Like any good politician, he doesn’t quite say he believes in paganism, he’s just willing to use it and any number of other religions to bolster his position. A position I do not necessarily disagree with, I hasten to add. But when someone starts talking about goddesses and nature worship, you start to wonder whether the other stuff he’s saying is a bunch of malarkey too.
Then destroy the Party and re-form a portion of it named something else that represents what people like me that lean conservative but eschew religion want: less government intrusion, less wasteful spending, a strong military, an embrace of science, tolerance towards marijuana laws, homosexuals and anyone else, provide some form of government healthcare and do everything in our power to reduce the deficit.
Yeah, it’ll happen.
Speaking of which, it’s weird to me how we’ve become a nation of just two very powerful and monetarily connected political parties. Back in the day it seemed to not be a big deal for a new party to come along…populists, Whigs, whatever. It seems incredibly unlikely that we will deviate from the two parties we currently have in the near future.
Gore is a Baptist. What has he said about goddesses and nature worship?
Again: That kind of conservatives are not numerous enough to win alone. Because “winning” under our present system takes a majority or a plurality – see below.
But, note that America has almost always had some form of two-party system.
Why? It’s not our political culture, it’s our political system.
What we have now in America is called a “first-past-the-post/winner-take-all” system combined with a “single-member-district” system: The legislature’s jurisdictional territory is divided into geographic districts of roughly equal population, and each district elects one representative by majority-or-plurality vote. (“Plurality” meaning you can win the seat with fewer than 50% of the votes cast, so long as you get more votes than any other candidate for the seat.) That’s the system we use to elect the House, every state legislature, and most other multimember policymaking bodies. (Some county commissions and city councils are elected “at large,” which is less democratic still – that’s another discussion.)
The problem with that electoral system, from any third-partisan’s point of view, is that it naturally forces a two-party political system. Consider: Suppose, in your state’s next election to the state legislature, 10% of the voters vote Libertarian (or substitute Green, or Socialist, or Constitution Party, whatever, same mechanics apply) – how many Libertarians get elected? None, because there are not enough Libertarians in any one district to form a plurality. No political party, therefore, can make it save by being a “big tent” party – which leads to the confusion as to, e.g., just what the GOP stands for these days, when it includes libertarians and paleocons and neocons and theocons and bizcons and those factions don’t always see eye-to-eye. That is why America has always had a two-party political system, except when it had a one-party system. There is no room for more than two.
Under a proportional representation system (which most of the world’s democracies use, in one form or another – there are several forms), OTOH, if the Libertarians get 10% of the votes, they get (more or less) 10% of the seats.
Healthcare has to do with science. What you commented on was “healthcare law” (your phrase, bolding for emphasis mine). There is a huge difference. For example, this has nothing to do with science:
This is you attempting more relativism with the parties, something you failed to do with science in particular, so now you take a debate over something that at times pertains to science to misrepresent that the arguments were all about science. They weren’t. The healthcare debate was about who gets insured and who pays for it. Insurance ain’t science. Medical billing ain’t science.
Now to be fair, let’s let you finish your point:
That’s not really science either: It’s science fiction.
It might be an issue pertaining to science if indeed Obamacare attempted to take medical decisions out of the hands of trained professionals. However, that’s not actually something in Obamacare at all. Nothing in the Heathcare Reform Act allows for anyone other than trained physicians or the patient to have a say in the manner of care one receives. So scientists and physicians needn’t concern themselves, which is why they (and “liberals”) aren’t concerning themselves.
That’s okay. Another science-denying Republican Sarah Palin made the same mistake when she erroneously complained about so-called “death panels.” So you’re in good company! I mean, she was almost Vice President…
A nice sentiment, but unfortunately, this all starts at the top. You cannot even vote for Romney without condoning scientific ignorance:
How many of the Republicans and Romney-supporting independents who post so eloquently in Great Debates are going to start with this Presidential election when it comes to voting against ignorance?
Since none of them could be bothered to even show up for their pitting, I don’t think many.
Sorry, but you’re just wrong about this. Insurance companies employ thousands of doctors to make judgments about the efficacy of different treatments and to second-guess the patient’s doctor. Any insurance company that paid no attention to science would soon be out of business. The PPACA, being essentially a set of insurance regulations, is also deeply intertwined with the practice of medicine. The trouble is, PPACA was set up by politicians, so it’s riddled with sops to alternative medicine. Bless the politicians, they just can’t help themselves.
But that’s not what you said. You said:
Your attempts to offer six degrees of Kevin Bacon are amusing though. Insurance companies hiring doctors happened long before Obamacare so your excuse for bringing up the healthcare debate is even more pitiful.
Care to respond to the numerous other questions and criticisms of your views and the strawmen and hand-waving and non-cited assertions you have made to defend them? Because this one thing you’re infatuated with ain’t helping your cause.
While I meant more generally (ie the US is not becoming a third-world country or a Saudi Arabia anytime soon), I concede the point there. However the US falling behind in educational levels shouldn’t ignore far bigger factors than the strength of fundamentalist religion (for example the Dutch have a fairly large minority, although smaller than the US, that are far, fare more hardcore and Koreans have a strong Christian population too) such as the educational structures of the countries, our curriculum, and the attitudes toward education by large segments of the population here in the US>
I was comparing Broun and the BNP in that both are not nationally viable but can win legislative elections.
I really don’t want to read it, does this count?
