JFTR, I didn’t object to your bringing up your experience, or even to your using it to rebut Lobohan’s incorrect jibe; I merely commented on your using it as a bludgeon against people who haven’t reported any epiphanies they may have had for your edification.
I can sympathise (to a point) with your desire to lash out (a direct comparison with the great circumnavigator would probably raise my hackles, too), but I tend to think of you as a little more classy that that.
I’ll ask you the same kind of question I asked elucidator earlier: does this mean that my opponents in the thread can use all sorts of tactics without raising anyone’s eyebrow, but I’m constrained in my responses somehow?
I’m reminded of Bill Cosby’s routine imagining the coin toss to determine field advantage in football being applied to the American Revolution: The Minutemen call heads… it’s heads. OK, the Minutemen get to wear whatever they want, 'n hide behind trees and rocks, and shoot whenever they want… British got to wear red coats and march in a straight line!
Let us take a moment to commend friend Bricker’s lurching, hesitant, but undeniable steps away from the path of political error. If this should prove insufficient to smooth his ruffled feathers, I will call for a Level One response from the SDMB Hug Squad.
You did it grudgingly for SSM, presumably an issue you could give a shit about. The fact that you held off for so long only underscores how unmovable you are. You stuck to keeping rights from other Americans for something that had zero impact on you. And you did it for purely ideological reasons.
Don’t try to pretend that your eventual conversion to reason is some kind of achievement. You have grudgingly climbed out of moronic ideology and achieved what should be self-evident.
As for me:
I for one have turned around on tort reform in this very thread. I thought I had a solid grasp on it and when new information came out I changed my stance. Only a moron is immune to facts.
I’m not liberal because it’s my team, I’m liberal because I’ve evaluated the issues and I more often than not fall on the liberal side because of rational reasoning.
For instance I understand that we have a society that shares some costs to everyone’s benefit and it will be better if we have more universal healthcare. You however appear to fear magic space elves who will lube up every slope in Christendom.
But enough about me, we were talking about how you’re arguing rubbish. Do go on. 
It’s your slope. Me and [del]Waldo Pepper[/del]The Other Waldo Pepper are attempting to flesh it out. It’d be just dandy if you’d join in. You could either look at other countries (I know. The inferior ones.) and use them as an example to grease your lil hill there, or you could pull an example from the ether of the next thing those workers will be buying for us non workers.
I’m simply looking at it from a government coffer point of view. Yes certain people will pay more. Shit happens then you die. Life’s not fair. I’m accepting that as a given and moving on. The status stays mostly quo. All taxes go up an equal bit to help fund. What would be the negative of the increased taxes.
Except that Bricker seems to be refusing to play. Maybe there are too many qualifications that need to be made for such a discussion to move forward.
Apart from the inefficiency of this arrangement, it isn’t entirely cost-free to you. You could conceivably be punished for the rest of your life for your inability to pay that bill, what with the impact on your credit rating.
As to cutting edge treatments–and I wish I’d thought of saying it this way before: I’m not convinced that it’s defensible to run a high priced system for the elites of the world, at the expense of leaving 37M of our own nationals uninsured.
It’s hard to know which of these assertions to rebut first. I thought of addressing them seriatim, to give some sort of order to the response, but realized that such a disordered set of accusations would only be more confusing with such an approach. Alphabetically seems likewise unhelpful. So I’ll address them in order of decreasing silliness.
“Grudgingly?” No. I held my position based on what I thought were solid reasons. As each was rebutted, I moved on to the next. When there were no reasons to support my position left unrebutted, I abandoned the position. That’s not grudging – that’s the essence of being convinced by debate. I didn’t hold the opposition to same-sex marriage because of some personal animus towards gays, and there was no reason to begrudge anyone anything. You seem to confuse “grudgingly” with some other word that means something else.
“An issue I could give a shit about…” If you mean, “…an issue that affected me personally…” then that’s true. But that’s true of most issues on this message board to one degree or another. Even if we care passionately about an issue, our support or rejection of it rarely moves the issue closer to some kind of actual decision or change. If you’re advancing the canard that one can only have an opinion about an issue that affects them personally, then I disagree. If nothing else, I’m a voter. Like any other voter, I’m entitled to express my policy preferences at the ballot box. By your lights, since I “couldn’t give a shit” about civil unions, one would think that you’d have wanted me to be silent about my approval for them, too – except that I suspect that’s untrue. I suspect if there had been a discussion in those times that targeted civil unions versus no legal rights at all for same-sex couples, you would have welcomed my support on this “issue I don’t give a shit about.” Right?
“Purely ideological reasons.” This commentary comes last, because you have (undoubtedly by accident) offered an observation that has a grain of truth.
