Who on earth said the word 'millions'? That word isn't even in my post. In fact, that word appears exactly once on this entire page besides your post, in reference to an amount of money.
And perhaps you should learn what a metaphor is. In case you weren't paying attention, union members do not get paid in food. No one does. The food was a _metaphor_ for money.
To actually answer your question (I'll pretend you asked it in good faith), the US has about 150 starvation deaths each year, but generally most of those are in the form of 'accident' or 'suicide' or 'murder' instead of not being able to afford food.
But those are just deaths due 'not enough calories', which is the technical definition of starvation. In fact, in the entire world, actual 'starvation' is not that common, even in all those places where people are, in the colloquial sense, 'starving to death'. ('The colloquial sense' is not the same as a 'metaphor'. Please consult an English teacher for more information.) Those people are not actually dying from 'starvation'.
Those people, and a moderately large group in America also, are dying from _malnutrition_, which is when they get enough daily calories to keep functioning, but are missing nutrients. You can tell the difference in photographs because continual malnutrition of this gives these people large stomachs whereas continual starvation gives them...uh...death in three weeks. (There's not actually such a problem as 'long term starvation' in the technical sense. No country can be 'starving' for years. Three weeks, then you die.)
After years and months of _malnutrition_, they will quickly and without and fuss die of something, heart failure is the most common. In the US, with the homeless, this usually coincides with bad weather, so is commonly called 'exposure' in death rates, but it's at least halfway due to malnutrition....healthy people, like the recently homeless, usually live through harsh weather just fine.
Another common and fun one is infection. (Note that 'fun' is sarcasm, which is unrelated to metaphor.) Get a cold? Oh, look, you can't fight it off because you're so malnourished, and you're dead.
Even the homeless can afford ramen noodles or other sources of calories so they do not die of starvation. At worse they will eat plants. What they _can't_ afford is food with the nutrients they need to keep healthy.
The problem here is not anything to do with public unions. I would argue in a sane economy, public unions are sorta pointless, because other unions tend to raise the level for everyone else.
The problem is, after decades of class and anti-union warfare, everyone else's wages suck, while public unions have managed to maintain their pay and pension. It's not that they're doing 'better', it's that _everyone else_ had their wages and benefits slowly sucked out by giant corporations.
Heck, public workers actually still make _less_ than private workers. They just have good pension plans, you know, like we used to have with companies, back when we have job security and whatnot too. This was before everyone was supposed to start saving in 401ks themselves, but didn't because they had to use that 'extra' money to buy food because their wages didn't go up for a decade? Remember that? Remember how prices kept going up, but wages somehow never did, so everyone spent their savings, and then money they did have? Remember how that's still true?
It's all nonsense. Corporate America has been slowly starving everyone to death, and we're looking and spotting the one group of people not employed by Corporate America and who still have food and yelling 'They have food! They must have stole it from us! Get them!'.
Yes, folks, they still have stuff, let's take it from them too. When we do the government will spend less money, so we can give even _bigger_ tax brakes to the rich and corporate America.
And then...the poor! They're getting stuff from the government too! We should take that stuff away from them, and maybe somehow a tiny fraction of that could go to our pockets, if the rich will let us keep it. And a few years from now, when we've gotten all the stuff from them, we can declare war on Canada, too. I hear they still have stuff, too.
Let no one turn around and wonder where all the stuff we used to have has wandered off to.
A real 'broken windows' policy of policing liberty would be stuff like requiring the police to monitor all interactions with the public. Or demanding that their city issue parade permits in a non-biased manner. Or attempt to get courts to start using treatment instead of punishment for drug violations.
You can either start at the top and worry about huge violations of liberty, or start at the bottom and worry about smaller local ones. Starting at the top and worrying about microscopic things is just inane.
It's like someone declaring they're a mountain climber, and they're going to start by climbing 20 feet up a hill next to Mount Everest. Yeah, um, why don't they try climbing something local first, before flying around the world? Or, hell, get a team, and try actually climbing Everest to some actual milestone? Their plan makes no sense.
And it's even weirder than that. There are entire climbing climbs that strategize about how to climb that hill. People become famous for trying to climb the hill. People demonize the hill, and make pithy quotes about how they climb it because it's there.
You don't need to get people to 'sign up for it', probably half the population is already there, it's just that the political parties are operating in such an idiotic manner that there's no solution.
No one who spends any time looking at it can come up with an justification for the manner in which we operate the drug war. It's obvious we'd be better off than the status quo if we'd just legalize everything. There people is an even _better_ solution, with treatment and whatnot, and I'm all for trying to find it, but when we'd clearly be better off with no laws at all, the system is broken.
As a progressive, there's plenty I probably disagree with you on, like trade barriers, which I think we actually should have against anyone without a comparable economy. And I would say 'education', but I'm not sure if you mean our _current_ national education system which is just gibberish, or any at all. I think we should have some sort of national education thing...that doesn't look anything like what we have.
But, seriously, that's not important. What is important is there are honest libertarians, who actually look at the infringements of liberty, which start with actual constitutional violations, and range down to just stupid counterproductive, but constitutional, laws, and think we should start there.
And, the honest ones say, we can worry about replacing (not removing, replacing) the welfare state sometimes after we solve the problem of generational poverty, which we will have solved somewhere after we've gotten rid of the War on Some Drug Users, which we're only going to care about after we close Gitmo.
At _that_ point, after we've fixed all that, presumably sane libertarians and sane liberals can have the drag-out fight about our entire different world view and There Can Be Only One or whatever is supposed to happen then, which is about as vague as what is supposed to happen in those movies, and will also happen in the distance future or another planet or whatever. Who cares, we'll be long dead.
And then there are dishonest libertarians, whose entire idea idea of liberty is apparently 'How much taxes am I paying?'. (And this new 'Tea Party' is the same way.)
Now, generally, people who say 'Why do you care about this thing instead of this other thing' are attempting to deflect the issue. It is not reasonable to demand that people try to fix the much-worse conditions in Haiti before they do something about Detroit.
But that only goes to a certain point before it really does turn into hypocrisy. Especially since all the unconstitutional and obviously stupid things our government does costs us _more_ than welfare. Anyone who _actually_ felt that 'taxes were just as important an infringement of liberty as imprisoning people without trial' would, um, duh, realize that imprisoning people without trial, and the entire war effort, also costs money. So yeah.
At this point, these dishonest libertarians worrying about welfare has pretty clearly turned into 'poor people punching'.
Okay, I'll agree with you then. Every law the government passes restricts liberty in some manner.
I think I'm just a little tired of a bunch people on the right who seem to assert that everything the government could do that is bad is something that it is not allowed to. And, coincidentally, exactly what they what the government to do is exactly what it is allowed to do, and nothing more.
Such talk is just silly. There's millions of things the government is allowed to do that would be very very stupid. For example, it could use eminent domain to pave the entire continent in postal roads, which is it _explicitly_ allowed to build. That is entirely constitutional behavior. It's utterly stupid, but constitutional under any possible interpretation of the constitution.
