Lurker > red sox 777

Why should I have to explain something as self-evident as one gender not being superior to the other?

You don't have to unless you are trying to convince someone, or show someone that you are right. But if you are, then saying, "this is a fundamental principle with which everyone must agree" doesn't cut it. Don't be a fundamentalist.

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When I say "men and women are equal," do I have to make an argument that supports this position?

Of course you do. In some cases like this one everyone might already agree with you, in which case the whole discussion could be rather pointless.

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If you make a statement like saying there isn't a single good argument against something, you might want to actually make an argument supporting your position.

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Percentage change = (x2 - x1) / x1

That midpoint thing should produce different results. Ex: Gas goes from $4 to $10 (change of 150%), and demand drops 10%. So we have elasticity of 1/15. Using midpoint, the 10% drop becomes 10.53%, and the 150% gain becomes an 85.7% gain, for elasticity of about 8.14.

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It was pretty clearly understood that the founders were talking about commerce between the states, not commerce between individuals who happen to reside in different states.

That was never the understanding of the commerce clause. A big reason it was put in there is that New York could not, for example, put a tariff on goods from New Jersey.

I like the pre-1937 approach though. Commerce = trade = exchange, and only the exchange can be regulated. So the manufacture of goods cannot be regulated by the federal government.

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I'm curious, why would you want a more powerful federal government at the states' expense anyway? What can it do for you that state governments can't do? Unless you live in a welfare state like Alaska that receives massive amounts of funds from the other states through the federal government anyway.

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I think the 10th amendment is pretty clear. Anything the constitution doesn't address is up to the states to decide.

That doesn't help us very much when the Federal Government has the specifically enumerated powers of regulating interstate commerce, and doing whatever is "necessary and proper" to carry out the other enumerated powers.

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The "founders' intent" has nothing to do with how to interpret the Consitution. They made it flexible for a reason. But flexible to a point. There's just so many problems we have today that could have been avoided by just checking with the Consitution, it's really stupid.

Well, the Constitution does have to be interpreted. It's a very short document that isn't very clear on many situations we face today. The question is how to interpret it, and there isn't an obvious answer. You can say plain meaning, but what is the plain meaning?

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The biggest changes are:

1. 14th Amendment (Equal Protection, Due Process, Extension of Bill of Rights to the states)
2. 16th Amendment (Income Tax)
3. The vast expansion of the Commerce Power after 1937. Blame FDR for this one.

There's a good chance we see the 3rd Commerce Power law since 1937 struck down as unconstitutional this year though! (Obamacare, that is)

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Seems you should be taking just as much issue with people for supporting Obama in the first place as you are with them now supporting Ron Paul. Why do you think they supported Obama in the first place? For ideas like freedom, transparency, hope, and change.

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And I'd say Obama's campaign rhetoric was really not that leftist at all. Perhaps leftists heard it and thought it was, but then, non-leftists also heard what they wanted to hear. It was very well designed in that sense.

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Many Obama supporters wanted more freedom, less war, and less corporate control over government. The ones who wanted socialism probably are not the ones now supporting Ron Paul.

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And as I said before, the US is moving more and more towards a worst of both worlds approach.

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So? Way to completely miss my point that healthcare in most of Western Europe (and Canada) is one of those things that is done infinitely better than the US. it doesn't matter that that wasn't the case 50 or 100 years ago

The point is that without someone developing advancements, they won't happen. Socialized medicine tends to slow advancement. It may be better for more people now, but posterity will pay the price. IMO this is really the biggest problem with socialized medicine, and it's almost never addressed in the media.

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most people who are in money trouble and can't pay their medical bills don't have some ultra rare disease that is only treatable in the US.

Way to completely misunderstand. Most people with medical problems have conditions that are treatable now, but wouldn't have been 50 or 100 years ago.

