i like the fact that some state have the power of federal recall
and that some state apparently have banned certain people from running there :>
but the states always have to the right, unless some uppity fed overrules that with great threats. i think it says that somewhere on a piece of paper. that which is not disallowed, is allowed. that is: they cannot grant power per se, just block it.
we already know which guy to not vote for. or which party. sadly, it might come down to the lesser of weasels, though honestly, the guy hasn't committed "sin" yet, so, why not?
What I've read about Ron Paul's positions seems to pretty clearly indicate the states are, for some reason, not allowed to outlaw abortion. And he would like that changed (but doesn't want abortion outlawed at a federal level). I think that all revolves around Roe v. Wade.
OK, I’m going to see if I can calm down enough to type an actual response.
President Obama signed the defense budget. That was passed in the eleventh hour as a result of extremely contentious negotiations between the Senate, more or less in the hands of grownups on both sides of the aisle, and the House of Representatives, which would turn the United States of America into a totalitarian theocracy if it could. (Hint: The House of Representatives is not controlled by the same party as the President.)
There is an awful lot of awful stuff in that bill. There is an awful lot of awful stuff in that bill in part because the GOP fascists (and I use that word deliberately; fascism is antithetical to the expressed values of the Tea Party ground troops, but it is the driving force of their puppetmasters and funders) in the House knew that it was a must-pass bill.
Now, I don’t know the specifics about the negotiations between the President and Congress over the specific indefinite detention provision you’re talking about, but I agree that that’s utterly appalling. However, I do know that Obama said he would veto an earlier version of the bill that mandated that any judicial process about civilians so held could only be conducted by military tribunals, not civilian courts. Obama insisted that the Executive Branch at least have the authority to move such detainees to civilian courts. I.e., he was threatening not to sign the bill, and let the entire military shut down,* if Congress insisted that civilians held by the military could only be tried by military tribunals and were beyond the jurisdiction of civilian courts. (He also, according to my fuzzily-remembered source, insisted on removal of a provision which would have made it harder to prosecute torture of detainees.)
So, the bill he eventually signed was awful, but he spent some political capital to make it a little bit less awful.
Looking at The Wikipedia article, it looks like a lot of the controversial provisions in the bill were explicitly granting powers that W. and the hawks had previously said were implicitly granted (and also explicitly forcing the Executive to use them in certain circumstances). Obama managed to negotiate language that did not alter the status quo as much (leaving it legal for US citizens in military custody for terrorism to be transferred to civilian custody, and leaving a lot of the powers W.’s administration had de facto assumed for itself in their previous ambiguous state rather than explicitly granting them). [cont’d] [edit: minor grammar fix]
Do you actually want to make the United States of America a freer place through the electoral and legislative processes, or do you just want to overthrow the government tomorrow and not let anybody who disagrees with you have any role in government? If you actually want to work within the framework of the Constitution, you have to put up with a lot of sausagemaking, unfortunately, and sometimes the sausage is really really nasty. If you don’t want politicians to work within the constitution, fine — but then you have to admit that you don’t think they deserve to be in office because they disagree with you and your friends, rather than because they support policy that is unconstitutional.
As far as Ron Paul, I don’t know for an absolute fact that he himself is racist in his own mind, only that he published a newsletter which used his name and purported to be from him and about his views which called for race war and gave advice for killing black people. And I sort of presume that the content of that newsletter which he published came up from time to time, even if he didn’t actually write its contents himself, given that he was a fairly high-profile gadfly and the newsletter was published for him and under his name. OK, yes, despite what a former aide said about him, come to think of it, sure sounds like he is racist, or at the very least willing to culitivate explicitly racist support for political advantage. And I do feel confident that he’s homophobic. (See that previous link. And of course, since that link is from a former Paul staffer, I hope it goes without saying that I don’t agree with all or most of the points of view in it.)
So, Ron Paul is evil. Now, I support the right of people to hate whom they please in their private lives. [Edit: The legal right. I don’t think they should be immune to criticism. Ron Paul thinks if your boss threatens to fire because you won’t agree to have sex with him you should quit your job and not rely on the government to intervene. I think if your boss threatens to fire you because you’re a racist scumball you should quit your job and not rely on the government to intervene.] But if somebody is so morally messed up as to be racist (or at least happy having vile, violent racist stuff printed under his own name and presented as representing his views) and homophobic, doesn’t that make you wonder the slightest little bit about his moral compass? So, yes, I’d pick Barack Obama over Ron Paul. I’d also pick Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney over Ron Paul. And I think despite Nixon’s private racism and public “Southern strategy” and power-hungriness and paranoia, I’d probably take Richard Nixon over Ron Paul.