I confused you for one of those people, whose decided to just basically make up 'lack of taxes' as a right along with all the other rights we have.
Why do that? Well, sometimes, rights are in conflict with each other, and we need to compromise them so we don't lose another entirely, and that's why certain people are trying to make 'lack of taxes' as a right, so the government can only fund 'rights', and not anything else. I.e, we can compromise and pay taxes if we need a court or a military, because those are also 'rights'. But if we need health care, no, the 'lack of taxes' right wins.
But 'lack of taxes' is _not_ a right, it is not something that can be 'more powerful' than other laws. It's just a law that, like any law, needs to be reasonable.
So I mistook you for someone making that argument. But, instead, you're just saying 'Obviously, any law restricts us in some manner, including taxes, and extending any law to the excessive ends could result in something that looks like slavery, and people should have problems with that', so I'm entirely with you.
Except that freedom from taxation has _never_ been a right. See if you can find any such a right in English common law. Let's see if the Magna Carta mentions it...wait, the Magna Carta _says_ that taxes can be collected, but only with the assert of Parliament. How odd.
Heck, see what the Declaration of Independence says about taxes. It mentions a lot of unenumerated rights, like habeus corpus and whatnot. And a lot of rights that were enumerated, like the first five amendments. It seems like a good source of rights.
It manages to mention taxes once in the context of not having representation (Aka, without Parliament). And...that's it.
Just because there are unenumerated rights doesn't mean lack of taxation is one of them, anymore than the right to own a horse or walk around juggling is one of them.
In fact, on of the _enumerated_ rights is that seizure of property by the government must be in a fair and just manner, which rather implies if it _is_ in a fair and just manner, it's perfectly fine.
Clearly, when two people both think their point is made, they are confused about what they are arguing over. ;)
_My_ point is that the government, can in fact, legally do those things. We, strictly speaking, have no constitutional right to buy food, to work, or to eat the food we buy. Or to not pay 100% in taxes.
You can call those things 'infringements of liberty' if you want, but I was using that phrase to mean actual 'infringement of constitutional rights', which I think is where the confusion comes from.
The constitution doesn't forbid any of those, even when they end up looking basically like slavery. And if you want to argue that it literally becomes slavery at 100%, and hence exactly 100% couldn't be allowed, I won't even argue with that. (Although, as I said, strictly speaking a tax rate of 100% actually looks like 'everyone dying', so is pretty unlikely to happen anyway.)
But that doesn't mean that a 90% of tax rate is 90% of slavery, or that we're trading off a _constitutional right_ not to be taxed for something. There is no _constitutional grounds_ for arguing against taxes, just like there are no constitutional grounds for arguing that people should be allowed to buy butter or eat corpses. (Hey, look, I just thought of something the government forbids you to eat. Ew.)
The government _does_ control our ability to acquire goods. Ask any retail store, ask any food supplier, ask anyone. Then attempt to purchase some cocaine.
The government _does_ control our ability to work. Ask people here illegally or on a student visa if they're allowed to work or not. Ask a 12 year old.
The government even can control our ability to 'eat' stuff we own. Purchase some spray paint. Read the label about how it's 'illegal to use this in a manner inconsistent with the labeling'. They're talking about huffing. Yes, it's illegal to inhale something that you own. While I can't think of anything it's illegal to 'eat' per se, if they can stop you from inhaling something they can presumably stop you from eating it.
I'm not sure exactly what point you're making there. The government pretty clearly _is_ our master, except where we're specifically excluded them from certain areas via constitutional rights.
What the government _can't_ do, what stops it from putting people in slavery, is equal protection under the law and the protection from bills of attainder. They can't make laws giving just some people a tax rate of 100%...they'd have to do that to everyone, at which point it's really not 'slavery' anymore, it's 'everyone starves to death while all their stuff sit in government warehouses'.
Worrying about that is akin to worrying about 'What if the government drafted every single person in America and the government ceased existing due to lack of people in it?'. Well, yes, in theory, that is allowed under the constitution. No one's going to _do_ it, though.
Well, yes, but it would have been just as bad any other way.
The problem is, for decades, local governments have decide the way to 'help the economy' is to participate in a race to the bottom where they try to bribe corporations to show up and build there, with lower and lower taxes, and it was sorta inevitable that at some point they'd just start handing them money and property.
_How_ they hand them money and property almost entirely moot. The situation would have been just as bad if New London taxed everyone to raise $100 million dollars or whatever, bought the property, and given it to developers.
The state has the power to compel you to give it stuff. Arguing about that is just crazy. What they must be stopped from doing is _them_ giving stuff to corporations in return for imaginary benefits, or hell, even real benefits.
Not being 'okay' with something and it being an infringement of liberty are not the same thing. I'm not okay with people yammering on their cell phone on a bus, but it's probably not a constitutional issue.
Although asking if I'd mind if they did it to _me_ is not the same thing as an infringement of liberty. Doing things to just _me_ is, in fact, an infringement of my liberty...it's a bill of attainder. (They could do it as punishment for a crime...which we _do_. It's perfectly possible to be fined to nothingness. We exempt things like housing as a matter of law, not constitutional rights.)
If the government decides to tax _everyone_ at 100%, though, no, that's not an infringement of anyone's rights. (I will point out that does not reduce anyone to 'slavery'...it reduces everyone to starving to death.) Just like if the government decided to outlaw wearing clothing or drinking liquids or walking instead of crawling.
Obviously, passing such a law and then enforcing it randomly would be a violation of people's rights...again, a specific actual right, called 'equal protection under the law'.
Just because something is epically stupid and would destroy the country doesn't mean it's an 'infringement of my rights'. The constitution protects us against specific problems where the leadership of this country gets out of control and tries to put things ahead of rights we've decided are always more important, regardless of what the government thinks...it doesn't protect us against actual attempts to blow up the economy or committing suicide as a country. (That would be pretty much impossible to protect us from.)
OTOH, thanks for stating the misunderstand that the right's been subconsciously putting in everyone's head more clearly.
Indeed, I just made that comment on some other site to someone who was saying 'Oh, almost all government spending is unconstitutional, and an infringement on our rights.' I replied something like this:
To infringe my rights, things have to actually harm me in some manner. Spending money on me, or on others, does not harm me. Arguing that food stamps harm me and infringe on my rights is crazy.
People on the right argue the taxes harm me...but the government _does_ have the power to tax. So 'Food stamps infringe the constitution' can't get from there to here....the 'tax harm' is from something the government _is_ allowed to do, even if they aren't allowed to spend it how they are. That doesn't change the fact they could have exactly the same amount of taxes and spend it on more ICBMs or something. (In fact, an argument can be made that the level of spending is, and has been for quite some time, entirely unrelated to the level of taxes anyway, so it would be hard to even show an indirect link to 'unallowed' things.)
Secondly, more importantly, why the hell would anyone who cares about 'rights' care about the government spending like 4 cents a year of 'their money' on food stamps? What about, I dunno, the people we're imprisoning without charges? The whole 'seizing property without proving any changes' thing the DEA's been doing? Indeed, the entire premise of drug laws! What about the fact that the police seem utterly unwilling to record their interactions with the public, despite that technology being there for decades?
