Politics: A new beginning

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch The marketplace takes care of the rest.

if that were strictly true, some of the goldbricking fucks here with 1000+ posts would be getting fired. NTTAWWT

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
if that were strictly true, some of the goldbricking fucks here with 1000+ posts would be getting fired. NTTAWWT

note that the solid american's here have far less than 1000 posts, and the fuzzy logic crowd is all way above, not even counting socks.

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
BTW, your use of "belief" is telling. Are there any other matters of theology that the state should have scripts for?

All morality is derived from religiousity? I didn't know . . .

Continue your outraged cheerleading, where the main issue is already answered in your mind. Consider your views when a stranger is murdered, and you discover that you have constructed a moral system that only allows you the freedom to verbally object, 'cuz, after all, the murderer has rights and needs and desires, too. That's what you assume here.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
It seems to me that you are a libertarian up to the point when you say the government should adopt a position on the (moral) question of whether a fetus is "a human life."* Why doesn't a libertarian say, I'm pro-life, but I respect my neighbor's autonomy to decide otherwise?


* Not really the question, since everyone agrees that fetuses are human.

I don't know what other libertarian's say, but for me it's for the same reason that I DON"T say "I'm pro-life, but I respect my neighbor's autonomy to kill his wife."

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Sexual Harassment Panda
If, as Not Me says, there aren't any doctors doing D&Es, how are there thousands and thousands of dead babies produced because someone was inconvenienced?

I didn't say that there aren't any docs doing D&Es. The women in the weblog claimed she would have to go to out of state to get a certain procedure. I took that to mean that there weren't any docs in MN who would do it. Why else would she have to go out of state?

Originally posted by Sexual Harassment Panda
If mothers facing medical emergencies can't get these because of the lack of providers, who's doing the thousands and thousands of elective D&Es?

Why are you saying mother's facing medical emergencies can't get these? Who said that? The Supreme Court specifically struck down the Nebraska law for that exact reason. Now if there aren't any doctors who will do them, that is a different issue. There aren't any neurosurgeons in rural MN and the other doctors are unwilling to do brain surgery since they haven't been trained to do it. So if you have a brain tumor and live in rural MN, you have to travel to the twin cities for your operation. Same is true of these late term abortions. In some places in the country, there aren't any docs who do them.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
I don't know what other libertarian's say, but for me it's for the same reason that I DON"T say "I'm pro-life, but I respect my neighbor's autonomy to kill his wife."

Well, surely it's not a question of life and death, or you'd have no problem with seatbelt laws.

[Not Me]

If you want to know accurate abortion stats, you can click here:

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5212a1.htm

Very few late term abortions are performed in the US.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
Well, surely it's not a question of life and death, or you'd have no problem with seatbelt laws.

Are you having fun toying with me yet?

[The Larry Davis Experience]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
As the LA Times reports today, Arnold was on CNN yesterday and suggested that he might suspend Proposition 98, an initiative that guarantees a certain minimum level of school funding. To anyone who wasn't in California during the campaign it's hard to get across the depth of the deceit this demonstrates. [url=http://www.politicsus.com/gubernatorial%20press%20releases/Schwarzenegger/090303.htm]
...
I haven't been paying close attention, and hope Drum is overreacting.

I don't think he is overreacting. AS is faced by a difficult situation made more difficult by his politically expedient campaign promises. We are only beginning to see his struggles.

Last week while the legislature was gearing up for the vote on the spending cap and the bond issue a bunch of school administrators got all over AS about how his spending cap proposal would effectively eliminate the ability of those schools to get paid back for certain school funds (IIRC, over a billion dollars) that the state has unilaterally "borrowed" during the recent budget crunches. AS quickly asked the schools to redraft his proposal to make sure their money could be returned. In light of this little episode (and the fact that no one would have mentioned it if the school folks hadn't squawked) I was not all that surprised to hear the murmurings about Prop 98 school funding levels.

To me this all means that either (a) AS has been floating proposals out there that haven't totally been thought out yet or (b) AS has already begun weighing which of his campaign promises are politically inviolable (cut the car tax, balance the budget w/o new taxes) and which can be sidestepped (school funding, fundraising during budget negotiations).

Neither one seems to bode well, but as sgtclub has correctly pointed out, we should give the guy some time. Or some rope to hang himself, depending on your level of pessimism.

btw, why is it that AS's aides always refer to his huge voter mandate? Didn't he get less than 50% of the votes cast?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Are you having fun toying with me yet?

I think that libertarianism is incoherent -- it's a preference about certain kinds of outcomes masquerading as a principle about process -- and you have said nothing to convince me otherwise.

[bilmore]

Originally posted by The Larry Davis Experience
btw, why is it that AS's aides always refer to his huge voter mandate? Didn't he get less than 50% of the votes cast?

It's a little disingenuous, because it refers to a poll that concluded that over 87% of voters who weighed more than four hundred pounds voted for AS.

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally posted by bilmore
All morality is derived from religiousity? I didn't know . . .

Continue your outraged cheerleading, where the main issue is already answered in your mind. Consider your views when a stranger is murdered, and you discover that you have constructed a moral system that only allows you the freedom to verbally object, 'cuz, after all, the murderer has rights and needs and desires, too. That's what you assume here.

Yeah, I'm pro-murder. That's why I was such a Saddam fan. {Sniff.}

Minnesota enacted a bad law with good intentions. (I understand your being defensive about it; hell, I guess I'm a little defensive about Warren Buffet saying Prop 13 was a bad idea, even though that's inarguably true.) That bad law produces shockingly bad results for 86 people a year --- bad results that you're rather not discuss because it isn't productive to the debate, whatever that means --- and much more invisibly bad results for the hundreds of other women who seek to terminate pregnancies arising from everything from rape and incest to drunken weekends to bad marriages. You know what? I no longer care about what happens in Minnesota. Take care of your own. Just promise me you'll PM the mom-to-be who wrote the blog, and tell her your feelings. Until you do, forcing a doctor to have that uncomfortable conversation on your behalf is laughably chickenshit. Until you do, your moral superiority is a total crock of shit.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
I think that libertarianism is incoherent -- it's a preference about certain kinds of outcomes masquerading as a principle about process -- and you have said nothing to convince me otherwise.

You can say that about any philosophy or political ideology. I'm not a knee jerk libertarian, but I am on the libertarian side of the spectrum.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
You can say that about any philosophy or political ideology. I'm not a knee jerk libertarian, but I am on the libertarian side of the spectrum.

Actually, no. Some people have principles. And libertarianism is ostensibly defined by a fairly simple set of principles. They're incoherent, but most libertarians don't know that.

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
Minnesota enacted a bad law with good intentions.

Are we that foreign to each other that you couldn't understand that that was my fucking point?

That bad law produces shockingly bad results for 86 people a year . . .

While the other choices for bad law produce thousands of completely final bad results, and the proponents of THIS particular bad law saw this badness as the only logical and working response to an ideology that would produce many more of those completely final bad results.

You know what? I no longer care about what happens in Minnesota. Take care of your own. Just promise me you'll PM the mom-to-be who wrote the blog, and tell her your feelings. Until you do, forcing a doctor to have that uncomfortable conversation on your behalf is laughably chickenshit. Until you do, your moral superiority is a total crock of shit.

While yours, premised on wilfully dealing with this one badly-worded statute as if it exists separate and apart from the entire abortion debate, is a shining example of truth, beauty, and light? Right.