A round about way of saying “Fuck you, Mr. Ryan”. Not all that good, but better before I had to explain it.
It is very hard to give a faction credit for good intentions, or for being “good people”, when the positions they constantly espouse are so consistently reprehensible, and based so consistently on simply opposing whatever “the other guys” try to do.
Remember that the Republicans’ stated primary goal in Obama’s first term was to make him a one-termer - their stated, primary goal. Not the welfare of the nation. Remember too that they’ve taken no initiatives during his second term other than trying to repeal Obamacare, 50 times now, and shut down the government rather than pay its bills. Now we even see their last VP candidate oppose school lunches.
So, what would be appropriate appellations that would be consistent with their being “good people” nonetheless?
No, samclem, “both sides” do not do it equally or even comparably, as comforting as it may be to dismiss the whole problem as beneath you. Refusal to use the factually correct words for a thing *promotes *ignorance rather than fights it.
None of which provides the slightest justification for attack on the people as opposed to the positions.
How do good people come up with consistently repugnant positions, then? What would be the contrary evidence for their being good people anyway?
No. serve brown paper bags as school lunches.
They’re good people because they might, if they feel like it, give a few bucks to charity here or there. Of course, the fact that the charity they give to is also a proselytizing organization bent on “saving your soul” is supposed to be ignored. All of that is supposed to overcome the fact that they spend much of their professional lives doing things that would cause Jesus to beat the fucking shit out of them were He actually here.
With a packet of ketchup. Gotta have a vegetable.
“Not with my tax dollars! Little mooch-maggots can fucking steal their own God-Damn ketchup from the McDonalds where their slut mom works.” — *Mitt Romney, or somebody with similar hair. *
Oh, FTR, none intended. If I was to justify attacking the people rather than the position, I would make a different argument.
Admittedly, I’ve lost the thread of your argument though. Surely it is appropriate to evaluate a Presidential candidate’s character. My assessment is that Ryan passes this particular bar (though in a debate forum he would lose points for not assessing his source adequately) and that Biden slipped up in 1987.
I assume you were just propping this general point:
Fair enough, but if you expanded your point over (say) 2 paragraphs, you might agree that there are occasions to call your opponents evil. I maintain that such claims should be subject to rigorous filters of accuracy and moreover public diplomacy and venue-appropriateness.
At any rate, I’ll repeat that false equivalences are both common and toxic to our public discourse.
Yes, and I’d add that the accusation of evil deserves great care, and it’s application should be avoided unless the claimed conduct or position is essentially unambiguously evil – that is, unless the substantial majority of of people agree with the underlying moral position.
For example, I am strongly pro-life. But I don’t call (or believe) that people advancing a pro-choice position are evil. They are in my view mistaken in their initial premises, to be sure, but they are not evil. (Of course, I acknowledge that many on the pro-life side do not approach the matter this way.)
By the same token, Ryan is not evil if he believes that handouts do not fight poverty as effectively as other methods - the “give a man a fish” aphorism comes to mind. It’s absolutely valid to disagree with this viewpoint; it’s not, in my view, appropriate to call him evil for it.
Because when people of any value system put their ideologies ahead of the well-being of actual, flesh-and-blood human beings, that makes them bad people.
I’m sure there’s some of that on the left, but you probably have to go to some lefty website to find it. On the right, it’s basically taken over the GOP: they’d rather have government do nothing to boost the economy than to have Obama get the credit for economic recovery, even though the result is that there aren’t enough jobs to go around. And then they don’t want to extend unemployment benefits or food stamps so that those people who can’t find jobs because there aren’t enough of them to go around can’t support their families, because they’re against government handouts. They’d rather have states refuse Federal Medicaid money than have millions of low-income Americans get insured. They’d rather block a minimum wage increase than for people who are working to be able to make ends meet.
Yeah, they are scum. They love “America” as it exists in some image they carry around in their minds, but because they believe what they believe, they inflict major damage on the lives of millions of Americans.
I believe in calling a spade a spade. Those who put principles ahead of people are poor excuses for human beings. End of story.
They refuse to give a man a fish, so he can eat TODAY! They’re EEEEEEVILLLLL!
Sorry, but it’s possible to say that the proper role of government is not to send more than it has, even if that means unemployment benefits are not extended…and not be evil.
Even if you teach a man to fish so he can catch a fish tomorrow, instead of feeding him today, it is a cruel joke on him if there are no fish in the river. And a damned malicious one, if you happen to know there are no fish there.
If there were jobs available for all, you would have an argument. But given a serious shortage of jobs, starving the unemployed so that they will be more motivated to find one of these jobs simply means that you’re going to starve a bunch of people, whether you’ve succeeded in motivating them or not.
Yes, that is in fact evil.
Oh yeah: tell me about the time Jesus urged ‘tough love’ for the poor. I’m leafing through the Gospels, but I can’t find that one.
