Commenter Archive

Heh, I used to make a similar point about 'conservatives' before, back during the Bush era.

All conservatives that have been elected, except Saint Reagan, seem to somehow, uh, not be real conservatives once elected. (And everyone is just pretending that Reagan was.)

Conservativism, at this point, sounds exactly like communism....every time it's _tried_ it appears to fail, at which point all the supporters of it dismiss that example as 'Not really conservativism'.

Look, there are really only two options at this point for both of those: Either is not a good political political philosophy, and fails when implemented, or it is physically impossible to implement correct, so it's a moot point how it's implemented.

But, now we're got actual 'real' conservatives in office. Yeah, how's that working out?

That's pretty much exactly what I'm imagining.

The idea it's the Democrats on the way out is just...insane. It's the Republican party that's tearing itself apart, because its base has escaped control of it. If anything, the Democrats are stronger than ever. Although, granted, the Democrats have managed to move more _right_ than ever, too.(1)

The Republicans be winning some local elections for a bit, but the ones that win are extreme ideologues who do things that really piss the majority of people off. And they can't even find a presidential candidate.

However, political parties do not 'die' like that. They end up as a minority and then other people come in with other ideas. Pretending we have any idea of how long that will take is a bit silly, but I think you're basically right. It's going to be extremely hard for them to find candidates who can win both the primaries and the general for at least a decade.

1) As I have to keep pointing out to everyone, the Democrats moving right is not a victory for the Republicans. It's a _loss_. It's a victory for people pushing right-ish policies, sure...but it's absolute disaster for the Republicans. New voters show up, look around, and even the ones with center-right positions say...hrm, I think I'm a...Democrat? And vote for them.

The parties _used_ to fight over the center, for damn good reasons. The Republican party has apparently forgotten this. (Or, rather, been extorted out of it by their base.)

There _is_ a positive reason to go there: Free bus parking.

I have to agree. It's one thing to point out rank hypocrisy by pointing out if someone who opposes homosexuals is homosexual himself. If Marcus Bachmann is actually homosexual (Which, let us recall, is defined as 'being attracted to men', not 'speaking with a lisp'.), fine, point that out.

It's even reasonable to point out that people who make fun of 'unmanly' men are, themselves, not very 'manly'. Did Marcus Bachmann ever do that? Not that I am aware of, but perhaps. (Rush Limbaugh, OTOH, has, which is why it's fair to attack him on the ground he isn't that 'manly' looking himself.)

And it's fine for gay men to mock themselves and the stereotypes used against them. It's even reasonable to speculate in a non-hateful manner about who is secretly part of their 'group', and they can get away with saying things straight people wouldn't. If they want to run various people through their 'gaydar' _jokingly_, whatever.

But this is not really any of that.

This is using stereotypes to attack someone as gay, in _exactly_ the manner that not only is harmful to actual gay people, but is pretty damn harmful to straight people who don't entirely conform to gender roles. (And, while we're at it, pretty hateful to transgender people also.)

Unless Marcus Bachmann has stated speaking effeminately is a bad thing (Which is _not_ the same thing as being gay, I have to point out from some absurd reason, although Dan Savage should know that.), he should not be attacked for that. And unless Marcus Bachmann has stated it's a sign of being gay, he shouldn't be called gay because he does that. Those would be _valid_ ways of pointing out hypocrisy, if he had done those things, then people could point to his voice. Has he? Not that I've heard of.

As he hasn't that I'm aware of, this is just...Dan Savage, of all people, gay-bashing. (And it's the _imaginary_ gay bashing of non-gay people that Dan Savage has repeatedly mentioned as an issue, where victims have to then prove they aren't gay.)

The ultimate example of ideological preferences is 'tax cuts'. This appear to be the solution to every economic problem. Every one of them. Even when we've come out of a _decade_ of tax cuts that, uh, didn't appear to help anything.

