Bill O'Reilly makes one of his trademark screeds against the War on Christmas, but it doesn't quite have the effect he intended, I think. He's very cranky about the atheist sign in the capitol of Washington state, which is Olympia, so he rants against Seattle. I'm sure it makes sense in Billo World.
Seattle now rivals San Francisco for secular-progressive nuttiness. The city fathers are allowing public nakedness in city parks, nude bike riding, and in Fremont, a Seattle suburb, they actually put up a statue honoring Lenin, the father of communism.
What's wrong with nudity? That sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea, especially in such a cloudy place — it would increase the exposed surface area for enhanced synthesis of vitamin D. It's probably not something people could do very often there, but in the summer…sure.
And the statue is lovely. It wasn't put up to honor Lenin, though — it was a work of art rescued from a Russian scrapyard.
Some on the Seattle school board actually supported denigrating Thanksgiving by teaching children about the atrocities against Native Americans by the Pilgrims.
Rather than keeping the children in ignorance? What does Bill think the purpose of a school is? I think it is a good idea for students to learn from the ugly events in our history.
In addition, Washington State voters have passed assisted suicide, and the state gives out free birth control pills, including the "morning after" pill.
This is wonderful! A state that promotes dignity for all and freedom for women, that does the right thing to reduce teen pregnancy, and uses government to promote the welfare of society. What's the objection?
On the quality-of-life front, the streets of Seattle are full of homeless people, but they don't have to be out in the rain. The city will pay to house alcoholics and drug addicts if they want it. They can actually get free furnished apartments. Taxpayers, of course, pick up the tab.
Helping the poor and needy? My dog, this place sounds like paradise.
Everything he listed sounds great! Bill O'Reilly has succeeded in making me homesick. I want to go back now, even though I know Seattle can't quite be the rosy-dawned utopia he's painting for us here.
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I used to visit Seattle often when I was stationed in Ft. Lewis. Out of all the places I've lived, it's by far the loveliest. I think I'm going to move back there after I get out. Of course, one liberal's paradise is a conservative's nightmare.
From the highly scholarly site, wikipedia,
Yeah. Lenin sure is being honored.
Remember the definition of a conservative (or it it a Puritan - same difference): A person who harbors the horrible suspicion that someone, somewhere is happy.
The difference between libertarianism and this sort of stupid rightism is that under libertarianism, anyone who wanted could be free to participate in providing any good works they felt were desirable to the community and helped individuals. Rightist conservatives would make all these efforts illegal for "moral" reasons.
Now I'm going on a three-hour conference call. Someone else can answer your squawks of outrage against your ill-informed notion of libertarian attitudes toward the common good.
Little billy has to have something to complain about since he has no opinion on anything actually of value. I think we should declare a moratorium on billy, get all the blogs together and declare, "billy is no longer of interest and we refuse to discuss him". Then we get to watch his head explode.
Let us put the Saturnalia back in Xmas!
Sun come up, sun go down.
For us ignorant Europeans: who is this Bill O'Reilly, and why does his opinion matter?
From what I've seen religio-conservative nuts are a dime a dozen in the USA, and this one seems hardly exceptional.
Some on the Seattle school board actually supported denigrating Thanksgiving by teaching children about the atrocities against Native Americans by the Pilgrims.
WHAT? There are school board members in Washington State who actually want to have the schools educate the students? With actual history? OH NOES! This cannot stand! How are we going to continue our national slide toward the educational event horizon if we get school board members who act responsibly? We need to contact Fox News ASAP and convince them to keep these un-American activities square in the center of the news cycle.
To think, Washington state acting in a humane manner, pretty soon, folks in other states might start to wonder why they aren't treated so, might even wonder why their ministers seem to ignore anything positive in scripture. One can see why the nutters freak out, blue collar types might even ask for decent treatment.
Too many in USA would prefer to see the homeless die of exposure and starvation rather than let society support them. Some christian charity.
Bill'O can't handle the fact that the world isn't a Norman Rockwell painting.
Y'know... Heaven is overrated... Washington is sounding pretty good right about now...
That's only because all homeless persons are alcoholic drug abusers. Just ask Billy-boy.
@Vidar: this nut has a popular show on the Fox cable news channel.
That's only because all homeless persons are alcoholic drug abusers. Just ask Billy-boy.
And lets not forget that substance abuse is simply the result of lack of character, rather than, say, addiction.
Billo betrayed Christmas. "Great American Holiday" quiz, indeed. http://tinyurl.com/5f9t7m Countdown, of course, names him the Worst Person in the World for this bit of hypocrisy.
@ Ian Monroe
s/Fox/Faux
s/News/Noise
There, fixed that for you.
My biggest problem with the public nakedness is that there's a lot of people I'm pretty sure I don't wanna see naked... :P And there's basic hygiene to take care of. If you're naked in public, you have to drag a cloth with you to sit on. That's how it works in nudist grounds. It's common sense. Some people have... ah, secretions... and you can't just let that all over public benches...
Also there's a thin line between nudism and exhibitionism. Like... How do you know that the guy was scratching it cuz it itched? Is he standing there or posing in front of the little girl? I'm not sure how we could figure out how to manage the thin line. There's sick fucks out there... And I know first hand. The man that gave my mother his seed to create me (whom I don't want to give a fancy title to any longer) is a sicko like that. But through him I met what real nudists are. They are decent people, careful about basic hygiene and sensible about others. That freak is no nudist though he said he's one. He's a pervert, a freak, a monster, and a sexual abuser. See the problem? I have no doubt that most nudists are great people. I know it. But the freaks are still there. How do you manage against them?
Frankly I think the easiest way to manage all this is to say "dress up when you're in public, PLEASE".
As I understand it, you can legally expose your breasts or go nude in public in New York. People have been arrested, but to the best of my knowledge all have had the charges dismissed or won their court cases.
NOTHING'S wrong with nudity! (And everything's wrong with Bill O'Reilly) Thank you for acknowledging this!
Yeah right. Let the homeless people do drugs and alcohol while sitting in the rain and dying of exposure, medical problems, malnutrition, and starvation. While stealing to support their habits. Instead of getting them indoors and treating their addictions while trying to turn their lives around.
Because xianity is a religion of peace, charity, and tolerance. And jesus loves you. So crawl into that culvert and die quietly.
O'reilly and the fundies have taken anything positive out of xianity and kicked it into Jupiter orbit with Russels Teapot and jesus. And they would wonder why there is a backlash against the Hater, Liars, and Killers for jesus. If they had brains.
Billy's ideal world must be a very, very strange place.. a kind of purgatory, where everybody pretends really hard that all history is nice and kosher, letting the homeless die of exposure in the streets is perfectly compatible with Christian charity, and people aren't actually naked underneath their clothes.
"Helping the poor and needy? My dog, this place sounds like paradise."
In fact... That sounds very... christian of Seattle.
What is Bill's problem? Isn't he a good christian himself? After all, he must be since he's all for trapping women in their wombs.
To be entirely fair to Mr. Bill, Olympia is only about 10 times further from Seattle as Levittown is from Westbury and he couldn't tell the difference there either.
Don't forget just plain mental illness. IIRC, the homeless rate jumped after most states changed from large locked facilities to community group homes. The group homes were underfunded of course, and many patients just walked away and became homeless.
Oh Noez, woman can haz secks wifout gettin pregnet!
Stone the damned whores, using witchcraft pills to murder the mans sperm...or burn her, I don't care which.
I've had falafel in Seattle.
It was particularly good. I wonder if Billo just hasn't had the pleasure?
More from Chicken Billy's screed:
As long as they do it according to your way of thinking... right Billy? And by the way, how is this sign disrespecting Christmas, itself? It's not disrespectful to the reasons I celebrate it.
Maybe not... but it sure does fit accurately, doesn't it? As is evidenced by your ongoing apoplexy regarding this issue.
I don't know, Billy... can you? Once again, here's another christian bully crying persecution all the while insisting we can all "just get along" as long as we agree with their beliefs. Otherwise, words like "war" get pulled out. Who was it that started using the phrase "WAR on christmas", Billy... and you ask the rest of US if we can all just get along?
Why is it that religious goofs like O'Reilly consistently confuse "fact" with "belief"... in both directions? I know... they are interchangeable in a world where one blindly accepts virgin-birthed, tortured zombies as godly saviors, without even questioning the lunacy of it.
I'm sure you meant "man", singular... as in you. But you'd be wrong, of course. The wise men AND women are allowing a display in a public venue in accordance with the law, just as they should be.
As another sign there reads, Billy: "Get over it".
I still don't understand the whole up-in-arms against the morning after pill. I mean, there hasn't even been attachment yet by the egg *if* it's been fertilized - the pill simply makes sure it doesn't. I'm pro choice, obviously, but if they want to stop abortions from occurring, I would think the morning after pill would be their new best friend. It gives people who make mistakes the ability to not get pregnant so they don't end up with an abortion later - what's wrong with that?
"My dog, this place sounds like paradise."
It is, it is!
World, eat your hearts out.
But we have our fundie nutcases here too, who want to rule the world in the name of Jesus the Cracker Man.
Oh gosh darn it Billo! Now I don't want to go to Seattle and Washington when I'm done with my University and Grad school. Now I desire to live there! How could you Bill!
#11:
Funny that you mention Norman Rockwell, as the man was actually a lot more political than people give him credit for. He often fought with his benefactors about racial integration; he wanted to include more racial diversity in his paintings, while the guys who usually commissioned his work didn't want anyone darker than unbaked bread in there unless as a servant. Don't forget about his painting "The Problem We All Live With"!
So a Norman Rockwell world would probably be too liberal for Bill "omg darkies use cutlery" O'Reilly after all.
He said he found it a bit spongy.
Christie, it's because they don't really care about teh babies - it's all about controlling women's sexuality.
Seattle sounds awesome. They can secede and join Canada whenever they like ; )
Ah Fremont. Home of the Bridge Troll
I love that area. All the more so that O'Really appears not to.
JC
A little OT, I know... but...
Congrats on your Molly, SC... well deserved, but am I the only one that can't look at your moniker "SC, OM" without immediately thinking "Systems Center Operations Manager"...
*sigh*... I've been working in IT too long.
@Christie #29: It's because it gives women a mild power over their ovaries. Any attempt to stop fertilization is(even if there wasn't any, since the goal of sex to them is strictly for procreation), by crazy religious standards, a sin.
I guess what I mean is, there are people who are ok with condoms and birth control but against morning after - why?
I understand if you are against any form of contraceptive, but if you're ok with most of them, what's the harm of the morning after pill?
re #7:
If I can put in a word for us iggerant furriners: anyone in the UK and surrounding countries with a Sky satellite TV box - which means a significant population - is quite able to watch the charming Mr. O'Really on Fox.
It's just that AFAIK few of us do. Raving loonies usually only infest tabloids over here.
Much of the reason people are against the morning after pill is because they don't understand how it, or fertilization, works. They think that the second after you have sex... bing! Baby! Pregnant!
I mean, there hasn't even been attachment yet by the egg *if* it's been fertilized - the pill simply makes sure it doesn't
That is the point. The egg is fertilized, therefore a human and deserves to be implanted. Nevermind that there are plenty of reasons why it may fail to implant anyway. Nevermind all the in vitro fertilizations that fertilize multiple ova but only implant a few and throw away the rest. Nevermind putting any thing into any kind of context. Just look at it in the most narrow minded view possible; you would be denying it it's right to life by not letting it implant.
I'm sure that a big part of Billo's problem with all of the wonderful, charitable things that Seattle does is that it's done with gasp taxpayer dollars!!! I mean, those nice, Christian groups should be able to provide meals, drug rehab, housing, etc., with a healthy dose of Jesus thrown in, of course, with money given freely instead of at government gunpoint. Seriously, there's megabucks available through the Faith Based Initiatives, right? And that's all freely given by, um, waitaminute...Nevermind.
PZ, please ... the statue of Lenin was rescued from a scrapyard in Poprad, Slovakia (then Czechoslovakia) not in Russia. I guess you missed it in the Wikipedia article you linked ;-). Cheers.
Thanks, Celtic_Evolution!
Oh, no! I fear IT's getting to you. Soon you'll be living on whiskey and bacon and forgetting how to type...
I would think that their simple reason is that since your condom failed and you may be on the way to be pregnant, stopping the thing right there would be murder.
To them at least. I just think that's retarded. But aren't most people against the morning after saying that having sex with condoms is evil cuz it stops procreation?
Christie -
Mainly abject ignorance, if I had to guess. If you explained to a person who doesn't oppose birth control, per se, what "levonorgestrel" is, how it actually works, and how similar it is to the birth control pill, they'd likely not raise an eyebrow.
But, then ask them if they support using the "morning after pill", or "abortion pill", as it has very unfortunately and incorrectly been labeled, the reactions are bound to be quite different... despite the fact that they are the same thing.
@ Michelle (#3)
Was it the nudity that made him an asshole? I don't think so. And, really, plenty of perverts to their pervert thing without being nudists. I don't think making everyone wear clothes actually protects anyone from anything. Except the weather, of course.
Admittedly, I'm a Washingtonian, so maybe I'm just too crazy liberal, but I think it would do great things for our whole society to de-stigmatize the human body. Good grief. We all have one. And sure, there might be people currently clothed that would not be my top pic to view naked... so what? Why should the fact that I happen to not find them attractive force them to change how they look or behave? Frankly, in such a culture, would it really matter if a child saw a man scratch whatever body part happened to be itching at the moment? I don't think it would scar them. They simply wouldn't care. My girls wouldn't... they'd just give him hell if he didn't wash his hands, after.
I can tell that there's a lot of story going on behind your post, though, and obviously I can't really address that.
SC, OM
Yeah... and losing my hair... I warned Rev. BigDumbChimp that this very thing would happen to me yesterday and he dismissed me with some "post hoc ergo propter hoc" nonsense.
Typical elitist bastard.
Christie: their dirty little secret is that they often DON'T support birth control. Dig down in the fine print of the anti-choicers' mission statements, and you'll find it's abstinence only until marriage, and babies after marriage.
As you noted, their actions aren't rational if their goals really are to reduce abortions. They ARE rational, however, if their goal is really to control women's sexuality.
Say my name three times in a mirror and a pig will appear.
A glowing red star and sometimes Christmas lights have been added to the statue for Christmas since 2004. -- from the Wiki article
It would appear that Vlad is an ally of O'Butthead. Who da thunk?
That's a fascinating story concerning the statue of Lenin. The man who originally procured it was right. Even though Lenin was not in fashion and removing it from its location was probably the right thing to do at the time, it is still a work of art worthy of saving. Do we really want to lower ourselves to Taliban level of historical destruction? Politically I am about as far from Lenin as you could imagine, but I have not beef with this statue. Why is it these conservatives are so hostile to art?
Really? Then I can haz the baconz????
Mmmmmm... baconz....
//saunters off to find a mirror//
I think there's still time to stop the downward spiral if you develop some non-work nterests, like, say, cooking. Or photography.
Wait...Maybe not...
@Anomic Entropy: Like I said most nudists are good people. So no. It was a tool to him. He was using a real principle that is very correct(nudism) for his own sick mind (sexual deviancy). But you figured... I'm biased.
And yes, there's way more to the story. But you know... I just tell you the basic excuse he was pulling was that he was a nudist and that it's perfectly normal and you're born that way.... yea. It's normal... when you're normal and not an alcoholic sexual deviant.
Four daughters and our mother, we lived with that man until very recently (I kicked him out this july during an incident but he stalled and didn't leave until october). I'll live up to your imagination what happened to us. I don't feel like saying the whole shebang on a blog commentary but I'm sure you can guess the basics.
S'why I'm very careful about the whole public nakedness thing.
Too many in USA would prefer to see the homeless die of exposure and starvation rather than let society support them. Some christian charity.
There's something I always say - most Americans would rather spend $1,000,000 to imprison an addict than spend $5000 to treat them. Kicking each other when we're down is an American trait.
Sadly, no. My hair is fleeing like an elephant from a herd of mice.
I miss seattle so much at moments like these! I'm in the south, needless to say, no Lenin statues here (in drag or otherwise). The wife likes the weather here though, so no chance in going back.
My wife and I have been talking about moving to Seattle for a few years now. We were hoping that the word wouldn't get out on how great it is there.
Thanks a lot O'Reilly!!!
A quick word of advice, Mr. O'Reilly: if you're going to bemoan the taxpayer-funded housing for the homeless, you might not want to do it in the same column where you criticize the state for not adequately acknowledging the birthday of one of history's most well-known advocates for the poor.
Or, more briefly: EPIC FAIL.
Ancient wise man say, "You see blind man lying in gutter, you kick him. Why you be kinder than God?"
My fiance and I make the trip from Victoria, BC down to Seattle at least once a year to watch the Blue Jays and Mariners. Of all the American cities I've visited, Seattle is far and away my favorite.
But then again, I'm Canadian (with the somewhat-socialist Canucklehead leanings) so maybe I'm not necessarily the best example, if not an actual symptom...
Suburb? SUBURB!??!?!?
Everett is a suburb, Kirkland is a suburb.
Fremont is the "Center of the Universe!"(tm)
Just remember, this bastion of liberal thinking in Seattle, this utopia, is also home to the Discovery Institute.
Knew it was too good to be true. (Well, the DI and all the nutty woo woo that is accepted/practiced in Seattle. Hippies!)
@Craig: Well personally I would rather not spend anything on the addicts and just legalize the whole drugs thing (beyond the few parts like: don't drive drunk or high... Cuz then you can kill sober people.). They're the ones that started up on it afterall, why should I help them? Heck, why did they do it in the first place when they knew it would mess them up so bad? They brought it up upon them. I'm all for people willingly giving to charities to help them folks but I don't like to be forced into it.