There's hundred and hundreds of actual constitutional right infringing issues that come before 'Hey, the states are supposed to do that, not the federal government', which isn't even an _individual_ constitutional right anyway...the only entities who should complain about that are the _states_.
Getting worked up about 'the government taking a tiny fraction of my money and spending it on stuff they shouldn't be allowed to ' is the equivalent of being worked up that the armed robbers didn't let you fix your bed hair during a home invasion. Yes, that was, indeed, rather rude of them, but, um...
You could operate a gulag and rape rooms for a measly hundred thousand a year, in fact. $20 a year for 4 guards to rotate shifts, and a rented warehouse for the remaining $20,000. That stuff is _cheap_. I've been trying to point this out for years to people on the right: The 'size' of the government is not the problem. That is a nonsensical measure of liberty.
If the government employed 200 million people to each hold one library book and read it aloud to any of the remaining 100 million people who came up to them, well, that's a pretty stupid and wasteful government, but everyone is still utterly free.
If the government employs four people who wander around breaking into houses and imprisoning people they don't like, you are not free. (Although admittedly with only four people, the situation would rapidly spiral out of control and the people would fight back.)
What the corporate right has managed to do is define 'free' as 'taxless'. That's it. That is what 'freedom' now means, at a subconscious level, to a good portion of the population. The lack of taxes makes you free. Taxes are the only possible infringement of liberty.
Oh, and property, which is why the right got all worked up about Kelo, where there was outrage directed at entirely the wrong thing. The government can use eminent domain to take property for basically whatever reason, just like it could collect taxes for whatever reason.
Kelo would hardly have been better if New London had decided to tax everyone to the poorhouse, _buy_ the land, and then sell it undervalued. Or if they'd just keep all tax revenue the same, defunded everything for a few years, and saved enough money to buy the property. The problem there was a city giving handout to corporations, not how it happened to _gain_ said things to hand out.
Taxes are not an infringement on liberty. They are not a 'compromise of liberty' we make to find the government, because they are not related to liberty at all.
It's functionally impossible for someone to be endangering the life of an a fetus without endangering the life of the woman carrying it. At least, if they're endangering it in a way that a self-defense claim would work...they could poison it or something, but you don't normally have to kill poisoners to stop them, and that wouldn't work in court.
The only way this important is if you believe this is happening. Maybe pro-lifer believe that abortion doctors are drugging women and doing abortions without their consent?
Although that still doesn't make a lot of sense. Legally, if someone drugs someone else, and starts cutting them up, you can probably just shoot them in justifiable homicide anyway, even if they claim they were a doctor and just committing _really_ aggravated assault that they intended the person to live through. (This whole thing is surreally unlikely, though.)
Does anyone else find it odd that the 'defense of other' clause only lets you do it for family? Surely, if someone is about to murder a total stranger, you can legally shoot them too.
In the 1925, the Christians were _progressives_, and exactly the people arguing for changing society for the better. The overlap between the Temperance and Eugenics movement is pretty large, and the Temperance movement almost entirely Christianity based.
Meanwhile 'Conservative' didn't mean _anything at all_. Conservativism didn't appear in the US until the 1950s, and didn't solidify until 1964.
So claiming 'Christian conservatives' had anything to do with the opposition to eugenics is just utter and complete nonsense, historically, as such a group did not, and could not have, existed in any shape at all, and it was the Christians attempting to social engineer society and, if not actually in favor of eugenics themselves, were at least standing right next to people who were.
Also, note the eugenics movement, despite the quotes above, never even slightly suggested killing children as any sort of actual policy at all. It was entirely about castrating 'defective' adults so they couldn't reproduce. Which is, indeed, a pretty horrible policy, but not anywhere near as bad as people seem to think they were suggesting.
Oh, sure, individuals will, but there are two sorts of people in charge of the pro-life movement: a) Those that are anti-women and would like the law to go further into anti-contraceptive, which is why the movement isn't in favor of those either, despite that being an obvious way to reduce abortions _also_. b) Those that are using the movement for political gains, which is why the plan, for the longest time, was 'keep electing Republicans and eventually we'll replace the Supreme Court', which is possibly the most inane political plan ever...unless you're a Republican running for office.
At this point, the straight-up Republican control of the anti-abortion movement has been lost, (Just like the anti-tax people hijacked the other half of the party, and named it the Tea Party.), but, like that just left, basically, the anti-women people in charge.
No one running any of the pro-life groups has ever, as far as anyone can tell from the POV over here on the left, has even been actually in favor of actually doing anything to reduce the number of abortions. It's either political posturing, or (and now entirely), a way to rail against loose women and even imprison them.
Call me cynical if you will, but as a 'less abortions' member of pro-choice position, no group has done more to _stop_ the reduction of abortion than the pro-life movement. And when the pro-choice movement has an idea on how to reduce abortions, ideology on the right, not 'pro-life ideology' but _economic_ ideology or 'freedom' ideology or something like that, utterly stops that idea from being considered on the pro-life side.
Again, this is people _running_ the groups...plenty of pro-life individuals are utterly on board with these plans. One can only imagine what they think when the plans go nowhere.
(For some reason I can't reply to your comment, so I am replying to mine.)
I completely apologize if you thought I was, in any manner, attempting to say the stupid-left was smarter than the stupid-right.
If anything, the stupid-left is stupider, because they actually, at some level, accept science, and understand it, and then come up with crazy superstitions like 'vaccines are bad' and run around trying to justify them. This is _epicly_ stupid.
Whereas the stupid-right is just ignorant and doesn't really understand what science is beyond 'a bunch of eggheads saying things'. The stupid-right lives in a world where truth is handed down from high, and they reject competing truth, which is an entire understandable world-view.
This is why the stupid-right tend to treat science _as_ a 'set of beliefs', utterly baffling people who know that science is, at most, a single belief, a belief that is not really in dispute by anyone. (The belief that 'You can predict things by observing things and make theories to explain them.') 'Science', by itself, doesn't imply evolution or even a belief in gravity.
The stupid-left, OTOH, live in a world where, in theory, facts can be determined by objective evidence, and yet they refuse to apply their own rules to actually figure out the truth WRT whatever idiotic thing they believe.
Which is why the stupid-right doesn't want those competing truths taught to children, or at least their truth also taught, whereas the stupid-left delusionally thinks their 'truths' have been proven by their own super-duper science (as opposed to actual science, which has been duped, probably by big corporations) so don't mind.
'Different levels of abstraction' is a great way to talk about that, and I'm stealing that phrase from you.
Jenny McCarthy is a _Hollywood_Scientologist_. It's a category that 20 people total in the entire universe are in, so it's not really that representative of anything.
And anti-vax isn't anti-science in the sense I was using 'science'. Anti-vax is anti-_fact_. They actually accept science, which is why the anti-vaxers on the left have to keep changing their rational when science proves them incorrect. (The ones on the right, OTOH, just assert 'religion' or 'freedom' to have their kids die.)
