US Politics Mega-thread - Page 658

On November 25 2013 12:38 sam!zdat wrote:


aka the priesthood

he's essentially right, you know. There's no "correct" answer as to what the constitution from the late fucking 18th century says about anything in the 21st century. of course, HE wouldn't agree with that because he is likely a fundamentalist

On November 25 2013 12:33 kwizach wrote:

First of all, on the matter of the constitutionality of the ACA, yes, your position is very clearly in the minority among constitutional law experts.

My point isn't that you're not allowed to have your own opinion on the constitutionality of the ACA. You very much are. And I'm certainly not trying to paint judges as infallible either, or saying that there aren't plenty of SC decisions that I disagree with. My point is that you are presenting your opinion as the undisputable truth on the matter of the constitutionality of the ACA, so much so that you consider it an objective criterion to separate good judges from bad judges. That is what's ridiculously out-of-touch with reality.


Again, the fact that you are presenting the ACA as "a clear issue, constitutionally", only shows how incredibly biased, and dismissive of facts and opinions that go against your view, you are. No, it's not a clear issue. No, your arguments aren't the definitive word on the matter. You're the one who's completely partisan and ideologically-driven, not the nominees that we are discussing. And you still haven't explained what is supposed to be unacceptable about the views they hold to justify not nominating them.


It's so easy they've been found and nominated by the president, and rejected by the Republicans in the Senate.

On November 25 2013 12:42 kwizach wrote:

By saying there's no "correct" answer, you are saying that he is not right, since he is saying there IS a correct answer, and that it is HIS answer.

On November 25 2013 12:09 sam!zdat wrote:
no, it's just written into the sacred text that you can change it.

what is reality grasshopper

On November 25 2013 13:04 Roe wrote:


well apparently you know, since you know the sacred texts can't approach it, so in a roundabout way the constitution could approach reality.

The "sacredness" of a text is usually that it can't be changed

, and that its native form is ultimately the pinnacle of whatever subject it expounds.

On November 25 2013 12:51 sam!zdat wrote:


yeah, he's a fundamentalist. he locates the authority in the text, and thinks that would be a good thing. you're a democrat, you locate the authority in the exegetical apparatus, and you think that's a good thing. I think you're both crazy

I'm saying he's right about the fact that the decisions made about what is and is not constitutional are not direct readings of what the constitution says and that it is all about ideology and politics. he is right to distrust the "constitutional experts," he's just wrong to think that literalist interpretations of the constitution are a good idea or possible in the first place

the fact remains that the constitution is basically 1 or 2 sentences that have so many layers of case history on top of them that what they mean has nothing to do with what they say. they function as sedimented agglomerations of judicial history, not legal propositions

the constitution, like any other sacred text, can be made to said a lot of different things, you just have to know how to read it

On November 25 2013 13:08 sam!zdat wrote:


what? how?



why do you think that? the sacred text is the sacred text because it is the Law. it's an extra proposition to say that it can't be changed. sacred texts get changed sometimes. this is just a sacred text that happens to say in it that you can change it in a certain specific way. doesn't make it any less sacred.



then what do you need priests for

On November 25 2013 13:12 Introvert wrote:


Thankfully, however, the originalist ("fundamentalist") position has lots of documentation, as almost every single clause/idea contained in the Constitution has some sort of notation that can be found pertaining to it: the Commerce clause, tax and spending clauses, etc. These things do not exist in a vacuum. The ratifying debates, the notes from the convention itself, the federalist papers, anti-federalist papers, letters from key persons involved... all these things certainly help. For instance, the main reason the Commerce clause is as complicated as it is now is not just the vague wording, but the fact that the judiciary has re-purposed it so many times.

The intent can be taken and used for today's problems, or, if the document is insufficient, you change it legally- not leave up to a bunch of judicial oligarchs.

But as to the question of "should we follow from what the original intent was?" Well, that's different. Ideology aside, it seems like the only rational way to evaluate things and avoid a government that is essentially run by courts.

In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan opposes to the thesis of the
death of God the claim that God is dead from the very beginning, it is just that he just
didn’t know it[...] While in pagan religions gods are alive, Jewish believers
are already taking into account his death. Indications of this awareness abound in Jewish
sacred texts. Recall from Talmud the wonderful story about two rabbis who basically tell
God to shut up. The two rabbis fight over a theological question and, unable to resolve it,
one of them proposes, “Let Heaven itself testify that the law is according to my
judgment,” then a voice from Heaven agrees with the rabbi who appealed to it. However,
the other rabbi then stands up and claims that even a voice from Heaven, God’s voice,
was not to be regarded, “for thou, oh God, didst long ago write down in the law which
thou gave us on Sinai thou shalt follow the multitude.” So God himself had to agree, after
saying, “My children have vanquished me. My children have vanquished me.” And he
runs away.

On November 25 2013 12:15 kwizach wrote:

You argued that his foreign policy had been "as disastrous as it can be in terms of managing diplomatic relations" - of course, you were in your original post criticizing him by grouping together completely different aspects of foreign policy, being as vague as possible in the process. The example I provided addressed diplomatic relations in the context of international organizations, which can be tremendously important even though they seldom get press coverage (even for important issues). The IMF quota reform involved negotiating changes to the relative weight of western and emerging (BRICS...) powers (notably in terms of voting power), which is basically a matter that is, on a broader scale, going to shape 21st century international relations. The Obama administration basically achieved all of its objectives in the talks and maintained its preponderance and influence through extremely effective negotiating. That you're trying to equate this with "negotiating international standards for peanut butter" speaks volumes about your understanding of international relations.