Perhaps, perhaps not, but it does entail empirical observation. And there is such a thing as economic crackpot stuff. For example, Jude Wanniski favored a unicausal theory of history: tax rates could explain everything, even the rise of Hilter! The idea that tax cuts could routinely generate sufficient revenue via incentives to work involved parameter values that had no empirical basis and no serious economist defended. In other words it was a crank theory.
As I said, you guys need to organize, if only for the sake of your self-respect. But libertarians embrace crackpot stuff too, from global warming conspiracy theories to the nutty stuff outlined above. There are serious conservative economists such as Martin Feldstein and arguably Nordhaus who steer clear of wackjob material.
In the mid 1970s, nuttery was more even divided between the parties: heck, the Democrats may even have had the edge.
I thought this was a nice point. But you are basically discussing the poetry of the campaign. Smart politicos know how govern on the basis of reality, while tossing red meat to the gulls every now and then. The real problem is that the Republican policy-making apparatus has undergone collapse: obstructionism crowds it out. So when Al Franken proposed a bill addressing a woman who was gang raped in Iraq Republicans opposed it without offering modifying amendments on their own. Admittedly I’m veering off into tangent now.
Do we have to be a third world country before it becomes a problem?
I don’t think it’s fair to solely blame religion as the cause. America has always been a religious country and in fact, Atheism Rises, Religiosity Declines In America according to a poll earlier this year. So how can we blame religion on how we are becoming increasingly more scientifically illiterate while our religiosity is trending less?
Do they really?? Do you think ANYTHING the Republicans do or say would make the hard right types vote for Obama?
I think all this socialist Muslim crap is the best thing that could happen to the Democrats. No undecided voter could be swayed by this BS, those that believe it are solidly in the Republican camp.
But this line of attack gives Obama “street cred” and riles up his left flank…who, frankly, should be more than a little disillusioned with the seriously weak compared to what he promised PPACA (“Obamacare”) and his all too cozy relationships with the Federal Reserve and the banking community.
A better strategy for the Republicans would be to point this out and go in on an “outsider cleaning up Washington” strategy but thankfully they are too stupid to see this.
Both sides are bad, so vote Republican.
Strawman.
I’m so glad you said the following:
Because I was going to let this one slide.
Healthcare absolutely is subject to scientific inquiry, with numerous academic institutions dedicated to researching effective methods of treatment and provision of healthcare. For instance, a study conducted by Wilper in 2009 demonstrated the following: “After additional adjustment for race/ethnicity, income, education, self- and physician-rated health status, body mass index, leisure exercise, smoking, and regular alcohol use, the uninsured were more likely to die (hazard ratio = 1.40) than those with insurance.” Extrapolating from those data, we can assume that almost 45000 Americans die each year due to lack of insurance.
We can also look at the raw numbers: America spends roughly 17% of its GDP on healthcare, with the EU average being roughly 10%.
Before he was banned, moonshot linked this report to demonstrate that European healthcare was unsustainable, but it projects a rise in healthcare costs to 14% of GDP by 2030 and only after a bulge in the aging population. The US absolutely needs to switch to a public healthcare system to avert a demographic crisis and pointing to idiotic Republican Congressmen should not deter anyone (any more than the US ought to switch to hiring mercenaries for the same reason).
Even the maligned Greens shy away from even mentioning the possibility of catastrophic failure (a wind turbine could collapse on people, technically).
Tu quoque, poisoning the well and the deductive fallacy all aimed at establishing a false equivalence.
Fuck me, totally neglected to mention this: of course it’s a scientific question (to the extent that transubstantiation is, at any rate).
No, but it might make them stay home on eday, or vote for the Constitution Party candidate or something.
Yep, of course they have. It’s called the Discovery Institute.
They are a real piece of work, I could spend hours exploring their website and laughing and laughing.
They played a key role in the Kitzmiller vs Dover Area school District Trial in Pennsylvania, which was a revised version of the Scopes Trial held in 2005. The intelligent design faction lost. During the trial it came out that some of their materials were actually old creationism documents that had been “searched and replaced” to swap the words “intelligent design” for creationism.
And I can’t believe we’ve gotten 3 pages into a thread with this topic without anyone mentioning Rick Santorum’s famous “Science should stay out of politics” quote regarding evolution and global warming.
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/12/santorum-science-should-get-out-of-politics.php
Not to mention the Santorum Amendment that he tried to tack onto “No Child Left Behind” which would required schools to discuss alternatives to the ever so controversial and unproven theory of evolution.( that was sarcasm )
To kill two birds with one stone, here’s the take on it from the allegedly non-partisan Discovery Institute.
This kind of stuff pisses me off because I love to learn. I love to study. I’ve been out of school for years but I’ve taught myself a whole lot of stuff like evolutionary biology, quantum physics and neuroscience I ( love my Kindle, it makes so many books on these subjects easily accessible).
And the Republicans are worse than the Democrats. Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of liberal friends that piss me of with their ignorant “conspiracy to suppress cancer cures bullshit” and similar wacko doctrines, but I haven’t seen any Democratic politicans actively embrace this ignorance as part of their campaigns.
Perhaps if religion is declining that is why the wackos of that bent have become so pushy of late? It seems like I can’t go anywhere without having someone’s beliefs shoved in my face, so trying to influence politics and government seems a logical step for them.
You wrote an awful lot to try and make the “he did it worser than us” argument.
:rolleyes:
**GIGO **has this whole thing for facts, cites, and stuff. We’ve talked to him about it, but he won’t listen, he thinks they’re important. Whaddaya gonna do?