Commenter Archive

And some of the Swedes' best friends are black, right?

If you don't put sick-time payouts in the contract then we'll STRIKE.

You beg the question of whether the "extreme wealth inequality" is a bad thing. Are we assuming that wealth inequality is bad based on historical experience? Because in historical experience, the low end of the equality scale was generally starving to death. In modern America, the low end of the equality scale has cars and TVs and cell phones and is so well-fed that their biggest health problem is obesity.

And it seems to me that this is something that Kain alludes to in his mention of Sweden, with business and labor working cooperatively. American unions always seem to act like it's 1921 and Andrew Carnegie is making asbestos-scrapers buy their own dust masks.

I don't understand.

I'm saying that when you describe the "rubber sheet" model of gravity, you wind up with someone wondering what happens if you poke a hole in the sheet.

"Of course there are problems with this."

HIPAA making such identity-linked reportage illegal, for example.

And you might as well also suggest that for certain categories, the mother in question should perhaps be given some kind of indicator to show her poor moral character. Maybe a red "A" sewn on a white piece of fabric, and she's legally required to wear it everywhere.

It's been my experience that any attempt to use analogy to explain a physics principle will result in trouble. It's important, when making an analogy, to explain where it's limited and how far you can generalize it.

At no time did the published papers change. What happened was that No True Scot started to come into play as people pointed out that the AGW "consensus" wasn't nearly as solid as the AGW supporters said that it was.

Supporters like GeneralNBForrest, right down-thread.

We'd have more scientists and engineers if we had more jobs for them to do. But we'd rather give money to old people and poor people, so we don't have any jobs for scientists or engineers anymore.

And many deniers would love to be taken seriously when they do present factual arguments that prove the contrary. Instead they're told all about how their anti-science denierism is blinding them to the obvious truth, leading them to err in their interpretation, leading them to cherry-pick data, leading them to assume all the errors will go their preferred way...

You say that as though the Democrats are out there intellectually bench-pressing bulldozers.

If the bank is repossessing your house I'm not sure that a sense of "reality" would help either. When Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses, he didn't mean it as an insult.

In fact, no specific weapon is called out in the Constitution. Should we infer that the "arms" described by the Second Amendment don't actually include any type of firearm at all?

It must be nice to live in your world, where you can just invent reprehensible beliefs and assign them to labels that other people use to describe themselves.

To me, the best argument against AGW has been made by the AGW side themselves.

Because, at first, it was "ALL scientists agree."
Then it was "MOST scientists agree."
Then it was "LOTS OF scientists agree."
Then it was "ALL THE CLIMATE SCIENSTS agree."
Then it was "All the climate scientists WHO ACTUALLY DO RESEARCH agree."
Then it was "All the climate scientists who actually do research AND ARE UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS agree."
Then it was "All the climate scientists who actually do research and are university professors AND AREN'T PAID BY EXXON agree..."

And at no stage was there ever mention that, suddenly, a whole bunch of "supporters" had suddenly been flipped to "deniers". Indeed, in the classic 1984 tradition, we were told that the current argument had ALWAYS been the argument presented. They always had meant "publicly-funded climate-change researchers" when they talked about the "overwhelming consensus among scientists". Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

"But I have a question: how does organized labor work as a counter to the financial industry?"

How do beans work as an answer to crocodiles?

Organized labor doesn't work as a counter to the financial industry because the two have nothing to do with each other. The "capital/labor" distinction which organized labor depends on doesn't exist in the financial industry; effectively, the market is the boss and every banker is labor.

So an organization that supports a viewpoint should not be permitted to provide a public service?

Congratulations, you've successfully argued that no non-government entity can be allowed to provide a public service, as it can always be argued that a private entity is "supporting a viewpoint", even if that viewpoint is "eat at Joe's". Because if Joe's is allowed to put their logo on the food containers or the servers' uniforms, then isn't that a form of advertising?

And when you say "oh, well Joe's can provide food containers with no logo and tell their servers to wear plain white clothes", then I ask "how is that functionally different from having civil servants doing it?"

so...what's your definition, then? You clearly have one in mind. Why not just tell me what you mean and stop this dancing around?

"YOUR FUCKIN WRONG U FUCKIN MORAN GROW A BRAIN" is hardly "schooled".

As the article points out, the nation at the time derived most of its income from trade, and trade security was indeed a matter of national security. The modern equivalent would be requiring the Navy to provide health care for sailors (as opposed to paying them more and expecting them to handle it themselves.) And this is in fact what the Navy does.

"...if universal health care could be demonstrated to have national security implications, it would pass that test?"

Hey, yeah, or maybe we could show that health care was a matter of Interstate Commerce. Don't we have some kind of Clause about that?

"This sorta implies that an employer mandate isn’t unconstitutional?"

And--again, as the article points out--the employer mandate in Obamacare is not being challenged.

The point being that if you support same-sex marriage because you think cohabitation is immoral, you'll be seen as reprehensible, because "cohabitation is not immoral" is a tenet of Progressive ideology.

"Whether what is actually a problem? The conflation of mission? I confess, I didn’t think this was “begging the question”, I assume that everyone would acknowledge that there have been historical problems here. You don’t?"

Shouldn't it be obvious that I don't? If you feel that Catholic missions are proselytizing and that this is bad, then start your own mission. Or, as is the fashion these days, insist that if an organization gets one thin dime of government money, then it needs to abide by every moral standard the government espouses--and that tax breaks and fee waivers count as money.

"[M]any pro-market folks will turn around and ridicule public solutions for being full of bureaucracy and red tape and inefficiency while simultaneously not holding their own plans up for similar scrutiny."

Is this a failure of the idea of private providers of public service? Or is this a specific failure of a specific person or plan?

What was the point of that?

I'm still not really sure what you mean by "Freedom From Want". Like I said, men have many wants; at what point should they no longer be free of them?

Most libraries send the contents of the "donation" box straight to Goodwill.

Of course, this is because most library donation boxes wind up stuffed with mass-market hardcovers. People feel stupid throwing away a $30 book they only read once. So it goes to the library, because hey, libraries are all about books, right? So here's a book for the library to have! Yay! No guilt! I'm not stupid!

"For example, I actually give a great amount of credit to the Catholic church for its work in health services and education. However, it does not do a good job of separating either of those two missions from its religious motivations. "

You're begging the question of whether this is actually a problem.

"“Privatize it and the market will fix it” seems more common than, “See, if we create a market for services like *this*, then market forces will result in *that*, and that’s as good if not better than the alternative”. "

That's probably because "Privatize and the market will fix it" is easier and quicker to say than "here is a twelve-page plan outlining exactly how we will encourage private profit-seeking entities to best provide a service that benefits the public". I very much doubt that, except for the anarcho-libertarians, they actually mean "shut down the Parks And Rec bureau today and everything will be fine tomorrow".