I actually think what ppnl said is exactly right. The left, when it turns irrational, goes anti-technology, luddite. Anti-nuclear, anti-vaccine, anti-medicine, anti-automobile, etc. Usually with vast conspiracy theories to explain why everyone has it wrong.
The right, when it turns irrational, goes into into _denialism_. They just say 'You cannot tell me actual facts'.
To put it another way, if the left was doing climate change denying, they would be running around asserting that all the electric cars wouldn't work, and that the people producing them are evil con-men, and that the real problem is making the plastic for the car bodies, and stuff like that...it probably wouldn't even occur to the left to deny the _actual fact_ that the climate was changing.
The 'stupid left' doesn't argue with things that are obviously demonstrably true...they just invent nonsensical conclusions from those things. Whereas the 'stupid right' does argue with a lot of the actual facts, because it's those 'Godless scientists' and 'ivy tower elites' who came up with those facts.
New York City lost a huge amount from the pension fund due to the economy crash. Not the recession, the actual crash, as the money was invested in things that lost value.
So there's another reason pension costs are going up: Because investments crashed. And, actually, there's yet another reason...health care costs continue to skyrocket.
None of this really has anything to do with unions, expect that unions actually _demand_ health care and retirement, and at this point, _no one_ can afford paying for those things, at least, not without raising taxes, which they won't.
And, yes, taxes are a race to the bottom. That doesn't really change my point.
And if he'd said 'anti-science' ideology I'd have no problem. Instead, for some reason, he said 'anti-education'.
Which is actually important, because the left has just anti-science people, whereas the right, in addition to having anti-science people, often has anti-education people too.
Actually, the left doesn't really have anti-science people. It has people who think that X is more important than stuff that normal people think it is not, which is sorta what I was trying to explain with 'object to what they do'. People objecting to animal research are not objecting to 'knowing how to cure cancer', they have just (irrationally) decided that not killing pigs is more important than curing cancer.
Same with the environmentalists, and to quote Craig Ferguson 'I wait your letters', anti-nuclear people, who think that not having easily manageable nuclear waste is more important than not spewing cancer-causing coal dust everywhere. Or the (mostly imaginary) hippies who think we should go back to pre-industrial times.
The fanatic left often veers into anti-science because of the results, real or imagined, of that science. Animals are more important than people! Trees are more important than people! No nuclear waste is more important than people! Radioactive testing might unleash Godzilla! The left and the right both can have this belief, in fact.
However, the right is often anti-science as an aspect of anti-education. A fair number of fanatics on the right seem to think that education _itself_ is bad, and this has actually managed to bubble up to the leaders ranting about 'elitism' (When the right says 'elite', they mean 'educated'. When the left says it, they mean 'rich'.) and 'liberal college professors' and 'ivy towers'.
The thing about evolution is exactly that. Teaching evolution has no actual physical harmful effects. There's no mistaken priorities over harm, because there is no harm. Or, rather, the harm is literally _knowledge_. It is saying 'People should not know this thing.', which is quite a different direction than where the anti-science left is coming from.
Yeah, and if Einstein is correct Newton is wrong. But _physics_ is correct. The idea that there are actual laws that govern the movement of stuff is correct, and the idea that the FSM pulls things to earth with his noodly appendages is not something that should be taught, or even _mentioned_, in school. (I'm not even a fan of the 'teach ID in philosophy class' concept. ID is not a 'philosophy'. Christianity might be, but not the creation myth part of it.)
There are accepted general theories in science, and there are obscure corner case theories debating aspect of those, which don't matter in general education because no one gets anywhere close to them. No one cares about different sorts of evolutionary theories, just like no one care that the formula you're using to calculate motion stops working right at 9/10th the speed of light. No high schooler is going to deal with that. Heck, actual engineers don't deal with that 99.9999% of the time.
Public schools teach a simplification of everything, and don't need to figure to which evolutionary theory is correct, anymore than they need to figure out whether Einstein or Newton is right....they're nowhere at the level of that actually making a difference.
If you want to lump 'all people threatened because of what the threatener believes' into one group, almost all generalized threats fall under that. (I.e, threats not made for personal reasons.)
I was just pointing out that 'researchers' are not 'teachers', nor are they 'educators', and hence cannot possibly be the the targets of the majority of 'threats against educators'.
You're right, lucrative retirement payments aren't really bankrupting state and municipal governments. Lack of _tax revenue_ are doing that.
Which is about 33% the fault of the recession, and 33% the fault of the local right-wing tax-cut fanatics failing to have any buffers in revenue at all, and even having too little tax revenue before the recession, and 33% the lack of the Federal government failing to help out enough because of tax-cut fanatics there.
Threats against animal researches isn't even slightly related to threats against _teachers_. Those are two entirely different things.
Animal researchers are not being threatened because of what they 'teach', because they do not teach anything. They are being threatened because of what they do.
If all, or even any percentage of all, of environmentalists went around asserting that finishing constructing a house was going to kill someone, yes, they would be liars or cowards for not destroying construction equipment. As no one actually _does_ say that, though, it's a moot point.
The ELF is actually a pretty good proof of what I'm talking about WRT to how people behave to things they _actually think_ are killing people. A single SUV driver is not going to kill anyone, even statistically, with pollution. And yet there are people willing to light SUVs on fire.
On one hand, we have one 'side' where they believe the earth is being damaged, the majority claim being that it's being very slowly damaged and generally no one is standing around yelling at construction crews...
...and there _still are_ people willing to commit massive property damage. To quote the FBI: 'In 2005, the FBI announced that the ELF is America's greatest domestic terrorist threat, responsible for over 1,200 "criminal incidents" amounting to tens of millions of dollars in damage to property.'
OTOH, we have this other group, who is fighting, according to them, _murder_. Not trees being cut down, not oil being burned to slightly damage environment, but clear, direct, outright murder of people...
...and they're content with yelling at people and glueing locks.
Something's really really off there. Where is the ELF equivalent for anti-abortion people, who wander around firebombing abortion providers?
While no one knows how many people are in 'ELF' (Or even what that really means), for 1200 incidents (And probably only 200 non-trivial ones that went beyond slashing tires or spray paint or something.) I'll guess it's about 300 people in total, clustered in groups of maybe a dozen at a time. Which is basically the same as the number of abortion protesters outside clinics.
(I actually find it strange to have to point out how _little_ violence or even vandalism there is from an organization on the right of the political spectrum, because frankly most of the political violence and vandalism and actual terrorism _is_ from the right at this moment in time...but it's all anti-tax or white-power or crazy Beck-conspiracy nonsense. )
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On “A Basic Conflict”
Who on earth said the word 'millions'? That word isn't even in my post. In fact, that word appears exactly once on this entire page besides your post, in reference to an amount of money.
And perhaps you should learn what a metaphor is. In case you weren't paying attention, union members do not get paid in food. No one does. The food was a _metaphor_ for money.
To actually answer your question (I'll pretend you asked it in good faith), the US has about 150 starvation deaths each year, but generally most of those are in the form of 'accident' or 'suicide' or 'murder' instead of not being able to afford food.