At some point, society as a whole needs to say if you want tax cuts as an _ends_, fine, say so, and we can vote on that. But we're not buying this nonsense where they're coincidentally the means you think of to solve _every single problem_ that popups up. You propose them in good times, you propose them in bad times, you propose them to fight inflation, you propose them to make the economy work, you propose them as a pizza topping. We're not _total_ idiots here...you just want some damn tax cuts, don't you? That is your _actual_ goal, isn't it?

There's a couple of other disingenuous 'solutions' that come up in response to a lot of problems they couldn't possible solve, and are suggested so often that it's pretty obvious that they are not 'solutions' as much as 'things people want to do'...but all the examples I can think of are on the right, and I'm trying to be somewhat neutral here. Perhaps someone else can think of inane 'solutions' the left suggests that are simply things the left wishes to do, and obviously wouldn't solve half the problems they are proposed for.

No spoilers for the movie (If you know the book) until the end of the post:

The epilogue isn't 'poorly handled' in the movie. It's just a crappy scene in the book to start with. The movie does about as well as you'd expect with it.

If you want to know what it's like, read the one in the book, add some comments so we know the names of the kids, and cut all the existing dialog except the discussion with Albus about possibly being in Slytherin.

Which, sadly, cuts out the part about Neville teaching Herbology, and Teddy and Victoire being together, which are about the only other relevant piece of information in the entire epilogue besides who the the Trio end up with and their children. We do, at least, see Draco standing there on the platform with his wife and kid.

I was actually hoping we'd see people than the book had...it would have been nice to actually see Teddy and Victoire (Neither whom make an actual physical appearance in the books at all.) or learn what happened to Luna(1), who is completely missing from the book epilogue.

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Spoilers for the movie:
1) The writers slide in a hilarious Neville/Luna shipping moment near the end of the movie, where Neville, in the heat of a battle, exclaims he's hot for her and is going right now to find her and ask her out...and then later, awkwardly, sits next to her and doesn't. I just cracked up, because I've always been a fan of them, and it was a way to stay within canon (Where they end up with other people.) but at least acknowledge the shippers.

For every political philosophy, there's at least three versions of it. There's the great complex version of it that it internally claims it is...and there's at least one version of it that foolish supporters think it is, and there's at least one version of it opponents think it is.

Libertarians have the distinct disadvantage that the version that supporters think it is is almost identical to the version that the opposition thinks it is: Tax cuts for everyone, the government doing almost nothing.

There are all sorts of weird disconnects in politics, which is why I jokingly suggested a while back (I think it was here.) that if a genie gave me one wish it would be to remove all current existing political labels and classifications from everyone's mind and make them come up with new ones and actually explain what they mean.

People should describe their political positions in terms of goals and means to those goals. And should be able to explain _why_ they want those goals.

Which would result in a lot of social conservatives sounding like idiots. I'm reminded of that California court that kept asking what the specific _policy_ reasons for banning gay marriage would be, and the complete inability for anyone to come up with any.

And 'libertarians' would sound pretty silly, also. Because the government having 'less money' is hardly some logical way to get more freedom. The government can do rather horrific things to people with almost no money at all. (Of course, if the only 'freedom' you're worried about it to 'keep all your money', and can use your money to buy your way out of everything else, then it's relevant. Which is why some people on the left tend to impunge the motives of the super-rich supporting all those 'libertarian' think tanks.)

Meanwhile, economic conservatives tend to have logical goals and claim to have logical means that seem to work....until you realize those means that have been _repeatedly_ disproven to actually accomplish the things they say they wish to accomplish.

The left usually tends to have logical goals, ones that can be clearly stated and almost every agrees with...but often stupid means to get there. Often, it's not _possible_ to get there at all.But at least their means tend to be _new_ stupid means, instead of old stupid means. (Which is why I should point out the left has almost entirely given up on gun control, so that's a spectacularly silly example to worry about. The left was _barely_ able to propose 'clip size' legislation after the Gifford's shooting, and wasn't able to pass it. The idea of gun control helping anything is essentially discredited, and unlike the right, the left can actually give up on stupid ideas.)

Oh, please, like I'm not already reading that. ;)

I think I was pretty clearly a Ravenclaw even at 11.