Maybe I'm a bit heartless.
Of course, most homeless people are mentally ill. I've never understood the conservative view of "let them freeze to death, that'll show 'em". Like they're choosing to be homeless. These people must have a heart covered in stone. It's cheap and effective to take them off the streets and put them into group homes. And btw, it's also humane.
Happy Myth-mas, everyone!
Why is it these conservatives are so hostile to art?
I think its because true art may make people think. It may bring them out of their fogs. It may cause them to seer the world in a slightly different manner. It may cause them to actually use their brains in an independent manner.
I had a college classmate who was a fundagelical. He actually though the beginning and tje end of the "Wizard of Oz" should be colorized because he saw no artistic expression in the juxtaposition between black and white and technicolor.
I hope no one tells him that the Lenin statue sometimes gets dressed in drag during gay pride week... I'm not sure he would be able to handle the news without his head exploding in anger.
Someone really needs to give this guy a geography lesson. I'm surprised you didn't point out that Fremont is not, in fact, a suburb of Seattle; it's a neighborhood in Seattle.
SCOM? I prefer the older name better myself. doesn't
MOM sound more cuddly than SCOM?
...stop looking at me like that.
I can't help but think Bill O'Reilly might not actually have read what Jesus was alleged to have done...
D
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | December 9, 2008 10:36 AM
"Say my name three times in a mirror and a pig will appear."
From ape to pig... proof to the creationists that evolution exists.
Were you half-ape half-pig when you were halfway to the mirror?
Nudity is fine but nude bike riding is dangerous. One should have a helmet at least, and what about a possible accident. What if your penis got caught in the chain.
The Lenin statue has been enrolled in the War on Christmas!!!
And...
It's on the side of Christmas, actually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fremont_Lenin_Christmas_2006.jpg
Hey, why wouldn't the star of Betlehem be red, after all?
...I'm playing out a lot of scenarios in my head right now and I can't figure out how that would happen unless your wee is like 2 feet long.
...Which is scary.
Seattle and San Francisco are two of the most visually beautiful cities in the US.
Oh, by the way :
"The city will pay to house alcoholics and drug addicts if they want it. They can actually get free furnished apartments. "
Something tells me that one day, after his hour of "glory" has faded, Bill O'reilly will remember this free housing, and he won't find it so offensive. He may even hitch a ride to Seattle to take advantage of it.
I've always wanted to move to Seattle, it sounds like a beautiful place. Maybe I'll join a commune there, just to piss Bill-O off.
No the cosmic muffin poofs me directly from form to form
How do we get PZ on the Factor ?
I'd love to see this, PZ on his show and BillO getting all reved up.
PZ on the Factor !
The public nudity thing in Seattle, to my recollection of several years of residence there, is primarily in the Fremont neighborhood on the Summer Solstice parade. Naked people deck their bicycles out with flowers and ribbons and ride en masse down the parade route. Trust me... these people are people one can enjoy seeing naked. Lovely biker fitness.
On another note... many many many of the homeless are families. The average age of a homeless person in the US is 9 years old. Seattle at least did have when I was there a special school program for homeless kids. There was one school that had a dedicated program, and dedicated busses would make the rounds getting kids who were in shelters or on the street, take them to the one school, feed them, clothe them, and educate them. This was to ameliorate the damage done by periods out of school and frequent school changes. Gave the kids some stability and consistency.
Kids and families are the fastest growing group of homeless. Also, most homeless people have jobs. Actual, real jobs. The thing is, if you lose a home to job loss or illness, getting the $3000 or so together to get back inside is a really difficult task. Nowhere to cook = money spent in restaurants, weekly motel rates, extra clothing to deal with the elements, etc etc. With housing prices high and wages flat, the struggle is immense.
Was in that situation once... married, working, college student, parent, pregnant... living in a tent in a friend's backyard. Took us almost 3 months to get back inside, and we did use some student aid, but we only spent half the semester living in the tent. Haven't been homeless since, but it did suck eggs. BTW, got a 4.0 that semester with a full course load.
Yes. Maybe a bit ignorant, too.
Raven: Except that the way Seattle does its drug and alcohol housing system, it allows the alkies to keep drinking even within their housing. Seattle has taken the sociological power-law issue to heart: there are people at the end of the spectrum who will refuse all help, and who would cost the city a million dollars a year in their use of police and emergency room.
Seattle has decided, for whatever reason, to house those people and let them drink themselves to death. Help is available, but it is not forced on them, and continued drinking is no bar to getting housing.
Some on the Seattle school board actually supported denigrating Thanksgiving by teaching children about the atrocities against Native Americans by the Pilgrims.
Where's the silly defense, then about "teaching both sides and letting the children decide"?
Isn't this what creationists usually trot out in relation to getting their arguments into school curricula?
@SC: I'm not ignorant. There's no ignorance in what I say. These people decided to shoot up drugs in their veins. They decided to drown themselves in alcohol. Peer pressure, problems in their lives, no matter. I have no mercy for them.
Bill O'Reilly is a fucking idiot.
To him the crime is not the conquering of the Native Americans, it's acknowledging it.
As for PZ on The Factor, I would LOVE to see that. I don't imagine it would be particularly enlightening for either side, but it would be entertaining as hell. I think Billo's head just might actually explode.
And all of those people with AIDS chose to have unprotected sex, therefore they deserve it. As I said, you're ignorant and heartless. I recommend that you read a few books by Paul Farmer, for a start - perhaps you could begin with Pathologies of Power in your path towards understanding the forces shaping and constraining people's choices in the real world. You may also want to check out some works about the psychology/physiology of addiction.
Michelle # 85
So... make a bad choice, a mistake, cave in to peer pressure, and it's "fuck you, buddy... you can rot for all eternity"? No attempt at reclamation, rehabilitation or room for redemption?
How very shallow, insular and yes, ignorant, of you.
Ever hear the phrase "walk a mile in my shoes?" Consider it, carefully. How very arrogant of you to assume you can possibly conceive of all the reasons one might find themselves at the bottom... where have I heard this viewpoint before... where, where, where...
@Michelle #85
Actually, you seem quite ignorant. Consider yourself luck to never have had any form of addiction. It is not always merely a choice, in some cases it is an uncontrollable compulsion. Not to mention you sound quite a bit like those who would say "She decided to have sex, now she's pregnant. Too bad, no abortion. I have no sympathy for her."
O'Reilly, Donahue, Hambone and all the assorted religious wackos are separately or together more dangerous than that one dead sign put up in the state capitol building at Olympia. That sign will never ramble away from where it was placed to do anyone harm, but it's inscription is more realistic and powerful enough for the rational among us, and a dangerous impetus to the deranged simpletons to incite the forces of unreason to batter down not only the sign but the very basics of rationalism. And we are considered the dangerous element who reject and ridicule with blatant reason their insane affliction for an imaginary god. This will never end until human existence ends, and that insanity will also cease to exist.
Good old Billow. As if we needed one more reminder about how fucked-up the Conservative [capital C] mindest can be.
It's "can't happen to me" syndrome. The idea that it could happen to them is so frightening that they go to great lengths to convince themselves that it won't. Of course it's entirely the homeless person's fault that he's homeless. If it's not, it means it might happen to *me*.
Last I read (I wish I remembered where), due to the expense of emergency medical care compared to preventative measures, it was cheaper for a city to find apartments for homeless than to deal with the uninsured medical emergencies due to exposure and malnutrition. Of course, if Billo wants to pick up the additional tab so that we can treat homeless people like they deserve to be treated, my guess is Seattle might be willing to have him sign over his paycheck.
Bill may soon have yet another display to complain about. Someone has requested a festivus pole for the same display area. :)
See http://www.kirotv.com/news/18207510/detail.html
Here's an article by Malcolm Gladwell that talks about its being cheaper to house the homeless (though it's not nearly so satisfyingly punitive for O'Lieley) than to pick them up off the street every few days and take them to an emergency room:
Million-dollar Murray
If there were a heaven, and somehow O'Reilly managed his way in... how long do you think it would be before he'd be pissing and moaning about how liberal the damn place is and how soft Jesus is on the issues that matter to "Real Americans"?
He's become a living parody of himself.
Aahah, hear someone say something non PC and jump on her like she's gonna kill you. Okay. Bring it on.
The bad choice is theirs. They made it. It's their crap they just jumped in. Everyone is exposed to drugs in their lives. The trick is saying "no, I will not take it." It's called willpower. It's a wonderful thing.
Cancer is a disease. AIDS is a frickin' disease that can be caught by accident (IE:condom breaks.). Alcoholism is an addiciton because you're weak minded and gave in to the bottle. You don't accidently shove alcohol in your mouth and whooooooops you've caught the bacteria of alcoholism. You're comparing things that don't work together.
If there are people dedicating their lives to helping weaklings, I don't care. Asking people for donations, out of their free will, is none of my business. But don't take the money out of the government.
By the way.... Are you serious? People that have unprotected sex are irresponsible and needs a few slaps at their faces. You're really trying everything to be burned. And the person that had AIDS and gave it to them... If they knew they had AIDS I hope they're convicted and jailed as murderers they are.
Michelle # 97
And that diatribe was supposed to convince us you aren't being ignorant, shallow and insular on this issue how?
And did you just accuse this of being merely a "PC" issue? Really?
Wow--Christmas drag statues and nude alcoholic cylists or something. I'm amazed Bile-o survived looking upon it.
@Michelle the Merciless: Sure ... that's it ... These people thought carefully about their options and said "I wanna grow up to be a heroin addict."
You sound like one of these people who say "Well those chicks just get into street hooking because they like to £µ©λ."
But if it makes you feel better, you keep believing that. And may you receive all the mercy you give.
"Actually, you seem quite ignorant. Consider yourself luck to never have had any form of addiction. It is not always merely a choice, in some cases it is an uncontrollable compulsion. Not to mention you sound quite a bit like those who would say "She decided to have sex, now she's pregnant. Too bad, no abortion. I have no sympathy for her.""
I'm lucky? I'm not lucky. I'm INTELLIGENT. I never took the drugs. I never took the alcohol. I never took the cigarettes. Heck I never took COFFEE! I was offered all of them in my life. Many times. Like probably you all. Why would I take them? I knew they are things that have terrible side-effects on you. I never had an addiction because I have neurons and never give in to social pressure.
You're comparing that to abortions. That's fucking stupid, to say the least. If you have the insurrance, you can pay for your own abortion any time! In fact, it's obviously cheaper than to give birth to the unwanted kid. Abort all you want. Of course, it would be WAY cheaper to just wear the condom.
Want to be a drug addict? Be a drug addict. Just make sure you have the money to buy the junk, then save your life when the time comes because of your STUPID addiction.
Not worth it, in your case. In fact, all I want to do after reading your last comment is take a shower. I sincerely hope you yourself never have to face the effects of your arrogant ignorance. I also hope that someday you'll stop your pitiful ranting and make an effort to educate yourself. That said, fuck right off, creep.
Do you eat? Ever watch TV? Buy clothes?
*sigh*
Good for you, Michelle...
moving on...
"@Michelle the Merciless: Sure ... that's it ... These people thought carefully about their options and said "I wanna grow up to be a heroin addict."
You sound like one of these people who say "Well those chicks just get into street hooking because they like to £µ©λ."
But if it makes you feel better, you keep believing that. And may you receive all the mercy you give."
They sure as hell took the heroin. Unless they never had the good ol' "drugs education" course at school, they knew what they were getting into.
As for the chicks in the street doing hooking... It's obviously their choice unless they were kidnapped and forced into doing this.
Nerd of Redhead:
Most states made the change because Ronald Reagan eviscerated federal funding for mental hospitals.
@ The Petey #67
Agreement. Remember this one? I always thought this was the equivalent of grabbing a smug religioso by the lapels & screaming:WAKE UP!
Caps-lock != evidence.
There, fixed that for you.
In the spirit of the season...
"Spirit," said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, "tell me if Tiny Tim will live."
"I see a vacant seat," replied the Ghost, "in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die."
"No, no," said Scrooge. "Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared."
"If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race," returned the Ghost, "will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.
"Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!"
"Do you eat? Ever watch TV? Buy clothes?"
Of course I eat since I need it to survive. Clothes? I never waste money on clothes. Most of my clothes I had in my childhood were used. Stuff my older sisters wore and gave on to me. (Afterall, my fucking father blew all the money I could've used for new clothes in his ALCOHOL AND SMOKE ADDICTION so we were reusing all we could. Hippies should still like that though. We recycled!) Today, I still wear most of the same clothes as often as I can. TV? I Don't watch it very often. I download my stuff instead so I can watch it here and then.
tsg @ #92 is sooooo right. This scheme is so totally applicable to many, many human failures...
We should at least start with compassion for everybody. Otherwise, where should we stop?
That could extend to, for example, letting people die after some accident because they got drunk before, didn't fasten their seat belts, drove too fast or the like. Would be consistent, wouldn't it?
My "religion", if anybody feels the need to apply that term, is compassion. Compassion forms my moral concept (along with some other aspects). Compassion is why I am pro-choice, pro care for those who can't take care of themselves, pro gay marriage and the like. Compassion dictates what I oppose and consider punishable, also.
People make mistakes and ill decisions, it's just human. Keep in mind that it could be YOU, human being that you are.
Besides, addiction seems to be at least partially genetic. Some people are more prone to addiction than others. That makes it an even less free decision. Nobody plans on becoming an addict. Assumtions like that make me sick to my stomach.[/rant]
[Kindly ignore any grammar/spelling mistakes, I'm no native speaker.]
And now it all makes sense.
" Posted by: Nepenthe | December 9, 2008 12:08 PM
There, fixed that for you. "
How cute. Thank you.
Are you telling me that I should be merciful to my alcoholic genetic male creator because his addictive sexual deviancy and alcoholic addiction wasted my fucking life?
You know you all, it's very easy to say I'm heartless (I agree) and merciless (I so agree) because "I don't know what I'm talking about"
You say I should get the mercy I sow? Well I wish upon you all that you go back in the past and get fiddled by your drunk father.
Michelle @ 97
I have read your several posts and agree with you wholeheartedly. Your several detractors need a little character counselling and I feel inclined to prove that there adverse opinions are not unaminous nor correct. These types who avoid responsibility for their rampant and deleterious actions have to be slapped with more than a realistic bludgeon.
Michelle,
The idea that you believe street hookers make a conscious choice to live that way blows my mind. I'm sure you're aware that there are girls out there who are sexually abused, kicked out, left to fend for themselves at the age of 14 or 16. Not a lot of choices for them. If they want to fucking eat, if they have any survival drive, they will do what it takes, whether they want to do it or not.
Sheesh. Living in a narrow little black and white world with no grasp on the larger social ills that create social problems.
No, Michelle. We're telling you to realize that not every homeless child on the street is your father, so you don't have to be pre-emptively bastardly to them.
@Holbach: Thank you, it feels great to see that some people actually agree.
Michelle,
You are sooo stupid.
did sarah palin give bill geography lessons?
Michelle,
I hope you get some help. You seem to have a lot of anger that you're directing at the wrong people in trying to maintain a sense of control. I encourage you to seek out some free or affordable counseling in your area. I don't mean this to sound condescending - your comments have me concerned.
I seem to recall a SCOTUS decision somewhere in that time frame where you could not keep somebody in locked wards after a period of time without them being a clear danger to others. If you can't take care of yourself, but want out of the locked ward, you had to be let out. So the group home concept got started. It was supposed to be cheaper than the old mental hospitals. Of course, the money never made it to the group homes. But my memory might be off on the timing.
I'm mostly with Michelle here in terms of sympathy, but I can see that there'd be a lot of social benefit to helping people get out of addiction and to helping them provide for themselves, if not for the sake of the people who got involved in the drugs/alcohol/whatever, for the sake of their families and the other people who are inevitably going to have to deal with them.
And I'm a happy libertarian (don't yell at me just yet) and Seattle still sounds freaking awesome to me. It's not like they're forcing people to live in Seattle - I may be wrong, but isn't it actually kind of expensive to live there? I doubt all the cities in the US are headed in that direction, so there will still be plenty of options for people who don't like to pay taxes for these things. I don't know what BillO's bitching about; he can go live in North Dakota if he wants. As in any case, there will be people who can't afford to move, but aren't those the people who are benefiting from this kind of system anyway? I may be wrong; please correct me if I am. Be gentle :)
Holbach #114,
why am I not surprised ?
Brain dead.
WHAT's wrong with nudity?
What's WRONG with nudity?
What's wrong with NUDITY?
If God had intended us to be nude, we would have been born that way!
Geeeeez!
Re: The statue of Lenin in Fremont
As a resident of Fremont, I am consistently amazed at the number of folks who drive through the "Center of the Universe", and still don't get it.
The whole neighborhood is a statement for art, art that outlives all. The statue of Lenin is a particularly ironic example, in that it is a work of art that was commissioned as a political statement, and remains as an artistic statement long after the political system that created it has vanished. It's the art that has survived.
Re my #92
Case in point:
Obviously Michelle is one of those that thinks people should suffer for the rest of their lives for an error in judgment when an alternative exists.
Never make a mistake, Michelle. Ever.
If that doesn't convince you how flawed your position is, nothing will.
Michelle is a little too angry, but I can see the point she attempts to make as well. Even if it's hidden amid an endless stream of anger.
Should we continually help the guy who continually ends up needing it just because he wants a "fix" and never really responds to any rehab or help that is ever given to him? Probably not.