But those are just deaths due 'not enough calories', which is the technical definition of starvation. In fact, in the entire world, actual 'starvation' is not that common, even in all those places where people are, in the colloquial sense, 'starving to death'. ('The colloquial sense' is not the same as a 'metaphor'. Please consult an English teacher for more information.) Those people are not actually dying from 'starvation'.
Those people, and a moderately large group in America also, are dying from _malnutrition_, which is when they get enough daily calories to keep functioning, but are missing nutrients. You can tell the difference in photographs because continual malnutrition of this gives these people large stomachs whereas continual starvation gives them...uh...death in three weeks. (There's not actually such a problem as 'long term starvation' in the technical sense. No country can be 'starving' for years. Three weeks, then you die.)
After years and months of _malnutrition_, they will quickly and without and fuss die of something, heart failure is the most common. In the US, with the homeless, this usually coincides with bad weather, so is commonly called 'exposure' in death rates, but it's at least halfway due to malnutrition....healthy people, like the recently homeless, usually live through harsh weather just fine.
Another common and fun one is infection. (Note that 'fun' is sarcasm, which is unrelated to metaphor.) Get a cold? Oh, look, you can't fight it off because you're so malnourished, and you're dead.
Even the homeless can afford ramen noodles or other sources of calories so they do not die of starvation. At worse they will eat plants. What they _can't_ afford is food with the nutrients they need to keep healthy.
"
The problem here is not anything to do with public unions. I would argue in a sane economy, public unions are sorta pointless, because other unions tend to raise the level for everyone else.
The problem is, after decades of class and anti-union warfare, everyone else's wages suck, while public unions have managed to maintain their pay and pension. It's not that they're doing 'better', it's that _everyone else_ had their wages and benefits slowly sucked out by giant corporations.
Heck, public workers actually still make _less_ than private workers. They just have good pension plans, you know, like we used to have with companies, back when we have job security and whatnot too. This was before everyone was supposed to start saving in 401ks themselves, but didn't because they had to use that 'extra' money to buy food because their wages didn't go up for a decade? Remember that? Remember how prices kept going up, but wages somehow never did, so everyone spent their savings, and then money they did have? Remember how that's still true?
It's all nonsense. Corporate America has been slowly starving everyone to death, and we're looking and spotting the one group of people not employed by Corporate America and who still have food and yelling 'They have food! They must have stole it from us! Get them!'.
Yes, folks, they still have stuff, let's take it from them too. When we do the government will spend less money, so we can give even _bigger_ tax brakes to the rich and corporate America.
And then...the poor! They're getting stuff from the government too! We should take that stuff away from them, and maybe somehow a tiny fraction of that could go to our pockets, if the rich will let us keep it. And a few years from now, when we've gotten all the stuff from them, we can declare war on Canada, too. I hear they still have stuff, too.
Let no one turn around and wonder where all the stuff we used to have has wandered off to.
On “Government Spending and Liberty”
A real 'broken windows' policy of policing liberty would be stuff like requiring the police to monitor all interactions with the public. Or demanding that their city issue parade permits in a non-biased manner. Or attempt to get courts to start using treatment instead of punishment for drug violations.
You can either start at the top and worry about huge violations of liberty, or start at the bottom and worry about smaller local ones. Starting at the top and worrying about microscopic things is just inane.
It's like someone declaring they're a mountain climber, and they're going to start by climbing 20 feet up a hill next to Mount Everest. Yeah, um, why don't they try climbing something local first, before flying around the world? Or, hell, get a team, and try actually climbing Everest to some actual milestone? Their plan makes no sense.
And it's even weirder than that. There are entire climbing climbs that strategize about how to climb that hill. People become famous for trying to climb the hill. People demonize the hill, and make pithy quotes about how they climb it because it's there.
At some point, everyone else's head explodes.
"
You don't need to get people to 'sign up for it', probably half the population is already there, it's just that the political parties are operating in such an idiotic manner that there's no solution.
No one who spends any time looking at it can come up with an justification for the manner in which we operate the drug war. It's obvious we'd be better off than the status quo if we'd just legalize everything. There people is an even _better_ solution, with treatment and whatnot, and I'm all for trying to find it, but when we'd clearly be better off with no laws at all, the system is broken.
As a progressive, there's plenty I probably disagree with you on, like trade barriers, which I think we actually should have against anyone without a comparable economy. And I would say 'education', but I'm not sure if you mean our _current_ national education system which is just gibberish, or any at all. I think we should have some sort of national education thing...that doesn't look anything like what we have.
But, seriously, that's not important. What is important is there are honest libertarians, who actually look at the infringements of liberty, which start with actual constitutional violations, and range down to just stupid counterproductive, but constitutional, laws, and think we should start there.
And, the honest ones say, we can worry about replacing (not removing, replacing) the welfare state sometimes after we solve the problem of generational poverty, which we will have solved somewhere after we've gotten rid of the War on Some Drug Users, which we're only going to care about after we close Gitmo.
At _that_ point, after we've fixed all that, presumably sane libertarians and sane liberals can have the drag-out fight about our entire different world view and There Can Be Only One or whatever is supposed to happen then, which is about as vague as what is supposed to happen in those movies, and will also happen in the distance future or another planet or whatever. Who cares, we'll be long dead.
And then there are dishonest libertarians, whose entire idea idea of liberty is apparently 'How much taxes am I paying?'. (And this new 'Tea Party' is the same way.)
Now, generally, people who say 'Why do you care about this thing instead of this other thing' are attempting to deflect the issue. It is not reasonable to demand that people try to fix the much-worse conditions in Haiti before they do something about Detroit.
But that only goes to a certain point before it really does turn into hypocrisy. Especially since all the unconstitutional and obviously stupid things our government does costs us _more_ than welfare. Anyone who _actually_ felt that 'taxes were just as important an infringement of liberty as imprisoning people without trial' would, um, duh, realize that imprisoning people without trial, and the entire war effort, also costs money. So yeah.
At this point, these dishonest libertarians worrying about welfare has pretty clearly turned into 'poor people punching'.
"
Okay, I'll agree with you then. Every law the government passes restricts liberty in some manner.
I think I'm just a little tired of a bunch people on the right who seem to assert that everything the government could do that is bad is something that it is not allowed to. And, coincidentally, exactly what they what the government to do is exactly what it is allowed to do, and nothing more.
Such talk is just silly. There's millions of things the government is allowed to do that would be very very stupid. For example, it could use eminent domain to pave the entire continent in postal roads, which is it _explicitly_ allowed to build. That is entirely constitutional behavior. It's utterly stupid, but constitutional under any possible interpretation of the constitution.
I confused you for one of those people, whose decided to just basically make up 'lack of taxes' as a right along with all the other rights we have.
Why do that? Well, sometimes, rights are in conflict with each other, and we need to compromise them so we don't lose another entirely, and that's why certain people are trying to make 'lack of taxes' as a right, so the government can only fund 'rights', and not anything else. I.e, we can compromise and pay taxes if we need a court or a military, because those are also 'rights'. But if we need health care, no, the 'lack of taxes' right wins.
