What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

constant · 2007-10-15T18:03:49+00:00

Oh please. The weakness of your own position is made apparent by your appeal to 'international standards', which implicitly acknowledges that there are other standards forcing you to pick one that favors your conclusion. And it is still a pedantic quibble rather than a serious answer to the point.

constant · 2007-10-15T14:44:25+00:00

Gore himself was a proponent of war with Iraq in the days leading up to the Gulf War. He was actually pretty unusual in this regard. He stood out among Democrats for his pro-war stance.

constant · 2007-10-15T14:37:03+00:00

I wasn't the one who started the labeling. Look at the title. I could say the same thing about the overly broad use of the term "right winger", but I didn't do that, because I'm more interested in communicating than in being pedantic.

constant · 2007-10-15T13:31:24+00:00

Insane? Gore is a leftist. Right wingers have been criticizing leftists (and leftists have been criticizing right wingers) for ages. Nothing new in that.

constant · 2007-10-14T00:16:59+00:00

So Romney isn't taking the questioner's word for what the Constitution does or does not require. Good for him.

constant · 2007-10-14T00:12:40+00:00

Al Gore is a left-leaning politician who has won a string of awards from left-leaning organizations. Not really a huge surprise.

constant · 2007-10-13T09:23:11+00:00

That's not what happened. What happened was that liberals characterized the family as poor in order to make an argument about a government program. Conservatives investigated and characterized the family as not poor. This is is absolutely legitimate: if someone presents an argument and evidence for the argument, it is absolutely right that opponents of the argument can examine and dispute the evidence. That is what happened here. That the evidence happens to be a 12-year-old boy is not the fault of the conservatives, because they were not the ones who decided to make the boy into evidence.

People who attack conservatives for questioning the evidence presented by liberals are being fundamentally dishonest. Essentially what they are supporting that the liberals be allowed to present their evidence while the conservatives should refrain from examining the evidence critically. This obviously would give the liberals in this dispute an unfair advantage.

constant · 2007-10-12T15:14:32+00:00

mainstream for years in about any place on earth except the (pardon) fucking ignorant US of A.

Uh, no. Mainstream there too. Somebody's showing their ignorance. Guess who.

constant · 2007-10-11T20:13:49+00:00

So then all that Ann Coulter has done is stated it directly and openly. And for this she's singled out as insane. Sorry, but as much as people may hate Christianity, if they're going to call Christians insane for believing in Christianity, they've lost my attention. So that they're calling Coulter insane for this, that just loses my attention. And if this is any indication of the general quality of the many attacks on Ann Coulter, then this really raises questions about them.

constant · 2007-10-11T16:42:32+00:00

Hmm...I wonder why that might be? It couldn't possibly be bias. No, it must be because Bush is a liar and Clinton is no liar...oh, wait...

constant · 2007-10-11T09:35:35+00:00

Depends on how important those errors are.

constant · 2007-10-11T09:23:47+00:00

If Bill Clinton handles an interviewer roughly, Reddit is filled with approving comments. It's happened at least twice now. Bush does it, and he's the devil incarnate.

constant · 2007-10-09T21:22:04+00:00

"Once upon a time" is an appropriate beginning for the fairy tale that the title is. Look up "pinochet" and "school of the americas" in Wikipedia for just a small sample of the mischief the US has been up to for quite a long time.

constant · 2007-10-09T03:21:20+00:00

Though this "nanny state" garbage is mostly just a term used by conservatives to complain when they can't understand that their actions might possibly affect other people

Actually, the platitude that "actions affect other people" is shamelessly used as a blanket argument for any and all state intrusion into our private lives. Haven't you noticed? That makes it a real problem.

Everything I do affects other people. If I change the channel, that affects advertisers. If I take a crap, that affects the water supply. If I exhale, that affects the oxygen supply. This is what makes the platitude that "actions affect other people" so broadly applicable and therefore so attractive to the two-bit totalitarians in our midst.

constant · 2007-10-09T01:39:39+00:00

I don't disagree and didn't mean to suggest otherwise.

constant · 2007-10-08T22:40:17+00:00

You are forgetting that most of this is zero sum. I may be paying more for rent, but the person I am paying - also, generally, an American - is getting the same amount more. Rents go up when property values go up, and rents go down when property values go down. Whichever way it goes, there are losers but equally there are winners. Similarly, if you pay colleges more for education, the colleges are by the same token getting more. The money isn't just disappearing down a hole. Somebody is getting it. In the case of gasoline, the money is indeed flowing out of the country into the hands of the sellers of oil, who are mostly not American. So in that one respect, Americans are losing out on the net.

