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On May 18 2008 20:49 nimysa wrote:Show nested quote +On May 18 2008 20:10 Monsen wrote:On May 18 2008 10:34 nimysa wrote:
America is not good enough to have a presidential candidate like Ron Paul. Man its hard hating that guy, he has never lied, has been the most consistent on issues then any candidate including Obama and has a plan to tackle large global issues. He knows whats honesty and knows the problems of the country very well.
On the other hand, all Obama can tell you is hope and change, all he is, is a candidate thats black and wears a nice suite, only willing to promise to handle small-scale problems. He's not going to tackle problems such as the military industrial complex of America, or stop the U.S from continueing to be Israel's lapdog. Its sad because I thought Tl.net members were more sane and rational then to support a candidate like Obama. *Sigh* in a more perfect world Kucinich would be debating Gravel, instead these two nut-bags Democratic nominees and their racist-disillusioned supporters are all we get. Sry, I'm not sane enough to follow your eloquent and well founded post. Its ok I understand, English is not your first language so I do not expect you to know of the state of U.S affairs concerning my complex articulate post.You are from Germany land of no great food (except Beer) or anything darn interesting which is a bonus.
Again, I concur, as you are obviously from a country whose people are famed for their knowledge of foreign countries.
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ron paul supporters are almost always hilariously delusional
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On May 19 2008 02:13 fusionsdf wrote:
ron paul supporters are almost always hilariously delusional
I don't know about that. I've met a good number who are well-intentioned and principled libertarians. I have a devil of a time convincing them that hands off international and economic policy won't work out well for us. We have some common ground though. We can both agree that imperial military projection and farm subsidies need to go 
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I guess it depends on the forum
I seem to come across the conspiracy supporters :/
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United States22883 Posts
On May 19 2008 03:43 fusionsdf wrote:
I guess it depends on the forum
I seem to come across the conspiracy supporters :/
Yep. Socially, I consider myself a libertarian, but goddamn there are a lot of completely whacko libertarians out there. I'm talking about the types of guys who believe that reptilian president crap.
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ron paul is anti abortion, doesn't want to take any action to hire more women and minorities, opposes increasing funding for healthcare, wants to privatize social security, wants privatized education, opposes alternative energy, opposes campaign financing reform.
he sounds pretty out of touch to me
If these views are out of touch, it is because most of the electorate would rather be bribed by empty promises reflecting their own ignorance of the science of stable government. A successful, in-touch politician's platform is largely a product of sociological determinism, achieved by constantly studying the topography of popular sentiment and calculating the safest path. Any principles which remain after this hazardous trek in political survival (i.e. maximizing votes) is collected and commonly called the candidate's platform.
In poetry we give abstract ideas the characteristics of people, in order to imbune them with existence at the expense of purity. In politics we make people into symbols for abstract ideas which favours purity at the expense of existence.
Regarding private schooling, private social security, halting healthcare expansion, subsidizing alternative energy, these are simply more bribes the American people want without wanting to pay more. (They either believe they can continually borrow 750 billion dollars a year ad infinitum, or hope that the costs will be levied on someone else. Some of them even buy into the theory that they may enjoy all these benefits AND pay less taxes (I'm looking at supporters of Obama's platform.))
What astonishes me however, is the stark divide between the imagined and real interests of our generation.
The social security programme, if continued under its present system, will benefit our parents, but bankrupt our own generation. The present 8-trillion dollar shortfall in investment will burden our generation with a ballooning level of debt, and by the time we ourselves retire the system will be completely broken.
The members of this board ought to know better than our parents the qualitative poverty of modern public education, I have seen it ridiculed here more than once. They ought to know in their reason, that bureaucratized classrooms, teachers and grades is not a problem of underfunding (No amount of money can make teachers smarter and no number of Shakespeare editions in public classrooms will make children want to read them,) but belongs to more complicated issues, yet on the political front of education we are for its public expansion. (Another public-propaganda illusion whereby we are made to believe we care about something when we really don't.)
