough tribute to someone with such a profound effect on so many people. I just wanted to add my own voice to the chorus of those mourning her passing.
I’ll make no judgment on Sarah Palin myself; this article does enough.
Are we hardwired for short attention span theatre?
I loved the idea of a space elevator ever since Arthur C Clarke’s story.
What a concept! Thanks for sharing, David.