But 'lack of taxes' is _not_ a right, it is not something that can be 'more powerful' than other laws. It's just a law that, like any law, needs to be reasonable.
So I mistook you for someone making that argument. But, instead, you're just saying 'Obviously, any law restricts us in some manner, including taxes, and extending any law to the excessive ends could result in something that looks like slavery, and people should have problems with that', so I'm entirely with you.
"
Except that freedom from taxation has _never_ been a right. See if you can find any such a right in English common law. Let's see if the Magna Carta mentions it...wait, the Magna Carta _says_ that taxes can be collected, but only with the assert of Parliament. How odd.
Heck, see what the Declaration of Independence says about taxes. It mentions a lot of unenumerated rights, like habeus corpus and whatnot. And a lot of rights that were enumerated, like the first five amendments. It seems like a good source of rights.
It manages to mention taxes once in the context of not having representation (Aka, without Parliament). And...that's it.
Just because there are unenumerated rights doesn't mean lack of taxation is one of them, anymore than the right to own a horse or walk around juggling is one of them.
In fact, on of the _enumerated_ rights is that seizure of property by the government must be in a fair and just manner, which rather implies if it _is_ in a fair and just manner, it's perfectly fine.
"
Clearly, when two people both think their point is made, they are confused about what they are arguing over. ;)
_My_ point is that the government, can in fact, legally do those things. We, strictly speaking, have no constitutional right to buy food, to work, or to eat the food we buy. Or to not pay 100% in taxes.
You can call those things 'infringements of liberty' if you want, but I was using that phrase to mean actual 'infringement of constitutional rights', which I think is where the confusion comes from.
The constitution doesn't forbid any of those, even when they end up looking basically like slavery. And if you want to argue that it literally becomes slavery at 100%, and hence exactly 100% couldn't be allowed, I won't even argue with that. (Although, as I said, strictly speaking a tax rate of 100% actually looks like 'everyone dying', so is pretty unlikely to happen anyway.)
But that doesn't mean that a 90% of tax rate is 90% of slavery, or that we're trading off a _constitutional right_ not to be taxed for something. There is no _constitutional grounds_ for arguing against taxes, just like there are no constitutional grounds for arguing that people should be allowed to buy butter or eat corpses. (Hey, look, I just thought of something the government forbids you to eat. Ew.)
"
The government _does_ control our ability to acquire goods. Ask any retail store, ask any food supplier, ask anyone. Then attempt to purchase some cocaine.
The government _does_ control our ability to work. Ask people here illegally or on a student visa if they're allowed to work or not. Ask a 12 year old.
The government even can control our ability to 'eat' stuff we own. Purchase some spray paint. Read the label about how it's 'illegal to use this in a manner inconsistent with the labeling'. They're talking about huffing. Yes, it's illegal to inhale something that you own. While I can't think of anything it's illegal to 'eat' per se, if they can stop you from inhaling something they can presumably stop you from eating it.
I'm not sure exactly what point you're making there. The government pretty clearly _is_ our master, except where we're specifically excluded them from certain areas via constitutional rights.
What the government _can't_ do, what stops it from putting people in slavery, is equal protection under the law and the protection from bills of attainder. They can't make laws giving just some people a tax rate of 100%...they'd have to do that to everyone, at which point it's really not 'slavery' anymore, it's 'everyone starves to death while all their stuff sit in government warehouses'.
Worrying about that is akin to worrying about 'What if the government drafted every single person in America and the government ceased existing due to lack of people in it?'. Well, yes, in theory, that is allowed under the constitution. No one's going to _do_ it, though.
"
Well, yes, but it would have been just as bad any other way.
The problem is, for decades, local governments have decide the way to 'help the economy' is to participate in a race to the bottom where they try to bribe corporations to show up and build there, with lower and lower taxes, and it was sorta inevitable that at some point they'd just start handing them money and property.
_How_ they hand them money and property almost entirely moot. The situation would have been just as bad if New London taxed everyone to raise $100 million dollars or whatever, bought the property, and given it to developers.
The state has the power to compel you to give it stuff. Arguing about that is just crazy. What they must be stopped from doing is _them_ giving stuff to corporations in return for imaginary benefits, or hell, even real benefits.
"
Not being 'okay' with something and it being an infringement of liberty are not the same thing. I'm not okay with people yammering on their cell phone on a bus, but it's probably not a constitutional issue.
Although asking if I'd mind if they did it to _me_ is not the same thing as an infringement of liberty. Doing things to just _me_ is, in fact, an infringement of my liberty...it's a bill of attainder. (They could do it as punishment for a crime...which we _do_. It's perfectly possible to be fined to nothingness. We exempt things like housing as a matter of law, not constitutional rights.)
If the government decides to tax _everyone_ at 100%, though, no, that's not an infringement of anyone's rights. (I will point out that does not reduce anyone to 'slavery'...it reduces everyone to starving to death.) Just like if the government decided to outlaw wearing clothing or drinking liquids or walking instead of crawling.
Obviously, passing such a law and then enforcing it randomly would be a violation of people's rights...again, a specific actual right, called 'equal protection under the law'.
Just because something is epically stupid and would destroy the country doesn't mean it's an 'infringement of my rights'. The constitution protects us against specific problems where the leadership of this country gets out of control and tries to put things ahead of rights we've decided are always more important, regardless of what the government thinks...it doesn't protect us against actual attempts to blow up the economy or committing suicide as a country. (That would be pretty much impossible to protect us from.)
OTOH, thanks for stating the misunderstand that the right's been subconsciously putting in everyone's head more clearly.
"
Indeed, I just made that comment on some other site to someone who was saying 'Oh, almost all government spending is unconstitutional, and an infringement on our rights.' I replied something like this:
To infringe my rights, things have to actually harm me in some manner. Spending money on me, or on others, does not harm me. Arguing that food stamps harm me and infringe on my rights is crazy.
People on the right argue the taxes harm me...but the government _does_ have the power to tax. So 'Food stamps infringe the constitution' can't get from there to here....the 'tax harm' is from something the government _is_ allowed to do, even if they aren't allowed to spend it how they are. That doesn't change the fact they could have exactly the same amount of taxes and spend it on more ICBMs or something. (In fact, an argument can be made that the level of spending is, and has been for quite some time, entirely unrelated to the level of taxes anyway, so it would be hard to even show an indirect link to 'unallowed' things.)
Secondly, more importantly, why the hell would anyone who cares about 'rights' care about the government spending like 4 cents a year of 'their money' on food stamps? What about, I dunno, the people we're imprisoning without charges? The whole 'seizing property without proving any changes' thing the DEA's been doing? Indeed, the entire premise of drug laws! What about the fact that the police seem utterly unwilling to record their interactions with the public, despite that technology being there for decades?
There's hundred and hundreds of actual constitutional right infringing issues that come before 'Hey, the states are supposed to do that, not the federal government', which isn't even an _individual_ constitutional right anyway...the only entities who should complain about that are the _states_.