* It’s slightly more complicated than this; I believe the consensus of Constitutional scholars is that the US could still constitutionally feed and house soldiers, and maybe even pay to bring them back from the battlefield, even without authorized funding, but my sense is that the constitutional issues are not clear. And I believe that the consensus of Constitutional scholars is that the US could not actually fight, or make payments on its procurement contracts. Many people, of course, think that would be a good thing, but in any case it’s a Very Big Deal with unpredictable constitutional consequences. Would you like to see it go to the Supreme Court and end up with a precedent that the President can tell the military to do anything even if it’s not funded by Congress?
This story has some Paul quotes — both quotes from the ’80s and ’90s that are now coming under scrutiny and quotes from Paul now about those publications.
When the newsletters first arose as an issue in 1996, Paul didn’t deny authorship. Instead, Paul personally repeated and defended some of the most incendiary racial claims in the newsletters.
This article and this one are, to be fair, mostly about a prominent Paul supporter rather than about Paul himself. But when Kayser initially endorsed Paul the Paul campaign trumpeted that endorsement as a demonstration that Paul’s small-(Federal)-government goals were compatible with the goals of would-be-theocrats like Kayser. (I would recommend reading all of that last article.)
I really appreciate your reply. I had heard others wonder what Obama traded in order to sign indefinite detention. It's really messed up I didn't come across such an obvious answer as I was looking. Maybe it was too obvious and it just didn't get repeated in what I read, but I really feel like that Forbes article should have mentioned it. I didn't realize it was tied to the huge budget mess. That makes more sense. I'll have to see about getting it clearer on wikipedia.
I'm aware of the newsletters in Ron Paul's name containing racist stuff, and I agree there's no way that isn't bad. At best, Ron Paul and the people writing the newsletters were not racist, but thought it made political sense to sound racist in order to get support from racists. Which is no good.
The mainstream articles I’ve read about this have been so vague that I wasn’t clear that he had fought to narrow rather than expand that provision until I did some research in writing my reply. (I knew he'd done some narrowing, but I didn’t realize it was in the exact same provision of the bill.)
I had read some quotes about his insistence on allowing citizen detainees to be transferred to civilian courts, and about his opposition to parts of the bill that seemed to condone torture. I had also read that he had negotiated to get less restrictions on the executive branch’s power to determine how detainees are handled (with no further details than that, in an otherwise fairly long article). Turns out those two were the same thing — he wanted the executive branch to be allowed to let the civilian justice system handle civilian citizen detainees, while Congress wanted the executive branch to be forced to keep them in the military justice system. So the phrasing of that particular mention was very misleading; it suggested that the Obama administration wanted free reign to lock up citizens and throw away the key, while in fact the Obama administration fought for the freedom not to be required to lock up citizens and throw away the key.
Now, I’d much more prefer legislation that would prohibit the executive from locking up citizens and throwing away the key, and I am pretty certain Obama would too, but you have to understand the actual legislative history and a little bit about the bill here to undersand who’s fighting to expand authoritarianism and who’s fighting against it.
And that’s the mainstream media. (To be fair, I’m sure there are articles out there in the mainstream media that gave a more accurate picture; the one I stumbled across just didn’t happen to be one of them.) Given that I think you get lots of your news and political analysis from sources which are much more overtly anti-Obama (and pro-Paul) than the mainstream media is, it behooves you to put some effort into research to find out whether the picture in broad brushstrokes that you’re getting so indignant about really has much connection to reality.
I really thought Forbes would be unbiased enough. That might be foolish, I don't know. I looked, although admittedly not much.
After reading up a little more on the issue, while I agree that Ron Paul's moral compass is scary, it doesn't sound like has any goals I object to. It seems he wants to reduce the power of the federal government so that Texas can outlaw abortion and gay sex. And while I can't imagine people wanting those laws, I think there are enough people in this country who believe they are absolutely necessary that it is justified for a state to have them.
I really think that a huge problem in the US is that we have too many people who are too different, and we're trying to get them all to play nice and think the same things. And I think reduction in federal power and increase in state power improves that situation.
