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Jingy
Social climber
Nowhere
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Mar 26, 2010 - 03:35pm PT
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Health Care Bill Passes - Or "the republicans lost another battle to keep things the way they are..)positive for business, negative for the humans of the coutry)"...... which is just one of the many reasons the country is currently a void
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apogee
climber
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Mar 26, 2010 - 04:47pm PT
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"President Barack Obama says his health-care legislation will achieve the biggest U.S. deficit reduction in more than a decade. Some budget experts are doing the math a little differently.
While the Congressional Budget Office estimates the $940 billion plan will shave $143 billion off the deficit over 10 years, that number relies in part on billions of dollars set aside for other programs and an assumption that lawmakers will carry out politically unpopular cost cuts, they say.
“It’s a fiscal gamble -- there’s no doubt about that,” said Bob Bixby, head of the Concord Coalition, a Washington- based group that pushes for balanced budgets. "
This is news, fattrad? They've been saying this for weeks now- it's a well-known concern about the bill (now law). Don't you think Bloomberg is a little behind the game on this, or do you suppose they are just trying to keep the distrust and ranting going to suit their ideologic interests?
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Binks
Social climber
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Mar 26, 2010 - 05:06pm PT
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GroupThink? "Prominent Conservative Fired for Health Care dissent"
http://bit.ly/bJNCMe
"Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn’t already. … The donor community is only interested in financing organizations that parrot the party line.”
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mrtropy
Trad climber
Nor Cal
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 26, 2010 - 05:38pm PT
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YOU ARE CLEARLY UNINFORMED SIR I SPIT ON YOUR UNEDUCATED IGNORANCE
Boy, all caps you must be angry or correct.
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jstan
climber
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Mar 26, 2010 - 05:47pm PT
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No. The caps key was stuck.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Walla Walla, WA
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Mar 26, 2010 - 09:09pm PT
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Just checked back in, and wow! Same heat with little light.
Just a reminder: the issue here is NOT "socialism" (whatever that means to people) vs. "capitalism" (whatever that means to people). The issue here is between libertarianism (the political philosophy, not the political party) vs. communitarianism (the political philosophy, not the hippie movement).
You choose between living in a country with individual values/liberty/responsibility or a country with community-imposed "values/liberty/responsibility" (the terms mean very different things under the two rubrics). You can't have both except for relatively brief intervals in the transition from one to the other (basically where we are now).
Final reminder: individual liberties are on a one-way ratchet. When government takes one, it never comes back to you; it's gone forever.
You can debate the costs/benefits, etc. of this bill all you want. You can poke with sticks and call names all you want. You can label each other all you want (as the basis of guilt-by-association and ad hominem fallacies). But, as Mark Twain said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics," and fallacies are what they are.
There will be statistics and fallacious arguments trotted out on both sides of the debate. But what remains indisputable and unaffected by spin, fallacies, and, worse, statistics, is that this nation started out philosophically libertarian and has increasingly (and fairly recently) moved towards communitarianism. Just be sure that you understand ALL of the implications of that philosophical move before you so readily and happily embrace yet another (giant) step in that direction.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Boulder, CO
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Mar 26, 2010 - 09:22pm PT
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Mad wrote: Final reminder: individual liberties are on a one-way ratchet. When government takes one, it never comes back to you; it's gone forever.
Name any "rights" that have been taken from you in the last fifty years and by who.
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apogee
climber
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Mar 26, 2010 - 10:34pm PT
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"Name any "rights" that have been taken from you in the last fifty years and by who."
And while you're at it, see if you can give any specific examples of how the new HR law is truly socialist, and puts the controls into the gov't hands. (bluering's yellow custard)
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Arid-zona
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Mar 26, 2010 - 10:36pm PT
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Pate- They won't even read a conservative (Frum) writing critically of the RNC strategy. Why would they read a liberal's column?
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Walla Walla, WA
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Mar 27, 2010 - 12:05am PT
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Apogee....
I won't take you up on it, as I've already explained that I don't think the term "socialist" explicates. That debate is a red herring.
Bob D'A....