The quota to employ women and minorities in various academic and social positions may be a true sentiment of easy generosity, considering how few underprivileged races and genders actually come to these boards. As we are composed of largely caucasian or mongoloid races, we can expect to be disadvantaged in any scheme of artificial equality.
It's important here to note the American attitude toward liberty and equality as originating from a history particular to itself. Its origins lie in the enlightenment within which America was born, and at a time when America was both more free and more equal than any other state in the world, and American attitudes remain largely attached to this fixed progressive doctrine whereby liberty and equality are parallel phenomena, and an increase in one results in an increase in the other.
The potential for seemingly endless expansion (and therefore endless progress) was founded not only in the conditions of American society, but in the endless supply of cheap land, immigration and mobility. It was largely due to these benefits that the United States avoided the hierarchical liberty of Victorian England or the tyrannical equality of revolutionary France. An American could expand his wealth exponentially without encroaching on the wealth of others, and there was no need in this phase of the history of the American republic to acknowledge anything other than that symbiotic relationship between liberty and equality as was found on their continent.
With the closing of the frontier, American expansionist energies began to splutter across the Caribbean, the Pacific, and eventually the Atlantic, even while her own internal expansion and social mobility were forcibly slowed by the gradually encroaching reality of her limitations. Immigration to the United States slowed after 1900, and the size of her cities began to implode after 1950. After 1950 for the first time many Americans discovered that they were no longer capable of rising, in either material or social terms, above the stations of their parents. (Newer immigrants, particularly oriental ones are an important exception.) The flooding of the consumer market with various technological gizmos and gadgets, with increasing "convenience" products obscure the fact that the standard of living for millions of Americans has been receding. In some industrial states, such as Michigan or Ohio, this is not even an obscure argument among the common people.
A basic interpretive outline of the material expansion and slowdown of American history is significant above all for Americans, whose ideas most often travel behind circumstances. The American ideology is still progressive (although less so than 100 years earlier) and expansive, but they have long ceased to materially either progress or expand. This dichotomy between expectation and reality is the source of many present dissatisfactions, and also the source of conflict between liberty and equality which we see today.
In his defense of the constitution of the United States, John Adams heavily defended a government of laws, rather than of men. A government of laws, he argued, was ideally suited to equality whereby human corruption, weakness and vice were disarmed by the government's equal submission to constitutional laws. He foresaw clearly the dangers of a society where laws were subject to men, and the American constitution, while acknowledging the potential for amendment, armed the document with sufficient checks and balances with which to defend itself against mere caprice.
A government of laws implies universal equality before the law, as opposed to a feudal system which imbuned different classes with different rights and roles. Universal economic equality was not intended by this, and indeed, must have seemed absurd at a time when vertical mobility was so dynamic. (Imposing economic equality on America in 1783 would have implied a stop to all that pioneer-made growth.)
American egalitarian prosperity owing to her large middle class (and the lack of either natural elites or a large impoverished class) was also the reason that she was so resistant to socialism. As Tocqueville predicted, a growing middle-class reduces rather than incites revolution, since the acquisition of property makes people increasingly conservative and contributes to the stabilization of society. So long then, as American prosperity was healthy and expansive, she was resistant to the influence of socialism. When this prosperty was not healthy, socialism made slow advances into American society, as it did during the great depression. Today, when expanded social programmes are again in political favour, it is the symptom of a general malaise, of disappointed expectations and disillusionment with society.
It is wrong to believe that equality in socialist sentiment has any relation to the enlightenment meaning of equality, which basically meant the abolition of class privilege, and this view has succeeded the aristocratic view of society to become fairly universal. It is a belief not in rights but in entitlement. Not only that they are entitled to the pursuit of happiness, but that they are entitled to happiness itself. We find advanced forms of this sentiment in France today, where large protests periodically target government cutbacks which threaten the quality of life for those who work in the public services. The motives for these protests are largely ones of self-interest. Ironically, they are also conservative, since they inherently protect quality of life rather than protect mobility. That without mobility, that quality of life can neither be reached, nor, in the long-run, protected appears to be of no interest to them. That the American definition of happiness increasingly comes to mean consumption without production appears to be of no interest to them as well.
