Pac_Man

It's partly my fault for responding to Monkey's trolling. Sorry about that.

I'll agree with this up to a point. Instilling fear in criminals needs to be a combined effort between the government and law-abilding citizens. If the government can't have a police officer to defend your home 24 hours a day (which it can't), at least it needs to not interfere with your right and your duty to do what needs to be done. However, if a criminal gets away with doing something bad anyway (which they sometimes will), the government must do its best to catch and punish them. I completely agree with your statement about swift and severe punishments. The goal of punishment should either be rehabilitation or elimination. Keeping people in cages--where they can spend years learning from and being influenced by other criminals--accomplishes neither. Colonial Virginia was swift and severe. The first time you were convicted of stealing, you'd pay a moderate fine. The second time, you'd get branded--usually a small brand on your thumb. The third conviction would result in an execution, on the grounds that a career thief has no use to society. Rehabilitation (that is, scaring someone straight) or execution. One or the other.

I'm not questioning your political views, just your defense of DC Tom. "I've been called a Nazi by hard core liberals and conservatives alike." Well, if both sides of the aisle can find something to agree on . . . hmmmm. Just kidding. I haven't seen anything to indicate you're a Nazi, but you left yourself open to a good dig.

Don't you have something better to do than to incessantly annoy everyone else on this board by your weird crusade against me? I mean, you had to have been doing something with your time before you'd heard of me, right? Why not go back to doing . . . whatever it was you did before you met me? Oh, wait, the police might arrest you if you went back to throwing feces at people. Never mind.

You actually managed to get something about the Constitution right for once. As usual, your interpretation of my posts is incorrect, but going one for two is pretty good--at least for you.

A comment like this takes a lot of nerve, considering the number of blatant errors you made about the Constitution, which I pointed out. For crying out loud, you made those errors just a few hours ago. You: Ever hear of freedom of speech, or freedom of religion, or freedom of the press? They're all mentioned in the Constitution and its amendments. You made several other erroneous statements about the Constution--all while calling me an idiot. Anyone who wants to see this discussion can go here: http://www.stadiumwall.com/index.php?act=S...=60#entry343763 I realize not everyone is as smart as me, and that's fine. Where I have a problem is when people who aren't as smart as me--and let's face it, Monkey, you clearly fall into that category--start calling me an idiot. Perhaps you chose your name because your preferred debate style is to throw a lot of . . . feces and see what sticks.

An excellent post. I will go one step further, and say the purpose of government in general--not just national government--is to impose fear and terror in the hearts of those who would deprive us of our liberty. This means the military must strike fear in the hearts of those who would invade our nation, and our police force must strike fear in the hearts of those who would invade our homes. A government which deliberately falls short in either of these tasks has no moral authority. So that's the core role of government. But Campy has a point in saying there are other things the government can do also; such as provide a money supply or roads. He actually used the phrase "economic stability" which is somewhat broader than the role I see for government. There are two ways the government can influence the economy: monetary policy (think Alan Greenspan, interest rates, etc.) and fiscal policy (that is, taxes and spending). Most people agree that having someone like Alan Greenspan adjust the overnight lending rate (which is what people mean when they say he raised or lowered interest rates) is a good way of helping the economy be stable. Others go further, and say the government should spend more during economic slowdowns than during good times, to further increase stability. However, efforts to create stability in this way have been unsuccessful, and also it's very difficult to eliminate a program during a good time that you created during a depression. Moreover, quantitative research has shown that an influx of government spending doesn't stimulate the economy anyway. Campy has a point about conflict resolution. The legal system should be simple, inexpensive, efficient, just, and predictable. The more like this the legal system is, the better the economy will function. Collective goods and services is a thorny issue. Some things, such as electricity lines or roads, are natural monopolies. It makes no economic sense to have road network A run by company A, and road network B run by company B. Nor does it make sense to have two separate networks of power lines running through a given town, with the separate lines of Company A and Company B hooked up to each house. Because such things are natural monopolies, they can never be subjected to true supply and demand forces. However, allowing private, regulated companies to run such natural monopolies may be less bad than having the government run them. I don't like regulation in general, but in this case it can kind of serve as a proxy for the market forces that would encourage increasingly high levels of service at decreasing levels of cost. Then there is the issue of negative and positive externalities. A negative externality is when you do something which imposes costs or negative side effects on others; without bearing the cost of these side-effects yourself. A good example of this would be someone dumping a bunch of pollution into Lake Erie, killing all the fish. Maybe those fish were worth $50 million a year, whereas the piece of pollution control equipment would have cost just $1 million. Given a choice, the factory owner will not buy the $1 million piece of equipment, because nobody is forcing him to pay for the $50 million annual loss he's created. So when practical, the government must tax or prohibit negative externality activities. Then there are positive externality activities, such as basic research, education, etc. In a free market, these things are done too little. So I have no problem with the government subsidizing K - 12 education, or even college education. Nor do I see anything wrong with the government subsidizing a particle accelerator or an orbital telescope. My preference is for these subsidies to go to private institutions and organizations, especially for education. Such grants should have only a minimal amount of red tape associated with them; because parents and children working to choose schools is a far more powerful model than some bureaucrat trying to use regulations to deal with every little thing. America's public education system is an abysmal failure; whereas private and parochial schools have shown they can do more with less. Moreover, a system in which parents and children choose their own schools is far more consistent with the concept of freedom than is a centrally planned education system run from Washington, the state capitol, or even by the local school board.