I didn't say "rights." I said "liberties," which are implications of rights. For example, the "right to life" that we now see was originally penned as the "right to property" because, following John Locke's philosophical lead, the founders recognized that the right to life is dependent upon the right to property, and, hence, supervenes on it. Even the "right to liberty" is a negative right to be unmolested in my (the next one) "pursuit of happiness."
And these were not specified as three individual "rights among many," like as if "we just picked the three most important ones that came to mind at the time." Our founding documents were written by brilliant men that understood the political philosophy underlying their efforts. Thus, there is a tight relation between the rights: the right to property underlies the other rights, genuine liberty means being unmolested in your pursuits (insofar as you do not molest others in theirs), and those two establish the notion of an individual notion of happiness and the pursuit of it. Read Kant (they did) for an understanding of the role of happiness as the "objective end" in ethics and politics.
Thus, the three mentioned rights provide for an entirely libertarian view of "liberties" in which values are not imposed by government, the freedom to live according to your values is not impinged upon by government, and your right to property is not endangered by government.
This perspective is turned on its head for communitarians. The collective determines which values are in the best interests of the collective. That defines what liberties are in the best interests of the collective. And, finally, those two define what "property" even means!
With that backdrop, I'll answer your question about what "rights" have been lost in my own lifetime, and, again, I cast these in terms of "liberties," as I cannot lose my actual RIGHTS (they are "inalienable," after all), and the FACT that I cannot lose them is what grounds my ability to state with Constitutional backing the objective fact that this present approach to government violates my RIGHTS!
The Constitution clearly defines the powers and purview of the Federal Government with an eye toward carefully protecting my property from its devices. There are carefully specified "public goods," such as national defense, that the government is entitled to tax me for. But, as I've explained elsewhere in this thread, such "goods" are carefully limited to those that I cannot in principle provide for myself. When I am taxed for national defense, that is a legitimate tax for a Constitutionally-defined purpose. I can, through my representatives, delineate what role the national military will play in the world, and how much we will all pay to maintain it; but taxation for that purpose is fundamentally legitimate. I do not dispute it.
I DO dispute taxation that directly funds "social programs," subsidies to farmers committed to an out-of-favor (or even dangerous, like tobacco) crop, redistribution of wealth (on both a democratic and republican model of it), and so on. MOST of the federal budget concerns aspects of life over which the federal government has no legitimate purview or concern (these things are supposed to be handled at the state and local levels). And these things are NOT "PUBLIC goods," regardless of how they have been spun to seem so to many these days!
I ALSO dispute activities like the "testing of the waters" that went on in the 55-speed-limit era. The feds flexed their muscles, and the states capitulated rather than lose federal highway funding. And that raises more than just States' Rights issues. Our personal liberties took an unprecedented hit in that era, and we have never come back from it.
ALL fixed speed limit laws are a violation of individual liberty. ALL we need to protect each other from each other is a prima facie speed limit, which all States already have. The prima facie speed limit states that one my not drive faster than is safe for the vehicle and conditions. And the government should have to prove that I am violating the prima facie speed limit when I drive my heavily-modified Z-car at 100 MPH through long stretches of I80 in Wyoming at 2am in the morning, with nary a soul in ten miles of me (except the hidden radar cop that bags me). Isn't my own life entirely in my own hands on such a stretch of highway at such a time in such a vehicle? How is it anything other than a denial of my individual liberty to impose an entirely arbitrary speed limit on me?
Also, of critical note in this context, the burden of proof is heavily on the government in prima facie cases! Conversely, what we have for traffic laws in this country are an absurd travesty not even resembling justice!
For example, I have taken three speeding cases to court over the years. In all three cases I was not speeding. In all three cases the judge even agreed that I had proved that I was not speeding (notice the reversal of the burden of proof here?), and in all three cases the various judges said something like, "Just consider this one of the times you didn't get caught. Pay the clerk on your way out."
Speed limits and their enforcement have become nothing but a highway tax, and because they are "infractions," the normal rules of jurisprudence do not apply. I talked to lawyers after the three cases, and all told me that appealing would cost at least $10,000. What's the point for a $200 fine? None of the lawyers I talked to even wanted the cases. "Waste of time," they called them. So, I just endure the "little prick" of the government bleeding me just a little more, actually flat-out stealing from me, but "it's only a little," so why should I be so concerned?
