Liberal Friendly
For those of you who are offended by my disregard for climate change, my belief in capitalism, my belief in individualism over collectivism, my belief that smaller government is better, my belief that poverty is a behavioral disorder, and my belief that the “right to privacy” doesn’t apply when you are terminating innocent life: I present to you the Safe For Liberals category.
You may subscribe to it at http://txfx.net/category/safe-for-liberals/feed/
Nothing will go in here that, in my best judgement, would offend the majority of left-wingers. For example: anything that is critical of Bush will probably go in here. Anything about civil rights will go in here. Anything about the stupidity of trading freedom for security will go in here. Anything politically neutral will also go in here. The only thing I am not sure of is anti-white and anti-asian discrimination issues (such as giving extra consideration to non-white and non-asian applicants to colleges). Some of you lefties are in favor of such discrimination, and some aren’t. Maybe I’ll just stay away from that issue.
And yes, I mean “Liberals” in its new meaning (that is to say, a leftist, or a quasi-socialist). I don’t like this verbal distortion, but there doesn’t seem to be any escaping it. When I mean “liberal” in its original meaning, I’ll say “classical liberal.”
Note that this entry is not tagged safe-for-liberals. Mostly because of the horrid photo of Ms. Clinton.
We’re never going to see anything under that particular category, are we? (Sorry, couldn’t resist!)
Heh, well I know you were joking, but I disagree with Bush on:
Just off the top of my head.
Honestly, if he were up for reelection in 2008, I would not vote for him.
Neither would I.
I’m wondering where you’re coming up with free speech, though.
Washington Post: Recruits Sought for Porn Squad
I think you amy be on to something here, dude. I may add a “Safe for Neocons” section on my blog!
It’ll be for who are offended by my preference for science over dogma (esp. in science class!), my conviction that unregulated capitalism is incredibly dangerous, my demand of equal rights for ALL Americans, my commpassion for the downtrodden, my anger at the oppressors, and my support of sexual and reproductive freedom for all.
Of course, this may be limited to my Friday Abe Vigoda blogging, but what the hell?
Don,
As long as you offer the inverse! The Abe Vigoda ones are pretty much the only ones I skip over.
If you accept that there is a measurable resonance borne from all impacts, then it is simply a matter of degree which separates you from all the left-leaning liberals. By degree, I mean the amplitude and duration of such resonances. Humanity as a whole exhibits the continuing effects (resonance) of suffering through some type of cataclysm. It’s part of the collective consciousness, the id, or whatever psychological/sociological/anthropological spin one prefers to apply.
Rather than ignore that experience, one ought to realize that like all people, one is a product of one’s environment and a product of the history of humanity.
The more able one is to sense the resonances of the suffering of humanity, the more able one is to empathize.
Alternatively, one can ignore the echoes of misery and suffering born long ago. Note though, such ignorance leads humanity to reexperience the pain and ensuing misery again and again.
I have no problem with empathy… only with people whose reaction to suffering is to take things from people who have earned them, and give them to people who have not. That punishes success, rewards failure, and teaches that it is your right to survive in relative comfort, even if the only way to fund your comfort is the pilfering of the earnings of achievers. I give to the poor, but I’ll be damned if I’ll grant them a right to that which I have earned.
Such an argument only succeeds if you believe that punishment and success are divinely handed out in some sort of cockamamie karmic schema, where the deserving are always (or even mostly) successful and the undeserving are always (or even mostly) failures. Unfortunately for such arguments, real life has never functioned that way no matter how much people want or need it to.
No, I don’t believe that. But I also don’t believe that handing out punishment and success in a cockamamie utopic equalizing schema works any better. The relationship between success and effort and the relationship between failure and laziness might not be perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than the complete disconnect between effort and results that you get when you start punishing people for being rich and rewarding them for being poor.
Except for two problems…
First, we aren’t talking about a utopian equalizing scheme, that is the redistribution of all wealth equally, which is not remotely close to what is occuring in the American welfare system.
Second, the results you refer to being less desirable regarding the welfare distribution are positive: every country that has ever utilized a welfare system has seen a marked and steady increase in the quality of living of its citizenry and a net decrease in amount and severity of poverty. I shouldn’t need to detail the national economic and social benefits of such results for you.
Finally, it is only “punishment” if you choose to view it that way; the attitude of ownership of wealth is a socio-cultural construct based on the Marxist pillar of the labour theory of value. Other cultures claim that piety, filial devotion, patrilineal descent, or status create the entitlement to property and wealth.
(Tangentially, most of your money is being stolen by the Defense Department and the military, rather than social welfare programs (by degrees of magnitude). I suggest picketing them for a while and expecting them to start working for their money. I say this because your rancor towards the poor is disproportionate in comparison towards all the other groups who are also being given your wealth, in greater amounts, and I have to wonder why we never hear anything negative about the effect upon them.)