I am, of course, assuming that if Paul got what he wants, I'd be able to find a state that doesn't outlaw abortion or gay sex, but I'm pretty comfortable with that assumption. The number of states that had outlawed abortion before Roe v. Wade is scary, but I'm hoping more states would be more sane about that now, and there were still a few states that hadn't outlawed it back then.
It sounds like you wouldn’t have cared about slavery if you could have found a place to live where you could personally have avoided it. Either that, or your attachment to the Libertarian brand (as opposed to any principles) is so deep that you don’t care about morality and consequences, you just want your team to win. (Actually, it sounds like you’re content supporting your team while they lose, and find that preferable to actually working for greater human freedom.)
I really think that a huge problem in the US is that we have too many people who are too different, and we're trying to get them all to play nice and think the same things.
To some extent, I agree with you, but I’m not willing to go so far as repealing the 14th amendment and ending Incorporation (and some amount of jurisprudence before it) and letting state governments oppress their people arbitrarily.
If you think it’s not morally OK for large numbers of people to get together (e.g., the citizenry of the United States) and agree to stop medium-sized numbers of people (e.g., the states, or for that matter corporations or other power centers) from oppressing small numbers of people or individuals, then you are no defender of freedom.
I think you're more comfortable deciding what other people should or shouldn't do than you would like people who have different beliefs to be. Yes, for gay people currently living in Texas, it would be unfortunate if gay sex were outlawed. But they could leave. But that still leaves gay children born in Texas in an unpleasant position. It's not a great situation, but I think it's better than continuing to have those people who would outlaw gay sex continuing to exert political pressure on the federal government I share.
I think slavery is easily an entirely different class of oppression, because slaves don't have the option to leave. I recognize gays may have practical reasons making leaving difficult, it might even be financially impossible for some people, but I think that's resolvable. I think that's a cause I could donate time and money to. I think it's much more resolvable than coming up with one set of rules regarding abortion that satisfy everyone in this country.
I believe very strongly that it's wrong to outlaw gay sex or abortion. But I know that there are people who feel much more strongly that I'm wrong. How can you determine which of us is right? Why not just split us up as peacefully as possible?
Yes, for gay people currently living in Texas, it would be unfortunate if gay sex were outlawed. But they could leave.
What a lovely solution! If your neighbours don’t want to grant you equal rights as a person under the law, just leave. That’s always been the best and most just solution to persecution, hasn’t it?
Tell you what: Let’s apply that to you. You disagree with some things the country you and I share, and you want to change that country to better suit your political views, and more poorly suit mine (and poor people’s, and women’s, and those of anybody without the particular set of power advantages you happen to have, and probably also all the people who have power in ways you don’t). But you’ve hit upon the perfect solution! Get the fuck out of my country.
(Seriously, if you and people with your kind of sociocognitive dysfunction got your own little Libertarian Heimat, it would descend into civil war in short order, because you can’t see the beams in your own eyes, but you would put out your brothers’ eyes because the specks bugged you, and think yourselves righteous in doing it.)
I already have moved to a different state because of my preference for laws / government. I'm not suggesting anybody else do anything I haven't demonstrated a willingness to do (while recognizing I was in a better than average position to do it).
Your inability to consider the possibility you're wrong is no better than Christian extremists. Similar inability to discuss the problem calmly. Everything has to be run your way, and anybody who thinks different is evil. Sound familiar? I at least try to consider the possibility I'm wrong, and try to figure out what's best in that context.
But that won't help, because you can't consider the possibility you're wrong. How could you be? It's all so obvious. To you.
Right? Can you ask yourself the question? What if you're wrong?
I am honestly sorry to have upset you as much as I expect this has. You have only been incredibly kind and generous to me.
I expect you're pretty much done with this conversation. But if not, I'd love it if you could tell me why your certainty is any more valid than anybody's who is certain you're wrong.
I expect you're pretty much done with this conversation.
On the edge, but your honest request to continue it kept me here a bit longer.
But if not, I'd love it if you could tell me why your certainty is any more valid than anybody's who is certain you're wrong.
To some extent, this is fundamentally unanswerable on a philosophical level. How do I know genocide is wrong? I know I don’t like it, but how do I know that matters, that it’s a valid basis for action? I know the people who see it as possibly happening to them don’t like it, but how do I know that in some abstract, non-subjective way, their feelings matter? I know that, if we lived in a world where genocide were more routine than it is now, people would on average be less happy than they are now, but so what? Maybe people’s desire to commit genocide is more important, according to somebody else’s moral lights, than people’s desire not to have genocide perpetrated against them. If you don’t accept my moral intuition that genocide is to be avoided (and if you don’t accept some God whose word you think you need to obey — and I will note that throughout history gods’ opinions of genocide have been a bit mixed), then there’s nothing I can do to convince you.
