Does the "average American" agree with Michael Moore?

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Adam Smith

Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economist from the University of Chicago, was responsible for introducing income tax withholding.

George Stigler, Nobel Prize winning economist from the University of Chicago, refused an invitation to Reagan's White House because he could not put up with Arthur Laffer's bogus tax cut theories.

Robert Lucas, Nobel Prize winning economist from the University of Chicago, ripped Laffer's theories up one side and down the other at a major economics conereence (I was in the audience). His comments were widely quoted in the press.

Please do try to keep up.

Please try to recognize the difference between a polemic, pasquinade or tirade and a critique.

One is not after all responsible for what people do with one's theories- Karl Marx cannot beheld to account for Cambodia/Kampuchea.

And Kenobi- evolution isn't gospel 'truth' - it's a lot less dubious. It's science, whether you like it or not, and it can't be adequately substituted by religious mumbo jumbo.

Abortion isn't murder- that's only your opinion. Tried proving it in a court of law recently? Thought not.

As for it being impossible to regulate private consensual sexual intercourse- frankly that hasn't stopped religious bigots. One wonders why we have had to have laws legalizing gay and lesbian sex.....

But still, feel free to hijack yet another thread with your 17th Century religious propaganda.

It's no more persuasive than the last 53 times we saw it.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Sikander, how can you be so smart and still be a conservative?

I'm all over the map, and usually vote libertarian. Socially I'm very "liberal" if you count that as someone who thinks people should have the freedom to live their lives as they choose when it doesn't grossly impact the lives of others in a way that violates their rights to do the same. Most of my friends are liberals or apolitical with a paranoid lefty bent. My girlfriend voted for Nader last election. My mother was a liberal democrat (voting for Jesse Jackson in the primaries) while my father is a member of the religious right and has pictures of himself with Ronald Reagan and George Bush the elder on his wall.

My parents were missionaries when I was a kid, and I grew up in a foreigner's quarter on Okinawa, Japan. My neighbors and friends were Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, African American / Japanese etc., and I was bilingual as a child. I was raised to be a christian, but got disillusioned by the racism and religious bigotry I saw in most christians when we returned to the U.S. in the late sixties. My parents weren't like that at all, and I was shocked by it to be honest. I was also disillusioned by the war protestors (we moved fairly quickly to a college town where my parents continued their educations) and the hippies, who were on the whole at least as hateful and a good deal more ignorant than the soldiers they spat upon.

One group which didn't manage to disappoint were my mother's family in Arkansas. Uneducated formally (my mom was the second to graduate from high school and the first to attend college in our family) these "hillbillies" had zero pretension. Like so many from Oklahoma and the surrounding states they are part Indian and part white, and mostly stuck to their farms, only leaving to go to war whenever their was one to fight. They were also Christians, but church to them was one big family gathering rather than the painful collection of church lady cut scenes that I saw in other parts of the country. Their world was conservative, fairly non-judgemental and almost completely homogeneous. It worked from what I could see, but many of its lessons were not necessarily transferable to the more complex world of cities and heterogeneous populations.

Politically I've come to believe that there is a time to be liberal and a time to be conservative, a time to spend and a time to save etc. Most political postions are not correct per se, but are only correct or not in the context of a certain time and place and situation. This is of course vastly complicated, and most people tend to latch on to political postions based upon early experience and never let go. I've done this myself hundreds of times. Political parties try to collect more voters than their rivals by adopting political positions that fit the prejudices of these various groups, and end up often stuck mouthing the correct platitudes to placate certain adherants of outdated ideas in order to seem consistent, even when they have no intention of ever acting on these issues in a way any different than the other party.

A couple of years after we returned to the states my parents got divorced. My mother had gone into a psychotic depression after losing a baby and had tried to commit suicide, and then abandoned the family for about a year. She returned just long enough to be able to make a case for custody, which she somehow managed to win. She was using drugs and sleeping around and neglecting and sometimes abusing us. We had already learned to take care of ourselves when she was gone, as my father was also gone most of the night working and going to grad school during the day. There were more suicide attempts and I ended up caring for my mother much of the time for several years until she came out of her depression and got more serious about her life. The stupid hippy sh!t that I had to deal with was unbelievable. Imagine being lectured at 11 years of age about proper (ie radical crap) child rearing values by your mom's stoned lover in the ****ty apartment that you had cleaned while he waited for her to get ready so that they could go out all night while you stayed home and took care of your little sister. Imagine years of that, and worse.