However, the guy in the gutter beside him may one day become clean and live a normal life with that same rehab and help. He made one mistake and you're willing to throw him away just because this other guy was a complete loser? Definitely not.
Some people deserve neither mercy nor help while others will do great things with that same mercy and help. The only way to figure out which is which, is to offer some help. You are heartless, and ignorant. Not because you have an angered opinion. Because you refuse to see anyone else's opinion other than your own and then make your choice from that understanding of both. BTW, That's also the same thing that makes the Religious FundaMENTALs ignorant as well. Well that and a few other things...
Michelle,
your comments are usually well reasoned, but on this issue they are insensitive and show complete ignorance on the subject of addiction. Don't cave in to the usual fundamentalist moron Holbach, you are defintely not as childish as him.
Michelle sounds like the type of person that thinks if a woman is raped whe probably did something to deserve it.
"Your several detractors need a little character counselling and I feel inclined to prove that there adverse opinions are not unaminous nor correct."
this is code for "i've got nuthin' to add, but I'm talking anyway"
I seem to recall a SCOTUS decision somewhere in that time frame where you could not keep somebody in locked wards after a period of time without them being a clear danger to others
Actually, there were numerous legal decisions in the 60s and 70s about that. Where Reagan comes under fire is how he actively fought against funding those community programs, both as governor, and as President.
What's ironic about Reagan is that he legalized abortion in California. Of course, true to form, it wasn't to save women's lives, but to :::drum roll, please::: cut welfare rolls.
I just love telling that to Reagan worshippers, since so many of them seem to be pro-death--er, pro-abortion.
@130,
Seriously, that was a pretty insensitive thing to say given the rest of the thread. Wow.
@ 120: My thoughts were the same. It seems like a coping tactic to me. My guess, she grew up around an addict of some sort and has developed these really extreme opinions as a way of subconsciously reassuring herself that that'll never happen to her.
Michelle, the fact is, some drugs are so bad that if you take them *once* you can't stop, some people's brain chemistry is unstable in a way that makes them addictive in general (they can get addicted to, and suffer identical symptoms from just not being able to watch TV for 2-3 days) and, not everyone that ever took drugs did so intentionally, or aware of what someone gave them.
But, none of that matters, since the real problem is that, unlike alcohol, tobacco, and to a lesser extent, pot, most drugs, once you are on them, are a life long addiction, until you OD, and its a multi-trillian dollar business, which idiots like you think can be solved not by getting people help, and thus drying up the need for them, but by getting people to, "just say no". You know what that gets you? A 'big' drug bust, maybe once a month, if that, which constitutes less than 0.01% of all the drug sales and shipments into, and within, the country. These get held up as "proof" that the war on drugs is working, in the minds of people just like you, when in reality, treating the people that couldn't truly have understood just how horribly bad what they where doing was going to be like shit, instead of mandating help for them to stop using, while making useless drug busts, does nothing.Why? Because while the ATF is grabbing $50,000 in pot some place, six other people are making it into the country with $10 billion in heroin, pot, opium, etc, and another $20 billion in crack, or the latest local market drug is being shipped interstate by people that don't get caught.
Please explain to me how the hell your method of dealing with people, whether they "chose" or not is helping to do anything other than guarantee a market for these assholes.
Michelle has a point, though I don't think it's wise to see this question in overly simplistic terms.
First of all, let me point out that we are looking at two different questions here. No one is denying that compassion is a good thing, or that, given the chance, helping those in need is a morally positive activity. I fully support charity and voluntary work.
The question, though, is whether the homeless should have a right, enforceable against the productive members of society, to be fed, housed and rehabilitated at the taxpayer's expense. Like all government action, such redistribution rests on coercive force, and is therefore inimical to liberty; and so there must be a very compelling justification for it if it is to be done.
And, in this instance, I don't see that such a justification has been established. Let's assume for a second that the homeless drug-addicted/alcoholic people to whom we refer are competent adults. (I would apply different criteria to children.) Our society, and our notions of personal liberty, are based entirely on the principle that a competent adult is responsible for his or her own life. This is why we allow people liberty of action; we don't let the state tell people how to live their lives, what to eat, what to drink, where to live, where to work, who to have sex with, who to marry. And the flip side of liberty is responsibility. If we give people the freedom to live their lives how they choose, they must also bear the responsibility of those choices; if they are not competent to bear that responsibility, then they shouldn't have been given freedom in the first place. It sounds harsh, but it is a necessary result of living in a free society.
Of course, this doesn't limit compassion towards those who have made the wrong choices; and those who choose to help them are to be commended. Using your own time and money on such compassionate assistance is fine. But using other people's money, forcibly extracted from them via the coercive power of the state, to assuage your own sense of compassion... that is wrong, and is nothing more than theft.
Yes, I'm comparing it to abortions. Because the religious in this country are as tolerant towards others' situations as you seem to be, and if they get their way abortions will be banned. Because "You made the mistake, you pay the consequences (but only the consequences that we will allow, you don't get to choose your own consequences like abortions)".
You said:
I doubt anyone has ever said "I know I never drank before, but today I'm going to start drinking myself to death." If your family has a history of alcoholism then it is probably a bad idea to drink, but it is a responsible and healthy choice for most people. Ah, but you have no mercy for those who got addicted after trying it once. It is analogous to someone accidentally getting pregnant, but since you apparently don't get it, let me spell it out for you:
person with a history of alcoholism drinking = person having sex with no birth control
person with no history of alcoholism drinking = person having sex with birth control
person with no history of alcoholism drinking and getting addicted = person having sex with birth control but getting pregnant anyway
Because the only way to get pregnant is to fail to wear a condom? Because all forms of birth control are 100% effective, condoms never break, and no one is ever raped? She was probably asking for it anyway, right? You show an amazing lack of tolerance and sympathy.
Sympathizing with someone's problems does not mean you think they are not accountable for their actions. Treatment can help some people to straighten their lives out, and that is better for everyone, but robbing a liquor store while high still gets you jail time.
@133
Michelle has already shared her opinion of prostitution in this thread, specifically that all hookers must be doing it of their own free will. That's just another way of saying that if a certain type of woman is raped that she did something to deserve it.
Uh oh, I'm slightly worried by the fact that I now seem to be arguing on the same side as Holbach...
I don't know how to blockquote, so please forgive me if this is all wrong; she said:
""unless they were kidnapped and forced into doing this.""
Which I think would eliminate the rape thing, right? Unless you're saying that all street prostitution is rape, which I'd say is probably not true.
I just imagined Bill O'Reilly drunk and homeless on the street. Unfortunately, in my imagination, he was also naked.
I was ready to poke out my own mind's eye with a sharp stick, but fortunately, my imagination also placed Bill in Seattle, so he was able to find a place to stay and get his felafel out of public view.
JPBrowning wrote, "Should we continually help the guy who continually ends up needing it just because he wants a "fix" and never really responds to any rehab or help that is ever given to him? Probably not."
Perhaps not.
But it is cheaper than picking him up every few days for a trip to the emergancy room. Not just in the emergancy room costs, but the opportunity cost lost by the police/fire/EMT/ambulance workers who have to spend time with him rather than someone else. That someone else who doesn't get medical care may be you. For purely selfish reasons it's better to spend the money on an apartment which wouldn't be rented otherwise, and on a social worker who costs far less than an EMT.
It also improves the opportunity for him decide to change. Doing nothing maintains the status quo.
Collectively, as a society, we have enough wealth to provide opportunities to all. The fact that some people don't seize the opportunities available isn't a moral failing on their part.
Finally, government is an appropriate venue to distribute opportunities. Government is supposed to be a reflection of our society. Government can be an agent of compassion, if we, collectively, want it to be.
Or it can be a reflection of the selfishness, mean-spiritedness, insular thinking, and heavy-handed judgements of morality found in the likes of Bill O'Reilly.
negentropyeater @ 129
Fundamentalist moron and childish? The term rightly applies to you as a product of evolutionary aberration who even your imaginary god has abandoned to a life of rational indecision who pretends of knowledge that he is half-assed in possessing.
Angel
The less fortunate get all the breaks!
Holbach: The term rightly applies to you as a product of evolutionary aberration who even your imaginary god has abandoned to a life of rational indecision who pretends of knowledge that he is half-assed in possessing.
Erm, you what?
Coherent sentence structure isn't your strong point, is it?
Somebody ought to make Bill-O read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, to steer him clear of the fairy tales he seems to cling to.
It costs you one way or the other, and it's often cheaper to prevent the problem than to fix it afterward. If the homeless and addicts had no impact on anyone but themselves you might have a point, but that is not the case.
Bah it converted my ascii characters.
<blockquote>Quoted Text Here</blockquote>
Walton -
Don't be... you're really not... Both you and JPBrowning in #128 qualify your tacit agreement with parts of what Michelle is saying by indicating that attempts at rehabilitation and compassion for those who have made poor choices is inherently beneficial and socially valid... even important. Michelle makes no such attempts at qualifying her stand, nor does holbach in his unqualified support.
I would agree whole-heartedly that repeat offenders and those who abuse the compassion given should be treated scornfully and perhaps ultimately dismissed. I think most here would agree... but that myopic and insular viepoint that mistakes are not to be tolerated and people who make them "git what they deserve" is not really what I think either of you are advocating.
Someone else said it last week. If Bill O is ranting about Seattle, we must be doing something right. Or maybe left.
Thanks, Rev. I still only saw the blockquote and not how you did it, but it did make it easier for me to find the tags when I checked the page source. :D
JPBrowning @ #128:
"Should we continually help the guy who continually ends up needing it just because he wants a "fix" and never really responds to any rehab or help that is ever given to him? Probably not."
Depends on what you consider being help. No, we definitely should not put him in another rehab programm. Some people are therapy-resistant.
But I don't get the point why we should deny him pallitive care. He has an illness (addiction IS an illness, I will not discuss that) that is obviously not curable anymore and will probably kill him.
So keep him warm and fed, take care of related health problems and ease his suffering (explicitly including the prevention of withdrawal symptoms). The same thing we should do for everybody who can not be cured anymore.
I don't know, she seems to blame the victim. Maybe they took a wrong turn and went down a path that in hindsight they should not, but the same could be said of many victims of crime.
Holbach,
Translation: I know you are, but what am I?
If you have the insurrance, you can pay for your own abortion any time!
I'd like to know what insurance company covers this in America. I don't think abortion coverage has existed since the early 80s in most places, with most companies, except MAYBE to save the life of the mother. MAYBE.
#153
Should of course read palliAtive care.
yeah if you hit preview when entering the ascii characters to show code on the post, it applies it. Anyway post 149 shows it
The Swiss just approved a referendum to make their maintenance therapy for heroin addicts a permanent policy. It has got the addicts out of the streets and parks, and into apartments. It appears to work much better than our War On Drugs.
Well this is getting more and more out of hand.
Just to clear it up... I really wish you guys would stop thinking that I'm an angry avenger that just thinks that way because of my background. It's not true. I thought about it. My schools were pretty big on the "poor poor little addicts" tone, so I know the tune. Normally I should've been miked that way but I just had time to think for myself and I came to my own conclusions. It's not a produce of hate. I don't HATE addicts. I just... you know, make sure they're not in my life and not in my wallet. I don't scorn at people that want to help them. Dedicating your life to the needy is a value. I, personally, just don't want to help them.
Most of them don't want to help themselves anyway, and lots don't even think they have a problem. You can't help someone that does not see they have a problem. They'll just keep at destroying everything around them, and there's no way to reach them unless they commit a crime.
But I'll make it clear: to me, addicts are not victims. The people around them are (IE: children.), but not the addicts themselves. You can say all you want, you can call me an ignorant all you want, I will never. Ever. Ever. feel any bit of mercy for drug addicts because I firmly believe this is all their own fault.
I'm not sure which side of the argument this helps, but I'd like to note that in the case of drug and alcohol addiction, we don't actually give people that freedom.
(And of course I'd say freedom is not "given" by societies, but I know what you mean.)
Walton,
Do your absolutist principles also include that we shall all have equal chances at birth ? Has the notion of obvious trade-offs and balancing acts between equality and personal liberty ever come to your simplistic mind ? Well in actual practice how does that work out ?
In the real world, experience shows that those who have more than enough, whether it were aristocrats and bourgeois in pre-revolutionary times or the wealthy and upper middle classes in modern times, NEVER gave enough to charites to help the poor and defavorised to get out of their misery. NEVER ! That's why there were revolutions, by the way, and if we'd follow your advice, with this crisis, the next one will be coming very soon.
I just moved to Seattle about two months back, and I can say if there's something I agree with O'Reilly on, it's that Seattle is a lot like San Francisco, one of my prior hometowns. (I moved to Boston from SF, and was pretty damn homesick, so moving to Seattle was like a small antidote to that.)
If O'Reilly is disturbed by the Lenin statue, he should get a look at the naked man statue next to Olympic Park. And let's not forget the giant hammering guy downtown. Or the giant typewriter eraser thingummy. I'm sure that has deep overtones of....well, something.
I have already taken advantage of the Planned Parenthood here, incidentally, as I need to get access to the aforementioned birth control pills and I didn't have a doctor yet. There were men in suits praying outside, and I didn't realise right away, although I did think it was odd that there was a bus stop right across from the PP.
Finally I have yet to see any nekkid people. And I've been in Volunteer Park during a protest.
Walton,
Does Oxford offer any classes on, say, social stratification & inequality (domestic or global) or the history of global capitalism? Ones that deal with empirical research? If so, please consider taking one.
Because while the ATF is grabbing $50,000 in pot some place, six other people are making it into the country
Only one in six? Wow. I have a feeling it's a lot more than that.
Let's not forget how it fuels corruption in the system, too. One of the games we used to play in the Rio Grande Valley was seeing how long a sheriff could last without winding up in jail for taking bribes from drug dealers, or actively working with them. We had one last ten years. Strong guy!
No! NO! NOO!!!1
Seattle sucks! It's cold and rainy and dirty here! It rains all the time and you never see the sun. Never!
Don't even think about moving here! The traffic is terrible and home prices are outragious!
Darn you Bill O'Reilly! What are you doing? If everyone finds out how great Seattle is then they will all move here and ruin it.
P.S. I've always wanted to put some Groucho glasses and mustache on the Lenin statue.
Michelle:
This thread is going to erode into a direction that none of the participants will endure nor keep hold of the original intent. This is more than just a clash of opinions, but involves the lifestyles and mindsets of persons who have erratic habits that are incongruous with civil behavior and offer excuses to bolster their self-imposed pathetic shortcomings and expect society to forgive them and extend more than a helping hand. As long as you have a group that thinks as one against a few that think otherwise, you will have a situation where the majority wrong makes right. This is indictative of the several commenters who have diegned to feel that what we expressed as normal reaction to their pathetic ideals is wrongheaded to their way of thinking and lifestyle. This will get ugly and extremely sarcastic. A science thread has morphed into a quagmire of mean spirited dissonants.
That is just for the serfs and peasants. The leaders don't walk their talk. Dobson has 2 kids, Robertson 3, Bush 2, Cheney 1 and so on.
The fundie leaders have better things to do with their time and money than dealing with a bunch of rug rats. But if you live in a trailer park and are broke, you should by all means have as many kids as you can.
Walton opined, "But using other people's money, forcibly extracted from them via the coercive power of the state, to assuage your own sense of compassion... that is wrong, and is nothing more than theft."
Which is the identical argument libertarians make for all public works. Like roads, power distribution, the development of the internet, public water and sewer supplies, police forces, hospitals, anti-pollution controls, clean water acts, state and national parks,....
Maybe, just maybe, you will see sometime that your argument is the same as the teenager who, in a fit of pique yells at his parents, "I didn't ask to be born!"
You weren't asked if you want to pay for the road, and you won't ever use it. So without looking at the benefit to other people, you don't want any of your tax money going to it. What a selfish attitude. You may not see the benefits to society by collecting and concentrating wealth (which is what the government does through taxation) and using it to pay for public works. But you use these benefits every day, just like the teenager wears the clothes and eats the food his parents bought him.
If your only compliant was that the government doesn't appear to spend the funds it collects wisely, we would be able to agree. But to keep bringing up the trivial point that you didn't agree to your taxes makes you look like a petulant teenager.
@Holbach: I know. Folks here seem to hate you but I can't remember you from other threads so I have no idea who you are really. I have a bad memory anyway.
I know we gang up on lots of people that disagree with us here. I been a regular poster. And they seem happy when I agree with them. But now I sorta see how it feels. The minute they disagree with you, they'll jump on you and call you ignorant and stupid and all. No matter if you been here for a while or not.
Sorta hurtful a bit but well... You know, burner burned, right?
Michelle, given what happened to you, I can understand your anger. However, have you ever thought about what might have happened if someone had actually shown some compassion to your father, and gotten him the treatment he clearly needed? Now, maybe it wouldn't have helped. Maybe someone actually did try to help him, and he refused (obviously, I don't know the whole story here). But even if he refused treatment or it didn't help him, it does help some people. And if what happened to you could be prevented in other cases, wouldn't that be worth it?
Flex @ #142
I was actually more trying to make an argument for Michelle that wasn't based merely on anger and resentment from traumatically damaging events in her life. It really doesn't represent ALL my thoughts on the matter, though, the last part was my own injection into the argument.
Yes, preventive care, including education before addiction, should be pursued. Keeping some drug addicts off the street and easing their suffering isn't really that expensive. Especially compared to some other endeavors by the US, but I'm not getting into that pile.
I think Keenacat @ #153 pretty much summed up how I feel for the most part. Thanks.
