But “Christ” starts the sentence, so no expectation of whether “god” would be capitalized for consistency can be inferred.
ETA: Beaten to it.
I see no reason why these need be mutually exclusive. ETA: Also, “upset” has more than one meaning. I wouldn’t categorize the results colloquially as an “upset,” but a pedantic dictionary reading of the word indicates it can be used in that manner.
Thinking has nothing to do with it.
Well, if congress is *anything *like this thread, we should be out of the woods in no time.
And back in the woods shortly afterwards 
Remind me to never go to a Billy Bragg show. When I pay money to see a musical act I’d rather they shut the fuck up about politics and play music.
If you knew Billy Bragg you would have known what you were getting. Most people there would have been pissed if there wasn’t that kind of show.
Well, I tried. I had actually thought that some conservative would come along and help me understand where he was coming from. My bad.
Mods, please feel free to close this thread. Or if not you all can go back to arguing what the meaning of is, is.
I give up
My theory is they can’t explain, and they can’t because much of the response to the economic crisis is irrational. On top of that, the GOP and the Tea Party have been feeding that irrationality, e.g., by saying that government spending is the problem when it’s currently part of the solution, and by saying that the deficit was caused by liberal big-spenders when it was caused by (1) wars (2) tax cuts (3) recession.
My understanding is that, yes, everyone falls in to some class that is protected, mainly because crimes based on gender are considered “hate crimes.” But that doesn’t mean all classes are protected. For example, I remember not long ago at all that righties got riled up about veterans not being a protected class. There are other classes that are not offered protection, such as obese, alcoholics, homeless, and I’m sure many others. So yeah, some classes are offered more protection than others. My point is “hate crimes” in general are stupid and at the very least offer the perception that certain people get preferential treatment.
Being an elected office holder is not a right. Women are free to run and, indeed, some of them win elections. You’d need stats showing that women lose a substantially larger percentage of elections in which they run to show that are somehow being unfairly judged. Even if they are somehow unfairly judged at election time, which I do not at all concede, they still at least have the same rights as men.
Perhaps this is where we disagree: for me equality is not just about rights. On paper, African Americans got equality after the Civil War, because legally they had equal rights. However, politically, economically and socially they continued to be oppressed. So, while the 14th Amendment gave them equality under the U.S. Constitution, in reality they didn’t come even close to equality until after the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
There’s nothing remotely ranty about the OP, so I’m moving this over to GD. Please try to recall that the thread is no longer in the Pit when reading some of the more intemperate posts made before the move.
I kind of acknowledged that equality is not JUST rights when I said you’d need data to show that women are unfairly judged by the general voting public. Otherwise, the fact that elected officials are not split 50/50 men/women doesn’t mean much. Could be women just choose different career paths. Furthermore, I would pretty much agree with your explanation of African Americans’ rights.
Miller, you might want to also change the thread title to: *A Pedantic Discussion Over the Meaning of ‘Equality’ *while you’re at it. We wouldn’t want anyone to get confused.
Well, I’ll give healthcare a go. You say that the private sector has tried and failed, so now it’s time to give the public sector a shot. I disagree.
First, one of the big reasons healthcare is less than perfect now is that it is tied so much to employment. This gives the actual consumer little ability or motivation to negotiate for themselves. Why is that so? The government made it that way by providing tax breaks to companies that provide health insurance. So, the problem is not enough private sector activity (ie, competition by insurers for customers).
Second, the claim that UHC provides better healthcare is not supported by the evidence. The statistics cited for this proposition are statistics about the health of different populations. More goes into the health of a population than the quality of its healthcare. So, saying that French people are healthier than Americans doesn’t show that UHC provides better healthcare.
Third, lowering administrative costs is a red herring–it’s not a benefit in and of itself. Iim sure we could lower the administrative costs inherent in the food production and distribution system by socializing it–does that alone make it a good idea?
Fourth, an econmy must grow at a healthy pace for a socety to survive with any sort of decent standard of living. Large entitlement programs necessitate higher taxes, which slows economic growth, which is a per se bad thing.
I’ve got more but I’ll stop there.
Well, lowering administrative costs actually is a benefit in and of itself. It might not be a sufficient benefit, but it is, of course, a benefit. It might be outweighed by other losses, but it is, of course, in and of itself, a benefit.
And why on earth do you say there would be lower administrative costs in socializing food production and distribution. One of the big strikes against state ownership and control is the increase in admin costs. Generally speaking the private sector is claimed to lower these. Why would you think food would be different? Why would you think that goernment bureaucracies determining what is produed, where, for how much, and where it is delivered, stored and sold would have lower administrative costs than the current system?