Getting worked up about 'the government taking a tiny fraction of my money and spending it on stuff they shouldn't be allowed to ' is the equivalent of being worked up that the armed robbers didn't let you fix your bed hair during a home invasion. Yes, that was, indeed, rather rude of them, but, um...
"
You could operate a gulag and rape rooms for a measly hundred thousand a year, in fact. $20 a year for 4 guards to rotate shifts, and a rented warehouse for the remaining $20,000. That stuff is _cheap_. I've been trying to point this out for years to people on the right: The 'size' of the government is not the problem. That is a nonsensical measure of liberty.
If the government employed 200 million people to each hold one library book and read it aloud to any of the remaining 100 million people who came up to them, well, that's a pretty stupid and wasteful government, but everyone is still utterly free.
If the government employs four people who wander around breaking into houses and imprisoning people they don't like, you are not free. (Although admittedly with only four people, the situation would rapidly spiral out of control and the people would fight back.)
What the corporate right has managed to do is define 'free' as 'taxless'. That's it. That is what 'freedom' now means, at a subconscious level, to a good portion of the population. The lack of taxes makes you free. Taxes are the only possible infringement of liberty.
Oh, and property, which is why the right got all worked up about Kelo, where there was outrage directed at entirely the wrong thing. The government can use eminent domain to take property for basically whatever reason, just like it could collect taxes for whatever reason.
Kelo would hardly have been better if New London had decided to tax everyone to the poorhouse, _buy_ the land, and then sell it undervalued. Or if they'd just keep all tax revenue the same, defunded everything for a few years, and saved enough money to buy the property. The problem there was a city giving handout to corporations, not how it happened to _gain_ said things to hand out.
Taxes are not an infringement on liberty. They are not a 'compromise of liberty' we make to find the government, because they are not related to liberty at all.
On “Is South Dakota About to Legalize Pro-Life Terrorism?”
Indeed, this is just dog-whistle nonsense.
It's functionally impossible for someone to be endangering the life of an a fetus without endangering the life of the woman carrying it. At least, if they're endangering it in a way that a self-defense claim would work...they could poison it or something, but you don't normally have to kill poisoners to stop them, and that wouldn't work in court.
The only way this important is if you believe this is happening. Maybe pro-lifer believe that abortion doctors are drugging women and doing abortions without their consent?
Although that still doesn't make a lot of sense. Legally, if someone drugs someone else, and starts cutting them up, you can probably just shoot them in justifiable homicide anyway, even if they claim they were a doctor and just committing _really_ aggravated assault that they intended the person to live through. (This whole thing is surreally unlikely, though.)
Does anyone else find it odd that the 'defense of other' clause only lets you do it for family? Surely, if someone is about to murder a total stranger, you can legally shoot them too.
On “Searching for Oskar Schindler”
Then they're very very confused.
In the 1925, the Christians were _progressives_, and exactly the people arguing for changing society for the better. The overlap between the Temperance and Eugenics movement is pretty large, and the Temperance movement almost entirely Christianity based.
Meanwhile 'Conservative' didn't mean _anything at all_. Conservativism didn't appear in the US until the 1950s, and didn't solidify until 1964.
So claiming 'Christian conservatives' had anything to do with the opposition to eugenics is just utter and complete nonsense, historically, as such a group did not, and could not have, existed in any shape at all, and it was the Christians attempting to social engineer society and, if not actually in favor of eugenics themselves, were at least standing right next to people who were.
Also, note the eugenics movement, despite the quotes above, never even slightly suggested killing children as any sort of actual policy at all. It was entirely about castrating 'defective' adults so they couldn't reproduce. Which is, indeed, a pretty horrible policy, but not anywhere near as bad as people seem to think they were suggesting.
"
Oh, sure, individuals will, but there are two sorts of people in charge of the pro-life movement: a) Those that are anti-women and would like the law to go further into anti-contraceptive, which is why the movement isn't in favor of those either, despite that being an obvious way to reduce abortions _also_. b) Those that are using the movement for political gains, which is why the plan, for the longest time, was 'keep electing Republicans and eventually we'll replace the Supreme Court', which is possibly the most inane political plan ever...unless you're a Republican running for office.
At this point, the straight-up Republican control of the anti-abortion movement has been lost, (Just like the anti-tax people hijacked the other half of the party, and named it the Tea Party.), but, like that just left, basically, the anti-women people in charge.
No one running any of the pro-life groups has ever, as far as anyone can tell from the POV over here on the left, has even been actually in favor of actually doing anything to reduce the number of abortions. It's either political posturing, or (and now entirely), a way to rail against loose women and even imprison them.
Call me cynical if you will, but as a 'less abortions' member of pro-choice position, no group has done more to _stop_ the reduction of abortion than the pro-life movement. And when the pro-choice movement has an idea on how to reduce abortions, ideology on the right, not 'pro-life ideology' but _economic_ ideology or 'freedom' ideology or something like that, utterly stops that idea from being considered on the pro-life side.
Again, this is people _running_ the groups...plenty of pro-life individuals are utterly on board with these plans. One can only imagine what they think when the plans go nowhere.
On “Science, Non-Scientists, and the Mind-Killer”
(For some reason I can't reply to your comment, so I am replying to mine.)
I completely apologize if you thought I was, in any manner, attempting to say the stupid-left was smarter than the stupid-right.
If anything, the stupid-left is stupider, because they actually, at some level, accept science, and understand it, and then come up with crazy superstitions like 'vaccines are bad' and run around trying to justify them. This is _epicly_ stupid.
Whereas the stupid-right is just ignorant and doesn't really understand what science is beyond 'a bunch of eggheads saying things'. The stupid-right lives in a world where truth is handed down from high, and they reject competing truth, which is an entire understandable world-view.
This is why the stupid-right tend to treat science _as_ a 'set of beliefs', utterly baffling people who know that science is, at most, a single belief, a belief that is not really in dispute by anyone. (The belief that 'You can predict things by observing things and make theories to explain them.') 'Science', by itself, doesn't imply evolution or even a belief in gravity.
The stupid-left, OTOH, live in a world where, in theory, facts can be determined by objective evidence, and yet they refuse to apply their own rules to actually figure out the truth WRT whatever idiotic thing they believe.
Which is why the stupid-right doesn't want those competing truths taught to children, or at least their truth also taught, whereas the stupid-left delusionally thinks their 'truths' have been proven by their own super-duper science (as opposed to actual science, which has been duped, probably by big corporations) so don't mind.
'Different levels of abstraction' is a great way to talk about that, and I'm stealing that phrase from you.
"
Jenny McCarthy is a _Hollywood_Scientologist_. It's a category that 20 people total in the entire universe are in, so it's not really that representative of anything.
And anti-vax isn't anti-science in the sense I was using 'science'. Anti-vax is anti-_fact_. They actually accept science, which is why the anti-vaxers on the left have to keep changing their rational when science proves them incorrect. (The ones on the right, OTOH, just assert 'religion' or 'freedom' to have their kids die.)