Walton,
btw, congrats for starting your blog.
@Cactusren: We all tried, at least for the alcoholism part. Lots of people did. But the only thing you get is "I'm not an alcoholic, that's not what alcoholism is, yadadada" you know? I guess that drinking 24 beers in a day isn't alcoholism. But well, I'm a woman. Women don't know shit. And he's the victim because we're women and he's the only man. Oh boy. I know the speech by heart.
Really, I think these people need to kill someone with a car to learn that they're trash.
Science thread? This thread is a response to what Bill O'Reilly thinks of Seattle. Interesting yes, but not really science.
You can say all you want, you can call me an ignorant all you want, I will never. Ever. Ever. feel any bit of mercy for drug addicts because I firmly believe this is all their own fault
Yeah, the guys in my unit who killed little kids by mistake during an ambush and who just cannot seem to get over it are simply weak minded. Fuck you.
The problem though, Michelle, is that you can make the same argument about someone with a schizophrenic disorder, or bi-polar, etc, who refuse to stay *on* drugs, because they don't think anything is wrong with them. Oddly, despite the fact that addiction is strongly biological (you can't become addicted without changes in brain chemistry) we are perfectly willing to *require* medical treatment for people that have other mental disorders, and even force treatment, if they are dangerous to themselves and others, but... not addicts, who have the same symptoms: need for treatment they refuse to take and dangerous behavior. I just don't get it. Its not about if you think they "deserve" it, its about if you think society benefits from letting them remain a danger to themselves and others.
Wombat #52 "Why is it these conservatives are so hostile to art?"
I suspect that a sizeable proportion of the religious right, lacking any sense of the aesthetic, regard statues as simply something to worship.
@Josh: And killing little kids have to do what with drugs and alcohol and sex addicts exactly? I'm not following.
@Kagehi: You're talking about something medical here. It's not conditions that could've been prevented by just not taking the heroin. You can't become addicted to heroin unless you take the thing in the first place, see?
I was responding to your comments @ #110 and #113, which I think speak for themselves. Even if you didn't harbor this anger, you would still be ignorant, heartless, and wrong.
Thinking about it, especially when you're not acknowledging that your strong emotions caused by your personal experience can affect your rational consideration of the issue*, is not the same as educating yourself in the way I suggested briefly above.
*This is not to say that strong emotions are necessarily inconsistent with rationality, or that personal experience is not valuable in developing social thinking it's just no substitute for learning).
Thanks, Nerd. I remember seeing a 60 Minutes story and some articles about that program years ago, and had wondered what the outcome had been.
Seattle is Paradise. That is why I moved here from Hell (also called Oklahoma).
On the subject of the homeless:
I don't know what to do with them. There's the possibility that most of them could benefit from help, and there's the possibility that most of them will squander it on drugs.
Both Michelle and her supporters and negentropyeater and his/her supporters have valid points; yes, a great many of them are drug addicts who have been shown to completely fuck up and put all the help they get toward their drug addiction. I think there needs to be a change in the way mental illness is handled in the United States - from my perspective as a neuroscience student, I think much of this is simply going to be making sure treatment is inexpensive enough and giving people access to the treatment they need; mental illness, I think, is FAR more pervasive in US society than most people think; some of the boundaries for mental illness and simple eccentricity seem a little arbitrary even though many of them are well-established by psychologists - I'd almost be tempted to ask the APA to categorize some people's hyperreligiosity as a form of mental illness owing to their delusions.
In terms of addiction, you have to consider how well-informed they are about drugs. No, I have no pity for someone who knows the consequences of alcohol or drug use and chooses to drink frequently or shoot up, particularly if it's a drug that will hook you on the first use. Yes, alcoholism can arise without warning, but people need to be responsible adults. The nature of addiction is that it sneaks up on a drug user sometimes - heroin, for example, strongly affects dopamine in the brain. It's like a massive rush of good feelings - think about the feeling you get when you have an orgasm, and multiply that by 10. People will get addicted to what makes them feel good. There's a reason NIDA is still active.
I'm not saying your father isn't a fuckhole who should languish in prison for his crimes, Michelle; I'm saying that besides the free choice, there was also probably a genetic problem and an awareness problem which fed his problems. Read up a little on the neurological aspects of addiction; there's a good site by the name of 'Mouse Party' at the University of Utah which has a fun little flash which is probably much more straightforward and contains the more basic information summarized fairly concisely for many members of the public than the stuff I and people in my field read which goes into more particular detail.
There's a perilous mixture of genetic susceptibility, awareness, and free choice that influences addiction and mental illness, especially criminal insanity.
Walton, don't worry about agreeing with Holbach. Worry if you agree with Robert Byers or Pete Rooke.
Have fun with your blog.
But I'll make it clear: to me, addicts are not victims. The people around them are (IE: children.), but not the addicts themselves.
And were not (some) addicts victims at some point? (IE when they were children.)
If so, when does the transition take place from pitiable victim to deserved target of self-righteous scorn?
Walton:
Well, maybe. Another way of looking at the question is whether society improves itself by feeding, housing, and rehabilitating its least fortunate members. If you look at society as a whole thing — a body politic — then repairing its most damaged members looks more like self-care than like undeserved redistribution.
If your fibula were broken, would your other body parts debate whether the stupid fibula deserved to be set, at the cost of "redistributing" resources to bonesetting that might otherwise be spent filling the much more deserving stomach with fine food?
I'm increasingly convinced that this distinction — between those who think of society as an integral whole and those who see only an aggregation of self-interested individuals — is at the heart of almost every debate.
Michelle: Personally, I don't smoke or use recreational drugs, but I enjoy coffee daily, and I like to match an appropriate beer (often) or wine (less frequently) with a nice meal, and I enjoy trying new cocktail recipes on occasion. Since I'm not an alcoholic (nor do I ever even get drunk), I presume I pass your character test... however, someone else with a slightly different genetic or emotional background might have fallen into ruinous alcoholism after making precisely the same decisions I have made about drinking. If my behavior is acceptable, how is it that my hypothetical alcoholic doppelganger deserves his sad fate?
Further, as I wondered to Walton, even if addicts really don't "deserve" any help, in some absolute moralistic sense, are we as a society really making a wise choice for ourselves if we refuse to help them? Aren't we better off to try to heal our neighbors than to simply live among the damaged?
Finally, I agree with SC: Not only in the substance of your comments, but in their tone, you seem angry and emotionally damaged yourself. Far be it from me to pretend to be some sort of expert, but as your fellow human being, I genuinely hope you do whatever you need to do to find some resolution and peace.
@SC: It's undeniable that I hate the douchebag who triggered my birth. But my thinking just works that way... You can't become addicted to drugs unless you get some and shove them in your body. (I hope I don't have to say that medicine is not part of my reasoning, medicine is a need and sideeffects happen.... including addiction)
You can't ask me to want to feel mercy for someone like that when they had all the info that this was going to fuck them up.
Again. Drug kids thanks to bad parents drugging them up or things like that... They don't count.
Wow, I'm surprised no one has caught this one yet... The nudity on a bicycle thing happened in Portland, Oregon. He didn't get just the wrong city, but the wrong state as well.
Oops.
At least he got the correct region.
I ride bikes a lot, but cycling naked really doesn't sound like fun to me. Besides, no one should have to see my pasty ass. I even feel sorry for my wife.
Flex at #169:
Which is the identical argument libertarians make for all public works. Like roads, power distribution, the development of the internet, public water and sewer supplies, police forces, hospitals, anti-pollution controls, clean water acts, state and national parks,....
I don't quite know why you roll all these into one list, since they have little in common, other than the fact that they all, currently, happen to be activities in which government is engaged. Many of the public works you list are, in my view, things which should be provided by the private sector (power distribution, water and sewer supplies) or abandoned entirely (national parks). I don't believe that anyone has an inherent "right" to receive electricity, water or sewer services; these things are consumer goods, and should be provided only where the private sector can profitably provide them. Likewise, as Friedman explains in Capitalism and Freedom, there is no good reason why government should protect areas of outstanding natural beauty for public enjoyment as national parks. If a landscape is sufficiently "beautiful", in its unspoilt form, that people wish to visit it, then it ought to be possible to run it as a private tourist attraction at a profit; if it can't attract enough visitors to be profitable, then there is no reason to protect it. (NB I do understand that, for ecological balance, it may sometimes be necessary to prevent the destruction of certain animal and plant habitats; but this can be done by land use restrictions, without actually taking land into government ownership.)
In contrast, other parts of your list are things that government can and must engage in, by their very nature. Policing is the clearest example; while anarcho-capitalists disagree, I would contend that one cannot have a free, capitalist society without a system of law to protect property rights and maintain the peace. Ditto for anti-pollution controls; since pollution, as any economist will tell you, is a negative externality and cannot be dealt with entirely by the market, yet has a dramatic impact on property values and quality of life, it is legitimate for government to be involved in limiting pollution through legislative controls.
Michelle,
no hard fealings. Don't take it too personal. Frankly, I think I could have very well written all you have written a few years ago until I was forced, for personal reasons, to go beyond the symplistic assumptions about addiction and really try to understand better what's going on.
You might want to challenge your preconceptions. That's what you should do if you are a critical thinker. Dig in the subject, study, inform yourself.
One of the problems with the body politic analogy and, in fact, most arguments that rest on the assumption of society as an entity of itself instead of a collection of individuals is that it can result in some really atrocious outcomes.
What about adults with mental issues that self medicate and don't have the social or economic background understand that they can get help elsewhere?
cactusren #171 - Great comment!
Michelle,
I know you said that you will "never. Ever. Ever. feel any bit of mercy for drug addicts" but I encourage you to attend a few meetings of Narcotics Anonymous and meet some addicts who actually want to be clean and drug free. Both of my parents are drug addicts (divorced: one actively using, one in recovery). It's because of them that I made the choice never to do any drugs. Like you, I felt that I was just better because I made the right choice. They fucked up. Then as I got older I learned that my mother's addiction began when she was given pain pills while undergoing extreme back surgery as a teenager.
I have discussed whether addiction is a 'disease' with friends, and it's tough to convince people of unless they see people fighting it. My mom's been clean for about 12 years now and says she still wakes up every day wanting to use drugs. It doesn't go away. But with help and support, people can change their behaviors and contribute to society instead of just leaching off it.
I hope you will increase your exposure to other types of addicts than your father and not generalize all addicts as the same type. It's similar to saying that all homeless are just lazy, when there are clearly those with mental illnesses. Anywho. Just my 2 cents.
Michelle, ok, nothing helped in the case of your dad, and I'm sorry about that. My point was, though, that treatment will help some percentage of people (I don't know the numbers, but people can and do recover from alcoholism and other addictions). And if they recover, then their kids and loved ones wouldn't have to go through what you did. Are you really unwilling to put a small portion of your taxes toward such a cause?
Bill Dauphin: Another way of looking at the question is whether society improves itself by feeding, housing, and rehabilitating its least fortunate members. If you look at society as a whole thing -- a body politic -- then repairing its most damaged members looks more like self-care than like undeserved redistribution.
If your fibula were broken, would your other body parts debate whether the stupid fibula deserved to be set, at the cost of "redistributing" resources to bonesetting that might otherwise be spent filling the much more deserving stomach with fine food?
I think this conception of society - as some sort of living body, of which we are all merely component cells - is at the heart of the problems with left-wing thinking. You're essentially anthropomorphising an abstraction. "Society" is not an organism of any sort, nor is it a cohesive whole. It is an abstract term which we use, for convenience, to refer to a great mass of individual people and the complex web of social relationships which connect them.
Human beings are not ants, and human society is not an anthill. An ant colony is a cohesive unit in the sense you describe; it is directed by a central will, and the individuals do not (to the best of my knowledge, though I'm no expert on ants) have wills, desires or interests distinct from those of the whole.
Humanity, however, does not work like that. We are all individuals. Yes, we are also social creatures, in the sense that we form bonds and groups, and interact with many others on a daily basis - but this does not make us any less individual, nor does it render our wills and interests subordinate to some superior, abstract entity called "society". Rather, "society" is the name we give to the patterns formed by the complex, multi-layered daily interaction, bilateral relationships, and power and status differentials between human beings. "Society" is a phenomenon; it is not a living entity, any more than, say, an ecosystem is a living entity.
Thus your analogy is, IMO, a false one. A person's body parts are subordinated to his will and to his interests. A human being is a distinct entity, with a central directing will and his own thoughts, wishes and desires. "Society" is not; and subordinating the individual to "Society", or to any other collective (howsoever named), is the root of tyranny.
Or those that can't get help elsewhere, of whom there are many in the US, and therefore self-medicate. When I first read Michelle's comments, I couldn't help but think about veterans and the problems they have due to their traumatic experiences (one of my students is writing about an issue related to this). Even many of them have great difficulty getting proper treatment. Huge numbers have developed drug or alcohol addictions or committed suicide.
@Zeekster: Hmmm, yea, I did go to a naranon meeting. Three times. Cuz I was making a website for them as a teenager.
Great cake. Made 100 bucks with bad HTML and a terrible midi file. With the prayer thing rolling in a gif file. Oh, and saint seiya pictures. They loved it! ...I don't get it either.
Addiction starting from prescribed medicine is not preventable really, since you NEEDED that drug from the start. You just need to know that you have to talk back to your doctor if it starts getting addictive. Unfortunately, lots of douche doctors forget to mention that.
Medical addicts aren't the same. The start is very different.
You know I can't pull a category for EVERYONE out there. There's always grays and such. I know that. But mental issues, do you mean people that had a bad problem in life or just retardation?
SC:
Indeed, I think attributing her POV to anger is the most charitable way to evaluate Michelle's comments. If she's not suffering from some emotional trauma due to the background she's describe, the only other conclusion to reach is that she's just "ignorant, heartless, and wrong."
Michelle, no matter how much you deny it (and perhaps truly don't see it), the "tone of voice" of your comments is clearly angry. I'm not going to lay any phoney-baloney pop psychology on you, but, non-expert that I am, I know the sound of emotional pain when I hear it. I hope you find some way to heal before you end up, in one way or another, like the people for whom you profess so little compassion.
well either problems they were born with or brought on by their situation or disabilities
Michelle, that is the point.
Michelle:
Are you aware that loads and loads of substance abusers have mental illnesses? It's called self-medication, and it's very common, esp. seeing as beer is a lot cheaper than psychiatric care and antidepressants. Are they to blame? Is a person with severe depression or bi-polar disorder just being dumb? Is a person for whom therapy has failed so far just being a stupid jerk when they take substances?
Keep in mind that I have had loved ones who were substance abusers too, so I'm not talking from a position of ignorance.
I'm not saying that these things are good alternatives; obviously they're not. But to say that all substance abusers are just selfish morons is overly simplistic at best. There are useful treatments for substance abuse, but treating a person like dirt isn't part of it.
If a landscape is sufficiently "beautiful", in its unspoilt form, that people wish to visit it, then it ought to be possible to run it as a private tourist attraction at a profit; if it can't attract enough visitors to be profitable, then there is no reason to protect it.
So the natural world is only valuable insofar as it can be exploited for a profit? What if a given landscape were marginally profitable as a tourist attraction, but could derive some other entity greater profits if they were to clear cut the timber and strip mine the mineral resources?
I am honestly flabbergasted at some of the reactionary bullshit that emanates from your keyboard. I can't think of a better argument to use to dissuade someone from libertarian leanings than simply quoting what I did above. Fuck right off Walton. I have less charitable feelings for you and your libertarian heroes than Michelle does for drug addicts after reading that.
Well some people are just trash. Don't forget, it's not that guy's only problem. Looooots of problems beyond alcoholism in that guy. Hey, want to know a fun part? He got raped by a priest. But I'm 99% sure it's not the source of anything with that dude. Gotta live with the guy to see.
As a compromise only... Once. You only get the therapy once, and if you go there by yourself. If you go back to it, you obviously just don't want to help yourself.
Appendix to my post at #194:
This is why I also reject the concept of "social justice". Society, as I explained at #194, is an abstraction, describing the patterns created by a mass of human beings and the web of relationships and interactions between them; it is a mistake to anthropomorphise it, and treat it as if it were an entity with a will, desires and interests of its own.
In contrast, justice is a normative standard determining the relationship between one individual and another, and the quality of an act in the context of that relationship. If I strike you in the face, or steal your property, or pollute your water supply, or break a contract with you, I have done you wrong; and this imbalance must be redressed by punishing me (criminal law) or by compelling me to compensate you (civil law). Fundamentally, justice is defined by the proper bounds of a person's liberty. I do not have the right to interfere with your person or your property without your free and informed consent, and if I break that prohibition, then justice requires that I must suffer for it.
"Social justice" clearly does not fit into this paradigm. Justice can impose upon me rights and obligations to other individuals - both the general right, and reciprocal obligation, of respect for liberty of person and property, and the individual rights created by entering into a freely negotiated contract, or by the existence of certain relationships (such as that of parent and child). But since "society" is not an entity in itself, and has no will nor moral responsibility of its own, justice cannot grant it any rights or obligations; I cannot owe it anything, and it cannot owe me anything.
Well, they had to put all the crazy somewhere.
Some pics of Lenin's "honor" in Fremont...
http://soundpolitics.com/Lenin.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/22102374/
(someone should show Bill how to use google...)
I'm glad Walton has a blog. Let's all go and post irrelevant, pompous, clueless political screeds on it!
@Josh: And killing little kids have to do what with drugs and alcohol and sex addicts exactly? I'm not following.
The two guys have taken a serious little walk down the road toward alcoholism since. Following now?