Agreed. I was just saying that if the multinationals are harming this country as much as they are, they're probably similarly indifferent to the fate of countries such as Yemen or Syria. And yet, because of their size, power, and economic interests, they are probably a significant source of influence in such countries. This combination of interference and indifference may be breeding hatred.

I had not heard of these reports. If you have a link, I would appreciate it.

Maybe you're right. But once I catch someone engaging in one blatant lie (such as this cartoon) I become much more open to the idea that they may be engaging in other lies as well; in areas where it's harder to hold them accountable.

The cartoon I saw didn't point out the absurdity of anything. Or at least, not anything real. It accused American interregators of torturing a prisoner to death. A blatant lie.

You've said some idiotic things recently, but calling me a moron takes the cake. It's clear you have some inner need to get into a flame war with someone, so maybe making idiotic and inflammatory statements is your way of achieving that. Why do you say that I'm the same as KurtGodel77? Was he someone else you tried to get into a flame war with?

You know, I actually thought you were a pretty cool guy until you started sticking up for DC Tom. Now I'm beginning to wonder whether you just like bullying for the sake of bullying, and have a natural affinity to others who are the same.

You appear to have taken my refusal to discuss race at all as meaning I'm some kind of Nazi. This "attempt" at a flame war is absolutely pathetic. What bothers me most about this discussion is that nobody has even attempted to advance an intelligent reason why it's okay for the Supreme Court to ignore the rule of law. Despite this lack of intellectual justification, people seem quite content to attack myself and my views anyway. Campy dodged the issue of judicial legality by saying that he agrees with the position the Supreme Court took on abortion, and that he disagrees with what he assumes my abortion views are. I specifically chose not to discuss my own views about abortion, instead focusing on the legal mechanisms by which any given view of abortion should be put into practice. Maintaining the rule of law is, in the long run, more fundamentally important to maintaining a democracy than achieving a short-term victory on an issue like abortion. If it's okay for liberal justices to legislate from the bench, it's okay for conservative justices to do the same. The Constitution prohibits the government from maintaining a state religion. Well, conservative justices could (if they were activists) stretch this prohibition into something which would prohibit the government from doing anything which might influence people's religious views. So if the National Endowment for the Arts sponsored anything which might possibly have anything to do with Christianity (urine mixed with religious images comes to mind) this organization would immediately lose all federal funding. Judicial activism is all good and fun (for liberals) when it's being used to promote liberal causes. But if conservative judges started pulling this stuff, the liberals would be up in arms. Let's just be glad that at least conservative judges still believe in the rule of law.

That's pretty much what I was getting at. Presently, America is importing people while exporting jobs. This combination represents an attack on the American worker and the American people; the primary beneficiary of which is the multinationals.

At least your response wasn't, um . . . . . . . a flame or anything!

Allow me to dissect this post piece by piece. In other words, you're not happy that I didn't allow myself to get sidetracked into a discussion about race and mixed marriages. Fine. Actually, it does both. There is the habeus corpus provision, the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, the right to peaceable assembly, the right to bear arms, the freedom of the press. All these things are outlined in the Constitution and its amendments. You are sort of right about this. The Constitution states that any rights not specifically set aside for the federal government are reserved for the states or the people. True, but not relevant. How can 200 years of legal precedent be used to justify a completely new interpretation of a constitutional provision that's been around for 200 years? You're no longer skating on thin ice here, you're skating where there's no ice at all. According to this line of thinking, Roe vs. Wade was a mistake, because it turned what was a state issue (abortion) into a federal issue. The chief effect of Roe vs. Wade was that the states no longer had control over their own abortion policies, because this was dictated from Washington. Based on the errors you've made above, it would be easy for me to make some remark about the pot calling the kettle black. But to be honest, I'd rather engage in an intelligent debate about the issues at hand than fight a useless flame war. Most people are at least somewhat reasonable; which is why disagreements can often be resolved by exposing people to new information and new ways of thinking. This is the style of debate I will continue to try to follow. If you have any interest in this type of discussion, I may continue to respond to your posts.