So we have seen that the origins of America, although investing heavily in the concept of equality, invested in a kind of equality which guaranteed liberty. In turn, liberty, while the potential for expansion in the continent was limitless, produced equality by propelling all immigrants to a comparable station in life within a few generations. That the wheels of American progress have been visibly slowing in the past century has placed this system in jeopardy. Equality can no longer be achieved by the underclasses except with an terrific effort of character. Theoretical equality (before the law) no longer automatically produced actual equality (quality of life) and it is this gulf that divides the political ideologies of the American people.
This exaltation of equality in American society, therefore, owes its origin to the 18th century, but owes its present character to the 19th century.
The problem stems then from the grandiosity of American expectations. As mentioned before, the majority of Americans still believe in progress. As their 230 year history has shown progress to be the natural condition of human life, they deal with their limitations more painfully than nations with less expansionist pasts. They still expect their lives to become perpectually better past a point where it is historically possible. That social redistribution is the symptom and not the solution of their problems is a different argument. What is necessary for them is to recognize not only the finiteness of the human condition, but the finiteness of the modern age, in which all the symptoms of progress- from privacy to individualism to family life to literacy to education to the cult of respectability to solid money to representative art to faith in human reason- are all visibly declining today.
Politically, we cannot expect to outwit human behaviour by piling regulation upon regulation, loophole within loophole, security against everything, and achieve that political equilibrium which Aristotle had recognized as an impossible ideal. The wasteful obsession with security pursued in the aftermath of 9/11, where the response was out of all proportion to the threat is readily acknowledged now. What remains to be acknowledged is all the wasteful obsession with security in domestic life, a system in which everyone has to be protected against everything, and the scales of meaning are obscured.
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Hats off to everyone who reads all of that.
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It certainly deserves to be read.
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I am so copying and pasting that for one of my papers in the future.
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On May 19 2008 07:26 MoltkeWarding wrote:
In his defense of the constitution of the United States, John Adams heavily defended a government of laws, rather than of men. A government of laws, he argued, was ideally suited to equality whereby human corruption, weakness and vice were disarmed by the government's equal submission to constitutional laws. He foresaw clearly the dangers of a society where laws were subject to men, and the American constitution, while acknowledging the potential for amendment, armed the document with sufficient checks and balances with which to defend itself against mere caprice.
This is the same guy who waged an undeclared war and successfully made criticizing the government illegal. :|
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On May 19 2008 07:56 Mindcrime wrote:Show nested quote +On May 19 2008 07:26 MoltkeWarding wrote:
In his defense of the constitution of the United States, John Adams heavily defended a government of laws, rather than of men. A government of laws, he argued, was ideally suited to equality whereby human corruption, weakness and vice were disarmed by the government's equal submission to constitutional laws. He foresaw clearly the dangers of a society where laws were subject to men, and the American constitution, while acknowledging the potential for amendment, armed the document with sufficient checks and balances with which to defend itself against mere caprice. This is the same guy who waged an undeclared war and successfully made criticizing the government illegal. :|
The Quasi war was no more a war than NATO actions against Somali pirates are. At the time, the United States was not very united, her defense rested largely on the capabilities of local militias, and had no means to protect her commerce on the high seas. (One of the consequences of American weakness was her lending considerable moral support to "freedom of the seas," which belatedly found their way into the Atlantic charter and became somewhat universal two centuries later.) The creation of a federal navy would have increased the power of the federal government and was therefore opposed by the Republicans. In hindsight, it was probably a natural step in the progress of the American republic (the constitution mandates national defense to the powers of the federal government,) in view of her early military weakness. The development of a federal navy provided tangible benefits in the Barber wars a few years later. The point being, there is a substantial difference between the federal navy contemplated in the 1790s (for defensive, anti-piracy action) and the offensive Battleship navy contemplated a century later.