And being in Hufflepuff would have at least one advantage. They are, after all, very friendly over in Hufflepuff...so I suspect all of them get laid by graduation. Someone should write a fanfic where they're all basically hippies. ;)

It's kinda funny how most people in fandom think about the houses. Harry's perception of them is sorta bland. He likes Gryffindor, and doesn't like Slytherin, and doesn't know much about the others. This is clearly silly, but it's what happens in a viewpoint book.

Then others flip it around, make Slytherin the 'misfits', and work from there, but that's even sillier than taking Harry's observations at face value. Slytherin is where all the extremely rich and powerful purebloods end up, it's like writing about all those poor misfit legacy students attending Yale. Huh?

Yes, we have the Marauders, so it's not impossible, but there's class issues there I suspect most non-English readers are missing. Snape wasn't a misfit because he was in Slytherin, and wasn't in Slytherin because he was a misfit. He was in Slytherin for exactly the same reason that Voldemort was, and for exactly the same reason Harry almost was...his home life was horrible, and he wanted some respect, _any_ respect, as a human being.

And they ignore the other houses. Where are the Ravenclaws who attempt to learn a little too much forbidden knowledge? Slytherin would play with the Dark Arts to conquer the world...Ravenclaws would play with them _because they're there_. (Surely scientific experimentation doesn't count as 'evil', right? Famous last thoughts.)

And where are the Hufflepuffs who are _wrongly_ loyal? I've actually seen a few that postulated Umbridge was a Hufflepuff, who was loyal to 'the government', whoever that was and however wrong or horrifically evil it was, and that makes a twisted amount of sense.

I'm sure such fanfics exist (There are more than half a million Harry Potter fanfics on fanfiction.net.), but, statistically, of the fanfics that try to make a point the houses, something like 75% seem to be 'Gryffindors are heros, Slytherins are villians', and another 20% seem to be 'Slytherins are misunderstood, Gryfinddors are jerk jocks'.

Well, yes, most Gryffindors _are_ jocks. Or, at least, wish to be jocks. (You're pretty clearly sorted by what you want to be, not what you actually are.) Gryffindors crave the roar of the crowd, the rush of success. You can very clearly see it in Ron.

It's a bit hidden in Hermione, because she want to win accolades _academically_. Which is what separates her from Ravenclaws, who want 'knowledge', not 'get better grades than other people'. This is not normally classified as 'jocks', but it's same sort of mindset. Training fifty hours a week, studying fifty hours a week, same thing.

And with Harry, he's happy to just be even moderately respected, unlike how his 'family' treats him. And is why he's so like Voldemort and almost sorted into Slytherin, which is where people go who demand 'respect' for who they are, instead of what they do. I.e, they both might want to be famous, but Gyffindors would want to be, for example, movie stars, whereas Slytherins would want to be politicians.

In fact, Harry Potter is perhaps the most _positive_ portray of jocks there. None of the current ones are bullies. The closest is someone like Cormac, who is just overly demanding of his teammates.

The Maruaders, OTOH, _do_ appear to be bullies, of a fairly mild variety.

And there's another outcast in the series beside Snape...Luna, who seems to be teased by her dormmates because she has some sort of emotional issue that keeps her from ever getting angry or depressed. And hence, apparently, she can be teased with no repercussions, as she doesn't get upset about it.

He already asked about the drug war's point, and said we should legalize _heroin_, and got applause for it, despite the talking heads on TV pretending it was some huge gaff. (Here's a hint: When the audience breaks into random cheering, it probably wasn't a 'gaff'. You idiots in the media can pretend that normal people couldn't possible hold such ideas, but as they clearly _do_, it's not going to work. This was a Republican debate, not a meeting of NORML.)

But here's the fun possibility:
Ever since Obama got elected, the media has been moving from crazy person to crazy person letting them sprout whatever nonsense they wanted. Because it gets them ratings, you see. Eventually they're run out of semi-attractive semi-young crazy women and move on to other people, and they're probably going to think Paul is the same sort of crazy person, and do the same with him.