On the other hand, you and I may agree that genocide is a bad thing, and disagree factually about how to avoid it. In the ’30s, there was sincere debate in the West about whether confrontation or conciliation with Hitler was likely to have the best outcome for the people whose lives he affected. In the ’50s and ’60s, there was similar debate in the US over what policy towards the Soviet Union would be best, in the long and the short term for Soviet citizens (including the Jews and other minorities brutally persecuted by Stalin). People with very similar goals argued radically different courses of action. And since you can’t go back and repeat the experiment the other way, it’s kind of tricky to collect data from history. But it’s not impossible.
I think you want (or think you want) to maximize human freedom. I also want to maximize human freedom. I think you think that if you got to be the architect of the Utopian society, designing its rules, you could be the perfect watchmaker and construct a machine that would produce maximal freedom. And I look at the machine you want and its starting state (including the watchmakers) and it’s obvious to me that that would be a machine for producing human misery on a grand scale, that would turn on many of the people who had put it in place in the first place and destroy them (somewhat like the French Revolution).
So here I’m basing my decisions about what to fight for and what to fight against on two basic things I trust about myself: My moral intuition (which tells me that letting people live their lives as freely as possible consistent with other people also living their lives equally freely is desirable), and my ability to predict consequences.
If you want Ron Paul to be president, and you want him to be able to put into practice his articulated policies, you are advocating for a the most radical sudden change this country has seen since the Civil War. (And in fact, when you make the arguments you are making for state sovereignty over the Federal constitution and Bill of Rights that you are making, you are essentially advocating going back to the condition of the US prior to the Civil War, modulo the fact that the country’s a lot more urban now and slavery has lost a lot of popularity in the intervening century and a half.) Even if I didn’t think Ron Paul was a racist, misogynist, homophobic lunatic who would be happy seeing Dominionists in power, even if I agreed with everything he said and thought he was a wise and foresightful person, I wouldn’t want to make such a huge restructuring in one jump. I would want to make smaller changes as experiments and see how they go.
OK, that’s maybe one third of the first point of three or four, and probably not the most important or the most interesting point, but I can’t let this discussion take over my life. (And LJ won’t let me post comments that long, anyway.)
(1) I think I may have misunderstood your question, since it sounds like you’re saying either that all argument about right and wrong is completely futile, or that I don’t have a right to disagree with you, because no matter what my reasoning process may be I might be wrong, but you have a right to disagree with me, because I might be wrong. Wrong about what? If I’m wrong that all people deserve equal human rights, and I’m successful in persuading my government to protect those equal human rights, then I suppose some people are tragically defended from being enslaved or raped or murdered who don’t “deserve” to be, but that’s a very strange argument for somebody who claims to be a libertarian to be making. (That said, it’s a conclusion that capital-L Libertarians seem to come to on a surprisingly regular basis.)
(2) Backing up, you’re telling me that the American people should support for president someone who you have granted is a racist and a homophobe; who doesn’t believe in evolution or global warming (in fact, claims global warming is a deliberate hoax); whom the overwhelming majority of Americans in almost any demographic and of almost any political stripe think is an absolute nutcase*; a large fraction of whose prominent supporters explicitly want to impose their religious views on their neighbours by force and turn America into a theocracy; and who you yourself have said has lots of unforgivable beliefs that belie any claim to be a (real, small-l) libertarian. I’ve tried to take you seriously and argue individual points, but if it’s not apparent to you that there’s something wrong there, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.
(3) All of that said, by all means, vote for Paul in the New Hampshire primary! First of all, the right to vote is important, and I think everyone should have the right to vote, but secondly, I want to see the contemporary Republican Party and capital-L Libertarianism not just utterly discredited, but made a laughing stock, such that their distinctive ideas fall out the Overton window and more space is made for sane, realistic political discourse in this country. The more places Ron Paul makes a respectable showing in the GOP primaries, the more discredited the GOP will be, and the more people learn about Ron Paul, the more discredited capital-L Libertarianism will be.