While the alien and sedition acts exceeded the powers of the federal government and were a blot on the Adams administration, they were also inconsequential in the long-run. Jefferson won the election and the act expired before the supreme court could repeal it.
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On May 19 2008 07:30 Mandalor wrote:
Hats off to everyone who reads all of that.
They should read it.
Particularly the summarization of the argument into the idea that people now expect happiness, instead of the right to pursue it. Very to the point in that aspect, I am glad Moltke wrote it.
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I don't think the "right" to pursue it is sufficient- "opportunity" makes more sense to me. It might just be me not exactly getting the meaning here, but some poor, sick, uneducated sod surely still has the right to pursue happiness but not really the chance.
While I agree with the notion of overextended expectations, I see the solution not only in a resurrection of the "right to pursue" mindset but rather in a redefinition which values we should, well value, most.
Wealth does not necessarily correlate with happiness.
Neither does "freedom of choice". I found a TED talk on that topic most enlightening:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/93
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On May 19 2008 07:26 MoltkeWarding wrote:Show nested quote +ron paul is anti abortion, doesn't want to take any action to hire more women and minorities, opposes increasing funding for healthcare, wants to privatize social security, wants privatized education, opposes alternative energy, opposes campaign financing reform.
he sounds pretty out of touch to me Some of them even buy into the theory that they may enjoy all these benefits AND pay less taxes (I'm looking at supporters of Obama's platform.).
why doesn't that theory work? you raise taxes on the wealthy and use taxes & tax breaks to sculpt business behaviour in a way that most benefits society.
The social security programme, if continued under its present system, will benefit our parents, but bankrupt our own generation. The present 8-trillion dollar shortfall in investment will burden our generation with a ballooning level of debt, and by the time we ourselves retire the system will be completely broken.
as i am one of those obama supporters i guess i will be gay and say that i think obama has a much better plan for taking care of social security than just privatizing it.
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/seniors/
one of they points listed there is that currently only the first $100k of your yearly earnings are taxed for social security, and the money after $100k has to be taxed as well. obviously there's more to the plan than just increasing revenue, but when you look at the complete plan it looks good to me.
The members of this board ought to know better than our parents the qualitative poverty of modern public education, I have seen it ridiculed here more than once. They ought to know in their reason, that bureaucratized classrooms, teachers and grades is not a problem of underfunding (No amount of money can make teachers smarter and no number of Shakespeare editions in public classrooms will make children want to read them,) but belongs to more complicated issues, yet on the political front of education we are for its public expansion. (Another public-propaganda illusion whereby we are made to believe we care about something when we really don't.)
again yeah high school sucked but it was because they teach to the test, something obama doesn't want to do. teachers can only work with what they're given, if the system is built so that it rewards cardboard teaching then that is what they will do. once change is made at the top crappy teachers won't be able to hide anymore. public education needs to be reformed not privatized, i think every kid should have equal opportunity to a good education and you shouldn't be able to cut in line because you have money.
i mean i'm not even sure if i like ron paul more than john mccain. at least john mccain listens to the scientists about climate change and alternative energy, two of the greatest concerns of humanity.
the iraq war will cause maybe a million deaths and a few trillion dollars, climate change and the energy crisis will make that look insignificant.
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you guys heard about this i'm sure
75,000 people attend a massive obama rally in oregon
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/stateupdates/gGBfJH
+ Show Spoiler [article] + Under skies that obligingly turned from habitual gray to clear blue, Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama on Sunday drew the largest crowd of his 15-month marathon campaign for the presidency.
Sixty-thousand people packed into a park alongside the banks of the Willamette River to listen to Obama, with another 15,000 left standing outside the gates, according to city fire officials. Hundreds more anchored their motorboats, or floated in kayaks and canoes.
... Even after months on the trail, Obama seemed slightly stunned by the size of the crowd, saying "Wow, wow, wow" as he surveyed the audience.