Thankfully my mom usually dropped us off with her parents in Arkansas for the summer while she took off to party hardy in California. My grandmother was in many ways worse than my mother insofar as she was much more mentally ill. Fortunately she seemed to have undergone a transformation whereby she managed to reign in her extremely violent tendencies while my sister and I were around. (She apparantly used to beat my mother severely.) My grandfather was really cool always. Gentle and wise. Neither of them ever laid a hand on us, and they provided more parenting in 2 1/2 months than we were used to in a calendar year. I had a lot of freedom there. They let you make your own mistakes, but they were never very far away and there were always older cousins, aunts and uncles etc. to teach you their little bit of accumulated wisdom.

My own tendency to have knee-jerk reactions is thus usually to the conservative side, as it is this side that seemed the most rational, stable and least destructive of my environment when I was a child. Conservatives usually respected military service rather than disparaging it and hating those who served, which in my family amongst men is almost everyone. Conservatives didn't go for the radical child-rearing theories in the 1960s and 1970s that had so many parents being an absent friend to their children so that they could pursue "free love" and drugs. They actually wanted to parent children when appropriate. Though they were sometimes bigoted racially or religiously, so were radicals. In an age of reckless experimentation, proven methods are valuable. Of course some of my opinions aren't rational. I got into the habit of assuming that radical hippy dippy sh!t was always wrong until proven otherwise, an assumption that even today seems to be correct more often than not. I try to give things more thought these days, as I have a lot more margin for error than I did during my childhood. But as you can see I'm really no better than most when it comes to spouting an opinion or a feeling without putting a lot of though behind it. I'm still pretty impulsive.

Sorry for the poor organization and rambling nature of the post, I'm at work and keep getting interrupted.

[Mr. Harley]

Ben

I've met Joel Brind, in November and attended his lecture. It would do him a grave disservice for me to take this approach.

Where was it, and what was the context - i.e. anti-abortion foes, paid seminar, talk at a medical symposium on reproductive issues, etc. Trying to get some context, it will probably also help me Google tomorrow or Saturday - I may wait till then when I'm off, the thread got a bit more "lively" while I was asleep.

However, Ben, I will call you on a different quote.

I'm guilty in this instance of doing what Berz does to other people's posts, in posting comments before the entire point has been made.

You own words (please note GUILTY, implying not exactly the righteous thing to do I believe), when I called you on it a page ago, when doing a Berserker-esque chop and drop (and then you get the same reactions as Berserker gets, surprise, surprise). Ben, once is a mistake, twice is a trend, and three times? Let's have some intellectual honesty, you appear to be using it conveniently in a way that discredits those you are disagreeing with. Since you are our resident moralist, let's see a little bit of truthfulness here and either state - yes, I'm going to chop and out-of-context refute like Berserker, being right justifies it, or stop doing it. By the way, I did out of brevity take your short chop and block quotes and refute them in that format. If you think it germane, I'll go back and include the whole thing, but I want both our posts on the same page.

Ben stated: Do they now? I don't remember any calls by the Catholic church to change the laws of the country to ban contraceptives.

Ben, you're wrong. I was Catholic, remember. The Catholic Church officially opposes any form of chemical birth control and abortion, and as part of it's official doctrine works against it, including on the legislative scene. It's why I left, not their opposition but their attempt to force it via legislation. Look at the Catholic Church's meddling on these issues in Ireland, Italy, and Latin America, to name a few. In fact, look at their support for laws banning them in the United States.

Ben, your statement about it being impossible to regulate private conduct, reference banning gay sex. Now in Canada you have the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms that may prevent this. In the United States it is very different, and only LAST YEAR were the anti-sodomy laws SPECIFICALLY targeting gays and lesbians declared unconstitutional. The two men involved had the police enter their apartment unannounced due to a fake crime report, and when they caught them at it they were arrested and charged.

The history of anti-sodomy laws is quite ugly in the United States, so don't deprecate the concerns of the gay community, they have both history and jurisprudence on their side. Oh, and just last year in southeastern Kentucky a school that had Bible studies was forced to also permit a gay-straight alliance club due to a court order (permit one, permit the other). Not exactly the anti-Christian persecution ranted on in this thread (the Bible studies were fine), it exists, but you also have a substantial amount of covert and overt support by local governmental bodies in the US. The local Baptist and Methodist ministers organized a boycott of over half the student body over this, to try to force the school adminstration to ban the gay-straight alliance. Now who's being persecuted, and intolerant? (Story in the Louisville Courier-Journal).

Evolution. Now religious evolution. Puh-lease. I post every time some moron plays red herring with that. Yes, Darwin made mistakes. Just like in psychology, Freud's mistakes do not invalidate the entire field. Darwin's mistakes DO NOT disprove the validity of evolution, it just shows that the field is constantly growing as our knowledge improves. Using him to disprove evolution is a straw man, of course you can make a scientist from over a century ago look ignorant. Duh.