* This is the one thing in this list that I don’t think is necessarily disqualifying, but given the tiny minority of Americans who don’t think Ron Paul is batshit crazy, I think it’s almost disqualifying. On the bright side, it guarantees he won’t be elected, and goes some way towards guaranteeing that if he were elected he couldn’t get his policies implemented.
Oh, and yes, you’re right, I’m more comfortable having myself decide (say) how the Afghan government should treat women than I am having the Taliban decide how the Afghan government should treat women. That’s not because I’m a hypocrite unjustly trying to impose my own arbitrary and frivolous personal preferences on the Taliban, that’s because the effects on women of the way the Taliban would like the Afghan government to treat women are not morally equivalent to effects on women of the way I would like the Afghan government to treat women.
Way, way off topic, but I managed to get from that Wikipedia article to the articles on coats-of-arms and English heraldry, as well as the Bayeux tapestry.
To bring this comment back to topicality, while I agree with you in general about the principle of states' rights (the 9th and 10th amendments don't get nearly enough love), I really think you've missed the forest for the trees on this one. To pick an intentionally incendiary example, should the deep South be allowed to re-institute segregation? (I forget if it was Rand or Ron that mentioned the Civil Rights Act as an example of Federal overreach, although I think it was Rand but am too lazy to go look it up.)
The rights to abortion and gay sex are both examples of having sovereignty over one's own body. Would you not consider mutually consensual sex with someone to whom you are attracted to qualify as a pursuit of happiness? (While the Declaration of Independence isn't a document that really has any legal force today, I will remind you that the Founders agreed that some of the most basic, "unalienable Rights" that people have include "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.")
How much of an infringement of personal liberty is it to say that you can't have sex with that (willing) person over there just because you both happen to have the same set of genitalia? How disingenuous is it to say that your civil rights are only civil rights as long as they stand up to a majority vote? Would it be valid for a state to, say, disenfranchise gun owners or redheads if there was support for it?
To draw an analogy, you're advocating for BSD-style government, while beowabbit is in favor of a GPL-style government. You want maximum freedom from an author who imposes the fewest possible restrictions on anyone at all, which makes it possible for a middle-man third party to close-source the codebase and restrict the freedoms of modification and distribution among the end users. He's saying that it's much better to accept a few additional restrictions up front so that the code base stays open and anyone can modify it, resulting in much greater net freedom for all. (I'm not sure which license you prefer these days, but the analogy seemed interesting when it hit me.)
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and that some state apparently have banned certain people from running there :>
but the states always have to the right, unless some uppity fed overrules that with great threats. i think it says that somewhere on a piece of paper. that which is not disallowed, is allowed. that is: they cannot grant power per se, just block it.
we already know which guy to not vote for. or which party. sadly, it might come down to the lesser of weasels, though honestly, the guy hasn't committed "sin" yet, so, why not?
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President Obama signed the defense budget. That was passed in the eleventh hour as a result of extremely contentious negotiations between the Senate, more or less in the hands of grownups on both sides of the aisle, and the House of Representatives, which would turn the United States of America into a totalitarian theocracy if it could. (Hint: The House of Representatives is not controlled by the same party as the President.)
There is an awful lot of awful stuff in that bill. There is an awful lot of awful stuff in that bill in part because the GOP fascists (and I use that word deliberately; fascism is antithetical to the expressed values of the Tea Party ground troops, but it is the driving force of their puppetmasters and funders) in the House knew that it was a must-pass bill.
Now, I don’t know the specifics about the negotiations between the President and Congress over the specific indefinite detention provision you’re talking about, but I agree that that’s utterly appalling. However, I do know that Obama said he would veto an earlier version of the bill that mandated that any judicial process about civilians so held could only be conducted by military tribunals, not civilian courts. Obama insisted that the Executive Branch at least have the authority to move such detainees to civilian courts. I.e., he was threatening not to sign the bill, and let the entire military shut down,* if Congress insisted that civilians held by the military could only be tried by military tribunals and were beyond the jurisdiction of civilian courts. (He also, according to my fuzzily-remembered source, insisted on removal of a provision which would have made it harder to prosecute torture of detainees.)
So, the bill he eventually signed was awful, but he spent some political capital to make it a little bit less awful.