Like I said, the information on IR you read in newspapers are but the tip of the iceberg, and the same goes for the public declarations by foreign government on U.S. policy you keep taking at face value even though they are half the time made for their own populations rather than actual reflections of the governments' stance with regards to U.S. policy (see many of the declarations by E.U. government following the NSA scandal, even though it did do some damage to U.S.-E.U. relations, but mostly when it came to the leaders themselves being spied on). Even though there's definitely plenty of valid criticism that can be put forward about various aspects of Obama's foreign policy, the idea that the United States were better off in the hands of George W. Bush when it comes to its external relations is outright laughable. To support that idea with the Obama administrations' reaction to the Arab denotes a misunderstanding of both the current situation and the Bush administration's way of conducting foreign policy. I refer you to the rest of my first comment.

In short, after the end of creation is accomplished, God survives only as the dead letter of
the law, without retaining even the right to intervene into how people interpret his law.
God thus has to die two times—in itself and for itself. In Judaism it dies in itself by way
of being reduced to the effect of the human speech. God nonetheless continues
to function, so it has to die for itself, and this, I think, happens in Christianity. That is to
say, why did Christ have to die? The paradox is that God is a fiction but a fiction which
structures our reality. It’s a symbolic fiction. It is efficient in its very inexistence. It
doesn’t exist but it nonetheless works.

It is thus not enough to destroy the fiction from outside, to reduce it to reality, to
demonstrate how it emerged from reality. This is what vulgar atheists like Dawkins are
doing. The fiction has to be destroyed from within. To put it in descriptive terms, it is not
enough to prove that God doesn’t exist. The formula of true atheism is that God himself
must proclaim his inexistence, must stop believing in himself. Therein resides the
paradox. If we destroy the fiction from outside, just reducing it to reality, the fiction
continues to function, to exert its symbolic efficiency, as in the famous joke about the
atheist Zionists who do not believe that God exists but nonetheless believe that somehow
God gave them the land of Israel.

On November 25 2013 13:55 sam!zdat wrote:
whatever metaphysical nonsense you do or don't believe about the sacred text, that is irrelevant, it is still a sacred text. it is a secularized sacred text, but that doesn't make it not a sacred text

On November 25 2013 13:28 xDaunt wrote:


Vague? I specifically pointed out Obama's hemorrhaging of influence in the Middle East through various stupidities such as drawing "red lines" in Syria as a concrete example of his poor foreign policy.

On November 25 2013 11:47 Introvert wrote:
This new Iran deal is only accelerating our loss of influence. Now, it will probably be worth it IFthis deal actually results in a permanent treaty that disarms Iran and ensures that they don't develop a nuclear weapon. That would be a real accomplishment.

On November 25 2013 11:47 Introvert wrote:
However, my peanut butter and jelly line stands.

On November 25 2013 11:47 Introvert wrote:
Go ahead and keep arguing that negotiating relatively minor adjustments in IMF voting during regularly scheduled adjustment sessions is a big deal. It clearly isn't. Nor is it anywhere on the same spectrum of consequence to the global realpolitik as the larger issues discussed above.

On November 25 2013 14:10 Roe wrote:
I guess I'm still not sure how it works like a sacred text. You say the judges or w/e are priests...well ok...? But how is that a meaningful thing to say? You're not saying it's sacred, in the end you're merely saying it's the law.

On November 25 2013 14:16 sam!zdat wrote:


i want people to understand that the system we live in is not some modern break into rational governance, it is a shuffled around and rearranged version of things that have existed for a long time. the constitution is completely functionally analogous to a sacred text, and so you should think about it in whatever way you are accustomed to thinking about sacred texts, which is a whole nother question

and whatever observations we may have about how religions and priesthoods and sacred texts work should be applied to american jurisprudence, the judiciary, and the constitution, because they are the same kind of thing

so the argument that kwizach and introvert are having is just an argument between a catholic and a protestant and should be conceived of in precisely this way

On November 25 2013 12:48 Introvert wrote:


It's a clear issue from my perspective, but I understand that not everyone shares my view on the relevance of the Constitution or the role of precedent. IF one is looking at it from an original intent perspective, then the ACA obviously fails. But if one looks at it through the lens of what all Court decisions on the last ~200 years, then yes, things get murky. And that's where the "experts" come in. Most of them don't just judge from an originalist perspective, they are essentially bound (and for making predictions this works quite well) to look at other decisions. So if I were a conservative in the Senate, then to ME the vote on some of these judges would be obvious. I'm not saying that we should throw out every old court case, but I'm saying that when bad judges make bad decisions, it's still something that future judges down the line are required to take into account, and are very adverse to the idea of undoing a previous ruling.

On November 25 2013 11:47 Introvert wrote:
Ideology is a test. Take Cornelia Pillard. Now I'm sure you would agree with her on just about everything, but from my perspective she's pretty far left. That's who their blocking, not Joe Schome the moderate.

On November 25 2013 11:47 Introvert wrote:
Whether you like it or not, ideology is the determining factor now, not credentials.

On November 25 2013 11:47 Introvert wrote:
It's so easy that, as provided by heliusx on an earlier page, Obama has had 207 of his 275 nominees approved. Still a lot are not approved, but they aren't blocking everything.