So explain the refusal to consider higher taxes for the ultra-rich (who are literally enjoying the lowest tax rate in US history), explain the refusal to consider ending corporate handouts, explain the utter willingness to pay for bombs and bullets that cost more than government has (and for at least one unnecessary war). Why do all the fish go to those that already have fish while the poor go without? You might want to study the text you claim to believe in (hint: focus on the words in red text).
Sure, it is proper to say that government shouldn’t spend more than it has. So, why not discuss how to marshal more resources to address the problems we have? Why is it right to end unemployment benefits, for example, rather than figure out a way to keep them going?
It seems that the reasoning is backward. How about, we decide that the goal should be “let’s not let people starve”? Then, we devise a plan that achieves this goal. Instead, the plan is “how do we run this country as cheaply as possible” with no thought as to the consequences for real people.
Look. We know the solutions to most of our problems. We are just having trouble gathering up the will to act. And, from my perspective, the people who are preventing action are on the right side of the aisle.
In the back of my mind I wanted the flexibility to characterize advocates of extra-judicial death squads as evil. Seriously, that was what I had in mind. It’s not like all politics are US politics.
The problem is that he is making an empirical claim and many of his budgetary presentations in the past have been flim flam.
I don’t tend to call legislators evil: I think of them as representing a point of view. I do have mixed feelings about McConnell though: he identified a weakness in our constitutional structure and exploited it to the fullest. (Specifically, he recognized that bipartisanship disproportionately aids the party in power, so obstructionism makes a lot of political sense.) Now that he is done that, turnaround becomes fair play. But I am rather wary of such sleaze innovators. Our system is predicated on compromise after all.
The other issue touches upon a weakness in utilitarianism (and Christian charity). Once you acknowledge that the poor have a moral claim on those that are more fortunate, those frameworks don’t give a good sense of where to draw the line. Personally, I shrug at Republican claims given that the US safety net is far less generous than essentially all of Western Europe, excepting emerging economies such as Greece, Spain, and Portugal. If I lived in France or Germany though, I’d probably want them to tighten belts during times of prosperity. Most people live a life fall short of the demands of utilitarianism.
Still, circling back to Ryan and the Republican party in general, I’d sooner say they are populist sloganeers and intellectual phonies than that they are evil per se. I mean c’mon: attacking school lunches along bootstrap lines? I can see complaining that the middle class is improperly receiving subsidies but that’s not the argument he’s making. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the professional class has trended Republican since 1964. Back in 1960 Republicans has a solid lock on professionals: I understand that is no longer the case.
Back to evil. I haven’t put it in these terms before, but there’s something evil about advocating waterboarding in the US. Scylla established that it was indeed torture. Professional interrogators had established that torture doesn’t work very well as a method of extracting truthful information. Perhaps that wasn’t the goal. Some of the false intelligence presented during the run up to the Iraq War came from waterboarded prisoners who unsurprisingly told their American captors what they wanted to hear. Whether this is evil or just sick seems to me to be a topic of legitimate discussion.
With all due respect, this IMO is a serious watering-down of Ryan’s position.
Ryan has stated that we (the United States) “don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” Unless one is willing to split semantic hairs, I don’t see how that can be taken as anything but a sincere belief that the current “safety net” is lulling the poor into “complacency”, and that a substantial number of “able-bodied” poor aren’t really entitled to that help.
From October of 2012, Paul Ryan said "Right now about 60 percent of the American people get more benefits in dollar value from the federal government than they pay back in taxes. So we’re going to a majority of takers versus makers in America and that will be tough to come back from that. They’ll be dependent on the government for their livelihoods [rather] than themselves.” Laying aside his ridiculous 60% figure for “takers” (if he really believed that), how is anyone supposed to interpret that in any way other than a substantial number of the poor don’t really deserve government help?
Turning to his most recent address to CPAC, his use of the particular story regarding the school lunches is part and parcel of that disdain for the poor. It turns out that the child in his story–Maurice Mazyck–is now a social activist who partners with a group called No Kid Hungry - which (wait for it…) hooks up hungry kids with federal lunch programs. But for Ryan, the story’s interest ends at its usefulness for his particular political agenda, just another example of what Jonathan Berstein calls the lazy mendacity of right-wing political figures in general and Ryan in particular.
So yeah, I don’t just “disagree” with Ryan’s viewpoint; I find it and him to be repellent and opportunist (I personally don’t believe he’s evil, but only because that word IMO can seem a cartoonish oversimplification unless we’re talking about the Nazis). I really don’t see how anyone paying attention could think otherwise.
But this theft of ketchup packets from McDonalds is exactly why, to make any profit, they must pay their employees so little that they (the employees) must get food stamps, and their kids must get subsidized school lunches! Q.E.D.
I don’t understand that. I did not give two shits where my lunch came from when I was a kid. Heck, I preferred school lunches to the lukewarm milk and same-old stale sandwich I could get from home…
Just chiming in I think this is right! It’s during prosperous times that any “belt-tightening” should take place because during prosperous times is when there is more opportunity for the economy to run itself well.