I agree with the points just made by Rev Rev. In fact, when modeled using multi-agent systems, a community of altruistic agents as a group fared better than a community of selfish agents.
Sure… at the expense of freedom, self-determination, and with an overall decrease in wealth.
The Labor Theory of Value (besides being wrong) isn’t the only way to describe an ownership society.
I don’t disagree. The difference there is that while national defense is a valid function of government, and provides me a tangable benefit, social welfare does nothing for me. Yeah, we spend too much and too inefficiently on national defense… but every single dollar put into the welfare system is a wasted dollar.
You should stop talking now before everyone else realizes you don’t know what you’re talking about either, since it is well established that exactly the opposite occurs. The psychological trauma of poverty is a deterrent to freedom and self-determination: it is proven that poverty breeds hopelessness, despair and erodes the will. Survival takes precedence over freedom.
When a nation is wealthy, a nation is free, for precisely the reason that it does not have to worry about survival and can concentrate on higher level concepts. People will choose food over freedom every time, for the simple reason that if you starve to death, freedom doesn’t do a whole lot for you.
Second, as proven by American history, the advent of welfare has been responsible for the increasing prosperity of Americans at all levels of society. Pre-New Deal America, with 50% and more of the population living in poverty was not exactly a bastion of economic progress or prosperity, nothing like the incredible growth in both areas we have seen in the years since then.
Or to put it bluntly, do you think you would be able to afford a microwave (or that they would have even been invented or available for the public market) if welfare had never existed? Color televisions? Personal computers? Fat chance.
Which, notably, doesn’t overturn my actual point.
Ah, so we get right down to brass tacks: “[it] does nothing for me”…So it IS all about greed and selfishness. As I’ve noted before, throughout human history greed/selfishness has never been a very progressive value for any society of which it is a part, and hasn’t done a hell of a lot for freedom, either (perhaps surprisingly to you, it regularly comes out as the antithesis of it). You’ll note Kenneth’s statement about altruistic groups faring better than selfish groups in multi-agent systems.
This ties into debunking your statement that each dollar of welfare is a wasted dollar. Historically, there are numerous tangible benefits (even to you) that arise from the adoption of social welfare programs. Some of those are economic, some of those are social.
Welfare programs are shown to reduce crime, increase economic prosperity (which energizes invention), and raises the overall level of wealth in a country from the poorest to the wealthiest members. There’s more money being spent in the economy: the wealthy can produce goods, the poor can buy them, production of goods and sales increase, competition between manufacturers rises, etc.
Less money and manpower is being wasted on health and sanitation, there are fewer criminals (or inticements to criminal activity) and thus less is being spent on crime prevention and punishment, etc.
If you want to live in a 3rd-world country whose economy is stagnant, sure, abandon welfare; but it is very simple (and proven) socio-economics: by improving the lot of all members of society…you improve the lot of the whole society, which definitionally includes you. When some of society’s members get left behind, it ends up being a drain on the entire society, holding it back and stunting or slowing its economic growth and development as well as causing numerous social problems that affect everyone and waste resources.
Following this line of thinking, prisoners are the most free people in America, as all their needs are met.
Ah, now I remember how that quote goes. “Give me survival, and a prescription drug plan, or give me death.”
What are you talking about? These were items that only the rich could afford when they first came out. Computers in 1985 cost over $4,000 in 1985 dollars… prohibitively expensive. It was capitalism and the desire to sell the product to the general market that drove the makers of these items to find cheaper ways to make them so that average Americans could afford them.
It is about legitimate self-interest. The government forcibly takes money from its rightful owners, and redistributes it to others who are not its rightful owners. Now it’s greedy or selfish to object to that? The ability to keep and control your own assets is a fundamental part of freedom. Any system that takes away some of that control is a system that reduces peoples’ freedom. There’s no way to give that back. Cheap microwaves and food stamps have nothing to do with freedom.
I don’t want these benefits! It doesn’t matter what you get… the price (a reduction in economic freedom) is too high.
Not worth it.
I don’t care about “society.” You can give me all the arguments you want about how wealth redistribution decreases crime, improves standards of living, etc, etc. I am not tempted by these things. Many people who spend a long time in prison become dependent on it. They cease to care about their reduction of freedom, and become content to merely survive. All their needs are taken care of, just because they are there. Many can’t make it on the outside where they have to make decisions and be the one to put food on their table. Any argument you make in favor of making America more like prisons is going to fall on deaf ears. I don’t want to start down that road of giving up freedom for security.
Except that you aren’t following that line of thinking, you’re creating a strawman. Your counter is not valid because the statement was not “having your needs taken care of makes you happy”, it was “poverty breeds despair.”