Why it is important in health care is that despite the usual idea that government provided services have higher administrative costs, the evidence is pretty clear that it is lower with health care.
Now, lower admin costs isn’t enough to justify it (even though it is obviously a benefit in and of itself). But it is another check point in favor of it, as more out of each gvoerment dollar spent will go to health care, rather than admin costs (which is, obviously, a benefit in and of itself).
The private sector has failed utterly. Pushing it to an entirely private sector system would make it worse. It is the elements of the private sector that have made the system into the shambles it is today. Profit motivates insurance companies to not pay when they can get away with it. It is cheaper to exclude someone with a chronic illness than it is to cover them. So they will be excluded without government involvement. Then you have a situation where the government is forced to pay for the people who can’t get insurance.
Which is the profound silliness of the anti-government involvement stance. You want the private sector to cover the people it can make a profit on and the public sector, the government, to cover the people who are unprofitable to get private insurance. A real free market enthusiast wouldn’t be looking to support corporate welfare like this.
I can’t force you to actually face reality and accept facts, but suffice it to say that you are completely and utterly wrong. UHC provides better results and lower costs. Only someone who doesn’t care about costs or results because of ideology can possibly argue against it.
It would if 30 million Americans were priced out of the food market because of private industry’s pathetic failure.
The HCR law actually lowers government costs and lessens the burden on business. Ask the CBO, they’ll tell you.
You might want to bring out the rest, because what you have already brought is simply misunderstandings and ideological dogma.
I will try to address the two points in the OP:
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I think one of the problems in this debate is that many, many people, on either side, are fiscally conservative but socially liberal. I may be hardcore about spending and taxes, but I am also hardcore about gay rights, drug legalization, prostitution, Blue laws, etc. It is one of the original traits of the Tea Party, before the crazies invaded and the press bent the coverage in their favor (not necessarily for any media bias, but because they sell more newspapers). I am happy to not only compromise on most social issues, but I may even “out compromise” you on many of them. This is a great way to forge a good working environment in a split government.
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Again, I think that most people can agree that they are tired of the bailouts for businesses and banks. But the fiscal conservative also is tired of the other side of things - the constant shoveling of money into a broken educational system that’s already demonstrated that more money doesn’t help, a Social Security system that’s being ignored, etc., and the answer from the Left on that side of things is to shovel more money into it. That money is coming from the upper-middle class, who is suffering just as much budget trouble as anyone else.
For me , the unemployment extensions are an example - we keep extending it, and extending it, and I see Help Wanted signs everywhere, and the paper is full of jobs available. I have no idea why people complain about not being able to find a job. Of course, it may not be in your field, or it may be a lot less than you used to make. But I was raised that, oh well, shit happens, and you downgrade your lifestyle, you move, you do whatever you have to. Life is hard work, and you do what you have to do. For me, who’s budget has suffered the same downgrade - having to pay more in taxes to fund programs for people who don’t seem to be willing to put in the hard work that I have to get the things that I want, seems like a shit deal.
There is a lot of middle ground out there, it’s only a matter of putting the loudmouths on both sides in the tool shed, and letting the grown-ups actually talk and compromise.
The problem is that many of us ‘conservatives’ have patiently explained where we are coming from many times on this board, only to see our point of view caricatured, ignored, replaced with the current Democratic talking points or the latest rant from Keith Olbermann or some damned thing.
I suspect most of the liberals on this board only ask questions of conservatives hoping to get stupid answers they can mock or easily refute. When you respond with something detailed and not easy to throw a soundbite at, you usually get either silence in response, or a mischaracterization of what you said, or a response that makes it clear that the other person didn’t really bother to read your message but just responded against some caricature of your position that he has in his mind.
So don’t be surprised if you don’t get the full cooperation of the board’s ‘conservatives’ to yet another thread asking them to explain themselves.
And it’s not like it’s hard to find thoughtful conservative commentary out on the web that you could use to educate yourself. Of course, liberals like to find the craziest conservatives they can, and then label them as the standard-bearers for the ideology. But there are plenty of sane conservatives around. George Will, for example. Read some of his columns and you might get a better picture of where conservatives are coming from.
Or you could read the CATO institute’s site, or some of the articles at the Library of Economics and Freedom at George Mason University, where a lot of libertarian/conservative policy is discussed. They also have an excellent series of podcasts consisting of economists mixing it up with political scientists, media figures, or other movers and shakers. Well worth listening to if you truly want to understand the free-market proponents’ point of view.