CJO at #200: Please read what I wrote directly after the passage you quote:
(NB I do understand that, for ecological balance, it may sometimes be necessary to prevent the destruction of certain animal and plant habitats; but this can be done by land use restrictions, without actually taking land into government ownership.)
To clarify, I recognise that it is necessary to protect a certain amount of forest cover, ecological diversity, etc., for the future health of the planet, so as to sustain resources for future human exploitation. But this can be done without taking land into actual government ownership and maintaining it at public expense.
As far as I can see, the only justification for government ownership of "national parks" is that these landscapes are "beautiful" and should be preserved for the sake of "protecting the planet". But I don't see how that's a good normative justification in itself. I'm only interested in protecting a resource if it's useful to humans, either immediately or for the sake of future sustainability.
The environment is important for one reason and for one reason only: so that future human generations have a world to live in and resources to exploit. If a given protective measure can't be justified on those grounds, then you shouldn't be wasting taxpayers' money on it. Of course, if you want to spend your own money buying up areas of natural beauty and protecting them, then you're perfectly entitled to do so... but, of course, it's much easier to spend other people's money than your own.
@Michelle:
Easily the most disgraceful thing you've said yet. Wishing that sort of thing on an innocent victim to wake someone up to the point of an addiction, when the addiction itself renders them incapable of rational thinking, is despicable. For the final time, take your bile and go home.
Michelle -
Well... it seems as though you've moved off of your stance some... and this is a good thing.
Please don't take our opposition to your original stand as pure idealism. For many of us, myself included, it's a matter of experience... in some cases lots of it.
Taking a stand as pure cut and dry, as you did, does make you seem ignorant, and it's surprising to me based on your other comments here that you would think that way, frankly.
but you still need a little work on this one:
Again, I think you need to really look into addiction... I just don't think that you can say that it's simply that cut and dry.
Remember, all generalizations are false! ;->
Walton @ 207
Erm... Mind you, people might hold such opinions and still be taxpayers themselves. They do spend their own taxes as well.
While I was in the US military in the early 80's, I had the opportunity to visit Leningrad and see political statuary.
No one would have dared "desecrate" a statue of Lenin the way it's done in Fremont, especially in drag!
I've wanted to go to Seattle for awhile to see Hendrix memorabilia, now I have another reason to go!
Homo sapiens ueber alles, nein? Back to the killfile for you, you naively, arrogantly ignorant buffoon. But first, on behalf of future generations of people who actually give a shit: Fuck you, asshole.
Be fair, now. I don't think she meant "they should kill someone with a car so that they will wake up." I think she meant "it would take killing someone with a car to wake them up." Different uses of the word "needs." So you take your misreading and go home! Or something.
...Holy shit! What the FUCK is wrong with you?! You took a little bit of line and twisted it out of its meaning! It was satirical! Get over it! I don't want people to get run over by drunkards!
You know, "Geeze, I don't think that guy will EVER learn until *insert something bad HERE* happens." It's strictly a sad realisation on how AWFUL the other person is, not that you wish them to kill someone. You're twisted. You really are.
Must be:
Homo sapiens über alles, nicht? or, nicer: ..., nicht wahr?
"nein" means "no", "nicht (wahr)?" means "isn't it?".
Sorry, couldn't resist.
....Then again I'm not even sure it's a satire. Is it? Anyway, like Angel said. She said it better anyway, and she wasn't under the "WHAT THE FUCK?!" shock I was under.
Michelle --
I think you need some serious therapy when it comes to your Dad. Please don't take it out on everyone here...
The environment is important for one reason and for one reason only: so that future human generations have a world to live in and resources to exploit.
So, you have no problem with the wanton killing of billions of organisms if it benefits our species? Wow.
Sven DiMilo: Homo sapiens ueber alles, nein? Back to the killfile for you, you naively, arrogantly ignorant buffoon. But first, on behalf of future generations of people who actually give a shit: Fuck you, asshole.
Throwing abuse at me is, I would venture to suggest, not terribly constructive. I understand you don't like me, but it would, surely, be better to explain why you found my post so objectionable, rather than flinging profanities?
(What astounds me is that I've heard Sven DiMilo's name mentioned for a Molly. If this is indicative of his usual output, I have to wonder why.)
@Sherry: Yet again, he got nothing to do with this beyond being my first-hand experience. I do not need therapy. I'm able to cope with it by myself. Therapy would mean he won anyway.
wow I'm really starting to waste my breath here. I'm done. I said all I had to say anyway.
Michelle's ignorance of certain topics is astonishing. Comment #97 is a classic. For someone claiming to be "intelligent", she sure is a stupid fuck. What an interesting contradiction.
Michelle, I applaud your decision to stay chemical free, but your inclination to convert your abstinence into some kind of self-awarded moral superiority and a greater right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is contemptible AT BEST.
I read your whole goddamn screed, Walton. Consider that I thought your limp disclaimer insufficient to answer my criticism.
The environment is important for one reason and for one reason only: so that future human generations have a world to live in and resources to exploit.
"a world to live in." I'll remember that as the extent of libertarian largesse as I wheeze out the last of my cancer-ridden existence, stumbling across a blasted plain looking for the barest trickle of contaminated water to "exploit" before I lie down and die.
At least they gave me a world to live in!
Naked bike rides are a regular thing here, but only as part of the Fremont Summer Solstice Festival. (There have been naked bike protests, but they're more of an ad hoc thing.) Nudity isn't actively criminalized, but you can still be charged with indecent exposure if someone complains about you.
As for the 'wet' housing - it's a single apartment building, the only one of its kind in the city. Treatment is offered at the apartment, but residence isn't made conditional upon participating; every other housing program for addicts in Seattle (and King County) requires participation in treatment and abstinence from residents as a condition of continued residence. It isn't exactly as if Seattle/King County is handing out apartment vouchers to addicts; the people being housed in this facility are among those least responsive to traditional treatment options.
It's a harm-reduction approach - if people are going to do potentially harmful things - and they are - what can be done to minimize the most harmful outcomes? This single site is quite literally an experiment, and so far it's been mostly successful. For instance, medical and psychiatric hospital admissions are down significantly for these residents, and many of them have historically been 'frequent fliers.' I seem to remember that there has been a small but not insignificant reduction in crime in the area around the apartment as well.
Disclosure: my wife is involved in harm-reduction research.
Walton, I have to reiterate that you're a naive dipshit. Apparently you are completely and utterly unaware of just how much human health rests on the preservation and sustainable use of the rest of the environment (e.g. most of the drugs you take, if you take prescription drugs, were derived from natural compounds, some of which are in species which are endangered); also, the earth is not for our abuse. We are just another species on it.
Please take your benighted godbot Humanitat Uber Alles ass somewhere where it won't affect the rest of us.
Oh, gosh. Please. That's not true, Michelle.
Since he has Walton killfiled, and since this was directed to him, I feel the need (nay, the mischievous urge) to reproduce this for Sven:
Not quite as good as being called exceedingly unreasonable by Pete Rooke, but...
Michelle, apparently you have no understanding of what therapy actually is or, if you ever had any of it, you had a bad therapist.
From what I am aware of, therapy does not mean your detractor 'won'; it is generally intended to make you feel better and cope better with reality.
@Sherry (#211) -- the best Fremont Lenin display I've seen involved a boat horn, a car battery, a wire running down Lenin's arm to a push button taped to his index finger, and a "Pull my finger" sign. It's been done a couple of times over the last few years.
blaaaaaaaat!
(Here's Vlad, minus the above getup.)
Of course homeless people shouldn't be given any help. While they are in the gutter, they provide an invaluable service: they allow the rest of us to feel superior. And if a few die of hypothermia, I think that's a small price to pay.
In fact, why not turn their bodies into dog food? I wouldn't feed my Labradoodle such things of course, but I'm sure it'll be fine for poor people who own mongrels.
Won what? Stuff like that is anything but a fight that can be won. It's abuse, pure and simple. Imposed by somebody in a position of power on somebody in a position of dependency.
Maybe therapy would help you to rebuild something that got lost along the way, making him the ultimate loser.
Feel free to just ignore or dismiss that. I just felt the urgent need to say that.
Therapy is for you, you, you and nobody else.
I've been there (twice) and would recommend it for anybody who got subjected to cruel treatment of any sort.
All this posting about alcoholism and drug addiction misses an important point. It is treatable. Many and probably most eventually dry out.
For some it takes a brush with death or two to wake them up. A few pass the point of no return and do not pass go and collect $200.
One guy I know was a young problem drinker. Now he is an airline pilot. We all know people who quit one drug or another.
PS Skipped Michelle's posts when they become rants and raves. There are anger and hostility issues there for sure. She most likely has good reasons for them. Still, it is best to let it go or they have won and are winning.The bad people's karma eventually catches up with them in the end, in my experience.
Walton:
And I think it's at the heart of the value of left-wing thinking, and a major reason I'm proud to call myself a liberal. Though I'd quibble with your use of the phrase "merely component cells," about which more anon.
Not withstanding your accusation that...
...I'm well aware of the limitations of metaphor, and never intended that one quite as literally as you seem to be taking it.
That, my friend, is a purely ideological assertion, with no more claim to objective truth than my (admittedly also ideological) counterassertion.
"Complex web"? Now we're getting somewhere!
I agree that society is a phenomenon, and I do not assert that it is a "living entity." But I do assert that the "patterns formed by ... complex, multi-layered ... interactions" amount to something real... something that has identity and behavior and character that's more than a simple sum of the individuals involved. I assert that those complex interactions and interdependencies create interests that are sometimes different from, and in addition to, the interests of individuals.
Aye, there's the rub! But I'm not talking about subordinating the individual to society, nor are, in my experience, political liberals generally doing so. My liberal friends are vastly more concerned with individual rights — especially those related to freedoms of expression, conscience, and thought — than most of my conservative acquaintances. The notion that we must either assert absolute individualism or surrender to the hive mind is a false binarism. My position is that society is not an abstraction that stands in opposition to individuals, but a synthesis of individuals, whose individual rights remain such, but are also reflected in collective rights.
Look at it this way: As an individual, you have a right to life. So do all your fellow individuals. But if each individual depends on a larger social structure to survive (and all mythology aside, we do), then your right to life both implies and depends upon that social structure's (aka, society's) right to preserve its own existence. Your individual right to life is moot without the implied collective right to life.
The resulting web of rights and dependencies is subtle and complex, and often contradictory and infuriating (which is why public policy ain't easy)... but it's not simply "the sum of the [rights of] the parts."
So that's how I get to the notion that it's sometimes "right" and "moral" to help even people who in some sense don't deserve any help: Because even if you're not concerned with their individual rights (or think they've forfeited same through bad behavior), helping them may help the synthetic whole upon whose existence your own individual rights depend.
On a not-unrelated note, a world in which people help each other without being too awful judgmental strikes me as a happier, emotionally healthier one to live in than one where it's "every man for himself." YMMV, as always.
Lenin was the father of communism? Well that's set me straight--all this time I thought that distinction belonged to Karl Marx.
The notion that we must either assert absolute individualism or surrender to the hive mind is a false binarism.
Walton's stock in trade. What else is new?
and in Fremont, a Seattle suburb, they actually put up a statue honoring Lenin, the father of communism.
I was under the impression that (1) the statue of Lenin was brought to Fremont by an entrepreneur, nothing to do with the 'city fathers'; and (2) Seattle is in fact a suburb of Fremont.
(Full disclosure: I only went there for the brewpubs, not the public art).
Do Libertarians actually think Capitalism in its purest form can protect anything other than itself? It can't even protect itself in the long run. I am stunned beyond all comprehension.
Capitalism cannot and will not ever protect an environment from exploitation. It will blindly follow market forces into self destruction as it consumes all available resources without government oversight leaving only wreckage in its wake. Our own history here in America has repeatedly shown us that. That is the nature of capitalism. That very inability of capitalism to regulate itself is why we have Government Regulation today. Government regulation evolved out of the need to protect society as a whole from unrestrained capitalist economic forces.
Capitalism can do many great things, but only when managed and controlled from outside.
To sort of drive the point home concerning drug and alcohol addiction and why it's simply a counter-productive stance, as a society, to just toss aside people who find themselves with these addictions:
O. Henry
Hemingway
Poe
Dostoevsky
William Faulkner
Thomas Wolfe
John Steinbeck
Tennessee Williams
All of the above were addicts at one point or another...
Addressing homelessness - O'Reilly's portion of his screed devoted to this really annoys me. "The city will pay to house alcoholics and drug addicts if they want it." As if these are the only sort of homeless people. A class of people with palms out, begging him for money to feed their addiction. A class he feels he can sneeringly dismiss as having caused their own problem. An estimated 100 million of homeless people in the world, a sizeable chunk of which the US can claim for its own. And in the reality-denying O'Reilly-verse - it's all their fault.
The problem is certainly more complicated than O'Reilly has addressed. Lack of affordable housing, low-paying jobs, and mental illness/lack of needed services for it are the top three factors contributing to the growing problem of homelessness. Other main causes include substance abuse, domestic violence, unemployment, poverty, and prisoner re-entry. So shame on O'Reilly for sneering at a program that attempts to address and alleviate the problem.
An alternative is leaving these people, often with children in tow, on the streets to beg, steal, and survive as best they can sans assistance. Another is to hope the charity of the better situated individuals results in the care of this group. Me - I'm for forcing people to expend their tax dollars on helping people who need it - even if they don't want to give money to what they describe as dirty, lazy, non-people. I'm forced to expend my tax dollars on wars I don't agree with - so they should be forced to spend their tax dollars on programs that dare to treat other human beings with decency and compassion.
Michelle, I understand why you believe the way you do but you're working on a premise that simply isn't correct. You assume that everyone that becomes addicted is like your dad who in your mind is the way he is because of the addiction. You also assume that you are just like your dad but, through acts of will have been able to avoid the problems he had.
This is overly simplistic. Addiction is not a one way street where the choice of taking drugs leads to aberrant behaviour. Most addicts, whether taking legal drugs like alcohol or illegal drugs, have the personality disorder before the addiction. To some it is not simply just a choice, it is a compulsion. It becomes a positive feedback system that in some cases cannot be controlled.
I am not you, my brain chemistry is different, my neighbour is not me, his brain chemistry is different. While you have been able to harness your anger to avoid acting like your dad, that doesn't work for all of us. Don't make the decision to view everybody else as you view your dad and yourself, it will do nothing but give you a skewed view of reality.
Those of us who have addictions are not the ones that abused you, we are not responsible for your dad's actions nor do we have the same personality traits as him. Do we really deserve to be placed in the same box as him?
Interesting what very similar circumstances can provoke such completely opposite responses. I just read a little bit of what Michelle has written to my mom. My ears hurt a little bit right now from the volume of her response. My mom spent much of her childhood in foster care because of her parent's substance abuse (it's the reason neither her nor I will touch alcohol) and yet her response is the total opposite of Michelle. Instead of saying "fuck them" to addicts she became a special ed teacher helping many children of addicts (addict's children have more learning disabilities), also volunteering to speak to high school students and college kids about alcoholism and the effects it has, and donating time and money to charities that help addicts. She's chosen to try and help save other kids from what she went through instead of letting addicts screw up the lives of their families more.
Walton,
Since you accept, @ 188, that a government can legitimately organise a country's internal policing I am assuming that you would extend that to defence in time of war. Tell me if I'm wrong.
Now, let me take you back to 1914 in the UK. At the start of WWI we had a standing army of over 700,000 - far more than today. These plus the volunteers who signed up from August onward saw us through about 18 months but they were being killed and injured at such a rate that by 1916 conscription had become necessary - for single men from January, married men from the May.
It was then discovered that about 40% of the male 18-41 age-group was unfit for any type of military service at all. The 1917-1918 figures show only 36% of the "fighting age" population was fit for full military duties, front-line service on the Western Front for instance. Why?
By the way, I'm surprised that you don't already know this. You could have taken into account in making decisions for us all on how the world should be.
Why? Remember that in those days most of the babies with genetic defects or birth injuries just died so it is reasonable to assume that, apart from the few who had fallen from their horses during a local point-to-point, the vast majority who were unfit were that way because of poverty. The cumulative effects of poor pay, bad - damp, dangerous, overcrowded - housing, long-term malnutrition, possibly periods of near-starvation, dangerous working conditions and the inability to pay for routine medical care had taken their toll.
Only when it became desparate for more cannon-fodder did the government - ours by no means the worst - realise that, yes, it did have an interest in the well-being of the individual!
Producing a significant improvement in the health of the nation took decades and was such a massive challenge that it could only be done collectively.
This is a story I know well because my Dad was one of those who volunteered in 1915. He got a head injury in 1917, required quite a bit of medical care to which he was fully entitled and which no market would have provided and finally died of that injury in 1952 so I've followed the story all my life.
(The dates and proportions I've just checked on Wikipedia - before someone demands a source - but that confirmed I had the picture about right.)
You accept that pollution is a negative which cannot be dealt with by the market. What, even though that market created it? I feel that a much stronger case can be made for treating health, general wellbeing, economic and social justice as legitimately a matter for government. And that is why, dear Walton, some of us see a damn sight more sense in Marx - what the poor man actually wrote, not the bollocks which has followed him from both ends of the spectrum - that we have ever been able to find in Friedman.
KristinMH @34 -
Thanks, Western Washington's been eyeing BC in a more-than-neighborly way for some time now. We're going to give this New President (now with complete sentences!) a shot for awhile, and if it doesn't work out, we'll get right on that secession thing!
