Romney vs. Obama

[Winstonm]

 

I am sure you were partly referring to their social policies, of opposition to Abortion, but that is a policy which enjoys widespread support. Gallup suggets that the prolife-prochoice division is now 50%-41%, with 9% undecided. On Gay marriage, the republicans likewise appear to be on the right side of public opinion, with 57%-40% opposing legalisation of Gay marriage.

 

Being on the right side of public opinion is not much of a defense for a stupid idea. The U.S. Constitution is a document that protects the rights of the minority from the stupid ideas of the mob majority. The current Republican party does not get that - they think it is a document for them, only.

[blackshoe]

Which was the point - no-one stands alone in some Galtian ideal, everyone else contributes as well. No trucking company could succeed without the highway system built by the government.

If you think "everyone stands alone" is a "Galtian ideal", you don't understand Objectivism. Your second statement is demonstrably false, since if the government hadn't built the highway system, private enterprise would have done so. Now if you'd said "no trucking company could succeed without a highway system in its area of operations, some or all of which is likely to have been built by someone else", that would be true.

 

Like Robert A. (not Robert David, the actor) Hall, I'm tired.

[barmar]

Last night Jon Stewart replayed what he called his "favorite sound bite of all time". TV star Craig T Nelson, on the Glenn Beck Show in 2009, saying, "I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No."

 

There's also the old Jewish joke: A man's drowning, prays to God for help. Lifeguard swims out, drowning man says, 'No thanks, God will save me.' A few minute later, a rowboat comes by. 'No thanks, God will save me.' A steamship. 'No thanks, God will save me.' Finally, the fellow drowns, goes to Heaven. says. 'God, why didn't you save me?' God says, 'For cryin' out loud, I sent you two boats and a lifeguard, what the hell did you expect?'

[PassedOut]

There is a difference between being for or against some form of redistribution such as a negative income tax and still calling yourself a capitalist or conservative and being for what at their heart are socialist economic policies where economic and political power rests in the same hands that nonconservatives may be in favor of.

In that vein, it is interesting to watch the entire context of Obama's 1998 "redistribution" remarks, compared with the clip now being trotted out by the Romney campaign: In rest of '98 clip, Obama speaks of 'competition' and 'the marketplace'

 

I think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody's got a shot. How do we pool resources at the same time as we decentralize delivery systems in ways that both foster competition, can work in the marketplace, and can foster innovation at the local level and can be tailored to particular communities.

Nothing about getting folks dependent on the government...

[y66]

Last night Jon Stewart replayed what he called his "favorite sound bite of all time". TV star Craig T Nelson, on the Glenn Beck Show in 2009, saying, "I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No."

 

There's also the old Jewish joke: A man's drowning, prays to God for help. Lifeguard swims out, drowning man says, 'No thanks, God will save me.' A few minute later, a rowboat comes by. 'No thanks, God will save me.' A steamship. 'No thanks, God will save me.' Finally, the fellow drowns, goes to Heaven. says. 'God, why didn't you save me?' God says, 'For cryin' out loud, I sent you two boats and a lifeguard, what the hell did you expect?'

In a similar vein ...

 

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

This appeared in "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace along with a warning against blind certainty and close-mindedness -- the Romney qualities that scare me the most.

 

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

[jonottawa]

The problem is that the ideas are neither crazy nor indefensible. Mostly when I hear republicans talk I think "B is a crazy way to achieve objective A", not "A is a crazy thing to try to achieve".

 

Its their implementation that is crazy. They think the banks have colluded with Washington to make huge profits while the economy suffers: The answer is not to return to the Gold Standard. Ryan talking on the "insidious evil of money printing" is just crazy talk. I'm sure that he believes that his policies will fix the economy. He is just crazy :P.

 

They believe in a strong National Defence. Well, the world is a scary place. Just this week I have seen YouTube videos of Chinese Mobs chanting "death to the Japanese", and calling for War, over some basically irrelevant islands. ...

 

Even the opposition to healthcare has play, it is clearly a rational choice to refuse medical insurance. ...

 

I am sure you were partly referring to their social policies, of opposition to Abortion, but that is a policy which enjoys widespread support. Gallup suggets that the prolife-prochoice division is now 50%-41%, with 9% undecided. On Gay marriage, the republicans likewise appear to be on the right side of public opinion, with 57%-40% opposing legalisation of Gay marriage.

 

The quest for "small government" will never be over. ...

 

I continue to believe that a serious contender could unite the republican base sufficiently over these concerns, without needing to be crazy or stupid.

 

On 'strong defense': Nobody did more to break the military than Dubya. The notion that Republicans are more pro-military than Dems is absurd. Dems are more pro-grunt, pro-vet; Repugs are more pro-defense contractor.