However, Paul is not, strictly speaking, 'crazy'. Nor is he stupid. He's got a lot of weird ideas, but he also has exactly the sort of sane, normal ideas that no one in Washington will ask, but the vast majority of Americans will say 'Yeah, what about that? Why _are_ we bombing those people again? And locking these other people up for smoking pot? Isn't this expensive?'

They will then go on to ask 'Why can't we pay teachers instead?', while Paul will ask 'Why can't we reduce taxes instead?', but that really doesn't matter. Like I said, Paul isn't stupid.

He'll eventually get asked some question that blows up in his face and makes him unelectable, (Or someone will just track down something he already said.) but until then, he's going to be asking a lot of questions that other candidates would rather he didn't.

And, because of the fact the media has escaped the control of the GOP, I'm not entirely sure they'll drop him at that point, if he's getting them ratings! If Paul ends up being treated like _Palin_ is currently being treated, oh, wow. Imagine a _non-idiot_ in that position, with a hatful of incredibly popular ideas that Washington won't consider.

I figured all this out at the end of health care reform, when somehow the public option just vanished.

Guys, we have a textbook 'center-right, sane Republican' as president. Of course, instead of having to negotiate to the left, he's having to negotiate to the right.

Anyone who conflates the health of the economy with the debt is just utterly insane. There is no correlation there at all.

We _know_ what caused this economic situation, and it was nothing at all to do with the debt, and if the debt magically vanished tomorrow, it wouldn't fix a thing.

Um, while I'm in agreement about the idiotic effects of things like Megan's Law...what exactly is the problem with Amber Alerts?

Admittedly, I'd like to see a more general 'notification' system, I think it's absurd that in this day and age we can't have government-issued geographical alerts. Every cell phone tower should send them out free of charge, there should be computer programs people could install and put in their location, and people should be able to sign up email or get rss feeds or whatever.

There should be a way for the government to get information to us, whether it's 'tornado sighted' or 'someone missing' or 'escaped prisoner'. The days of using the Emergency Broadcast System are way behind us...the average person is within sight or hearing of an network-enabled electronic device _at all times_, and it's inane to not use them.

The fact that my county uses giant sirens instead of having the cell company send a text message to every phone on the tower is idiotic. Remember, text messages are sent in the communication overhead of towers, and hence are 'free' for all practical purposes. (And people should be able to block the display of such messages in their cell phone, if they wish.)

So I wish the alerts were more general. I'd actually like a specific government agency dedicated to that, working closely with state agencies.

But I'm failing to see any sort of _harm_ that Amber Alerts cause. Some people assert that they continue to mislead people about the almost nonexistent danger of strangers kidnapping children, but, frankly, that's much more the media that the alerts themselves, which don't make any such claims at all.

Oh, and with regard to 'access'...that's a total red herring. We will have as many doctors and hospitals under the new system, and can treat exactly as many people. The exact same amount of medical care would exist. If we have shortages then, it would only be because we have shortages _now_.

So unless the problem is that access won't 'rationed' correctly (Aka, access is no longer controlled based on how much money someone has.), there's no 'access' issue at all. Frankly, it's _this_ system that has 'access' problems...I would much rather have doctors rationing care based on doctory things, or the government rationing it based on standardized rules, than have insurance companies rationing it based on how much money patients give them.

But on another level, I’d really prefer to see the healthcare industry opened up to actual market forces because there’s always the risk that we’ll run into cost and access issues (not to mention quality issues) if we just pile a single-payer system on top of the system we have.

Yes, but the situation is so bad at this point that there's nearly no conceivable way that single-payer can make things worse in the short term. Especially as single-payer would immediately knock something like 30% of the costs out of the system solely due to paperwork reduction and insurance company profit.

Even if costs then start climbing faster, it will take years before we even reach the point we are currently with costs, and even longer until we reach the point we would have been at had we done nothing. I have to randomly guess 'five years' until then.

So we might as well go there now, and _then_ worry about controlling costs. It only makes sense to worry about future costs of single payer if we're operating under the assumption that we can only do one thing, ever, and that whatever system we set up can't be tweaked once we see how it's working.