What other reasons are there? The concept that all people should have equal rights, which you would most likely offer in support of same-sex marriage, is itself an ideological reason, is it not? At their heart, all of this argument is ideological: we imagine a set of principles that we believe should govern society and seek to adopt actions that will lead to those principles. In the present debate, we might imagine someone virulently opposed to socialized medicine who suddenly contracts a rare disease and is dropped by his insurance company – and how he reacts. If he maintains his opposition, we might applaud his commitment to ideology or scorn his pigheaded reliance on ideology. And if he reverses himself, and seeks public help for his condition… he has STILL acted on ideology, this time the ideology that what benefits him is the real motivator.
So I’ll grant you that my positions in every debate are influenced by ideology, as are yours, as are everyone’s. But I’ll also point out that the “ideology” in question is not purely partisan on my part, which is why adducing facts that contradict my assumptions will get me to change my course.
See, now, for someone who claims a fondness for rational reasoning, you leapt into a strawman pretty quickly, there. Two peopel may each rely on rational reasoning to reach opposite conclusions, if their initial assumptions – their postulates, if you will – differ. You begin and end your analysis with the postulate that it will be better for everyone to share costs, and you reason for that – quite rationally – that this applies to healthcare just as much as anything else. You are undoubtedly willing to be swayed from that position as it relates to any given subject, but it remains your starting, favored position.
I don’t share it. I believe that as a whole, humanity benefits not by lifting everyone up, but by creating environments that allow for achieving individuals to garner greater rewards. It is better, in my view, for everyone to have to work for everything, because it fosters a spirit of achievement and competitiveness that leads to innovation. I am willing to be swayed from THAT position as it relates to any given subject, but it remains my favored, default position.
We are each applying rational analyses to our positions. Only one of us knows it, apparently.
I can see that. I can totally understand where Bricker and others are coming from on the point that “I shouldn’t have to pay your way”, but it would seem to me that getting more of the bills paid would keep the cost of the bills from rising to compensate for the fact that so many are walked away from.
I have a hard time not buying into the fact that a more healthy populace would be a more productive one, so if simple sicknesses were treated before they became bigger issues, maybe more people would be working and pumping on the old economy. When I go from town to town here in Texas, the people in more economically depressed areas tend to be less healthy. I am not sure if lack of insurance is keeping them from being generally healthy, but I think its certainly plausable that lack of insurance will make something minor into something much worse very quickly.
This is the winning entry in publicoptionplease.com’s art contest.
I find the “collective body” language quite disturbing, to say nothing of the image. Washington is the heart of the nation??
Do proponents of this idea really find this image inspiring?
We all know Texas is the heart of the nation, at least us Texan’s do. 
I think the picture is gross. I think you may be reading too much into it. Where the hell else were they going to put the heart? Missouri?
Well, if the analog is to the human body, then Missouri isn’t too bad a spot. But that’s merely cavilling; my real disquiet comes from the text.
OHIO is the heart of hall. Duh! It’s even shaped like a heart.
I’ll call Iowa the stomach, Texas the rear end, and Florida the urinary tract of America.
Man, that heart lookls like part of some predatory squid-like creature. The veins and arteries join at far too agressive an angle for proper socialist art, unless the artist was thinking about brambles or doing LSD.
What you found there is a failure as a poster; a nicely done failure, but still the image does not play well with the obvious political goal.
Oh, come on. They’re quoting Jefferson. I don’t hear you complaining when people talk about the tree of liberty needing refreshing.
I don’t know how I got “heart of hall” when I meant “heart of it all.” Obviously America’s brains aren’t located anywhere near me this morning.
Well, it’s sure all over the web as a Jefferson quote.
Strangely enough, though, not one of the “brainy quotes” and “cool quotes” pages actually identifies the source of the quote. And it didn’t feel Jeffersonian to me.
Even more strangely, the exact phrase appears in “The Idea of a Patriot King,” by Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, in a 1738 essay – five years before Jefferson was even born.
Now, this just begs for a wry observation about the commitment to truth and accuracy exhibited by the forces pushing UHC. And this being the Pit, it’s certainly an appropriate place to make such a comment. Lord knows that this thread, with the feeble-minded insistence that the video linked to Lieberman shows him defending Medicare expansion three months ago, instead of the truthful statement that three months ago, he was explaining his 2006 stances… well, this thread would be EXACTLY the right place for such a cheap shot, wouldn’t it?
But of course it’s simply an error, not proof of anything except a rather cursory fact-check of an wholly collateral piece of information.
So my only response to you is: I don’t believe it’s a Jefferson quote.
What, no comment about what the tree of liberty is to be watered with? :dubious:
Your magnanimousness and restraint in avoidance of the cheap shot would be much more commendable if you weren’t holding up a sign saying “Look how magnanimous and restrained I am!”
Oh, alright, they’re not quoting Jefferson - but they’re pretending to, and that’s just as good, right?
Okay, maybe not, although this Henry St. John fellow sounds like a capital guy, but Wikipedia had something interesting to say about him:
So it’s entirely possible that Jefferson did borrow his exact words.
