Seriously? As if Obama is the worse one lol. Romney's only plan to increase jobs is by kicking out illegal immigrants. How will ending funding towards pbs help this fucking country? Romney's "plan" will lead to a $5 trillion tax cut which will inevitably lead the lower class to pay more and the rich pay less. I'm also a new college student that lives with a single parent so I have enough trouble having to pay off college, and now if Romney wins you're seriously gonna tell me that I'm gonna get shit from FAFSA......The guy doesn't even know what the hell he's doing, everything he has said at the elections is a lie and is only trying to create a good image by saying the complete opposite of what he actually plans to do. [video=youtube;uHSfnqho2jw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHSfnqho2jw[/video]
You mean just like Obama? They both make ridiculous lies that people don't seem to see through or care about.
http://pleasecutthecrap.typepad.com/main/what-has-obama-done-since-january-20-2009.html Anyways, I simply cannot understand why anyone would want to support romney, unless they're millionaires. He has no real plan, he flip flops on issues like a child, and the only reason he's gone this far in the race is due to his lies. He's like another George W Bush, except in many ways worse.
What amazes me is how far he's actually gotten without articulating how his plan works. It's kind of amazing, really, how well he's done on just a vague promise with no actual explanation.
Conservatives and Libertarians are a simple folk. They just go with their gut. When you got a gut, you don't need to think. All this coming up with "reasons" stuff just shows weakness. It's simple: 1. Make an assertion. It doesn't matter what the assertion is, it just has to be with your gut. Bonus points for simplifying the problem as much as possible. Romney and Obama both lie? Well clearly they lie the same amount then. Romney and Obama don't give a shit about repealing the Patriot Act? Well they must be the same on all the other issues too. Remember that ideology is more realistic than reality. 2. Wait for reply. 3. Reiterate assertion without regard to what the response was. Reading other people's responses is too much thinking and that's just showing more weakness. Never actually read what they say. 4. Start wondering why people eventually start posting sarcastic remarks toward you instead of taking you seriously.
Actually anyone who believes in government thinks with their gut. I know you don't want that to be true, but it is. Everything people vote on is an appeal to emotion. If it wasn't then there wouldn't be a government because people would actually use reasoning to get things done. It's a veil that's covering their eyes just like religious folk can't see anything logical that goes against their beliefs. Every defense you give for government most likely contains a fallacy. Everything the government does has a more moral, logical solution in a voluntary manner. If society wanted to be logical we'd come up with a better solution than mob rule, AKA democracy. But all we want to do is appeal to our emotions and force people to do things the way the majority wants it done. And if you're in the minority it's not like you can opt out of government. A gun is put to your head and you have to comply with the majority, or else. I can go miles and miles more in depth and logic the hell out of everyone, but in the end it hardly convinces anyone. People say it's not realistic or whatever else they can think of to hand wave away things that destroy their beliefs or are just too hard to understand. You have to take the veil off through your own means whenever the time is right. Someone can't logic the ignorance out of you.