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Even accounting for the population and economic size of the country, the other nations supporting the Iraq/Afghanistan wars were providing more nominal than anything else support, except maybe the UK. Or at least they were on the money cost side of things. For comparison, the US economy is about as large as the next 3 countries combined (China + Japan + Germany), whereas the military spending is as large as the next 20 countries combined.

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Also, the biggest difference between the Canadian budget and ours is probably that Canada is not providing more funding to its military than the rest of the top 20 nations in the world combined.

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I'd also say that birth control is something that it makes more sense to pay for out of pocket than through insurance. It's a small cost, where you have a pretty good idea of how much you need. Exactly the kind of cost where insurance doesn't provide a benefit.

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By this logic healthcare, socialized or otherwise, is never of an "acceptable" level. It will always be better after a hundred years, because, like you said, technology advances.

Right, that's why there is no acceptable level, and it's a bad idea to base your policy on raising everyone to a minimum acceptable level.

I really don't get the argument you're making here red sox. When has that happened? Seriously?

Hell, when I went on a tour of UBC, they were using a particle accelerator specifically so as to devise new medical treatments. Canada has socialized healthcare, and it's still advancing.

If you look at the advancement of the past few decades, a disproportionate amount of them have come from the US. Because there is a greater mechanism for rich people to pay colossal amounts of money for the latest breakthroughs here. Same with Nobel Prizes, actually- far higher tuition and far more Nobel Prizes in the US over the past few decades.

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That hasn't happened up here, so...

I'm assuming you're in Canada. The system there is actually fully run by the government, so there's no profit motive for them to increase prices. I fear that we're about to get a worst of both worlds system in the US where the government forces you to buy healthcare from private companies.

A system fully run by the government (actual socialized medicine) still has the problem of not producing as much innovation in medical treatments, though, which becomes a problem down the line. There is a bit of a free rider issue here though- if one big country in the world is producing advances in medical technology, other countries can copy the technology. In that sense the socialized medicine systems of Canada and Europe have been freeloading off the US for a while now.

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Even if healthcare could only improve if it's not socialized, I'd rather have adequate healthcare that's available to everyone than perfect healthcare that only the rich can afford.

But would you be okay with 1950s level healthcare? Would your grandchildren be okay with today's level of healthcare?

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One thing that isn't addressed enough is the distortionary effect government-mandated medicine has on its price. If everyone in society is forced to chip in to buy healthcare, what would you do as a healthcare provider? Raise your prices of course! Your customers cannot refuse. The government forces them to buy your product. It's even better than a monopoly.

This doesn't happen with charitable donations. People can look at the cost and decide that it is too expensive for them to donate that much money for that procedure.

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other countries manage it pretty well.

They don't. Where do the world's super rich go for medical treatment? The United States. Where they pay for super expensive procedures out of pocket. It is literally impossible for us to give this kind of treatment to everyone at this time.

But 20 years down the line, these procedures will be readily available to the commoner. And there will be a new set of ultra expensive medical procedures only available to the super rich.

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See, the problem with leftists is that they are really fundamentalists. They believe there is a level that is "good enough." We need to get everyone to the "good enough" level and then we can stop there or proceed beyond there at our pleasure. Just do the fundamentals right.

The world is not like that- with resource allocation there is always a sliding scale. It is always a problem of degree. There is no level of good enough for healthcare, because technology advances. A penniless illegal immigrant today can probably get better medical care than John D Rockefeller ever could. If we had frozen the "good enough" level of healthcare at as high a level as Rockefeller's back in the 1890s (at exorbitant cost to society!), people would still be worse off today. And they might not even know it, because they think they've achieved their fundamentals.

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I think it's pretty clear that people who are in favor of of socialized medicine are in favor of it at any cost

Well that's stupid. Healthcare is not something like freedom of speech where we can get it just by the government doing nothing. Healthcare costs resources, and we have a finite amount of resources. It is literally impossible to get everyone awesome healthcare.

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As far as we can tell right now. Give me a sufficient mathematical model of the universe, along with sufficient initial conditions, and I can predict the future.