Looking at The Wikipedia article, it looks like a lot of the controversial provisions in the bill were explicitly granting powers that W. and the hawks had previously said were implicitly granted (and also explicitly forcing the Executive to use them in certain circumstances). Obama managed to negotiate language that did not alter the status quo as much (leaving it legal for US citizens in military custody for terrorism to be transferred to civilian custody, and leaving a lot of the powers W.’s administration had de facto assumed for itself in their previous ambiguous state rather than explicitly granting them). [cont’d] [edit: minor grammar fix]
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Do you actually want to make the United States of America a freer place through the electoral and legislative processes, or do you just want to overthrow the government tomorrow and not let anybody who disagrees with you have any role in government? If you actually want to work within the framework of the Constitution, you have to put up with a lot of sausagemaking, unfortunately, and sometimes the sausage is really really nasty. If you don’t want politicians to work within the constitution, fine — but then you have to admit that you don’t think they deserve to be in office because they disagree with you and your friends, rather than because they support policy that is unconstitutional.
As far as Ron Paul, I don’t know for an absolute fact that he himself is racist in his own mind, only that he published a newsletter which used his name and purported to be from him and about his views which called for race war and gave advice for killing black people. And I sort of presume that the content of that newsletter which he published came up from time to time, even if he didn’t actually write its contents himself, given that he was a fairly high-profile gadfly and the newsletter was published for him and under his name. OK, yes, despite what a former aide said about him, come to think of it, sure sounds like he is racist, or at the very least willing to culitivate explicitly racist support for political advantage. And I do feel confident that he’s homophobic. (See that previous link. And of course, since that link is from a former Paul staffer, I hope it goes without saying that I don’t agree with all or most of the points of view in it.)
So, Ron Paul is evil. Now, I support the right of people to hate whom they please in their private lives. [Edit: The legal right. I don’t think they should be immune to criticism. Ron Paul thinks if your boss threatens to fire because you won’t agree to have sex with him you should quit your job and not rely on the government to intervene. I think if your boss threatens to fire you because you’re a racist scumball you should quit your job and not rely on the government to intervene.] But if somebody is so morally messed up as to be racist (or at least happy having vile, violent racist stuff printed under his own name and presented as representing his views) and homophobic, doesn’t that make you wonder the slightest little bit about his moral compass? So, yes, I’d pick Barack Obama over Ron Paul. I’d also pick Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney over Ron Paul. And I think despite Nixon’s private racism and public “Southern strategy” and power-hungriness and paranoia, I’d probably take Richard Nixon over Ron Paul.
* It’s slightly more complicated than this; I believe the consensus of Constitutional scholars is that the US could still constitutionally feed and house soldiers, and maybe even pay to bring them back from the battlefield, even without authorized funding, but my sense is that the constitutional issues are not clear. And I believe that the consensus of Constitutional scholars is that the US could not actually fight, or make payments on its procurement contracts. Many people, of course, think that would be a good thing, but in any case it’s a Very Big Deal with unpredictable constitutional consequences. Would you like to see it go to the Supreme Court and end up with a precedent that the President can tell the military to do anything even if it’s not funded by Congress?
PS — a couple more articles
And linked from that story, FACT CHECK: Ron Paul Personally Defended Racist Newsletters. A highlight (supported by Paul quotes):
This article and this one are, to be fair, mostly about a prominent Paul supporter rather than about Paul himself. But when Kayser initially endorsed Paul the Paul campaign trumpeted that endorsement as a demonstration that Paul’s small-(Federal)-government goals were compatible with the goals of would-be-theocrats like Kayser. (I would recommend reading all of that last article.)
Re: PS — a couple more articles
I'm aware of the newsletters in Ron Paul's name containing racist stuff, and I agree there's no way that isn't bad. At best, Ron Paul and the people writing the newsletters were not racist, but thought it made political sense to sound racist in order to get support from racists. Which is no good.
I'll read those articles.
Re: PS — a couple more articles
I had read some quotes about his insistence on allowing citizen detainees to be transferred to civilian courts, and about his opposition to parts of the bill that seemed to condone torture. I had also read that he had negotiated to get less restrictions on the executive branch’s power to determine how detainees are handled (with no further details than that, in an otherwise fairly long article). Turns out those two were the same thing — he wanted the executive branch to be allowed to let the civilian justice system handle civilian citizen detainees, while Congress wanted the executive branch to be forced to keep them in the military justice system. So the phrasing of that particular mention was very misleading; it suggested that the Obama administration wanted free reign to lock up citizens and throw away the key, while in fact the Obama administration fought for the freedom not to be required to lock up citizens and throw away the key.
