Yes. I do that, yes. Got me on that one! Boy, is my face red!
What’s policy to a hippie? Has he reminded everyone that he’s just a hippie yet today? What… it’s not 4:20 yet?
Oooh, snap! Have mercy! If you didn’t steal that from Dennis Miller, he’d steal it from you!
So you admit that the warm safe environment is at least partly responsible for your success. And now Republicans are trying to remove the warm safe environment from the next generation. In other words, I got mine, fuck you. So only those with parents rich enough to buy their kids a warm safe environment will be able to be successful in the future.
:rolleyes: It’s not possible to drag a meaningful policy argument out of anyone to whom “morality” means something? Not even you believe that.
Yeah, he does. It’s the one thing he has been amazingly consistent about. Morality is irrelevant.
Then he’s got no business using Rand’s name. Objectivism is based on unusual ethical premises, but it is by no means amoral philosophy, far from it. It is clearly the sort of world-view willing to sacrifice economic efficiency for the sake of ethics as Objectivism defines them, should such a conflict ever arise.
No.
I had nothing that the Republicans are now removing.
Let’s be specific, please: what do you imagine I relied upon that would now be removed by Republican policies?
And you’ve got no business having “brain” in your name since you so rarely use yours.
I don’t agree with everything Ayn Rand said. I don’t think she crossed the “is-ought” divide, and I think her “A is A” stuff is just bullshit.
When someone says “that action is immoral,” all they are doing is saying “I don’t like that action” in a way that tries to dress up their personal opinion into something more. That’s it. Saying that something is immoral is the exact same thing as saying that you prefer chocolate over vanilla, nothing more.
Yet some people get so proud of their morality and so defensive of their pronouncements, and they drop all policy argument (and even think there’s no reason to consider policy when the morality of an issue is involved). It’s really sad. Some people are essentially being lead around by their dick and are proud as hell of it.
Your dick is one thing, and your conscience is another. (Ever notice how they sometimes disagree?)
No, considering I, among many, have been pointing out the fact that some people of an unnamed political/ideological persuasion like to engage in rather blatant straw men for well over a year now.
I think it’s pretty obvious what I meant by “dick”, and it includes “conscience.” Essentially these people are ruled by their emotions–i.e., their own feelings of good and bad, right and wrong, which they dress up in fancy clothes (e.g., “morally right,” “moral obligation,” etc.).
So, instead of making policy arguments for a position (i.e., “the government should raise taxes on the rich to achieve the following policy goals”), they argue from emotion (i.e., “the rich aren’t paying their fair share!”) and expect other people to care.
I’ve been trying to decide how to respond to this.
I disagree completely with the claim that morality and moral claims, right and wrong, don’t exist in a meaningful way.
But I agree that public policy arguments generally should not rest on those pillars.
The reason is that you (using the pronoun in its indefinite sense of all of y’all) are not willing to accept my obviously correct moral principles, and you wish me to accept your obviously incorrect moral principles.
And neither of us can agree upon an authoritative source to referee the matter.
So don’t advance an argument that rests on moral principles, and I will agree to do the same.
Did you go to public school? Could your parents have afforded to send you to a private school if there were no public schools?
Republicans are gutting funding for schools, and by their treatment of teachers, they are encouraging the best of them to leave for greener pastures resulting in a worse education (hence a less safe and warm environment) for those who can’t afford private schools.
Perfect. That is the crux of my fight against morality language – it is used as a substitute for actual policy argument.
Inflation-adjusted, per-pupil, public school spending has increased about 150% since the early 1970s. AFAIK, no Republicans are advocating taking school spending significantly backwards (as opposed to stopping or slowing the growth); certainly none are advocating cutting spending back to the levels they were at when Bricker was in school.
Actually, public school teaching is and always has been a very low-turnover occupation, with about 80% of public school teachers remaining in place every year, and another 10% or so transferring to other public schools. That figure has held steady for decades. If you exclude teachers leaving after one or two years, it’s even lower.
Scott Walker cut education funding by over a billion dollars. He also took away school districts’ ability to raise property taxes to make up for the lost aid. Further, his attack on the unions made it possible for districts to make the teachers pay for more of their benefits, an effective pay cut.
According to Politifact:
I stand corrected: Walker did make actual cuts in state aid to education (including higher ed). These cuts amounted to something around 8% of state funding to K-16. In K-12, the per-pupil cut was around 5%.
However, since Wisconsin’s education spending before the Walker cuts was about 50% higher than it was ten years ago, and double what it was 20 years ago (cite), I think it’s safe to say that even if he grew up in Wisconsin, their schools have not been “gutted” such that the opportunities afforded young Bricker are no longer available. Insofar as education spending can be a measure of quality (a dubious assumption, but we’ll go with it), the education in Wisconsin should be about twice as good as it was twenty years ago, notwithstanding Walker’s cutbacks.
Ergo, Bricker’s claim that “I had nothing that the Republicans are now removing” still stands.
Thank you for making me laugh. I needed it today.
I went to public school.
No Republican proposal advocates cutting funding for schools to anywhere near the level that existed when I was in public school, even in inflation-adjusted dollars.
If I am mistaken about that claim, cite up.