Our current physics theory says that is impossible even with a perfect model. There is fundamental randomness built into the universe. The best you could do with a perfect mathematical model of the universe is produce a perfect probability distribution of the future.

Of course, we don't have a grand theory of everything yet and our physics could be mistaken on this point. Probably not though.

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Hardline Catholics who don't want to become pregnant and don't want to use contraceptives would necessarily have to do something else, such as not having sex, choosing to go ahead and have children after all, etc. That's what he's arguing, that the statistic is bad because it's saying only 2% of people don't want become pregnant and nonetheless take zero precautions against it.

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You are right, take out Iowa then. It's a very balanced state.

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As is, I might add, the value of empiricism.

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And if that was really my attitude, why haven't you, you know, tried ASKING for my position?

Because I am not trying to attack all those positions? For one thing, I agree with many of them, and for another, disagreements tend to boil down to "because I believe these principles because I choose to."

If your position is that faith can neither be proven nor disproven, then we agree. How important you then think faith is, is a subjective matter and also cannot be proven or disproven.

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Well Atlanta should be included in Metro Atlanta, no? We're not talking about Atlanta's suburbs here, which definitely favor Republicans by a lot. Either way, McCain needed rural Georgia to give him the comfortable victory he got in 2008. It's true that 2008 was a bit exceptional in that it's the best a Democrat has ever done in Georgia since it turned Republican (not counting white Southern Democrats like Clinton and Carter). I think Bush won Metro Atlanta both times.

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Well, these arguments have a history. Your method is to try to force other people into standing on positions, so that you can attack them. Meanwhile you just "ask questions." And if we're not going to try to prove/disprove faith, then questions about it are pretty irrelevant.

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I'm trying to include all of Metro Atlanta, not downtown only. Those counties should cover it right?

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http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html

Fulton - Obama +142k (67%)
Dekalb - Obama +189k (79%)
Clayton - Obama +66k (83%)
Douglas - Obama +1k (51%)
Cobb - McCain +30k (54%)
Cherokee - McCain +48k (75%)
Forsyth - McCain +44k (79%)
Gwinnett - McCain +30k (55%)
Fayette - McCain +18k (65%)
Coweta - McCain +22k (70%)
Paulding - McCain +22k (69%)
Carroll - McCain +14k (66%)
Henry - McCain +7k (53%)
Hall - McCain +30k (75%)

Total - Obama +133k

I covered all the counties relatively close to Atlanta. You could count some further out counties as Metro Atlanta (not where where that extends to), but all the further out ones have relatively small populations and aren't going to be able to overcome that 133k lead. McCain doesn't jump into the lead until we get well into rural Georgia.

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Though to be sure, it actually is perfectly correct to say that something is most important to me because I say so. I choose x because I choose it. There is no other reason you could want for that, or even possible.

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Well, when someone is trying to disprove faith you really don't need and can't get an argument better than "because I said so." It's like if someone wants to prove that there are no cookies and cream flavored ice cream cones oribiting a Jupiter-sized planet somewhere in the universe. Why don't you believe that? Because I said so works as well as anything else.

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Metro atlanta is like 6 mill alone.

The thing is that Democrats probably win Metro Atlanta, or at least get pretty close. Republicans win by similar margins in rural Georgia and rural South Dakota or Alaska, except that those states have no big cities, so there is nothing to act as a counterwieght to lower the percentage.

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I think I was trying to use the 11 Confederate states as my definition of South, but looking back at that list, I realized I actually used the 16 slave states.

As for a majority.....

Electoral votes of slave states in 1860: 199
Electoral votes of free states + states that were not states in 1860: 329

So. the South makes up 37% of the nation as a whole. Republicans tend to win around 60-40 or a bit less in presidential elections across the South, so that would give Southern conservatives around 22% of the national electorate. Assuming the electorate is split 50/50, that gives the South 44% of all conservative voters.

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It is offensive to Obama as an individual, but these people actually do hate Obama as an individual, so that's not surprising.