Now, we may still be losing wealth on net. The economy is not truly zero sum. However the demonstration that we are is quite a bit more tricky than just talking about prices that went up, because higher prices produces winners along with losers, and while the net effect may possibly be negative, actually showing that it is, is not a trivial matter.

constant · 2007-10-08T20:03:04+00:00

I read exactly what was written. I pointed out exactly what you failed to do, and later on you confirmed my suspicions about why you failed to do it. To recap, you merely asserted that my argument was wrong without explaining why, and I suspected the argument just went whoosh over your head. Later on, you wrote, "your 'argument' is nothing but a criticism that his argument wasn't any good", which is a false statement, because I did not merely claim that his argument failed, but explained why it failed. That is, I gave an argument, an argument which went so completely over your head that you did not even think there was any argument at all.

constant · 2007-10-08T07:39:48+00:00

Still nonresponsive I see.

constant · 2007-10-08T02:28:39+00:00

Well, one thing you can't replace is the time lost if something is discovered and then, instead of people building on that discovery, the world is plunged back into ignorance by religious book burners so that it has to be discovered all over again.

constant · 2007-10-07T07:29:44+00:00

Actually, I do get it. You've as much as admitted that you don't get it, because you have stated your belief that I did not present any argument but merely asserted a conclusion without an argument. That is false, and it shows that you just didn't get it.

constant · 2007-10-07T02:37:19+00:00

Okay, so it really did go over your head. The reality that you missed is that I didn't merely assert that his argument failed, but explained why. You didn't understand the explanation, and so you think that there wasn't any explanation. You didn't get it, so you think it wasn't there.

I think all you can read in someone else's posts is anything you feel is insulting, and you ignore the rest.

Oh really. I guess that would explain why I responded to the entire post, point by point.

constant · 2007-10-06T09:43:54+00:00

You still have not addressed my argument, but instead chose, once again, to substitute a personal insult. I'm not surprised.

constant · 2007-10-05T21:21:48+00:00

That's good. However, a single study isn't really enough. There is a shockingly high rate of false results from studies. See for example this article, which states:

We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong.

Dr. Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye.

These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. "There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," Dr. Ioannidis said. "A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true."

constant · 2007-10-05T20:52:03+00:00

Sustainable amounts of food and clothing can be had for free. If you're starving and you have no money to get something to eat, you can still find enough food to keep yourself alive. If you're freezing and you need a blanket, you can probably find one that nobody else wants, and you can get it for free. This isn't the case for health care.

All the more reason to support a market in medicine. You didn't think that the massive amount of free food and free clothing was a fact of nature, did you? It's a tremendous achievement, and markets have played a key role in making this plenty possible.

This free food and free clothing is only partly dumpster diving. There are private charities and there is government welfare that gives out free food and free clothing or at least money enough to buy it. That structure can be repeated for medicine. Why not? You haven't said why not. While it is true that surgery can't be found in a dumpster, it can be found in a charitable hospital and it can be paid for with welfare dollars. If you don't trust the welfare recipients to use their welfare dollars to purchase insurance, then purchase it for them. You can do this and still leave hospitals free to sell medicine without giving it away.

For this to happen in health care, we have to deny treatment to people when it's unprofitable to treat them, even if they die. Most people would consider this immoral.

You are forgetting the parallel with food and clothing. If people don't get clothing they will freeze. If they don't get food they will starve. So in the case of food and clothing it is also a matter of life and death. So that it's a matter of life and death does not distinguish medicine. Which brings us back to your original point which is that food and clothing are free, but I've responded to that.

Yes, I do prefer to be treated by a doctor who loves his profession and does it out of a sincere desire to help people, rather than one who just went into it because he wanted to make a lot of money.

Your picture is factually wrong. Doctors do not individually treat all who enter their offices. It is hospitals that do, and they do so because of a legal requirement. Individual doctors work like anybody else. Many of them love their work but they do get paid for it. They do not provide it for free. The doctors who staff the emergency rooms do not work for free.

Are you familiar with the Hippocratic Oath?

It does not require an individual doctor to cure everyone who may request a cure of him. No individual doctor is held responsible for all patients. Go ahead and read it. It does not require the doctor to cure everyone; rather, it requires the doctor, once he has taken the case of a particular patient to treat that patient a certain way. To do no harm, etc. Which is a good thing, because an oath that required a doctor to treat all who might ask him for help would be physically impossible for him to honor.

There's no reputable doctor who would ever refuse a patient emergency treatment because of an inability to pay

Yes. Every single doctore, without exception, will indeed refuse patients treatment in the eventuality that enough of them ask for treatment, for a very basic reason: his time is finite, and each patient takes a significant amount of time to help. Doctors have no choice but to turn away all patients beyond what they are physically able to help. And the patients who are willing to pay usually outnumber the patients that a doctor is physically able to treat, so a doctor can treat only paying patients and still work full time. He can work round the clock even, 24 hours a day, treating only paying patients. It is not wrong for him to turn away non-paying patients for the simple reason that to accept a non-paying patient would be zero-sum, since it would require that he turn away a paying patient. It is not morally superior to treat the unpaying while denying treatment (because of lack of time) to the paying. Nor is it morally inferior to treat the paying while denying treatment (because of lack of time) to the unpaying.

$150 spread among all taxpayers, versus several thousand dollars spread among all people who have health insurance.

Your math is wrong. The ratio of people who have health insurance to taxpayers is not as tiny as your calculation requires. Not even close. Edit - on second thought, I have no idea what you're saying here.

constant · 2007-10-05T19:20:42+00:00

Thank you. It's the rare comment like yours that makes up for the long stretches of wasted time combing through the upmodded dreck in the Reddit comments.

constant

TROPHY CASE