"We have had a lot of rallies," he said. "This is the most spectacular setting, the most spectacular crowd we have had this entire campaign."
In August of 2004, then-Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry held a large rally in the same location, drawing about 45,000 people.
But on Sunday, Obama topped that without even being the official nominee, speaking to a crowd filled with sunscreen-smeared babies in sun hats, union members in matching T-shirts, elderly ladies fanning themselves under the hot sun and twenty-somethings dancing to his opening act, the Portland-based band The Decemberists.
Some voters lined up before dawn to see him, including Michelle Kay.
"We are all so sick of Bush, his lies, the war," she said. "When Obama came out he was so honest, so refreshing."
Others arrived at the last minute, such as Afang Tang-Christianson of Beaverton and her husband Daniel. She is due to give birth to twins in the next week or two, and the two had spent the morning at the hospital when she began feeling early contractions.
But after leaving, she said they came straight to the rally, adding, "It's all about a new beginning, a new start. We are really hoping for change in Washington."
![[image loading]](http://my.barackobama.com/page/-/blog/Portland75K02.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://my.barackobama.com/page/-/blog/Portland75K04.jpg)
+ Show Spoiler [more pics] +
Two days until the big day in Oregon/Kentucky where obama will claim victory in the pledged delegate metric and possible a clump of supderdelegate endorsements~
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Nice fucking post, Moltke.
And a synopsis of a-game:
a-game:
Socialism, duh?
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On May 19 2008 02:49 GeneralStan wrote:Show nested quote +On May 19 2008 02:13 fusionsdf wrote:
ron paul supporters are almost always hilariously delusional I don't know about that. I've met a good number who are well-intentioned and principled libertarians. I have a devil of a time convincing them that hands off international and economic policy won't work out well for us. We have some common ground though. We can both agree that imperial military projection and farm subsidies need to go
Meh, iunno, I'ver certainly met some cool libertarians (actually, my good friend is one) in my personal experience, many are batshit insane. These two dudes I met at a City Council meeting were arguing that takign a shit on their front lawn is their legal right that can't be infringed!? Liek they had a few good points, but then they go onto shit like this and youre just like wtf???
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Meh, education is one of the things that I hate when any presidential candidate talks about. Basically, it's add more requirements/mandates, but not federally fund any municipalities. NCLB was a great idea on paper, but when the feds arent giving any money to cities, it means dick.
My city has failed more than 2/3 of their last 10 or 15 budgets, and hasnt gotten shit in funding from the state until this year. A fuck ton of our schools have failed those nclb tests, digging us into even further of a hole. Teachers teach to pass the fucking test, not to actually teach kids shit.
Not to mention tenure is the biggest crock of shit ever... anything short of punching the kid upside the head, and you really can't lose your job. In what other field does that bs happen? Theres so many fucking retards/assholes who have a job because of that bullshit.
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Sydney2287 Posts
On May 19 2008 14:38 HeadBangaa wrote:
Nice fucking post, Moltke.
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United States22883 Posts
On May 19 2008 22:40 Hawk wrote:
Meh, education is one of the things that I hate when any presidential candidate talks about. Basically, it's add more requirements/mandates, but not federally fund any municipalities. NCLB was a great idea on paper, but when the feds arent giving any money to cities, it means dick.
My city has failed more than 2/3 of their last 10 or 15 budgets, and hasnt gotten shit in funding from the state until this year. A fuck ton of our schools have failed those nclb tests, digging us into even further of a hole. Teachers teach to pass the fucking test, not to actually teach kids shit.
Not to mention tenure is the biggest crock of shit ever... anything short of punching the kid upside the head, and you really can't lose your job. In what other field does that bs happen? Theres so many fucking retards/assholes who have a job because of that bullshit.
No Child Left Behind was never a good idea. The states are meant to be the ultimate authority on education, not the federal government.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2010/2504271714_d92a62633c_o.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2042/2503438705_c22cf79b6b_o.jpg)