There's plenty of conservative majority areas outside the South. I'll try to list them:

Alaska
The eastern 80% of Washington
The eastern 90% of Oregon
Northern California east of I-5
Southern California minus Los Angeles County
Idaho
Montana
Wyoming
Utah
Northern 95% of Nevada
Arizona
New Mexico
Colorado
Oklahoma
Kansas
Nebraska
South Dakota
North Dakota
Iowa
Southern 90% of Illinois
New Hampshire
Middle 80% of Pennsylvania
Northern 80% of New York
Northern half of Maine
Indiana

And of course, around every major city there tends to be a suburban/exurban area that leans Republican. For example, the northwest suburbs of Boston, the eastern suburbs of Seattle, etc.

Democrats get by in elections by dominating the 1/3 of the population that lives in the cities themselves to the tune of 80-90% of the votes.

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Cause I say so, and I decide what's most important to me. The same way I decide whether anything is important to me.

It's that simple!

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It could be region related. It might be more of a South thing than a majority is mean thing though. And I've noticed liberals often have contempt for others' views even in areas where liberals are the minority.

In relation to this, both Christians and liberals in the USA have a persecution complex, where they believe society is persecuting them, even when it clearly is not.

The link shows something that is offensive towards a group of people, but not specifically to individuals. I daresay most of the people buying those shirts would not wear it if they knew they were going to be around a black person in person. And I doubt most of them have that kind of animosity toward black individuals, if they speak with them long enough to see them as an individual and not just a faceless member of a group.

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Who cares about any of that stuff. Faith is more important in itself than all the works of reason.

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What can ANYONE do, in theory to disprove "faith"?

And if there's nothing that can, what EXISTS to 'prove' faith? How do you know that faith exists in the first place then?

Both are impossible. Why would you even ask that question?

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I'm not sure how much someone can really care about an individual if they'd be willing to lump them into a group which they hate.

The thing is they don't lump you in with a group if they see you as an individual.

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i completely disagree on you there. I dont see many republicans understanding why people would disagree with them on social issues.

Have you talked to any? Conservatives tend to be very understanding and accepting of individuals. Very harsh on groups. Conservatives are often willing to think horrible things of large groups of people (poor people, gay people, people receiving welfare, people who live in New York City, people who go to elite schools, etc.) but will treat individuals from any of those groups that they hate very well.

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Oh, there are definitely liberals who understand the conservative side of issues, but there also exist liberals who can't understand how someone could possibly take the other side. You almost will not find that among conservatives.

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In that case it would be a fallacy to incorporate faith into the line of reasoning. Yeah you can do it, it is illogical to do so. If you use faith as any of your premises in an argument, the conclusion cannot be held as true.

It may be an invalid argument, but it could be true anyway. It would not be a logically wrong argument, just an argument that does not prove anything.

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I really dont see how anyone can be against almost all the popular opinions democrats have on social issues.

Spoken like a true Democrat. Just about every Republican, on the other hand, can understand why people would disagree with them on social issues, even if they emphatically believe they are right.

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That out of the way, faith is the belief of something without evidence.

I'd agree with that.

Therefore you could not move from a faith based belief and be wooed to a different belief through evidence and still retain the faith. You can make the logical conclusion from the evidence presented to you and decide which one you want to go with. That would be based on critical thinking, as you are analyzing the premises and evidence, and thus removing faith from the equation.

That doesn't imply this though. Why can't I consider faith and evidence at the same time? I could then decide to favor either of them in determining my final belief.

Your conclusion might work if we defined faith as belief contrary to evidence. As in, contradicts evidence.

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To move from a faith based belief to one of reason and logic means the rejection of the faith that led you to the original conclusion. If you do not believe the original conclusion, how can you be said to have faith in it?

But you said that faith was not the same as belief. If faith is not belief, but only evidence, surely I can have evidence supporting a position, other evidence supporting the other side, and choose one?

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