It's _usually_ a valid assumption of actual people. When normal people promote a policy, it is reasonable to assume that they, in fact, have some honest goal for it, or at least think they do.

This doesn't mean that their position is reasonable...just honest.

This assumption, however, doesn't work _at all_ for politicians.

Are you saying that _bad_ students should end up being by themselves at broken schools?

What I am perhaps saying is that we _shouldn't have broken schools_, and the insane idea that charter or private schools will 'fix' the problem is insane when those school are not forced to take everyone, and hence, by definition, cannot 'replace' public schools.

And we certainly shouldn't reduce funding because a school is 'bad'.

Indeed. My question is when someone says we shouldn't regulate corporations, I like to play dumb and say, "Wow, that's a pretty huge change. It's going to take quite some time to dismantle all corporations all like that."

And they start sputtering and asking what I'm talking about, and I point out that corporations _are_ regulations. You can't 'not regulate' _legal fictions_. It's like claiming that a writer should be forced to 'set free' characters in a novel he wrote. People, those things don't actually exist, we're just pretending they do. They can't be 'free'.

If someone wants to make a claim that human beings have some sort of inherent right to commerce, fine. If someone takes some land, and grows some food on it, and sell it to another person, fine. Heck, I'm a fairly liberal guy, but I'll even get behind the libertarians on that, as a moral stance. _Human beings_ should be able to conduct any sort of consensual activity with other human beings, be it business or pleasure or whatever.

That is nothing like the system we have set up, with limited liability and joint ownership of imaginary thing. Corporations are _not_ human beings. They do _not_ have that right. They have absolutely no rights at all, no matter what has managed to get through the supreme court.

People _choose_ to make one of those. And we as society will make and subject that created entity to *whatever* damn rules we want. Any rules, at all, period. Those things have a _gigantic_ amount of power compared to human beings, and are _voluntary_ to be in.

It's like walking vs. driving. One is just...you. The other is someone in control of a very dangerous thing, and we regulate it. Except, there the analogy falls apart, because we've got people driving battlecruisers up and down the road, and we've made it legal for them to run over pedestrians. (After all, the pedestrians should have paid more attention to the small print.)

There's another issue that no one mentions, besides the 'take money from schools' thing: Public schools all have specific goals to get funding. Standardized testing goals.

If you let people freely leave and enter a private school, even _without_ any sort of voucher at all...guess what sort of students the private schools will accept? That's right, the best ones. Leaving all the bad students behind, resulting in plummeting test scores and lower funding.

This happens with charter schools, too. If one school is required to take everyone, and one school is not, then the school that is will, statistically, do much worse...and we, for some unimaginable reason, have decided to base education funding on how well a school is doing.

Vouchers just mean that now _poor_ smart people can leave, making the system even more broken.

I'm imagining how this would work in medicine. 'We're sorry, too many people are dying while on Medicare, we're going to have to reduce your funding.'

Of course, you could go the other route, and make it look like health insurance currently looks...where poor performers would be 'uneducatable', like the uninsurable, and not get any schooling at all.

Oversimplification will always happen.

But what the people who are doing the debating could do is agree to, at the very least, not to use 'positional notation', and invent new terms to replace 'economically liberal' and whatnot, and use them as much as possible.

Or, even better, figure out if there are obvious places to break 'economically liberal' apart, like 'Keynesian' or 'protectionist'.

Of course, if I could control what people doing the debating are saying, we'd have _very_ different political discussion to start with.

Well, the most important change would be to stop describing things in _relation_ to other things.

And the second most important change would be to stop trying to map everything into 'left' vs. 'right'. Which, yes, I know is the pet peeve of libertarians...but you people don't seem to noticing that saying 'economically conservative', 'socially liberal' is still doing that. There is no such thing as 'economically conservative'. Or, at least, that's not even slightly a useful term. If you mean 'doesn't like to spend money', _say_ that.

I know people have to use the terms other people recognize, so this is a pointless battle, but I think we'd get along a lot better if we'd stop yammer about 'conservative' this and 'liberal' that, and said things like:

'I'm safety-net supporter. I think we should have single-payer health care.'