Puntuated equilibrium. Now say it again, slowly in case your tongue trips like my typing does at times. Essentially an ecological niche will tend to stay filled by the organism in it until something occurs to remove it - climate change, meteor impact, or some other catastrophe including local disasters (volcanoes), especially virulent diseases, and/or a combination thereof. Like the big extinctions (70%+) in the pre-Cambrian and the Devonian periods. Human activity is rapidly equaling those as an extinction level catastrophe, and we are starting to see indications of that kind of rapid evolution as a result.

Do creationist want to let the local Hindu temple teach their creation myth - oh, myth's are different, ours is "science." Balls. I've read some of the so-called science, for example the claims supposedly debunking radioactive based dating of fossils or archeological materials. If any of you "the world is 5000 some odd years old" types really believe it, go walk into the reactor core of some active nuclear power plant. It's the same science used for the dating that supports punctuated equilibrium, the most recent fine-tuning of evolution. Plus, there is some new work in genetics over what results are possible givent the genome of the organism.

Also, go read the various evolutionary theories (not the polemics of aetheists using them to justify their faith - belief in an unprovable assertion, in this case there is NO god ). NONE say there is no God, they give the mechanism of change. You can argue God set the ball rolling (it's called Deisim, as in you know, a D-E-I-T-Y or better known as God) or that it's just a mindless accident. Since either is a matter of faith, I won't argue that. Just stop the silly crossover with science and attempting to justify creationism. Good God, literally, Mendel was a monk (genetics) and Belgian priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaitre came up witht eh Big Bang. Soulless aetheists?

Now you want to teach creation science in public schools. The day you remove all reference to god, instead giving the mechanism of how it occurs, or the day you honestly suggest including the creation stories of every local religious group including Hindus, Sikhs, Native Americans, Santeria, neo-Druids, etc. then I will grant you point, and support it, because you are treating all religions equally, as permitted by the constitution. "Oh, that's different." Which is exactly why the Supreme Court has put up Jefferson's wall between church and state, because in case after case the jurisprudence shows that the majority (or politically connected, not always the same) religious group will NOT give equal time/space/resources to the other religious views.

On the argument over Laffer, could some of you go look at the exchange we had on a recent thread back in November or December where the discussion got hot and heavy over economic and taxation trends, refence the future of the US military if the US economy deteriorates. The problem with so-called Reagonomics is that they didn't even, and still don't, apply the Laffer curve as originally written! They make guesses at the changes in taxpayer behavior to support their anti-tax supposition, as opposed to a detailed analysis, and that comes from exchanges in meetings at the Reagan and Bush II white houses! So even if Laffer was right, the "tax-cut is always good" Republicans are engaged in "voodoo economics." From, remember anyone, George Bush no. 1. Not exactly a closet liberal, I do believe.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Sikander


Simply that the U.S. is a multi-cultural state and that variances between the way the component cultures value education makes it much more difficult to devise an educational system that caters to them all equally and efficiently. Additionally, the variance in the value placed on education between subcultures ends up excacerbating (I get a thrill using that word) the economic variance between the component groups, which in turn excacerbates the variance of political power between component groups (on a per capita basis, and of course numbers and interest in politics can and do influence the final tally enormously, skewing somewhat the result).

Finally, the U.S. as a whole cannot compete with certain other nations with relatively homogeneous populations which place a high value on education (like Europeans generally) with a population that is made up of a few who value education more than Europeans do generally, many who value it equally, and some who value it less. Thus our people as a whole will score lower on tests that measure educational achievement than the people of, for instance, Denmark. This despite the fact that we spend more money on education per capita than anyone else.

Basically I'm agreeing more or less with the Wall Street Journal article that Shawn is referring to without naming names. It seems to fit my experience as well as other statistics I've seen over the years.

Sikander, I hope you realize that this is somewhat racist.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Guynemer
I'm sorry, but that is just patently ridiculous.

Nobody, apart from Osama bin Laden, wants to wipe Christianity out of America.

What a lot of people want, including me, is to wipe religion out of the government.

That, my friend, is a huge difference.

No, out of the public domain, out of business -- out of anywhere a Democrat wants to go or has a right to go.

It's called freedom FROM religion.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Ned


Sikander, I hope you realize that this is somewhat racist.

Race has nothing to do with culture. Or my post.