Now, I’d much more prefer legislation that would prohibit the executive from locking up citizens and throwing away the key, and I am pretty certain Obama would too, but you have to understand the actual legislative history and a little bit about the bill here to undersand who’s fighting to expand authoritarianism and who’s fighting against it.
And that’s the mainstream media. (To be fair, I’m sure there are articles out there in the mainstream media that gave a more accurate picture; the one I stumbled across just didn’t happen to be one of them.) Given that I think you get lots of your news and political analysis from sources which are much more overtly anti-Obama (and pro-Paul) than the mainstream media is, it behooves you to put some effort into research to find out whether the picture in broad brushstrokes that you’re getting so indignant about really has much connection to reality.
Re: PS — a couple more articles
After reading up a little more on the issue, while I agree that Ron Paul's moral compass is scary, it doesn't sound like has any goals I object to. It seems he wants to reduce the power of the federal government so that Texas can outlaw abortion and gay sex. And while I can't imagine people wanting those laws, I think there are enough people in this country who believe they are absolutely necessary that it is justified for a state to have them.
I really think that a huge problem in the US is that we have too many people who are too different, and we're trying to get them all to play nice and think the same things. And I think reduction in federal power and increase in state power improves that situation.
I am, of course, assuming that if Paul got what he wants, I'd be able to find a state that doesn't outlaw abortion or gay sex, but I'm pretty comfortable with that assumption. The number of states that had outlawed abortion before Roe v. Wade is scary, but I'm hoping more states would be more sane about that now, and there were still a few states that hadn't outlawed it back then.
Re: PS — a couple more articles
If you think it’s not morally OK for large numbers of people to get together (e.g., the citizenry of the United States) and agree to stop medium-sized numbers of people (e.g., the states, or for that matter corporations or other power centers) from oppressing small numbers of people or individuals, then you are no defender of freedom.
Re: PS — a couple more articles
I think slavery is easily an entirely different class of oppression, because slaves don't have the option to leave. I recognize gays may have practical reasons making leaving difficult, it might even be financially impossible for some people, but I think that's resolvable. I think that's a cause I could donate time and money to. I think it's much more resolvable than coming up with one set of rules regarding abortion that satisfy everyone in this country.
I believe very strongly that it's wrong to outlaw gay sex or abortion. But I know that there are people who feel much more strongly that I'm wrong. How can you determine which of us is right? Why not just split us up as peacefully as possible?
Re: PS — a couple more articles
Tell you what: Let’s apply that to you. You disagree with some things the country you and I share, and you want to change that country to better suit your political views, and more poorly suit mine (and poor people’s, and women’s, and those of anybody without the particular set of power advantages you happen to have, and probably also all the people who have power in ways you don’t). But you’ve hit upon the perfect solution! Get the fuck out of my country.
(Seriously, if you and people with your kind of sociocognitive dysfunction got your own little Libertarian Heimat, it would descend into civil war in short order, because you can’t see the beams in your own eyes, but you would put out your brothers’ eyes because the specks bugged you, and think yourselves righteous in doing it.)
Re: PS — a couple more articles
Your inability to consider the possibility you're wrong is no better than Christian extremists. Similar inability to discuss the problem calmly. Everything has to be run your way, and anybody who thinks different is evil. Sound familiar? I at least try to consider the possibility I'm wrong, and try to figure out what's best in that context.
But that won't help, because you can't consider the possibility you're wrong. How could you be? It's all so obvious. To you.
Right? Can you ask yourself the question? What if you're wrong?
I am honestly sorry to have upset you as much as I expect this has. You have only been incredibly kind and generous to me.
I expect you're pretty much done with this conversation. But if not, I'd love it if you could tell me why your certainty is any more valid than anybody's who is certain you're wrong.
Re: PS — a couple more articles
On the other hand, you and I may agree that genocide is a bad thing, and disagree factually about how to avoid it. In the ’30s, there was sincere debate in the West about whether confrontation or conciliation with Hitler was likely to have the best outcome for the people whose lives he affected. In the ’50s and ’60s, there was similar debate in the US over what policy towards the Soviet Union would be best, in the long and the short term for Soviet citizens (including the Jews and other minorities brutally persecuted by Stalin). People with very similar goals argued radically different courses of action. And since you can’t go back and repeat the experiment the other way, it’s kind of tricky to collect data from history. But it’s not impossible.