This question really is out of the blue. I'd just as soon keep this thread focused on the issues regarding judicial appointees--including the issue of judicial activism--rather than wander off into a discussion about race, mixed marriages, etc. What bothers me about judicial activism is the idea of the Supreme Court creating new constitutional provisions out of thin air. Regardless of what your views on contraception or abortion happen to be, the right way to put those views into law is through Congress, not by pretending the constitutional clause about unreasonable government searches of private homes has anything to do with either contraception or abortion. While this tactic gets many people the policies they want, it does so by abandoning the rule of law.

I once felt as you do; until I put myself in the shoes of the average citizen of an Islamic nation. What things has this person seen over the last 15 - 20 years? They've seen an American president bomb the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and (by accident) Pakistan to distract attention from a domestic scandal. Many in the Muslim world might reasonably conclude that innocent Muslims died because the American president had an affair. Muslims have also seen their ancient culture undermined by the likes of Hollywood, American television, etc. Instead of whatever cultural richness and depth they've achieved in the past, young people are being offered something as shallow as it is sexual, as unfulfilling as it is glamorous. The American mass media represents the cultural equivalent of a nuclear bomb. Its epicenter was this country. Having wiped out much or most of the local American culture that once existed, the effects of this cultural bomb are now spreading globally. Muslims see the soulless multinational companies; the same companies whose efforts have created an anti-American immigration policy in this country. Perhaps such companies are equally predatory in Muslim nations. Muslims have seen the U.S. continue its aid to Israel, despite the latter's human rights violations. In the 1980s, Israel bombed and shelled the homes of innocent Beirut civilians, because there were terrorists hiding amongst the civilians. Ronald Reagan described the resulting murder of civilians as a "holocaust" in his autobiography. And yet, the political pressure for continued aid to Israel was so strong, that despite the subsequent election of a war criminal to Israel's highest office, Israel remained far and away the largest recipient of American foreign aid. Muslims are familiar with American bombs, both those dropped on them directly and those which proceed through the Israel conduit. Muslims are familiar with the amoral and anti-moral American mass media (including Hollywood). Muslims are familiar with predatory multinationals, many of which originated or are based in this country. What Muslims are not familiar with is the honest Midwestern farmer, the regular guy blue collar factory worker, the woman who stays at home and raises her kids. They are unfamiliar with the tens of millions of people who make this country great, who represent the true American heartland. And yet it's not the Hollywood film studio directors or the rich multinational heads who are over in the Middle East putting their lives on the line. Instead, it's the good Americans who are dying because of the hatred which, all too often, has been inspired by this nation's deeply flawed (and, ironically, often anti-American) elite.

Can you give a summary of what these documentaries have to say?

Agreed

I agree with this 100%. Neither party appears particularly concerned with protecting the interests of America or the American people. I'll admit to having a stronger feeling of revulsion towards Democrats, because they are more like communists than Republicans are. Communism is clearly the most evil ideology ever conceived by the human mind. But the modern version of the Republican Party appears to have stripped away everything good that once existed in the conservative movement--fiscal responsibility, a responsible immigration policy, and the environmental protections of Teddy Roosevelt--and has replaced them with naked corporate greed and the rape of this dying nation. The tidal wave of immigrants--legal and illegal--Bush has permitted is appalling. Corporations like immigrants because they drive down wages. That Bush has chosen to participate in this attack on the American worker shows he may be no better than many Democrats.

I believe the government should treat any prisoner with a respect for human rights, because to do otherwise sets a bad precedent. Torture, desecration of religious artifacts, rape by other inmates, etc. are unacceptable. Having said this, Newsweek was far too quick to cry wolf. The evidence for liberal bias in the mainstream press is irrefutable. It's been well documented by Bernard Goldberg in his book Bias. As for why the Bush administration hasn't denied the stories; it's possible they are a little scared about what happened in Abu Grahib. If there's even a 1% chance that some overzealous interregator somewhere took liberties with the Koran, the Bush administration doesn't want to fall on its face later by denying such things happened. There's a difference between exercising reasonable caution in the face of the complexities of running a large organization--which is what the Bush administration appears to be doing--and blackening America's name throughout the Middle East based on an unsubstantiated report from an anonymous source.

Considering how opposed the Left is to making generalizations based on race or gender, its willingness to generalize about the entire Christian Church and compassionate conservative movement based on one isolated incident is blatant hypocrisy. Apparently, the Left believes generalizations based on gender are inherently bad, unless directed against men. Generalizations based on race are bad, unless directed against whites. Generalizations about religious people are bad, unless directed against Christians. Generalizations about people based on culture are bad, unless directed against Southerners. Tolerance is to be celebrated, except when it comes to tolerating right wing ideas. The list is nearly endless.

Another useless response. Well, I guess you tried.