Read Thomas Paine people! Read Walden (again! or) for the first time! Can you really be so inured to what is happening here?
And let's not even talk about how the insurance companies are then allowed to raise my rates, as though I was an unsafe driver, when I wasn't even guilty to begin with! This is a government-run hidden-taxation scheme that has NOTHING to do with safety or justice!
A prima facie speed limit is ALL the government has the right to impose as an effort to keep people from recklessly endangering others as they "pursue their own happiness" in a vehicle. Everything beyond that just makes the taxation quick and easy!
Helmet laws... ditto. Seat belt laws... ditto. These are just a few vehicular examples of liberties I have lost in my lifetime. At this point I bet most of you are so inured that you don't even recognize these are infringements on your liberties.
So, let's see... so far we have taxation policies that steal my money to redistribute it to people I would not willingly give it, a host of "trivial" impositions on my vehicular liberties... oh, what about my privacy?
At this point there is now no real debate about the fact that the government has (for many years) been monitoring in real time ALL electronic communications in this country. This is not just "warrantless wiretapping" of fairly recent infamy. We are only now grasping the scope of the eavesdropping the government engages in. The justification? "Keeping America safe!"
Gag! Retch! I thought we were the "land of the free and the home of the brave." But no! It turns out that we are the "land of the enslaved and the home of the fearful!"
Keep me safe? I spit on your "safety!" I don't want it! I'll take my chances with the terrorists that you are supposedly protecting me from by monitoring even this very post! In fact, I'll take my chances with a whole host of evils that could POSSIBLY befall me, if you will ONLY give me my liberties back! Patrick Henry famously said, "Give me liberty or give me death." But WE now cry, "We DEMAND safety, even if we have to give you our liberties to get it!" Land of the free??? Yeah right! Home of the brave??? Oh give me a most major BREAK!!!
The "patriot act?" Have you people never READ 1984? HOW is this not double-speak? HOW is this odious name not a contradiction in terms for a ridiculous law that actually undermines liberty?
Moving on.... The IRS can seize your property, drain your bank accounts, and even imprison you WITHOUT TRIAL and even without probably cause! You are GUILTY before the IRS unless you can PROVE you are innocent, and, again, the normal rules of jurisprudence do NOT apply. The Constitution supposedly protects us from this VERY sort of governmental activity, but the IRS operates in a "legal" world of its own.
Bush suspended the writ of habeas corpus in 2006, and we don't have that protection back yet! Worse, that protection is denied us if the government only goes so far as to LABEL one of us an "enemy combatant" in the "war on terror." Because we no longer have that protection available to us MERELY if the government ACCUSES one of us of being a terrorist, we no longer have the right to even START to complain that we are being unlawfully or erroneously imprisoned. Furthermore, because this suspension is tied to the "war on terror," which is an undeclared war against an undefinable enemy, the suspension is in principle so endlessly and broadly applicable that it in effect grants the federal government the power to imprison ANYBODY at any time for merely being a certain sort of SUSPECT! Merely being a SUSPECT in this day and age is sufficient to get you into federal prison (or worse) with NO RECOURSE or access to normal legal channels to get yourself out again!
And here is ANOTHER example of how far-reaching the grasp for power over the individual has become. The law in the state of Washington, modeled from the similar federal law, now makes it illegal to even LOOK at a woman for too long. I'm not making this one up, and I posted at length about it on another thread, even posting relevant sections from the legal code to silence skeptics, and I'm happy to do that here too if requested. I can be fined and thrown in prison as a class A sex offender for merely LOOKING at a woman for "too long." So, "girl watching" is now a crime and makes men SEX OFFENDERS! So much for millions of years of evolution making men look at women and women "dress to impress" the men! Now a girl can go out into public wearing almost nothing, yet if you LOOK for "too long," that act alone makes you a sex offender and subject to fine, imprisonment, and being registered as a sex offender! So, in this country today, I don't even have the LIBERTY TO COLLECT PHOTONS with my own God or evolution-granted photon collectors, if those photons are bouncing off of a woman, EVEN in a public place!