[Mr. Harley]

Ned, it's nice having someone here to genuinely have a disagreement with. You know me, and I suspect have noticed my commentary on the history of the wall between church and state, and the reasons why. I am VERY comfortable having what happened in Sikander's communtiy, as long as every local religion is granted the same access. Evidently they did, nobody squawked, and the practice continued at least for a time.

How do you solve the "not playing nice with others." I would argue that both the history is clear, look at the case from the 1990's and the attempted use of zoning laws to outlaw Santeria sacrifices somewhere in Florida (luckily the Supreme Court invalidated that). Can you give me any case where the majority or politically dominant religion has consistantly, without lawsuits or other equivalent threats, wanted to give equal access to all religions, even those that are non-mainstream? Topically here in the US. That's why many people conclude that it has to be a wall betwixt church and state versus equal treatment.

What makes it even more polarized are the attempts by many of the most vocal religious groups to attempt to pass morality legislation. The anti-sodomy laws, or look at Ben's post on "abortificants". Please, I know I set him up, being an ex-Catholic I knew he had to either be inconsistant or agree with banning the pill. With that kind of rhetoric, and attempts to force that kind of legislation, is it surprising that secularists react the way they do. It may not be "reasonable". However, I think this thread has nicely highlighted exactly that divide in the United States, and how polarized the situation has become. I honestly feel that it hasn't been this bad since prior to the Civil War, but that may be due to my penchant for military history.

[Ramo]

Sikander's overview of American history is excellent. I would make two additions, one supporting his observations in the southern part of the US. During the last decade of 19th century, there was a Free Soil party that almost replaced the Democratic party. The Democrats engaged in a campaign of intimidation including ballot stuffing, beatings, and murder.

You're thinking of the Populist Party (also called the Peoples' Party). It was based in the South, and was a political movement built upon an economic liberation movement called farmers' alliances which were essentially farmers' unions where sharecroppers collectively bargained, and could use cooperative stores and secure low-interest credit instead of relying on landlords insanely high prices and interest rates (averaged around 60% in Georgia IIRC). This developed into a reformist, democratic political party called the Populist Partywhich took control of much of the South, supporting monetary reform, railroad regulation, among other things. However, towards the middle of the 1890's, with economic problems blacks (who played a huge part in this movement) were scapegoated for the problems by the Democratic elite, with the Populist politicians following not far behind. This lead to the infamous obstructions to the black vote that were finally dismantled by LBJ: poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests. This effectively took away the poor white vote as well, which combined with the economic problems, caused the Populist Party to collapse. Some of the less extreme issues of the Populists like railroad regulation were meanwhile co-opted by the main parties.

The Free Soil Party was a movement in the antebellum years (late 1840's to early 1850's) that basically represented the anti-slavery aspects of the Northern Democratic Party, where opposition to slavery in the territories, more land distribution, and low tariffs were the main planks. It never gained very much political support, and mostly was co-opted by the Republican Party which quickly became dominated by industrialists.

[Aqualung71]

Originally posted by Ned
Thriller, you have a party in Australia that can be described as "pro-business?"

That would be the Liberal party, of which our Prime Minster John "Little Johnnie" Howard is the leader. The comparable party in the UK would be the Conservative party (although they also have a Liberal party). But in the US I think conservatives are Republicans and liberals are Democrats.....so confusing, all this terminology!

The other major party is the Labour party, which is supposedly socialist. This party was born post the 1890 depression as the party for the workers, I think combining a few other parties at the time. They are inherently leftist in their views, but in Bob Hawke's and Paul Keating's governments from 1983 through 1996 they successfully appropriated the middle ground, pandering to big business (and inevitably bearing the brunt of major financial scandals) - essentially leaving the Liberal party with nowhere to go (since Fascism ain't never gonna happen in Australia!) and so without a constituency. Paradoxically, Bob Hawke as a decidedly centre-leaning Labour Prime Minister, was probably Australia's most prominent trade unionist in recent years, serving as President of the ACTU (Australian Council of Trade Unions) for about 10 years. In fact, the Labour party in the 1980's looked a bit like Monty Python - full of doctors and lawyers!

Labour was kicked out in 1996 due to the economic chaos that seems to inevitably catch up with Socialist governments, who think that spending all the country's money, creating swathes of foreign debt, ignoring the rising unemployment rate and generally eroding living standards is perfectly acceptable as long as the minimum wage doesn't suffer. John Howard has been "leading" our country from behind an American battleship ever since (no offence intended to Americans).

And if you detect any hint of cynicism in my comments, you will have realised that despite the quite significant differences between our 2 systems, Australian politicians are no different to their American counterparts when it comes the practical (as opposed to theoretical) differences between the parties.....and so an election becomes a choice between the lesser of 2 evils.....or even worse - which one might be better for my bank account balance?