I actually think what ppnl said is exactly right. The left, when it turns irrational, goes anti-technology, luddite. Anti-nuclear, anti-vaccine, anti-medicine, anti-automobile, etc. Usually with vast conspiracy theories to explain why everyone has it wrong.
The right, when it turns irrational, goes into into _denialism_. They just say 'You cannot tell me actual facts'.
To put it another way, if the left was doing climate change denying, they would be running around asserting that all the electric cars wouldn't work, and that the people producing them are evil con-men, and that the real problem is making the plastic for the car bodies, and stuff like that...it probably wouldn't even occur to the left to deny the _actual fact_ that the climate was changing.
The 'stupid left' doesn't argue with things that are obviously demonstrably true...they just invent nonsensical conclusions from those things. Whereas the 'stupid right' does argue with a lot of the actual facts, because it's those 'Godless scientists' and 'ivy tower elites' who came up with those facts.
On “The State of the Unions”
New York City lost a huge amount from the pension fund due to the economy crash. Not the recession, the actual crash, as the money was invested in things that lost value.
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/city-pension-funds-lose-billions/80738/
So there's another reason pension costs are going up: Because investments crashed. And, actually, there's yet another reason...health care costs continue to skyrocket.
None of this really has anything to do with unions, expect that unions actually _demand_ health care and retirement, and at this point, _no one_ can afford paying for those things, at least, not without raising taxes, which they won't.
And, yes, taxes are a race to the bottom. That doesn't really change my point.
On ““Reasonable” People”
But, isn't 'All theories will be incomplete as long as there are people to create them' itself a theory, and hence, according to itself, not complete?
Where's Godel when you need him? ;)
On “Science, Non-Scientists, and the Mind-Killer”
And if he'd said 'anti-science' ideology I'd have no problem. Instead, for some reason, he said 'anti-education'.
Which is actually important, because the left has just anti-science people, whereas the right, in addition to having anti-science people, often has anti-education people too.
Actually, the left doesn't really have anti-science people. It has people who think that X is more important than stuff that normal people think it is not, which is sorta what I was trying to explain with 'object to what they do'. People objecting to animal research are not objecting to 'knowing how to cure cancer', they have just (irrationally) decided that not killing pigs is more important than curing cancer.
Same with the environmentalists, and to quote Craig Ferguson 'I wait your letters', anti-nuclear people, who think that not having easily manageable nuclear waste is more important than not spewing cancer-causing coal dust everywhere. Or the (mostly imaginary) hippies who think we should go back to pre-industrial times.
The fanatic left often veers into anti-science because of the results, real or imagined, of that science. Animals are more important than people! Trees are more important than people! No nuclear waste is more important than people! Radioactive testing might unleash Godzilla! The left and the right both can have this belief, in fact.
However, the right is often anti-science as an aspect of anti-education. A fair number of fanatics on the right seem to think that education _itself_ is bad, and this has actually managed to bubble up to the leaders ranting about 'elitism' (When the right says 'elite', they mean 'educated'. When the left says it, they mean 'rich'.) and 'liberal college professors' and 'ivy towers'.
The thing about evolution is exactly that. Teaching evolution has no actual physical harmful effects. There's no mistaken priorities over harm, because there is no harm. Or, rather, the harm is literally _knowledge_. It is saying 'People should not know this thing.', which is quite a different direction than where the anti-science left is coming from.
On ““Reasonable” People”
Yeah, and if Einstein is correct Newton is wrong. But _physics_ is correct. The idea that there are actual laws that govern the movement of stuff is correct, and the idea that the FSM pulls things to earth with his noodly appendages is not something that should be taught, or even _mentioned_, in school. (I'm not even a fan of the 'teach ID in philosophy class' concept. ID is not a 'philosophy'. Christianity might be, but not the creation myth part of it.)
There are accepted general theories in science, and there are obscure corner case theories debating aspect of those, which don't matter in general education because no one gets anywhere close to them. No one cares about different sorts of evolutionary theories, just like no one care that the formula you're using to calculate motion stops working right at 9/10th the speed of light. No high schooler is going to deal with that. Heck, actual engineers don't deal with that 99.9999% of the time.
Public schools teach a simplification of everything, and don't need to figure to which evolutionary theory is correct, anymore than they need to figure out whether Einstein or Newton is right....they're nowhere at the level of that actually making a difference.
On “Science, Non-Scientists, and the Mind-Killer”
If you want to lump 'all people threatened because of what the threatener believes' into one group, almost all generalized threats fall under that. (I.e, threats not made for personal reasons.)
I was just pointing out that 'researchers' are not 'teachers', nor are they 'educators', and hence cannot possibly be the the targets of the majority of 'threats against educators'.
On “The State of the Unions”
You're right, lucrative retirement payments aren't really bankrupting state and municipal governments. Lack of _tax revenue_ are doing that.
Which is about 33% the fault of the recession, and 33% the fault of the local right-wing tax-cut fanatics failing to have any buffers in revenue at all, and even having too little tax revenue before the recession, and 33% the lack of the Federal government failing to help out enough because of tax-cut fanatics there.
On “Science, Non-Scientists, and the Mind-Killer”
Threats against animal researches isn't even slightly related to threats against _teachers_. Those are two entirely different things.
Animal researchers are not being threatened because of what they 'teach', because they do not teach anything. They are being threatened because of what they do.
On “Searching for Oskar Schindler”
If all, or even any percentage of all, of environmentalists went around asserting that finishing constructing a house was going to kill someone, yes, they would be liars or cowards for not destroying construction equipment. As no one actually _does_ say that, though, it's a moot point.
The ELF is actually a pretty good proof of what I'm talking about WRT to how people behave to things they _actually think_ are killing people. A single SUV driver is not going to kill anyone, even statistically, with pollution. And yet there are people willing to light SUVs on fire.
On one hand, we have one 'side' where they believe the earth is being damaged, the majority claim being that it's being very slowly damaged and generally no one is standing around yelling at construction crews...
...and there _still are_ people willing to commit massive property damage. To quote the FBI: 'In 2005, the FBI announced that the ELF is America's greatest domestic terrorist threat, responsible for over 1,200 "criminal incidents" amounting to tens of millions of dollars in damage to property.'
OTOH, we have this other group, who is fighting, according to them, _murder_. Not trees being cut down, not oil being burned to slightly damage environment, but clear, direct, outright murder of people...
...and they're content with yelling at people and glueing locks.
Something's really really off there. Where is the ELF equivalent for anti-abortion people, who wander around firebombing abortion providers?
While no one knows how many people are in 'ELF' (Or even what that really means), for 1200 incidents (And probably only 200 non-trivial ones that went beyond slashing tires or spray paint or something.) I'll guess it's about 300 people in total, clustered in groups of maybe a dozen at a time. Which is basically the same as the number of abortion protesters outside clinics.
(I actually find it strange to have to point out how _little_ violence or even vandalism there is from an organization on the right of the political spectrum, because frankly most of the political violence and vandalism and actual terrorism _is_ from the right at this moment in time...but it's all anti-tax or white-power or crazy Beck-conspiracy nonsense. )
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