Facebook? What a joke.

When I reply to people who ask me why I don’t have a Facebook page, or won’t visit their own, that it’s because I’m not a 12 y.o. girl, or a 19 y.o. gay emo kid, for some reason they seem offended. Weird.

Notice how many people online are addicted to praise? Sometimes it starts out innocently. Maybe they do something genuinely praiseworthy. But they become used to being praised. Then they expect to be praised. Then demand to be praised. Back they come for more, with desperate bids for fawning attention.

The world is full of abject losers, who spend their days wishing they were me.

Moderate religious types don’t appear to feel compelled to control the more vocal members of their cults.

And it’s true that human infants should not be consuming milk once they have been weaned. We certainly shouldn’t be drinking the milk of any other species, at any age.

Vegetarianism becomes more enticing to me each time I see the animals jammed inside a cattle truck trailer.

But coffee? Meh. Who cares?

I applaud you for your new stance and approach.

It’s one of the problems with athiests and vegans for years is that they’ve become louder and more preachy than most Christians I know.

Addressing their values and opinions before debating the topic works across all social and political differences. I hope many others take your new approach.

Cheers!
~greg

Naturally I’m coming from it from the other side, but it is still a very interesting and tricky question to know when it’s time to work at keeping people “listening and engaged” and when it’s time to try push people off the fence.

Gotta

He was a tech-ed teacher and I took Architectural Drawing from him for 3 years, it was my favorite class. He taught me that there was art, beauty and creativity in math and science. It’s so awesome to be able to re-connect with him 30+ years later.

Plus, he was funny as hell and always cracked us up (and he still does).

Liberals think we should socially cooperate on the things that make sense, such as national defense, education and healthcare. Our belief is that this actually helps the economy. It’s not parental in intent.

Conservatives want to discriminate against same-sex marriages. They want to inspect your uterus if you had unprotected sex so they can infer more rights on a small cluster of cells than they are willing to give the mother of those cells. They want to keep marijuana away from terminal ill people whose doctors have prescribed it for them.

No comparison, IMHO, on who the bad parents are in this metaphor.

Yes, exactly.

What was your point? Since they are neurotic, you can be, too?

-Tom

So instead, like astronomers, we have to observe different experiments in action and then try to normalize them somehow and get our insights that way. What are the other experiments? They are the other countries that are also experimenting with varying degrees of taxes and regulations.

The odd part about this is that the US is an anomaly. There is no Westernized country more conservative than us. There are none with lower taxes. When you look at the other thriving economies of the world they all, every one of them, have more taxes and regulation.

The Right likes to point to this and say – see! We are on to something here in the USA! Less taxes and less regulation make for a stronger economy. Unfortunately that is a statistically insignificant sample of one. There are a lot of other factors that have contributed to the strength of the American economy besides the conservatism of the last few decades.

So I’m glad we agree – there is a sweet spot for the level of taxes and regulation. You think we have erred in one direction and me the other. I really try to imagine your view as correct. I do trust people to look after their own best interest. I do see how the government screws some things up.

The reason I end up disagreeing with you is this: homo sapiens rose above the bloody fray of survival of the fittest and started cooperating in larger and larger groups. While the law of the jungle certainly applies, a stronger “law” has led to the great success of our species: cooperation. We all do better when we all do better. I can’t escape this ideology and economists have been unable to prove me wrong. I think we should put our efforts into making government better (for we are the government, after all) rather than trying to dismantle it.

I have written elsewhere on this blog why I think progressive taxation is fair and smart. Moving from taxes to fees is regressive. For certain things, I think it is viable and useful. But our government is more than a service provider. I want the best government money can buy. I really think you should want that, too.

I also agree that Amy’s child safety law had ridiculous unintended consequences.

Thanks for the great conversation.

Of course we would all be better without it.

Neither the Right or Left are better at it.

I believe it is impossible to stop it because people seem drawn to drama. The modern “news” reporting organizations are just short of being another branch of the entertainment industry. You name Rush Limbaugh, I’ll point out Bill Mahr. Both fan the flames with rhetoric.

People who use resources should pay for them. I.E. light rail should not have the ride cost subsidized by tax payers who will NEVER use it. Stadiums for sports should be paid for by those who benefit from it like business near by, TV networks who gather revenue from advertisers and ticket purchasers. I find it interesting the way minnegasco is doing the inverse block pricing for natural gas. If you use less you pay less.

I dislike the way income taxes work in that when a person works more they pay more. Working more and more is tough and the bigger my paycheck is, then the higher percentage the government gets. It’s an incentive to only work so much before the laws of diminishing returns kick me in the butt.

Been there done that in a third world country. I understand the role government plays. I really appreciate the good job my county does in keeping costs under control with regards to infrastructure, education and social services. I have nice low property taxes. But over regulation like that new safety bill authored by Amy K. was not fully thought out before implementation. Why not fully vet a bill and examine it’s implications before passing into law? Because of that law you know Estes had to put so many of it’s products through expensive and time consuming testing for lead when the chances of balsa wood containing lead is zero and who the hell eats a plastic chute from an estes kit? The spirit of that law is good, but the way it was put in place was poorly done. Same goes for the health care bill. There is no reason any able bodied adult should be able to get free health care.

As a rocketeer you should know the implications of over-regulation with regards to high power rocket motors. Lucky for us we had nice hard rocket science on our side of that fight.

But we can’t throw the baby out with the bath water. We have succeeded in large part in this nation because we do have a well-funded federal government. Go to Mexico if you want to see what a low tax rate buys you. I am astounded that people such as yourself can never acknowledge the importance of the federal government in the success of this nation – success funded by taxation.

I also know that you like having clean water come out of your tap and that you enjoy knowing the food you eat has been properly handled. Again, visit a 3rd world country if you want to realize how rare these benefits are.

I would be a bit more convinced by your argument if you acknowledged that there is a sweet spot for taxation and a sweet spot for regulation and if we have less than that we do worse. ‘Cause I’ve never had a Rightie come to this blog and admit that.

M.

The point is not whether the Right or the Left motivate this insane criminal. The point is that violence should be the expected result, starting initially with the criminally insane, if our rhetoric escalates from debate to hate. I’m pointing out that our rhetoric is doing exactly that and this is an indirect outcome of that.

So set aside speculation of who motivated what. Do you agree that there are risks of enflamed rhetoric? Do you think we’d be better off without it? Do you agree that the Right is better at it than the Left?

M.

Funny how the left is the group jumping up and down saying that a-hole in AZ was worked up by the rhetoric from the right. It’s the left who is now exploiting this tragedy.

That a-hole hated the right and was more of a leftist than the majority of the left. His facebook page listed The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf as favorite reading material…