The latter is true, it’s an unassaible fact proven by years of research and even a simple stroll down to poor neighborhoods, and all ridiculous hyperbole about prisoners aside.
Right. Taking historical quotes out of context is really a valid debate tactic, to say nothing of your taking the argument out of context (who said anything about prescription drug plans, given that we were talking about survival).
Throughout history, people have chosen to eat rather than have freedom. This has been one of the great controlling factors used by those with power to keep those without in check, because when it comes down to it, the human animal is wired to ensure its own survival first and foremost…not it’s own freedom. Freedom is useless to the dead.
Or perhaps you think the War of Independence would still have been fought if winning it meant death by starvation…
Precisely. So let’s see…if 50% or more of the country lives in poverty, then how many fewer consumers does that produce who will be able to afford the mid-price level technology after the early adopters have infused the business with enough capital to continue production for that level?
This is basic economic theory here! Wealth begets wealth; more wealth for you means more wealth for me. More poverty = less economic prosperity. Economic prosperity = freedom. History proves this correlation time and time again. The more wealthy a society becomes as a group, the greater freedoms they enjoy.
Already covered that previously with the Marxist labor value statement; but regardless of that, the government also forcibly performs other actions against your individual sovereignty, like preventing you from driving your car while intoxicated (How dare they!). All social systems impose some control upon various factors of property or behavior.
If greater economic prosperity and a better overall quality of life for a society can be achieved by taking some of your money and redistributing it, then the society has every right — as an entity — to take your money and redistribute it for the betterment of its members (which includes you). Why? For the same reason they can and should throw your ass in jail for driving drunk, because your actions are not beneficial to society, regardless of your “personal freedoms” as in this case your personal freedoms are causing harm.
No. It’s selfish/greedy to say “What’s in it for me?”
So…your argument is that quality of life is unimportant in comparison to freedom, ie: you’d be happy living in a shack in the woods picking ticks out of your hair and shooting at squatters and bandits as long as you can keep everything that is yours.
Great. Fine, get to it. Go. Be free, young man, and live in the dirt fighting dysentery on a daily basis while keeping everything you earn, like the rags dad hands down to you. I hear Somalia is lovely this time of year.
Don’t expect the rest of us to follow you down that road though, because most of the rest of us aren’t foolish enough to believe that the sort of insane anarchist “freedom” you want is worth the price. You’re the one bitching about the desire for economic freedom, while failing to recognize that the only reason you have the amount and quality of economic freedom you do is because of the current system.
Just because you don’t mind the idea of living in a dirt hole in the woods frightened that someone is going to come along and kill you for the heck of it — because economic prosperity, lower crime rates, and better health mean nothing to you — doesn’t mean the rest of humanity thinks that’s a great or rational option.
Let’s nevermind the continuing prison hyperbole, since this is one of those “happens occasionally, but not all the time” problems, just as it is with welfare, where over half of the recipients move off the rolls within one year, and the actual percetage that stays on welfare for life is miniscule (and generally comprised of those who cannot otherwise take care of themselves: the mentally and physically disabled, the elderly, etc).
We won’t let a thing like facts get in the way of repeating the message about the evil, lazy, disincentivized poor…just like the KKK doesn’t let facts get in its way about the evil, treacherous, stupid African Americans!
Yes, such a prison. How could I not have seen that not shooting my own food with my own gun is the devil!? I should be making my own leather boots and sewing my own pants while building a well so I can boil my water, and treating my own intestinal parasites. That’s FREEDOM, instead of the PRISON of modern life, where I can stroll down to the market and purchase fresh vegetables and clean meat without having to grow or raise it for myself.
I’m terribly spoiled by all that and I should abandon my horrible, insane, selfish desire for an easier, more prosperous life immediately to pursue real freedom, for I can see how I am imprisioned by this terrible economic prosperity I enjoy and have benefited from, and how that is so very, very, very, very bad because my teeth aren’t falling out of my skull and I don’t have to lie awake at night worried about roving gangs of bandits.
Yes, America the prison! Throw off your shackles! Recognize that a desire for prosperity, safety, and health is enslavement! Destroy the evil, disincentivizing system that has brought us these things in exchange for a measure of complete freedom, and ignore the great benefits (including greater and higher quality freedom)! Return to the days when a man had to work in the coal mines for fourteen hours a day for pennies and it took four hours to make a decent supper, because we were so much more “free” back then!
Sorry, that nutty proposition you’ve laid down falls on deaf ears as well. You don’t care about — which is tantamount to wanting in this context — more crime, more disease, a lower quality of life, more hardship in exchange for what you are calling “freedom”.
I’m afraid you will find that very, very, very few people would agree with you on this; most of us will happily take our “prison” of modern life, built by the economic success resultant from the social structures upon which it is based, because it gives us more actual freedom.