 

On healthcare: Obama desperately (and foolishly) tried to elicit Republican cooperation on healthcare reform. They refused to cooperate and did everything they could to demagogue the issue. So we ended up with a crappy bill. You will never get to 'small government' if you don't fix healthcare, it's by far the biggest long-term cost driver, especially with boomers retiring.

 

On social issues: I have nothing against principled social conservatives. Those who say that Roe v. Wade was incorrectly decided are right, imo (and nothing would swell Democratic voter rolls more than if it were reversed/overruled.) Those who say that government doesn't belong in the marriage business (because marriage is a religious concept) are also right. The truth, however, is that Repugs use these issues primarily to rile up their low-information voters who would have no reason to vote for them otherwise.

[billw55]

We could easily chop a quarter off our defense budget and still have by far the strongest military in the world. That would be a huge amount of money, just what we need going into infrastructure, particularly bridges and the electric grid. I'm not holding my breath though.

[mike777]

On 'strong defense': Nobody did more to break the military than Dubya. The notion that Republicans are more pro-military than Dems is absurd. Dems are more pro-grunt, pro-vet; Repugs are more pro-defense contractor.

 

On healthcare: Obama desperately (and foolishly) tried to elicit Republican cooperation on healthcare reform. They refused to cooperate and did everything they could to demagogue the issue. So we ended up with a crappy bill. You will never get to 'small government' if you don't fix healthcare, it's by far the biggest long-term cost driver, especially with boomers retiring.

 

On social issues: I have nothing against principled social conservatives. Those who say that Roe v. Wade was incorrectly decided are right, imo (and nothing would swell Democratic voter rolls more than if it were reversed/overruled.) Those who say that government doesn't belong in the marriage business (because marriage is a religious concept) are also right. The truth, however, is that Repugs use these issues primarily to rile up their low-information voters who would have no reason to vote for them otherwise.

 

 

At its core the Republican party stood for freedom, not making people rich.

 

However as I read your statements I understand your view of the party is that:

1) At its core it wants to make rich people, richer(defense contractors), rather than defend freedom.

2) On health care it wants people to die in the streets rather than receive medical care; but you dont think it is an issue about putting the economic power of the health care industry, about 18% of GDP, in political hands. Again an issue of freedom.

3) on social issues you see conservatives wanting to take away freedom from women rather than a freedom issue for unborn babies.

 

I can understand people not wanting to vote for a party that they view as against freedom and for making the rich , richer.

[Cthulhu D]

If you think "everyone stands alone" is a "Galtian ideal", you don't understand Objectivism. Your second statement is demonstrably false, since if the government hadn't built the highway system, private enterprise would have done so. Now if you'd said "no trucking company could succeed without a highway system in its area of operations, some or all of which is likely to have been built by someone else", that would be true.

 

Like Robert A. (not Robert David, the actor) Hall, I'm tired.

 

Yes, you stand alone if you are an objectivist, because of your answer to this dilemma:

 

You are running late for an event. If you make the event you will receive $100 million dollars. If you are late for the event you will not get any money. You have an opportunity to make the event on time by ducking down a side alley. Taking any other route will result in you being late for the event. However, blocking the alley is a homeless man with no social or economic ties. If you kill him, no-one will do anything about it or think less of you in any way. In your position you have a disintegration ray that will remove the man as an obstruction.

 

Do you

 

A) Shoot the man

B) Be late for the event?

 

You'll get much wriggling on this, but the Objectivist answer is A, shoot the man. The objectivist philosophy explicitly states that the only consideration in ethical questions is the costs an benefits to yourself. Here the cost is nothing and the benefits are large. Therefore there can only be one answer - murder.

 

Also, if my second statement is demonstrably false, please find a single road network in the world (note: Not toll road, full road network), built without public funding, serving an urban area with say, ~600,000 people at a minimum. Just one is fine.

[dwar0123]

Yes, you stand alone if you are an objectivist, because of your answer to this dilemma:

 

You are running late for an event. If you make the event you will receive $100 million dollars. If you are late for the event you will not get any money. You have an opportunity to make the event on time by ducking down a side alley. Taking any other route will result in you being late for the event. However, blocking the alley is a homeless man with no social or economic ties. If you kill him, no-one will do anything about it or think less of you in any way. In your position you have a disintegration ray that will remove the man as an obstruction.

 

Do you

 

A) Shoot the man

B) Be late for the event?

 

You'll get much wriggling on this, but the Objectivist answer is A, shoot the man. The objectivist philosophy explicitly states that the only consideration in ethical questions is the costs an benefits to yourself. Here the cost is nothing and the benefits are large. Therefore there can only be one answer -

The reason I make money is so I don't have to kill people to survive. If I will die if dont kill this man, maybe, I dunno, I'd really have to beleive I will die. But as I can survive on a lot less than a 100 million, I have no ethical dilemma here.