-in Olympia, which is NOT Seattle, having much less traffic, much more walkability, and (unfortunatley?) 100% fewer nude bike parades. We do have a giant dress-up-like-any-living-thing parade, though! It doesn't usually have enough squid, but they are represented.
As a former abuse victim, I seriously take issue with Michelle's statement that therapy for the victim means the perpetrator of abuse has won. Like some others here, I see extreme anger and hurt coming through in Michelle's comments. I know where she's coming from, even if I do disagree with her statements.
I was severly abused as a child. I continued to let my parents abuse me, psychologically, until just a year ago. With the help of my therapist, I have FINALLY begun to take control of my life, and put an end to my abuse.
A year ago I was a mess. I won't go into the long list of boring details, but I was seriously a mess. I still have a ways to go in my recovery, but I have made great strides and I actually feel good now. I could not have make that progress without therapy.
To Bill Dauphin at #231: You raise a number of interesting points, which I'll try to address individually (albeit not in any coherent order).
As an individual, you have a right to life. So do all your fellow individuals. But if each individual depends on a larger social structure to survive (and all mythology aside, we do), then your right to life both implies and depends upon that social structure's (aka, society's) right to preserve its own existence. Your individual right to life is moot without the implied collective right to life.
I would quibble with this line of reasoning on a number of points. Firstly, I usually prefer to avoid the vague term "right to life". It's easy - and very common across the political spectrum - to assert, for whatever ends, that people have an inherent "right to life". But what do we really mean by this? Do we mean the barest minimum - a right not to be (arbitrarily) killed through the deliberate or negligent conduct of another? Or, at the other end of the spectrum, do we mean that everyone has a positive "right" to be supported, and for his life to be sustained, at the expense of his neighbour? The former is so narrow as to be unhelpful; the latter, IMO, is fundamentally unjust, since it gives the improvident rights against the provident without any return or just cause.
So, rather than talking of a "right to life", I prefer to say that everyone has a right to freedom from interference with his person, or to security of person. Murder is, therefore, proscribed in the same manner that rape, assault, etc. are proscribed; it is an unlawful interference with another's bodily autonomy. This goes hand in hand with a right to freedom from interference with one's property, leading to the proscription of theft and fraud.
But if each individual depends on a larger social structure to survive (and all mythology aside, we do), then your right to life both implies and depends upon that social structure's (aka, society's) right to preserve its own existence.
In a sense, yes, all human beings do "rely" on thousands of other human beings every day to provide them with the necessities of life. Indeed, one of the most common misconceptions about libertarians is that we believe every man to be an island. We do not. In fact, we cherish and value the interdependence between individuals.
But the fact that you and I rely, every day, on a myriad of producers and suppliers around the world does not mean that we are in some way dependent on "society". Rather, we acquire these things through chains of mutually beneficial voluntary transactions. We buy what we need from retail businesses; they buy from suppliers and wholesalers, who, in turn, buy from manufacturers and producers. This is simple efficiency; without the process of voluntary bilateral trade between individuals, we would not be free to pursue our own specialist fields of economic activity. It is a case of individuals making a free agreement with one another for their mutual benefit.
Your statement could be read in another sense, though; and when you refer to "the synthetic whole upon whose existence your own individual rights depend", you have a point, in the sense that the concept of "rights" would be meaningless without the general acceptance of certain norms of conduct, and the structures (of government and of social convention) which declare and enforce those norms of conduct. In an anarchy (using the word in its loosest sense, as the absence of any organised governing arrangement; I'm aware that anarchist theorists advocate various different forms of "anarchy"), none of us would have any individual rights, because there would be no framework in place by which such rights could be enforced. So I do not begrudge - nor does any sensible libertarian begrudge - paying for police protection, the courts, and the rule of law, as well as certain other legal measures which protect us from each other's excesses.
The notion that we must either assert absolute individualism or surrender to the hive mind is a false binarism.
True, and I shouldn't, perhaps, have used the analogy with ants. I'm not suggesting that you want to see a society in which individuals are subordinated to the all-powerful will of Big Brother (few people consciously desire that, and those who do are generally not sane enough to carry on a rational conversation). Nor do I doubt your commitment to, say, civil liberties; and, incidentally, you're quite right to point out that American liberals have been far more energetic than their counterparts on the right, in recent years, in standing up for civil liberties against encroachment. (I would suggest that civil liberties tend to be less a question of left vs. right, and more a function of government vs. opposition; the government of the day - whether conservative Republicans in the US, or New Labour here in the UK - tends to encroach on liberty, and the opposition, whatever it may be, wishes to hold them in check. But that's another topic entirely.)
But there is a dichotomy at work here: individualism vs. paternalism. In the end, I am willing to support (or at least to tolerate) government action up to the point, and only up to the point, that it protects the liberty and autonomy of individuals from each other. In contrast, a paternalist sees a role for the state in protecting individuals from themselves and from the consequences of their own mistakes. Paternalism comes in many forms, many of which are genuinely benevolent and well-intentioned; and it has been promoted by some of the brightest minds in history. But it rests on a presupposition: that those in government, the legislators and the civil servants and the officials, are sufficiently wise that they should make choices for those under their rule, rather than allowing each person to make choices for himself. And I would venture to suggest that history demonstrates the essential falsehood of this supposition.
Wow. Lots of clenched buttocks, lots of iron rods in need of being released. Why the immediate attacks folks? I do not understand why Michelle appears to have a lack of compassion, but I also do not understand the need to play stomp stomp with Doc Martens on her head. Try to educate to your point of view, if that does not work then get out the hobnails.
Walton, stop edging around things. If you do not like Sven just say so. Call him an asshole, call me one if you wish. Namby-pamby concerns about Sven being put up for an OM is just code for an insult. Grab your testicles and actually make a statement.
Ah well, this exhausted my holiday cheer supply for the day. Back to being Scrooge. I am working on an alternate fuel made of puppies and crippled children named Tim.
Put the Saturnalia back into xmas!
JeffreyD
before tsg beats me to it... your concern is noted...
Also, see my prior statement: "all generalizations are false".
Check... and check.
I think you'll see that the majority of the posts concerning Michelle are now meant to show concern, compassion and support... if you're going to rip the negative, at least make an attempt at recognizing the positive.
abeja @242:
Let me express my deepest respect and admiration.
I was commited to therapy with minor problems compared to yours and still struggle. Achieving such an improvement in only one year speaks volumes about your ability to cope.
I wish you all the best. Keep up the good work (for hard work it is, indeed) and never, ever let yourself discourage by setbacks.
Lack of affordable housing, low-paying jobs, and mental illness/lack of needed services for it are the top three factors contributing to the growing problem of homelessness.
Indeed, and if you didn't have mental problems when you landed on the street, you soon will. Lack of housing, losing a job, these kinds of things (and how many of us are much farther than a missed paycheck or two from them?) can lead to incidental, ostensibly temporary, homelessness. But the rigors of life without a safe, comfortable place to sleep and enough to eat is enough to send most of us around the bend in short order. (If you're so sure you'd do fine, I suggest you spend a night on the street in a bad neighborhood in a major city.) And that's how in a lot of cases what started as an episodic problem becomes a chronic condition, and why "tough love" and stigmatizing the victims is such a terrible, costly, and inhumane approach to the problem.
Sending you good thoughts, abeja. Best of luck to you.
I hope Michelle reads your post.
Keenacat,
Thank you. Esp. the part about not being discouraged by setbacks. That's a big problem area for me. But I keep trudging along...
I wish you well in your efforts to deal with your problems. You're right that is is indeed a struggle (more than I could have ever thought).
How many people did Lenin murder? Anyone know?
re: the homeless. The easier you make it for poor people, the more you will have. Yea, Economics sucks, thats why they call it the dismal science. Doesnt mean you shouldnt read a little about it, PZ.
Interesting. The "I'm not [insert genetic predisposition of choice], so clearly those that are CHOSE to be that way!" apparently not only works for denigrating homosexuals, but also for homeless people and drug addicts.
FYI, that potential heroin addict who's never taken any? well, maybe instead he now weighs 400lbs, or is a fundie religionist, or a cutter, or an adrenaline junkie who has broken every bone in his body and is now permanently on morphine... point is: an addict can get addicted to absolutely ANYthing if the conditions are right (or wrong, in this case).
And also: addictions are permanent. they're treatable, not curable. if they were curable, then the "once only" approach might make sense: you made a mistake once and got addicted, and you got a chance to straighten things out, and everything is peachy; if you then go and start drugs again, clearly you WANT to take drugs.
It doesn't work that way in the real world, addictions are manageable and treatable, that's what rehab does: it teaches people how to manage their addictions. it's hard to stay the course, people slip up and need more than one attempt often. to say that everyone who doesn't manage the first time doesn't WANT to recover is an unfair misconstruction of the situation.
I notice how this conversation went from "all drug addicts did it to themselves" to "well, all but the accidental alcoholics" to "well, all but the accidental alcoholics, and the people who got addicted to meds" to "well, all but the accidental alcoholics, the med-addicts, and people who have been introduced to drugs as children". if we keep this thread up, there won't be much left :-p
SC, OM
Thanks for the good wishes. Unfortunately I think Michelle has given up on this thread, so she probably won't see anything else that is written. I do hope that someday she gets some help.
Matt
Relevance?
Citation?
Mm-hmmm... well, while you're looking for citations for your prior statement of stupidity, go ahead and look up "irony".
Gee. Thanks, SC (#225). You're right that I never would have seen that if you hadn't so mischievously reproduced it. (I only saw the post that set me off because the killfile started letting W through when he started linking, via his nym, to something I can only assume is--yikes--his blog. I have corrected that little glitch.)
Walton, this will be the last time I will ever address you directly, because this is the last time I will ever knowingly read anything you have written. My "usual output," such as it is, consists mostly of snarky little one-liners making fun of silly people, and occasional (attempted) humorous back-and-forth with other commenters of like mind. Sometimes the discussion strays to a subject that actually interests me (mostly biology), and then I try to offer some information or insight. Unlike, say, you, I harbor no illusions that my opinions on "serious issues' hold any interest whatsoever for most readers of this blog, and frankly I have better and more productive uses of my time than engaging in detailed wankfests discussions of political theory and whatnot with random people on the internet. You are 100% correct that I don't like you. I find your political and social attitudes loathsome and selfish and your style verbose and narcissistic. However, until now I have been content with poking fun at you, and then ignoring you completely.
However, your post (#207? I'm not unkilling you to check) pushed my most sensitive button. It may have happened, but I cannot remember ever before posting a direct response to a comment in anger. The attitude that natural ecosystems exist only for the pleasure and exploitation of humans is to me among the most poisonous and evil opinions it is possible to have. No, I have no desire to try to calmly and rationally explain to you why you should care about wilderness, biodiversity, and functioning ecosystems for their own sake. If you are so dogmatically wedded to your free-market anthropocentric bullshit that you can't figure that out for yourself, then (I repeat) fuck you.
I did not have to fling invective your way, probably shouldn't have, and I never shall again, but as long as I'm talking at you now I'll lay it on the line: I used to dislike you, but now I actively hate you. You and people who think like you will be enemies of mine as long as I live.
And now, adieu.
Walton:
Between this thread and the homeschooling one, I've vomitted out quite a few words in the last couple days, and I imagine folks are a bit tired of me... so I'll try to keep this brief (keeping in mind my usual success rate at that).
I pretty much meant...
"You have the right not to be killed!"
;^)
But seriously, your quibble (as you yourself called it) over my phrasing doesn't really impact my underlying argument about the interdependence between individual and societal rights.
You don't use the word, but your position seems to be that what you previously described as a "complex web" can always be reliably reduced to some set of bilateral transactions between individuals. I disagree. I don't know how either of us could prove our point, but it seems to me that public-policy decisions based on my notion are generally wiser and more compassionate than those based on yours.
Your formulation has embedded in it the presupposition that collectivism = paternalism. In this way, you're assuming the point you mean to prove.
You seem to see representative government as a surrender to the hoped-for wisdom of strangers; I see it, instead, as an investment of the public's wisdom in its chosen leadership... the combination and delegation of our individual rights and wisdom in our chosen leaders, by which act we collectively define what we hold to be wise. My fellow citizens, and the leaders we jointly choose, are not usurpers of my rights; they're force multipliers.
I realize you don't share this view, and I don't kid myself that I can persuade you... but I don't apologize for holding what I consider to be a more hopeful, humane view of the world.
@Michelle
I was a drunk. I drank away a scholarship for my post-graduate studies. I drank myself into a hole. But I was polite about it so virtually no one ever knew, or at least they didn't mention it.
I drank, because I hated who I was, despite all my gifts. Because I hated what the world was. Because the children begging next to the window of my car was too much for me to take, the helplessness was too much, because the elderly people I served food too at the soup kitchen sometimes cried when they got a hot meal. They cried. I helped, but did I change anything, no I didn't. I couldn't.
I'm still sometimes a drunk, because sometimes the only choice is between a drink and a lead sandwich. Because you know, the world is just that fucked and it is not going to get better.
So Michelle, tell yourself that you are better than me, than a whiny little drunk. But remember, we are all human, and the fates can fuck us all.
Even the least amongst us, are still human. Regardless of how hard they are to love, how smelly they are, how rambling their conversations, or how pitiful their condition. Respect for their humanity will not make you poorer.
by that logic, Pre-Revolution France was a paradise for poor people.
and alternatively, the likes of Sweden, Switzerland etc. are the most stringent and punitive in their treatment of the poor
You know, from a liberal stand point, Seattle is a pretty sweet place to live. But it sure does rain a lot here, so it can get a little depressing between Summers.
Ouch! Thanks a lot, Sven! ;^)
@113:
A strawman is still a strawman even if you are related to it.
Walton,
Oh yeah ? Care to compare countries, historically and today, which have government social welfare programmes and those which depend only on voluntary charity ?
I really wonder why we, the French, did a Revolution. It must have been soooo nice under Louis XVI if you weren't amongst the few % aristocrats or bourgeois or religious and were dependent on their charity.
Where do you get these ideas from, Walton ? where's the evdence ?
Sorry, Sven. :S It was mischievous in intent, but I was also bothered that he was challenging you to defend your remark when you had made it clear that you wouldn't see his comment. (And I felt I had a personal stake in the matter as I was the one who mentioned you for a Molly.)
Anyway, well said. And while I mainly enjoy the humor in your comments, I've also found your biology posts interesting and informative.
The easier you make it for poor people, the more you will have. Yea, Economics sucks, thats why they call it the dismal science. Doesnt mean you shouldnt read a little about it
The easier you make it for people to escape poverty, the fewer you will have. Where'd you read about economics, a corn flake packet?
Sven, I honestly regret that I've inspired such hatred. I apologise for anything I've said that is personally offensive; but I can't, in all honesty, apologise for expounding the views which I do genuinely hold.
By way of explanation: I don't mean to suggest that environmental protection is not important. That would be shortsighted; our resources need to be sustained for future generations, so that the achievements of our civilisation can be retained, and I understand that we must, therefore, be careful stewards of the natural and physical world, and not over-exploit resources. And, in response to Katharine at #244, yes, I do realise that the conservation of some such resources profoundly affects human quality of life. So I am not arguing that we should drill, slash and burn every inch of unspoilt wilderness.
But where Katharine says (#244) "The earth is not for our abuse", or Sven says "The attitude that natural ecosystems exist only for the pleasure and exploitation of humans is to me among the most poisonous and evil opinions it is possible to have", I would have to question the implicit presupposition that the earth and its natural ecosystems exist "for" any particular reason whatsoever.
You seem to be asserting that the Earth, on some level, is here for the benefit of all organisms - not just that of human beings - and that, somehow, we don't have a "right" to exploit it however we choose. But I would question whether the Earth exists for the benefit of anyone or anything at all. Rather, once one rejects the idea of a purposeful Creator (a question which is entirely irrelevant to this thread, so I won't discuss it), the only realistic conclusion is that the Earth is, simply, here. It doesn't exist for any particular reason, or for anyone's particular benefit; it just exists. It wasn't given to us with preconditions. And we, therefore, have no particular responsibility or mandate to use it for the benefit of anyone other than ourselves. Our consequent freedom is constrained only by our own rational future self-interest, in ensuring that resources are not depleted for future generations.
It is absurd to claim that the animals and the plants have a "right", enforceable against humanity, to exist in their natural habitats. Rights are not creations of nature (in the absence of a controlling intelligence of nature, they cannot be). They are human legal constructs, designed to allow us all to live together without killing each other.
Of course, if, for some reason of your own, you want to conserve animals and plants simply for their own sake, I won't stop you - but don't use my money, extracted from me via the coercive force of the state, to do it.
and this is relevant how?
The problem with the philosophy that people should have ultimate choice for themselves is precisely the issues we are facing with the environment right now. Each of our actions can affect others, so absolute freedom of the individual can have drastic effects on others. We've damaged the environment by treating it as a commodity to be used, and now when things are looking dire, governments are still trying their best to limit the restriction on large corporations to rape it further.It needs to be taken into account that some actions can have dire effects, and thus there needs to be tighter regulation on some issues. The free market will mean the death of the earth as we know it, and the only way to stop that is to regulate our use of the world. There was an interesting example Dawkins gave of this in Nice Guys Finish First. In an open field where all farmers could bring their livestock to graze, the field has started to become overrun with weeds thanks to overgrazing. Now each individual if they decided to limit the cattle grazing there wouldn't have an effect, indeed another farmer would just take up the slack. For any individual to try and save the environment, there was an immediate cost to that person and there would be no greater benefit in the long run. What I'm trying to say here is that sometimes we need an overseer of these processes because an individual cannot do much against the masses. We've had massive problems of a similar nature with farming on our Murray River, the farmers are fighting tooth and claw for their water allocation, despite the problems it's causing the Murray upstream and despite Adelaide relying on the Murray as a water source. It's a genuine concern that our environment is being damaged, it affects our capacity to have a long-term future. It's not an assumption that the government is wise, it's not an assumption they'll do the right thing. It's just that there's some regulation that is needed because any one individual cannot fix it.
negentropyeater: I really wonder why we, the French, did a Revolution. It must have been soooo nice under Louis XVI if you weren't amongst the few % aristocrats or bourgeois or religious and were dependent on their charity.