The 3rd major party is the former NCP (National Country Party), now called the National Party. As its name suggests it's policies are clearly focussed towards helping the rural and farming communities. It is Liberal (in the Ozzie sense of the word) leaning, and has long been in a formal coalition with the Liberal Party. In fact, it is somewhat more right leaning than the Liberals. The Liberals cannot usually win enough seats alone for a parliamentary majority, and stand a better than even chance in coalition with the Nationals, who win quite a few country seats but often don't even contest city seats. But as was well pointed out by Jellybean in an earlier post, our 2-party preferred system caters well to a coalition, since National party voters will almost always give their second prefernce to the Liberals.

The next biggest party is the Australian Democratic Party, which I recall arose in the mid or late 70's. Rather than having any particular idealogical leaning, the rise of the Democrats was more about a few ambitious polly's grabbing the opportunity to establish an all-important 3rd major party (ie, Liberal/National coalition and Labour being the 2 major parties). They tend to be centrist-left, and succeeded very early on to grab the balance of power in the senate, so neither major party could ignore them. Their popularity waned in the 90's as they were gradually replaced by the Green Party, who I recall are well represented in the Senate now.

The lasting stain on Australia's international reputation was caused by the rise of the One-Nation Party in 1998, led by a former fish and chip shop owner Pauline Hanson. Her party's complex platform for economic and social reform consisted of 2 policies - stop Asian immigration and no land rights for Aborigines. Australia is no stranger to racists of course (we had an official "white Australia" immigration policy until 1974!), but this particular racist won a lot of votes and took some seats in the Senate, which caused our country in general a good deal of embarrassment. Anyway, that really only lasted one term and I believe as I write this the fish and chip shop lady is rotting in a prison somewhere for political funding fraud. And so she should! SPLITTER!

So there you have it. A rather long-winded reply to a very simple question!

[Aqualung71]

Gotta rush, but Shawnmmcc I agree with you: Sikander, I really enjoyed reading your very informative and well written post and I actually learnt something, which is quite rare in this forum. So, thanks!!!

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Thriller
Gotta rush, but Shawnmmcc I agree with you: Sikander, I really enjoyed reading your very informative and well written post and I actually learnt something, which is quite rare in this forum. So, thanks!!!

Thank you, and you're welcome.

[Ned]

What throws me Sikander about your post is its apparent assumption that different cultures will continue to exist ad infinitum and that we must adapt the American system to cater to these different cultures rather than asking the different cultures to essentially become "American." If we do this because of some belief that a particular culture cannot adapt for some reason, then, I submit that that belief is racist. If we do this in order to provide separate but equal education to a particular culture, this is a known method of institutionalizing segregation and has been declared by the US Supreme Court to be unconstitutional.

[Guynemer]

Originally posted by Ned


No, out of the public domain, out of business -- out of anywhere a Democrat wants to go or has a right to go.

It's called freedom FROM religion.

Bull****. You can parade your religion around all you want. I don't give a flying **** about religion in business, and I don't give a rat's ass about any individual's religious beliefs.

But when I, as a public high school student, was forced to attend an assembly during school hours where a choir sang Christian songs--THAT I care about.

When non-monotheistist children in public schools are forced (and, be realistic, they are forced) to say a pledge containing "under God"--I care about that.

Piss off with your strawmen.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Guynemer


Bull****. You can parade your religion around all you want. I don't give a flying **** about religion in business, and I don't give a rat's ass about any individual's religious beliefs.

But when I, as a public high school student, was forced to attend an assembly during school hours where a choir sang Christian songs--THAT I care about.

When non-monotheistist children in public schools are forced (and, be realistic, they are forced) to say a pledge containing "under God"--I care about that.

Piss off with your strawmen.

Guynemer, you may be the most tolerant guy around as clearly demonstrated by your post, but there are people in the Democratic Party who are getting people fired if they express their religious views at work, expelled if they display Christian symbols at school or vilified if they'll attempt to hold meetings or even camp anywhere on public property.

But when one comes to confirming judges, Catholics need not apply as the Democratic Party holds a veto in the Senate. To a Democrat, separation of church and state means that a religious person cannot be confirmed to any court.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Guynemer
When non-monotheistist children in public schools are forced (and, be realistic, they are forced) to say a pledge containing "under God"--I care about that.

No one is forced to say the pledge.

PS. What is this thread about again? There seems to be several topics running at ones (ex the relative value of multi-culturalism, che calling conservatives ignorant, and this little gem). It's difficult to keep up.