But all of these points (from minor to major) I've raised are simply examples of the overarching point. These are all liberties we are losing that reveal a subtle but pervasive shift in the way our RIGHTS are perceived! I have written at length about the nature of rights elsewhere in this thread, so I won't repeat myself. But our RIGHTS are being reinterpreted in communitarian terms, and that necessarily results in a loss of individual liberties.
You can respond that these are all "small things" or that they are not genuine "liberties" because I don't have the "liberty" to infringe on others anyway.
Explain to me how the patriot act and IRS oppression (among many other examples) are small things!
Explain how in the State of Oregon I can possibly be infringing on the rights of others to drive faster than 20 MPH in a school zone AT 1AM ON A SATURDAY NIGHT! Oregon recently passed a law, then was forced to repeal it after less than a year, that extended the 20 MPH speed limit in school zones to apply 24/7. They then set up photo-radar speed traps all over the place to bag "speeders" and collect the highway taxes (higher because the violations were "in a school zone..." how convenient)! The law eventually got repealed, but nobody got THEIR money back, and nobody got their insurance rates reduced!
HOW can it be said that people driving 30 MPH in what was previously a 30 MPH speed zone, but that briefly became a 20 MPH speed zone, "were infringing on the rights of others" by their 1 am "flagrant violation" of the law?
THE POINT is that we now live in a nation in which it is PRESUMED that the government is legitimately in the business of "protecting us," rather than being in the business of protecting our LIBERTIES! The government is NOT in the business of protecting us! That is OUR jobs individually! WE must take the responsibility for our OWN choices and the outcomes of those choices. "Big Brother" is NOT your brother, he is not your friend, and he is NOT benevolent!!! HE is what the Constitution was written to protect you from!
And the communitarian mindset has made it "common sense" that my splattering my own face against my own windshield is a matter of PUBLIC concern rather than private concern! Thus, there just HAS to be laws to "protect" all of us from such eventualities! But I say that my splattering my face against my own windshield is a PRIVATE concern, and the very thinking that makes it a public concern is the root of the problem and the very sort of thinking that has turned rights/responsibilities on their heads.
So, you questions what rights I have lost. The answer is NONE! I denounce the fact that my rights are being VIOLATED in countless ways by an increasingly powerful and oppressive government that justifies its abuses by giving entitlements with one hand as it takes away liberties with the other.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Mar 27, 2010 - 12:05am PT
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I like where madbolter wanders....discuss......
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Mimi
climber
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Mar 27, 2010 - 12:09am PT
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Woe is us. The Blather hath been visited upon us. Or some would say it hath recurred.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Mar 27, 2010 - 12:15am PT
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Uhhh..........
...
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Mimi
climber
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Mar 27, 2010 - 12:17am PT
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Beware the Blather, bluering.
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apogee
climber
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Mar 27, 2010 - 12:21am PT
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madbolter, for all of your spraying, you aren't communicating very much.
Try working towards conciseness.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 27, 2010 - 12:25am PT
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Mimi
I thought madbolter1 did an excellent job of laying out everything he was trying to get across to the reader.
Clear and to the point.
Whether one agrees or not with what he wrote he did a hell of a good job explaining his arguments.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Mar 27, 2010 - 01:14am PT
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madbolter1 has some interesting thoughts, but libertarianism long ago became a non-starter. The days of the yeoman farmer on the frontier, free of the government, going to town meetings, and joining the militia, are long gone.
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Mimi
climber
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Mar 27, 2010 - 01:20am PT
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You may or may not agree with the diatribe.
The Blather remains. It doesn't wash off easily. Run, don't walk.
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Dave
Mountain climber
the ANTI-fresno
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Mar 27, 2010 - 11:41am PT
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If you don't understand and agree with at least part of what MadBolter is saying then you might just be part of the problem.
We wonder why costs and taxes go up? Why government is in every part of our lives? *We* let them...
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Crimpergirl
Sport climber
Boulder, Colorado!
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Mar 27, 2010 - 11:57am PT
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Madbolter, you stated "The prima facie speed limit states that one my not drive faster than is safe for the vehicle and conditions."
How is this demonstrated other than after an accident has occurred?
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