I think that example serves my argument as much as it serves yours. Pre-Revolutionary France was an iniquitous society because class divisions were enforced by law. The clergy were exempt from tax; the nobility had legal privileges; the power of the state was vested solely in the king. It was far, far from being a libertarian society. Of course, post-Revolutionary society in France wasn't all that much better either.
Rather, throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, the best place to live in Europe - the place where different ideas were, mostly, tolerated; where the rule of law applied to poor and rich alike; where there were great disparities of wealth, but there were always opportunities for those of ambition and ability to climb the ladder (like Josiah Wedgwood, who started as a young man with a few pounds' capital and established a world-renowned pottery business) - was the United Kingdom. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain was, on the whole, the closest thing to a libertarian society which existed at the time. And, not coincidentally, it was, at the time, the greatest and most prosperous nation on earth.
Bill Dauphin: You seem to see representative government as a surrender to the hoped-for wisdom of strangers; I see it, instead, as an investment of the public's wisdom in its chosen leadership... the combination and delegation of our individual rights and wisdom in our chosen leaders, by which act we collectively define what we hold to be wise. My fellow citizens, and the leaders we jointly choose, are not usurpers of my rights; they're force multipliers.
This would seem to be the normative core of your argument. And this is where we, irreducibly, disagree.
I do not trust a leader merely because he is acclaimed by a democratic majority. (Such majorities have, as you well know, produced some truly awful leaders...) Nor does the fact of his popular approval make me wish to "combine and delegate" my individual rights to him. While democracy is the least bad method of selecting leaders, it must be combined with a robust means of limiting the power of those leaders and of protecting, even against overwhelming popular will, the liberty of the individual. A tyranny of the majority is still a tyranny.
What an irrelevant point. The earth exists, and we live on it. We have a duty to protect it, we are the first species that's been able to consciously control the environment. We have been destroying the environment, we've had a devastating effect on it, and we know this. If we have the ability to protect the environment but are unwilling to, then we are going to put the future of our species in jeopardy. We have the duty to protect this planet for the sake of our own future as much as anything else.
But then he'd answer them with even more pompous and clueless screeds of his own!
Of course, they'd be there, so it might be worth it. His blog doesn't seem to have had the effect I hoped it would - of providing him with sufficient opportunities for virtual wankery that he didn't feel the need to come here to satisfy his needs. Alas.
Rather, once one rejects the idea of a purposeful Creator (a question which is entirely irrelevant to this thread, so I won't discuss it), the only realistic conclusion is that the Earth is, simply, here. It doesn't exist for any particular reason, or for anyone's particular benefit; it just exists. It wasn't given to us with preconditions. And we, therefore, have no particular responsibility or mandate to use it for the benefit of anyone other than ourselves.
Yep, and you can thus choose to be a bully, because you're the strongest kid on the block, and take what you want at whatever rate you want, or you can choose to have a little respect for the organisms you share the block with, out of some basic empathy for how it might be to exist as one of the weak.
That's an lousy metaphor at best, but I suspect you get my point.
Actually, it would be more accurate to post screeds about things that are only vaguely related to the topic at hand. Cane we turn all his posts into long rants about game theory?
Walton,
"The rich man in his palace
The poor man in his gate
God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate."
This thread is astonishing.
Like one big group therapy session.
Everything we ever wanted to say to Holbach and Walton,and even from Sven....
And then there is Michelle.
Angerly projecting away from the flaws of her father to every cigarette smoker and nude bather in the universe.
Im just waiting for the weather to get better,and then,off to the nude beach,with an esky full of beer....
I don't know how to blockquote, so please forgive me if this is all wrong; she said:
""unless they were kidnapped and forced into doing this.""
Which I think would eliminate the rape thing, right? Unless you're saying that all street prostitution is rape, which I'd say is probably not true. Angel Kaida
You're making an error Michelle has also made: that an action is either coerced, or fully voluntary. An abused fifteen-year-old runaway who sells sex to survive is forced by circumstances to do so. An addict of any kind is constrained by their addiction. Michelle's brutal views clearly result from her own history of abuse.
Many people, of course, become addicts after becoming homeless. Both alcohol and heroin deal, temporarily, with physical cold, self-contempt and despair.
Oh, sugar. I must be losing it. I'm starting to see an attempted pun in every random typo. I blame Emmet.
And, not coincidentally, it was, at the time, one of the worst shit holes on the face of the earth, unless you were a member of the lucky upper or middle class. Otherwise, as Engels noted, you lived considerably worse than most other nations' hogs. And that, Walton, is why we have revolutions.
One of the problems with the body politic analogy and, in fact, most arguments that rest on the assumption of society as an entity of itself instead of a collection of individuals Angel Kaida
Of course society is "an entity in itself", just like a species, or a molecule. Don't be ridiculous. Oh! Sorry, you did say you were a "libertarian".
Yea! A plug from grumpy screed screamer.
I love the Fremont Solstice Parade. I invite the world to come to my home town of Seattle and converge on the Freemont neighborhood for Summer Solstice: clothing optional, great beer, fun people, and a dearth of rightwing nut cases!
Welcome all!!!
Walton:
In the very language of this, you hold yourself apart from your fellows, rather than considering yourself part of a larger whole. That is the irreducible core of our disagreement.
And having come to it, I'll leave off this line of discussion.
I really wish you guys would stop thinking that I'm an angry avenger that just thinks that way because of my background. It's not true. - Michelle
I don't think you're the best judge of that. You yourself expressed your contempt for addicts by comparing them to your abusive father.
The question, though, is whether the homeless should have a right, enforceable against the productive members of society, to be fed, housed and rehabilitated at the taxpayer's expense. - Walton
The answer is, of course, "yes". Even from the point of view of long-term self-interest, this is worthwhile: homelessness leads to crime, and to injury and death of others besides the homeless. Then there's compassion. Real compassion, Walton, involves actually seeking effective ways to relieve suffering - and no society has ever even come close to ending homelessness (or poverty) without an extensive welfare state.
Asserting that we have a right to live on the Earth is about as absurd as saying horses have a right to live on the Earth. Yet we ride them and make horsemeat out of them. I'll laugh if you end your life between the jaws of some large animal. (Note I am not a vegetarian or against breeding horses; I'm just incredulous at the absurdity of Walton's words.)
I'm a neurobiology student who's taken general biology and the other classes in the basic science battery; I'm currently in more advanced neurobiology classes - I'm not letting some piddly conservative law naif lecture me about how sustainability, the environment, the food chain, the interdependence of species, and energy flow work. Take some science, prat, and learn why you're wrong.
Michelle, I'm going to tell you a story.
My boyfriend's parents and his 7 year old niece are homeless. They are living in a motel. His father is addicted to pain pills, which he started after an injury. They all three live in one room and scrape by on his mother's WalMart income. His father obviously has a problem, and is kind of a dick, so one could say that he reaps what he sows. But what about his mother and niece? His mother is working her ass off to provide for them, and his niece is obviously blameless for this situation. If there was help for them, his mom might be able to get back on her feet. But with a kid and a bad job, how can she save up money for an apartment deposit?
(For the record, our niece has a room at our place and is over all the time, and we help them out when we can with food and her school clothes. We're not rich but we do what we can.)
Nick OM @282,
Make that modern society.
I think this conception of society - as some sort of living body, of which we are all merely component cells - is at the heart of the problems with left-wing thinking. You're essentially anthropomorphising an abstraction. "Society" is not an organism of any sort, nor is it a cohesive whole. It is an abstract term which we use, for convenience, to refer to a great mass of individual people and the complex web of social relationships which connect them. - Walton
Societies are not organisms - so far, you're right. (I use "societies" and not "society", because the latter corresponds to "the individual", while "individuals" correspond to "societies": specific "societies" are themselves individuals in the sense used in philosophical logic. To deny that societies are (in some cases at least) cohesives wholes, is one of the many crass errors in "libertarian" "thinking". An individual is born into a society, kept alive by that society, taught language and other aspects of culture specific to that society, lives their life in the physical and institutional environment constructed over centuries by that society - unless they leave. Almost all modern societies are state-societies, and so have well-defined conditions of individual membership (nationality/citizenship); as have many (but not all) non-state societies. The self-sufficient individual owing nothing to anyone is the real abstraction - such a being, unlike societies, does not exist and never has existed. Societies are as real as molecules.
And termites.
John Morales@286. Can you suggest a non-modern society that came close to eliminating powerty and homelessness?
interesting. this is right out of the creationists playbook: "if there's no creator, there's no inherent value in anything!!!"
of course you're taking it to the opposite conclusion (i.e. that indeed there's no inherent value, not that there's a creator), but the logic is still flawed.
being human means that, unlike animals only concerned with themselves, we can and should see value in things not directly necessary/useful to us. that applies to other human beings (even those with whom we have no contact, and who are inconsequential to our own lives) just as much as for everything else. Valuing "The Other" for its own sake doesn't mean you have to put them AHEAD of your own good (as much as I'm for preserving biodiversity, I'm certainly glad we've driven the smallpox virus to extinction and are on the way to do the same to the Guinea Worm), but similarly we can't put our comforts ahead of the existence of "The Other". there's no rational reason why for example cougars have to be driven out of their habitat, and killed on a regular basis, just so people can fulfill their dream of a Suburban McMansion, when they can just as easily live in a city. this isn't any different than Westerners bitching and moaning about the discomforts that a smaller eco-footprint might cause, while entire nations are already having Savings Funds for the wholesale evacuation of the nation, because their countries are in the process of sinking into the ocean.
The Anthropocentric Principle is just as bad as any other kind of self-centered logic.
No, you're not an expert on ants- there's no "central will"!
we, therefore, have no particular responsibility or mandate to use it for the benefit of anyone other than ourselves. Our consequent freedom is constrained only by our own rational future self-interest, in ensuring that resources are not depleted for future generations.
You're on a slippery slope, Walton. What justifies saving any of the goodies for future generations? How are they a part of "ourselves"? Come to think of it, what is this "we" and "our" business, anyway? Why does "I, therefore, have no particular responsibility or mandate to use it for the benefit of anyone other than myself" not follow from your premises equally well, or better, than what you wrote?
Michelle,
Dammit, I missed all the fun, but I can't let your callous ignorance and sanctimony go without comment.
Now, a neuro-(bio)logist/chemist will surely correct me on the detail here, but I'm pretty sure I'm right on the general outline... There are countless people who have anomalies in their dopamine circuits: deficiency, receptor response, etc. This makes them feel emotionless, depressed, unmotivated, listless, and makes them particularly susceptible to addiction to substances that act to stimulate the production, or inhibit the reuptake, of dopamine (or both). Dopamine deficiency/response is a contributory factor to several mental illnesses and other neurological disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder). It takes a $6k PET scan with tracers that highlight dopamine activity (very recent technology) to see if the dopamine circuit in the brain is working correctly, but most sufferers don't have any "full-blown" obvious mental illness that brings them into treatment, and go their whole lives in low-level depression, listlessness, and susceptibility to addiction, sometimes to the extent that they can become alcoholics from normal levels of social drinking, without ever knowing that there's a neurochemical reason why they are the way they are.Traditionally, these people have been labeled malingerers and/or drunks. But, what the hell, fuck 'em, right? They're just too lazy to work and they chose to drink.
People don't choose their neurochemistry.
A tyranny of the majority is still a tyranny.,/I> - Walton
Indeed. But this begs the question. What counts as tyranny? You think taxation for any function that could possibly be provided for profit is tyranny. Most people disagree. So far as I can see, you and other "libertarians" wish to impose your view of the matter on the majority. That's why your hero Milton Friedman supported the mass-murderer, torturer, thief and tyrant Pinochet.
Thus spake SC, OM:
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
What you mean is,this brings up the question...
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/begging-the-question.html
Nothing better than correcting an OM for us underlings...:-)
a non-modern society that came close to eliminating powerty and homelessness?
Just speaking in general, poverty per se can't exist unless there's a surplus, so hunter-gatherer and subsistence horticulture-based societies don't have poor people, at least not any poorer than the rest, by modern standards (that we shouldn't apply). Though I don't suppose any group has ever managed perfect "income" equality, so I guess it's just in how you define poverty where modern definitions don't hold.
And, by the same token, "homelessness" at least by the modern standard of "lacking access to a permanent dwelling," is the default condition among hunter-gatherers, though typically no one has to go without shelter, so it's either ubiquitous or non-existent, depending on your frame.
But Amanduh, they're so free. Shouldn't his mother appreciate the freedom offered them by living in a free capitalist society? No one forcing any housing, medical care, treatment for addiction, or anything on them. Liberty! They're as free as you, me, or Wal-Mart...well, maybe not quite as free as Wal-Mart, but, y'know, free!
Anyway, his father's injury was probably his own stupid fault in the first place, and he didn't have to start taking pain pills. I mean, he could've just sucked it up. Plenty of people do, you know, since they're smart and know how addictive those things can be. And it's his mother's own fault, too, for marrying him in the first place. She's also pretty dumb to be working at Wal-Mart, by the way. Doesn't she know there are better jobs out there? Well, the niece deserves some sympathy, but only if she's under, say, 16, and we can't let sympathy for her get in the way of punishing her caretakers for their stupid choices...
that one, and "moot point" are ones I never knew were used incorrectly, so I have a hard time weeding them out of my vocabluary.
...though according to wikipedia, "moot point" as "irrelevant" is acceptable usage in the U.S. now, so I guess I can stop worrying about it :-p
our resources need to be sustained for future generations, so that the achievements of our civilisation can be retained, and I understand that we must, therefore, be careful stewards of the natural and physical world, and not over-exploit resources. - Walton
Walton, you must realise this completely contradicts the "libertarian" stance? Surely "future generations" and "our civilisation" are as abstract as "society"? A consistent "libertarian" would say "Stuff future generations. Screw our civilisation. Mere abstractions. If you want to protect the interests of future generations or our civilisation go ahead, but don't use my money or place any restrictions on my activities." In practice, that's what most of them would say if they had the moral courage, but instead they pretend that there are no limits to resources, anthropogenic climate change isn't happening, the ozone hole is a myth...
Basically, hunter-gatherers in mild climes. I'm thinking of historic, not current societies - I don't think there are any such these days (even the Bushmen have been affected by modernity).
Walton,
don't give me that bullshit that Britain was closer to Libertarian ideals in the XIX century than France, there's simply no evidence for this.
Please don't change the subject.
You have asserted that those in government, are not sufficiently wise that they should make choices for those under their rule, rather than allowing each person to make choices for himself.
So I suggested you compare voluntary charity and government social welfare programmes.
Or maybe that you compare parent defined local school board systems and standardised national education systems.
If you took care to really compare these, objectively, you would not reach your dogmatic conclusions but would appreciate that there are instances when Government does have value, beyong police and army.
That's what I thought when I read it, it's either God-given or free game. The problem I have with Walton's position is that he pushes a false dichotomy of control without knowledge versus knowledge without control. All he then has to do is show the shortcomings of a democratic system and conclude that it's ineffective and controlling. John Knight does the same tactic in philosophy (induction has problems, therefore it's not a perfect philosophical system and God exists.) The problem I see is that we do have a body that has been able to give knowledge (science), and with that we have an ability to actually do something to save the planet. It's the market that's actually holding back the ability to do so, in effect what Walton is arguing for is what is furthering our demise.
Michele- find yourself a good psychologist. Yelling at random strangers on the internet rarely solves anything. By behaving this way you are letting your asshole father (who, the way these things usually go, had an asshole father, who also perhaps had similar genetic/neurological tendencies, and it goes back and back and back...) control you even now. How sad for you. Let it go. You are afraid of being a human being because....why? Because you think other people ought to feel as miserable as you, or worse?
I don't condone the abuse of this damaged person, guys. She was not acting out because she had any real self-interest in it after all. She's just becoming another link in this terrible chain of destructive behavior...She is probably as weak-willed as those she berates- Projection.
Michele, my pity surely overwhelms my disgust at your inhumanity.
(I was hoping you'd show up. :)) And there are anarchists!
Ah, but in a libertopia, they would. Mega-geneti-corps would sell neurochemistry packages to would-be parents - depending on their ability to pay, of course. These would allow them to produce superior children, unsusceptible to addiction. Then, addiction being a problem that only affects the lower classes, no treatments would have to be developed or provided with public funds. After all, people would know that they risk having addiction-prone children if they could afford only a lesser package, and could make their decisions accordingly. The market could take care of addiction services.
John Morales@301,
I doubt hunter-gatherers even in mild climes were immune from acute shortages - or homelessness, in the sense of being driven out of your home range by stronger groups; though they wouldn't have suffered "poverty" in the sense that poor people in a society where there are also rich ones do.
Jadehawk@303,
Interesting!
People ARE anthills. There is no such thing as the "Self" in most cases. Almost all we think is influenced or brought to our attention by our subconscious. In every decision, there are little votes that get passed around to see if that motion will be carried. Reaching for a cup for example. Our brain already activated all the motor neurons to achieve that end, but we may decide not to. This only occurs After our brain had made it's decision. It's kind of like the Legislature/Executive relationship in our own country. We, as presidents of our brains, only get to veto motions lol. Sorry to all if tis is rather crude, but it seems to be the prevailing idea, if i'm not mistaken.