I think you want (or think you want) to maximize human freedom. I also want to maximize human freedom. I think you think that if you got to be the architect of the Utopian society, designing its rules, you could be the perfect watchmaker and construct a machine that would produce maximal freedom. And I look at the machine you want and its starting state (including the watchmakers) and it’s obvious to me that that would be a machine for producing human misery on a grand scale, that would turn on many of the people who had put it in place in the first place and destroy them (somewhat like the French Revolution).
So here I’m basing my decisions about what to fight for and what to fight against on two basic things I trust about myself: My moral intuition (which tells me that letting people live their lives as freely as possible consistent with other people also living their lives equally freely is desirable), and my ability to predict consequences.
If you want Ron Paul to be president, and you want him to be able to put into practice his articulated policies, you are advocating for a the most radical sudden change this country has seen since the Civil War. (And in fact, when you make the arguments you are making for state sovereignty over the Federal constitution and Bill of Rights that you are making, you are essentially advocating going back to the condition of the US prior to the Civil War, modulo the fact that the country’s a lot more urban now and slavery has lost a lot of popularity in the intervening century and a half.) Even if I didn’t think Ron Paul was a racist, misogynist, homophobic lunatic who would be happy seeing Dominionists in power, even if I agreed with everything he said and thought he was a wise and foresightful person, I wouldn’t want to make such a huge restructuring in one jump. I would want to make smaller changes as experiments and see how they go.
OK, that’s maybe one third of the first point of three or four, and probably not the most important or the most interesting point, but I can’t let this discussion take over my life. (And LJ won’t let me post comments that long, anyway.)
Three things
(2) Backing up, you’re telling me that the American people should support for president someone who you have granted is a racist and a homophobe; who doesn’t believe in evolution or global warming (in fact, claims global warming is a deliberate hoax); whom the overwhelming majority of Americans in almost any demographic and of almost any political stripe think is an absolute nutcase*; a large fraction of whose prominent supporters explicitly want to impose their religious views on their neighbours by force and turn America into a theocracy; and who you yourself have said has lots of unforgivable beliefs that belie any claim to be a (real, small-l) libertarian. I’ve tried to take you seriously and argue individual points, but if it’s not apparent to you that there’s something wrong there, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.
(3) All of that said, by all means, vote for Paul in the New Hampshire primary! First of all, the right to vote is important, and I think everyone should have the right to vote, but secondly, I want to see the contemporary Republican Party and capital-L Libertarianism not just utterly discredited, but made a laughing stock, such that their distinctive ideas fall out the Overton window and more space is made for sane, realistic political discourse in this country. The more places Ron Paul makes a respectable showing in the GOP primaries, the more discredited the GOP will be, and the more people learn about Ron Paul, the more discredited capital-L Libertarianism will be.
* This is the one thing in this list that I don’t think is necessarily disqualifying, but given the tiny minority of Americans who don’t think Ron Paul is batshit crazy, I think it’s almost disqualifying. On the bright side, it guarantees he won’t be elected, and goes some way towards guaranteeing that if he were elected he couldn’t get his policies implemented.
Re: PS — a couple more articles
no subject
To bring this comment back to topicality, while I agree with you in general about the principle of states' rights (the 9th and 10th amendments don't get nearly enough love), I really think you've missed the forest for the trees on this one. To pick an intentionally incendiary example, should the deep South be allowed to re-institute segregation? (I forget if it was Rand or Ron that mentioned the Civil Rights Act as an example of Federal overreach, although I think it was Rand but am too lazy to go look it up.)
The rights to abortion and gay sex are both examples of having sovereignty over one's own body. Would you not consider mutually consensual sex with someone to whom you are attracted to qualify as a pursuit of happiness? (While the Declaration of Independence isn't a document that really has any legal force today, I will remind you that the Founders agreed that some of the most basic, "unalienable Rights" that people have include "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.")
How much of an infringement of personal liberty is it to say that you can't have sex with that (willing) person over there just because you both happen to have the same set of genitalia? How disingenuous is it to say that your civil rights are only civil rights as long as they stand up to a majority vote? Would it be valid for a state to, say, disenfranchise gun owners or redheads if there was support for it?
To draw an analogy, you're advocating for BSD-style government, while
I've been posting my NDAA commentary mostly on G+
The law as signed doesn't create any powers that Bush and Obama haven't already claimed.
See also: http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/ndaa-faq-a-guide-for-the-perplexed/