I don't defend the government. I just end up as your foil because you seem to be so religiously anti-government. If there were someone just as unreasonable on the other side, I would be arguing against them too. You commit the very flaw you speak against in your own post. The fact that you think I always defend the government is just further evidence that you tend to oversimplify everything. Especially given how many times I've blathered about checks and balances on here. Human beings are wired to be efficient. To save energy. Human brains tend to take shortcuts in thinking to save energy. We make stereotypes, rules of thumb, and ideology to simplify the world around us. This is standard teaching in modern psychology. This comes at the cost of accuracy and leaves us open to big mistakes. There is a good reason for this. The world is far more complex than we can handle. I would think that would be a good excuse to say "good enough" all of the time, but then I notice how much time people waste defending generalizing ideologies. That very same energy could be put to use analyzing the world from the bottom up instead and weighing in on issues individually. We should be looking at every issue case by case. As in, looking at each position and what its consequences should be. We should be looking at the heart of schisms. For example, many of our issues fall on probably unsolvable problem between the right of the individual verses the rights everyone else. I would think to categorically call one side ALWAYS right, as what ideology does (ie, the free-speech-trumps-all sentiment I see a lot), doesn't take into account the difference in consequences in different problems. What really matters is consequences, not sticking to arbitrary rules. A dumb person supports free-speech because they follow an ideological rule telling them to. A smart person supports free speech because they see that not-supporting free speech sometimes has bad consequences. The latter keeps the door open for legitimate exceptions. I think this method has an added benefit of making people use examples from real-life instead of theoretical naval gazing. Hey, too much deregulation, as in the early 1900's, led a bunch of people to die in horrible building fires, child labor, railroad monopolies, mislabeled products and other such grievances. I can see the consequences right here in a history book. Every time I brought this up to you though, you never countered with other examples, or even better, hard scientific data. It's rare to see you reply with anything other than ideological naval gazing. Always using general wording like "government" in reference to every issue and other oversimplifications. Where's the basis in reality if you're not looking at real data? Even anecdotal data, which would be very poor by scientific standards, is better than iterating ideology over and over and over. Get out of that theoretical world. Maybe then American politics won't be so divisive. We could be debating issues instead of worshiping ideas. It could mean that two opposing parties could be able to compromise. It would at least make talking to people that disagree with me fun again. I used to learn a lot of these people, and the challenge kept me from getting too holier than thou. I need a competent antagonist though, and they're becoming rarer and rarer. I suppose a tl;dr version of that would be: Always avoid rules that have "always," "never," "every," or "no" in them. Yes, the contradiction in that rule is on purpose. You're not supposed to use rules. When you do, be aware that you use them. No one will ever be 100% good at this, but it sure as heck better than 10%.
It comes down to the fact that government cannot exist without coercion and violence. Everything it does is based on that. There is no need to make things more complicated than they are. Just because it's simple or a generality doesn't mean it's untrue or in any way less valid than a more complicated explanation. A system that exists due to coercion and violence will never yield efficient results. Not to mention the immorality of it all. But that doesn't bother most people. They accept government as an inevitability and try to make the best of it as they can. While this is a more realistic approach since government has been around for thousands of years and probably always will be, it doesn't mean that it's the most optimal solution. I don't see the point of arguing how to get the best out of a broken system. I'd rather take it a step further and figure out how to get the best out of any system, regardless of how realistic it is. Why limit your capabilities? This has already been done of course. Economists like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Carl Menger, and Henry Hazlitt helped create a new methodology of studying and accounting for human action in the economy. You can read about Austrian Economics and free markets if you want. They explain your child labor and railroad monopolies better than I would simply explain it, which would surely leave you unsatisfied. Edit: I've only read the first 10 or so paragraphs so far, but it addresses your railroad monopolies already: The Truth About the "Robber Barons" Edit: Here's an article on regulation: A Primer on Regulation
I said nothing of the sort. If a conclusion can be shown with reason that it can be applied more generally*, then it can be. But I wasn't talking about conclusions made in my post, I was talking about ideologies that influence the conclusions people make. The best ideology is not to have one. My ENTIRE post was about how to think about politics. Not about the content of said politics. Government was used as an example. *the method to avoid the fallacy of generalization is to take more sample points. Essentially, looking at each issue individually like I said to.
I'm sorry. I've been up for 32 hours and don't understand. I'll understand in the morning. Nothing I say right now will make any sense to anybody on this planet.
This. Every single time I've heard him bring up his "4-point plan" he says absolutely nothing about what any of those points are. When I watched the debates and saw him briefly skim over that without any explanation I face-palmed. How can anybody actually take that seriously?
Yeah I think what conservatives miss is that giving everyone the opportunity at higher education doesn't actually level the playing field that much; it's all what you do with that opportunity.
I really have nothing to do with this. But somehow I can't stand the thought Romney might be the President of America...
This is the kind of divisive thinking that ruins this country. And for the record, I've yet to talk to a libertarian who "just goes with their gut without thinking" (although I'm sure they're out there). That's actually the opposite of what I've seen, and what helped me embrace the liberty movement in the first place. Not sure who you've been speaking with.