Addictions are like the rise of lobbying power in that legislature, eventually to the point that we have no control over what motions get passed and we no longer have the power to veto such moves. Genetic engineering is going to revolutionize societies if it ever gets implemented in the fashion that SC OM has stated.
Walton says: "Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain was, on the whole, the closest thing to a libertarian society which existed at the time. And, not coincidentally, it was, at the time, the greatest and most prosperous nation on earth."
Based on tobacco, cotton, sugar, opium etc All the actual producers really freely entered into their "mutually beneficial interactions" then, didn't they?
Willfully ignorant smug git.
18th and 19th Century Britain had economic prosperity for only a small fraction of the population. The rest lived in grinding poverty. If that's the libertarian ideal, I want no part of it.
Walton, way up at 188 opined, "In contrast, other parts of your list are things that government can and must engage in, by their very nature."
Ahhh. There's your problem.
Nothing on my list is something that government must engage in. Governments do not have to provide roads, sewer or water. Governments do not have to provide police or fire fighters. Historically many governments, including our own, didn't. Governments don't even have to enforce contracts.
Government is a structure, a process, a machine if you will, that helps to organize society.
You have no rights that society doesn't grant you, and society has the power to take them away, up to and including the right to live. That is the stark, unpalatable truth.
Society, through the structure of government, has limited its own power and granted you certain rights. In this country only. Society, through the structure of government, has provided services for all its citizens, including you, including services you don't use like a national park in Alaska. I'm not saying that government accurately reflects our society, or that at times government takes liberties the citizens haven't granted it, but government is not the enemy. Government is a process.
Second of all, disabuse yourself of the notion of public or private good or services. There are only goods and services. Every good, every service, can be structured within a society as a private or public good or service.
Private contract enforcement? What do you think the mob does? More seriously though, independent arbitration is a common means of contract enforcement without government intervention.
Private law? Certainly, we have it today as the rich can hire better lawyers.
Private police? Security guards.
Private parks, private roads, private sewage treatment plants, etc. These all exist in the US today.
Every service the government provides can be turned into a income-generating private service.
Why do you believe that governments must provide police and anti-environmental regulations?
Nick, I've been fascinated with Tikopian culture ever since I've first read about them in one of Jared Diamond's books. They have managed a sustainable economy for ages, while the rest of the world is still praying to the gods of the Growth Economy. Of course their population-control methods were a bit.. ahem.. you now.. by modern standards, but considering the means available, it was probably the best solution at hand, and in our modern world we DO have effective birth control.
"Alternative Economies 101" should be a requirement for college graduation IMHO (well, in my imaginary dream world it would be a high-school requirement)
O RLY
They were putting in the Bridge Troll just as I was moving out of the apartment building across the street. God's watch must be slow, because it was eight years after the big, bad atheist moved out before a bus drove off the Aurora Bridge and landed on said building.
I always said: "Someday a truck's going to land on us", but I assumed it would be a northbound truck. I never thought somebody would shoot the driver of a southbound bus and it would veer over the northbound lanes, over the rail and onto the building!
Of course, in addition to killing a bus driver, and injuring a number of passengers, it hit the rearmost, upper apartment, when I lived in the frontmost, lower apartment. So in addition to God being a murderer and unable to tell time, he's incompetent as well.
Oh, what's that you say? The world doesn't revolve around me? Sorry, I've been listening to Bill O'Reilly!
Jadehawk @ 314: I caught that, too, but I interpreted it as a hanging fragment of a cut and paste editing error. Otherwise, it's not at all clear what country he's even referring to, much less how it fits with the overall sense of what he's saying.
Jadehawk correctly took me to task for this: "In this country only".
I noticed this after I hit the send button. What I meant to say was (and elaborated):
The rights our society grants are only granted to you while you live in this society. Other societies grant a different set of rights, some with large amount of overlap, and some with little.
ah, I suppose that might be it. though really it wouldn't matter which country he's talking about, it still would be incorrect.
thanks for the explanation, flex. it makes more sense now
Oooo... David, Owlmirror, i can't Keep teh lulz to myself, i'll die laughing! Someone NEEDS a History lesson BAD. http://womenintheword.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/the-god-of-mormonism/
How can someone find a statue of Lenine lovely ?
He started one of the most horrible dictature that ever existed on earth.
It does not happen often, but on this particular point I agree with OReilly.
RickrOll @ #309:
Usefulness of this analogy might be if a human believes that humans are not a result of the physics -> chemistry -> biology continuum of nature.
But not useful if person does think so.
Whether or not there is "Self" in actuality, there is evidence of the ideation of "Self" in most humans
(and in some other mammals when they have the comparative luxury of not having to minute-to-minute
- ingest enough calories
- escape predation, or
- evade other lethal conditions
that result in living a bit longer,
which condition a significant majority of humans DO luxuriate in.)
There is no evidence of an ideation of "Self" in an anthill & its constituent parts.
Is it just correlation or is it cause-&-effect between the display of ideation of "Self" and the extent of the influence of results to other species between ants & humans?
I am not aware of the research, if there is any, on this topic. Its just my hypothesis that the concept of "Self" by a significant majority of a species, whether that "Self" truly exists, can be a factor in the evolutionary success of that species. And since its our species that embraces that concept, it is one which is not useful to ignore, such as when making analogies between an individual mammal and an anthill.
ah yes. I always wondered how the pre-Soviet Lenin, the man who protested WWI, predicted the current "Credit Crunch" in 1916, who advocated a form of Direct Democracy (workers councils) in government and community in property, morphed into the Soviet Lenin of persecution and total government monopoly...
Lurkbot #315,
huh?
Bill O'Reilly is quite simply lying about the city where I live.
Public nakedness in city parks? Never heard such a thing. The annual gay pride parade and festival typically has a couple dozen people who participate while wearing fairly skimpy costumes, but that's not the same as nakedness, now is it?
Nude bike riding? Yeah, there's a neighborhood parade held one day a year during which there's a long-standing tradition for a few (as in 15 or so) bicyclists to crash the parade nude, usually "wearing" body paint. The cops have historically preferred to let it happen rather than acting like stormtroopers. I've seen a rider arrested for failing to immediately ride away to wherever their clothes were stashed, so it's not at all the nudist colony of Bill O'Reilly's dreams.
Statue of Lenin? Yeah, that's in the same neighborhood as the aforementioned parade. Some guy bought it from the sculptor (in Slovakia, where they don't have shipyards to my knowledge) for a song, but died in a car crash before his planned Slovakian restaurant could open. Ever since, the statue has served as a sort of gigantic dress-up doll to the general public's great amusement.
Free furnished apartments for drug addicts and alcoholics? I believe there was a pilot program for some selected addicts a couple years ago that involved free or heavily subsidized housing, but haven't heard about the program since. That leads me to suppose that it's more likely that the program failed than that it's become the customary way to deal with street addicts here. OxyContin-addicted right-wing talkshow hosts, for example, who might wish to, ahem, *rush* out here for the free housing are likely to feel seriously let down.
And as for the atheist sign in the state capitol dome, what would you expect? Atheism is no more a religion than baldness is a hair color. Instead, it's a philosophical stance of opposition to religion. There are no atheist icons that could be erected, no atheist holy days to be noted, nothing to say, really, except that religion is for the birds.
But by allowing religious gizmos to be put on display in an official governmental setting, the state really had no legal alternative to allowing other voices to weigh in on the significance of the season.
It's un-American for a governmental body, which must represent all the people, to promote the religious views of any segment of the people, not even the majority view. Other countries have done things the other way, places like Iran and Taliban-era Afghanistan, Northern Ireland leading up to the Troubles, Lebanon leading up to their many religious civil wars, Utah in the days when the Mormon Church systematically massacred non-Mormon settlers passing through the territory.
If Bill O'Reilly doesn't like the American way, he should get the hell out of our country and go live somewhere like that.
As a Seattleite, I am proud to be attacked by Bill O. But Fremont is not a suburb, it's a neighborhood within the city. And besides Lenin, there's a troll there. I hear it eats right-wing pundits in addition to Volkswagons.
Sorry, Feynmaniac.
JackC at #35 posted a link to the Bridge Troll.
I used to live in a building across the street. The rest was just a misguided attempt at humor, since Fremont is supposed to be getting smote, according to Bill-o, at least.
The bus story is true, though.
Tell me, Walton, in libertarian school do they teach you to be economically and historically ignorant or is it a prerequisite to becoming a libertarian? Because, like almost every libertarian I've ever run across, you are both.
18th and 19th Century Britain was a great place to live if you were one of the aristocracy or even the bourgeoisie. If you weren't it was horrible. Keir Hardie, the first Labour MP, was fired from a job when he was 10 because he was late for work. As further punishment, his employer refused to pay him his wages, "to teach him a lesson." This happened in 1866. The social conditions described in Dickens' Oliver Twist and Hard Times did not spring from the author's imagination. "Dark satanic mills" was a good description of Manchester and Sheffield after the Napoleonic period.
For ever Wedgewood, there were thousands who lived and died in grinding poverty. For every Blenheim Palace there were thousands of London's Jacob's Island, Manchester's Princess Road, and Glasgow's Garngad slum dwellings.
However, one thing I've noticed about libertarians is that nostalgia for bygone "golden eras" will guide them better than the actual historical record of their suffering, corruption, cruelty, inequality of rights, and primitive standards of living.
Celtic_Evolution, regarding your #245, not necessary, but noted and thank you. I demonstrated one of the hazards of responding when only part way through a thread.
By the way, I do not often post anymore, but am not new here and I read it every day. I recognize the positive and understand the dynamics of this blog. I will express concern and/or negative when I believe I should. Your concern is noted in return, and my tongue is firmly in my cheek.
JefferyD!
Big hug and SMOOCH! So glad to see you back. I've missed you.
I was told the Lenin statue was purchased to be melted down to make other sculpture by Fremont artists, but while waiting, it attracted so much attention, and started so many interesting conversations, the owners kept it whole. Also, Fremont is not a suburb, it is in the city proper.
i saw the statue once, the ice cream place next to it gave out a small extra scoop they called the lenny scoop for free.
SC, OM, been enjoying your posts in general. Regarding your #195 on your student writing about veterans and traumatic experiences, this subject is of great interest to me. I just buried a brother who took the long and drawn out suicide path - drugs and alcohol and nicotine, based on his military experiences. I know what bothered him as we talked about it at length a few times. Of course, I have my own issues as well. Should your student so desire, would be glad to be in contact with her/him after the new year.
Ciao bella brain
Re #330 - Patricia honey, hugs and smooches and congrats again on your well deserved OM! How have you been, hon? I have not been posting, but I do keep up with the threads every day. Maybe I will get back into posting again once the new year allows me to settle from travel and things.
Keep twirling sweet and charming one.
What has the identity of the subject got to do with the æsthetics of the piece? If you see an oil painting of a woman, do you reserve judgment on the quality of the piece and the beauty of the woman until you find out whether the subject was a nice person or not?I hate what cathedrals stand for -- the power and wealth of the church -- but that doesn't make them any less impressive or beautiful. I believe that the Jesus legend is evil and immoral, yet Carravaggio's "The Taking of Christ" is a great painting that I love to look at. A statue of Stalin, one of the most despised and reviled men in history, could nevertheless be exquisitely detailed, finely executed, well-proportioned, and an expressive and beautiful object.
"How can someone find a statue of Lenin lovely ? He started one of the most horrible [dictatorship empires] that ever existed on earth. It does not happen often, but on this particular point I agree with O'Reilly."- Lenin artist ftw. He totally got you. You reaction alone is worth the effort of sculpting it. It was also a very good statue in addition to this.
On the subject of statues, there is a common legend that if a person is on a horse, depending on the depiction of the horse, that tells the state that the subject was in at his death. standing on 4 legs- normal death; 3 legs- injury of battle/assassination (maybe?); 2legs, rearing up- died in battle. Just wanted to get it straight.
"There is no evidence of an ideation of "Self" in an anthill & its constituent parts."- untrue, Douglass Hoftadter is an example of how this can easily be done. He has written a couple of books, a an opinion on him would be just lovely. Additionally, the myriad areas of the brain vie for their goals in every decision we make, usually it is the frontal lobe vs. the emotional center of the brain. It has been some time since i looked into it, so many of the areas (there is like fifty by now) have been forgotten. But not Brocca's Area, that one is important to me. but not this discussion. Archetypes are an interesting reality of the concept of our minds being constructed by symbols at the lowest level of consciousness, something that Hofstadter thinks to be a reasonable assertion. The "I" is the central symbol because it allows us to objectively view our existence, despite the fact that it certainly draws attention to our own situation and perceptual vantage point.
Anyway, like ants, the chemicals emitted and stimuli that neurons give off coalesce in an intelligent behavior overall, even though these only seek to solve immediate problems. To the brain, however, every bit of information is interpreted as if it were an outside influence, which is what allows us to have that ability to control ourselves more so by intellect than instinct. I'll let you guys decide what sense this may make- if sense is indeed what is employed here.
@Mark (#325):
Nope, the project hasn't failed at all. It's still the only site of its kind in Seattle (or the state, for that matter), but it's still going strong. Their first-year results are listed on the linked page, but initial estimates are that the project saved the city and county almost $2.5 million in the first year alone.
O'Reilly, for all of his bluster, has a serious problem with getting his facts straight. Of course Seattle is not the same as Olympia, but neither is Fremont a suburb of Seattle. Most of his viewers probably won't notice these details, but it's just so clear every time he starts ranting that that he has no idea what he's talking about.
Thus spake rickr0ll:
That's an interesting idea, but according to Wikipedia, it's not true in general. If you're interested in it, the iconography of painting is very interesting (ever wonder why the Virgin Mary is almost always dressed in blue, what it means when a subject is holding a scroll or touching a chair?). Unfortunately dictionaries of iconography are staggeringly expensive and there's very little online about it :o(
Well, i don't quite trust wikepedia on this- the page is very, very short; but on the other hand, do i trust that Commodus assasinated his father circa Gladiator? Hmmm, tough choice. It would have been great if there were an index of statues and deaths that didn't match up, something. Oh well.
Hey, do you know what post BobC called me Mr. Asshole lol?
Rickr0ll #340,
It sounds like a perfectly plausible iconography to me, and I reckon it would be pretty easy to check out by compiling a list of equestrian monuments and finding out how the subjects died. Somebody must surely have done this already.
It was probably intended as compliment :o)
Snopes has an article on the equestrian statue thing.
i love living in washington :)
deff gonna stay here as long as i can
We had a statue of Lenin here in Dallas, too. A guy who owned Goff's Hamburgers bought it, and mounted it outside his shop on Lovers Lane.
He added a placque: "Cold War, 1946-1991. We won."
Alas, he closed that site, and sold the statue to someone else, and it has fallen off of public display.
O'Reilly probably would miss the meaning there, too.
I do wish there were more statues celebrating the way the cover of the old Firesign Theatre's album did: Tribute to (Groucho) Marx and (John) Lennon. It confuses the heck out of my world history students.
Jadehawk@313,
Yes, I'd read about Tikopia in Diamond's book, but I'd not really absorbed the details. Thanks.
You mean this? Enjoy!
Lurkbot #324,
I was very tired when I wrote my comment. In my exhausted state comment #315 read like an excerpt from some sort of gloomy novel.
Hmmm, I think it would either be a real good (or terribly bad) idea if someone wrote a novel in the comments, posting one page at a time....Exams have taken a toll on me.
"Hey, do you know what post BobC called me Mr. Asshole lol?"
"It was probably intended as compliment :o)"-Emmet
No, nevermind, i found our little flame war on "Let's not play this game." I have BobC to thank for inadvertently creating another personality for myself. Wowbagger isn't very pleased about it lol
I wonder where Ruth is.
Fremont is a district in the city of Seattle. And the statue is one of the "Hysterical Monuments" [meant to be funny]. As to naked people...I haven't seen any around. So, it hasn't caught on too much. Of course, it's 47 degrees right now.
So what does it mean when the guy depicted in the statue has no feet on the ground, like when he's dangling from a big wooden plus sign by nails through his hands?
I don't know if anybody posted this yet but the KIRO TV in Seattle has an article about the Westboro Baptist Church trying to get in on the signage free-for-all in Olympia.
"Santa Claus will take you to Hell."
A partial excerpt from the sign reads:
You'd better watch out, get ready to cry
You'd better go hide I'm telling you why
Cuz Santa Claus will take you to Hell
He is your favorite idol, you worship at his feet
But when you stand before your God
He won't help you take the heat
Santa Claus will take you to Hell
Get this fact straight, you're feeling God's hate
Santa's to blame for the economy's fate
Santa Claus will take you to Hell
Seattle has no more of a homeless problem than my town, nearby Portland, Oregon, and our homeless problems is certainly not nearly as bad as that of other cities.
Here we have homes where people can pay something like $20 a day- even though it's negotiable-- and you can stay for however many days you want. You can even arrange to pay by the month. Here in Portland it keeps many people off the streets and keeps them from squatting. It think that is worth some taxmoney, and it is certainly cheaper than keeping the homeless in jails when they are charged with squatting for days on end.
Does Bill-O want it both ways? Or would he rather spend much more money on jails rather than rehab programs and affordable housing? So, we shouldn't teach them about colonial crimes against Native Americans? How expensive is it for society at large to have children suffer from being maleducated in schools?