'Well, I'm safety-net supporter, too, but I think that we should instead regulate insurance companies and force them to take everyone.'

'I disagree, I do not think we need a safety-net for health insurance.'

Each issue has positions, and some issues seem to be somewhat grouped together, so could perhaps have sorta 'shorthand' positions. Like the noxiously named 'family values' position.

This makes sense, but quite a long time ago we invented 'left' and 'right' and 'liberal' and 'conservative' and started using those as shorthand for _everything_. When you have to add modifies and explain your shorthand, perhaps it's time, you know, to start using most specific terms to start with.

This is, incidentally, what has screwed up 'libertarian'. It has become shorthand for the positions of 'letting people do whatever they want' on the right, and 'letting corporations do whatever they want' on the left.

Likewise, I'm 'pro-choice', and I can't tell you how many 'pro-life' people I run into that, inexplicably, don't think abortion should be illegal per se. At which point I just stare at them, baffled. I can't figure out what _they_ think 'pro-life' means.

I'll make a plead to everyone: Stop using vague positional terms that are over 100 years old to describe things.

Look, you guys have an name that the super-rich have, for decades, used informed brainwashed dullards into unwitting pawns who think they shouldn't have to pay taxes or have food safety, and in return 'the government leaves them alone'. (While the super-rich rape them.)

Meanwhile, conservatives who aren't even the slightest bit libertarian use that label to hide behind.

Don't be surprised when slightly less stupid end up believing 'libertarian' is also this, but, being slightly less stupid, take objection at this completely insane concept.

You're just lucky the conservatives like to keep it as their backup label, or it would be roughly where 'liberal' is today.

Frankly, at this point, if I had a single wish from a genie, I'd wish that everyone became forever unable to use or remember any previous political label (Including 'right' and 'left'.). A nation-wide permanent amnesia, and aphasia if we went and looked them up from reference material.

Then everyone had to invent new ones that actually mapped to actual policy positions, or at least didn't map to decades of nonsense.

Yes, but it's only 'wrong' because Caplan swapped in the word 'libertarian' for 'conservative'. Krugman was talking about the _conservatives_, as he repeatedly said.

If you're allowed to change what was actually said, you can prove any statement wrong. If we were to swap out 'Socialist' for 'liberal', it would make just as little sense in the other direction.

Yeah, I knew there was something wrong with his idea, with replacing 'conservative' with 'libertarian', and couldn't quite pin it down. I tried to explain with 'studying', but that wasn't really it. But you nailed it exactly: People can fake a mainstream positions much better non-mainstream ones. Mainstream positions are in the collective subconcious of society.

I am not a baseball fan. I think it's a boring game. But I've been to a few games, and seen more on TV, and people talk about it around me. There's a lot of tiny details like players and stuff, but give me time to study, maybe some rules I'm not away of, and I can fake it. Hell, I can tell you right now I'm against the designated hitter rule!

I am also not a lacrosse fan. I have literally never seen an actual game, and I've never heard anyone talk about it. I've seen a few depictions on TV, so I know it's somewhat like soccer, you're trying to get a ball in the net past a goalie guy, and you manipulate the ball with sticks with baskets on the end. That's all I know.

The fact that I could fake being a baseball fan better than a lacrosse fan does not prove that is a more intellectually demanding game. Neither does the fact that, statistically, lacrosse fans could fake being a baseball fan than vis versa.

That just means _lacrosse isn't very popular_.

This is an interesting idea, but it's worth pointing out that computers are 'trained' (i.e, programmed) to simulate people...picking random liberals, even very smart liberals, and asking them to pretend to be right wing is about as inane as trying to discuss philosophy with Microsoft Excel.

And I think Krugman is almost right. The _political rhetoric_ that comes from the right about 'the left' is nearly incomprehensible to those of us actually on the left. And while I probably have a biased view, I don't see anything of that sheer insanity coming from the left.

I'm not, however, certain that rhetoric has anything to do with what the actual intelligent people on the right think.