 

You vastly over value the benefits of money and vastly under value the toll taking a life has on the human psyche. It almost seems like you think taking a life has no cost except in that you might get caught, which is kinda scary, that almost fits the definition of a psychopath..

[kenberg]

I don't regard myself as a money-grubber, and I seriously doubt that I am an Objectivist (my wife has read some Ayn Rand but she reads all sorts of stuff).

Still, I think it would be a really good idea for the homeless guy to get out of my way.

[phil_20686]

I don't regard myself as a money-grubber, and I seriously doubt that I am an Objectivist (my wife has read some Ayn Rand but she reads all sorts of stuff).

Still, I think it would be a really good idea for the homeless guy to get out of my way.

 

It was actually Rick Santorum who summed up my view of Ayn Rand's philosophy, although he may have been quoting someone else:

 

"When I grew up there were two books that really changed my outlook on the world. Atlas Shrugged, and the Lord of the Rings. One is about heroes and villians in an imaginary world. The other contains orcs."

[gwnn]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fit79MQwyeY

[luke warm]

You'll get much wriggling on this, but the Objectivist answer is A, shoot the man. The objectivist philosophy explicitly states that the only consideration in ethical questions is the costs an benefits to yourself. Here the cost is nothing and the benefits are large. Therefore there can only be one answer - murder.

maybe, but you're saying that all who practice the objectivist philosophy would act in the way you describe... that's a fallacious argument - some might and some might not... acting in one's own self-interest might mean not killing a homeless man, even at the risk of losing $100M... however, in this scenario, i doubt if one philosophy has any more moral quandary than most others

 

I don't regard myself as a money-grubber, and I seriously doubt that I am an Objectivist (my wife has read some Ayn Rand but she reads all sorts of stuff). Still, I think it would be a really good idea for the homeless guy to get out of my way.

LOL

[blackshoe]

We could easily chop a quarter off our defense budget and still have by far the strongest military in the world.

Could we? Pray show us how, oh guru. B-)

[dwar0123]

Could we? Pray show us how, oh guru. B-)

 

United States spends 711 Billion on defense

China spends 143 Billion on defense

 

711 * .75 > 143

 

Source

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures

[mike777]

For starters I suppose we can let China protect the world's shipping lanes. That should save a ton of money in the short run.

 

Also looking at the Map it looks like China is a heck of alot closer to places such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea and Japan etc.. we could pull back from all of that and save a ton of defense spending. Heck looking at the map it may even be closer to Europe's far eastern edge.

 

 

 

144>143

[dwar0123]

144>143

711*.75>143*3

[mike777]

711*.75>143*3

 

 

ok but where do you cut the cut 170 billion from defense? I mean do you have a plan or just wishing upon a star?

[kenberg]

Pi^2/6> 1+1/4+1/9+1/16+1/25+1/36+1/49+1/64+1/81+1/100

[onoway]

A headline in the Wichita Eagle someone sent me

 

From the Eagle...

 

 

 

"Traffic was heavy on Kellogg for yesterday morning's commute, despite 47% of the population lying in bed waiting for a government handout."

[mike777]

A headline in the Wichita Eagle someone sent me

 

From the Eagle...

 

 

 

"Traffic was heavy on Kellogg for yesterday morning's commute, despite 47% of the population lying in bed waiting for a government handout."

 

 

that is a sad comment on america

1) true

2) too damn lazy to find and report truth.

[blackshoe]

United States spends 711 Billion on defense

China spends 143 Billion on defense

 

711 * .75 > 143

 

Source

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures

So what? This proves precisely nothing, and certainly does not answer my question.

[blackshoe]

@Cthulhu: All I can say to your little scenario is that our respective understandings of Objectivist philosophy do not match. As for your request for an example, it's based on a false premise: that an example has to exist in order for your statement to be demonstrably false. As I've already demonstrated how it is false, your premise is false, your conclusion is false, and the fact that I know of no such actual example (as I'm sure you were expecting) is irrelevant. Or do you deny that privately constructed and privately owned roads could provide the trucking company with the necessary infrastructure?

[BunnyGo]

So what? This proves precisely nothing, and certainly does not answer my question.

 

Your question was whether we could continue to have the most powerful armed forces in the world while cutting military spending by 25%. Considering we already have a head start on research and spend as much year to year as countries 2 to 15 combined, yes, we could cut spending and cut the military and still have one more powerful than everyone else.

 

The hard part--as you're insinuating--is whether we could do this and continue to have bases in Germany/Korea/Japan/Taiwan, let alone the wars we're currently fighting without more input from our allies: no, we couldn't. That said, I'd like to see the rest of NATO chip in a few bucks towards their own defense. Let China control the stability of the world for a while, let Europe kick in a few bucks--hell, let them pay us to do it for them.