Political Science

[lektrode]

Re: Political Science

O&BTW - lest anyone get the wrong idea - i'm just as disgusted by the Republican Party's antics - as evidenced by mr rubio's kowtowing to the perception that all GOP voters are somehow motivated by religious concerns.

speaking as someone who calls himself a 'small-r type'
who still finds it amusing how this position/philosophy can be made a point of derision, by some

allow me to offer an example of why, IMHO, the recent election proves my theory that The US gov is being held hostage by the beneficiaries of The Party of Special Interests - here's a book/review that i stumbled upon earlier, that makes my point far more effectively that i can and its called Spoiled Rotten

and in only what can be described as 'damned by faint praise' - the bottom line on the description reads:

"Hard-hitting and uncompromising, Spoiled Rotten is a timely, powerful polemic from a rising intellectual star."
(the hyperlink to the term above by me, to prove that point)

with the rest of the description reading why i'm of my particular POV - but the reviews/comments say it all, or much better than i can...

sez the former resident of - what some of us anyway - still like to refer to as The Live Free or Die State
and why - depsite the best efforts of some of its recent inhabitants/voters -still shows US an exampleof
The Gold Standard of how The US Gov _should_ function.

Book Description


The Democratic Party has long presented itself as the party of the poor, the working class, the little guy. As Jay Cost's sweeping revisionist history reveals, nothing could be further from the truth.


Why have the Democrats gone from being the people's party of reform to the party of special-interest carve-outs? In Spoiled Rotten, political analyst Jay Cost tells the story of the modern Democratic party from the end of the Civil War to the present, tracing the sad decline of a once noble political coalition that is no longer capable of living up to its lofty ideals.

When Andrew Jackson formed the Democratic party in 1828, he promised to stand up for the little guy against the rule of privileged elites. What has become of this promise? According to Cost, recent history has shown the Democrats to be anything but the party of and for the people. Instead, they have become a collection of special-interest groups feeding off the federal government, exchanging votes for subsidies and benefits.

With the creation of a partisan spoils system in the nineteenth century, both parties practiced the politics of patronage. But, starting with the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the power of big government to transform whole classes of society into clients of the Democratic party. Urban machines, southern segregationists, and organized labor all benefited from this approach. FDR's successors—Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter—followed suit, turning African Americans, environmentalists, feminists, government workers, teachers, and a number of other groups into loyal Democratic factions. As a result, the Democratic party has become a kind of national Tammany Hall whose real purpose is to colonize the federal government on behalf of its clients.


No longer able to govern for the vast majority of the country, the Democratic party simply taxes Middle America to pay off its clients while hiding its true nature behind a smoke screen of idealistic rhetoric. Thus, the Obama health care, stimulus, and auto bailout health care bill were created not to help all Americans but to secure contributions and votes. Average Americans need to see that whatever the Democratic party claims it is doing for the country, it is in fact governing simply for its base.

Hard-hitting and uncompromising, Spoiled Rotten is a timely, powerful polemic from a rising intellectual star.

[aaron]

Re: Political Science

You could replace everything on the amazon page, including the comments by simply replacing Republican with Democratic. And, Democratic with Republican. It would be exactly the same.

[Raz]

Re: Political Science

As I wrote to Shiny, I'm not talking about proselytizing physicians -- who in their right mind would want to be a captive audience in that situtation? -- but a physician who had strong, "traditional" religious beliefs. Why would would that affect your decision (unless, of course the physician was a fundamentalist Muslim and you were an infidel: then all bets are off)?

+1.

[shiny!]

Re: Political Science

I'm not talking about physicians proselytizing; who the hell would want to sit through that?! But if you found out that your otherwise excellent dentist believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible (and didn't expound upon his beliefs when you had a mouth full of metal), would you really care?

Not only would I not care, but as a Sikh I'm sworn to defend his freedom to worship according to his conscience. Which kinda bites when he believes I'm a godless heathen who's going to hell by not believing what he believes, and I have to defend him against religious persecution if it comes up.

Would he put his life on the line to do the same for me? Probably not.

[Master Shake]

Re: Political Science

Not only would I not care, but as a Sikh I'm sworn to defend his freedom to worship according to his conscience. Which kinda bites when he believes I'm a godless heathen who's going to hell by not believing what he believes, and I have to defend him against religious persecution if it comes up.

Would he put his life on the line to do the same for me? Probably not.

You're probably right. I think those who are most vocal about expressing their religious beliefs often come up short when it comes to living up to them. Multiple famous teevee evangelists come to mind.

[lektrode]

Re: Political Science

altho i genl'y wont disagree with that, mr a - and dont consider myself a partisan type (voted 4 johnson) my experience/observations/comparisons/contrasts with a number of states i've lived in would suggest otherwise.

[Raz]

Re: Political Science

You're probably right. I think those who are most vocal about expressing their religious beliefs often come up short when it comes to living up to them. Multiple famous teevee evangelists come to mind.

You mean, like these selfless, "devout" people?

http://www.inplainsite.org/html/tele...ifestyles.html

WARNING: Have antacid ready - along with a barf bag.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Political Science

You mean, like these selfless, "devout" people?

http://www.inplainsite.org/html/tele...ifestyles.html

WARNING: Have antacid ready - along with a barf bag.

This reminds me of a post you made responding to me from about a year ago. It was one which I really appreciated, and so I've pasted the relevant part below:

As for Richard Scrushy: this is the "christianity" of Televangelism. It's really just show business, being too ridiculous and contemptable to even qualify as heresy. I've never known a true convert who didn't see himself for the mass of corruption and self-centeredness that each and every one of us truly is - to varying degrees.

Here's a theological proposition: Dickey is an embezzeler who yesterday stole a million dollars from the company he works for.
He attends a "Prayer Luncheon" where a presentation of the Gospel is made and Dickey realizes his need and "converts" by saying a Sinner's Prayer. He returns to work at 1:00 PM enraptured with his love of Christ to begin a new life, but since he's completely and totally forgiven, he sees no need to make any restitution to those he has robbed, and decides that he can keep the $1,000,000.

This is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "Cheap Grace". It is condemned by the Apostle in his letter to the Romans.

“Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks' wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church's inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap?...

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered Him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

[charliebrown]

Re: Political Science

In Jewish writings, forgiveness begins when the three R's are achieved.

R1=Remorse; I feel sorry for what I did.
R2=Repair; I will do my best to right the wrongs I have done (give back the 1M, also note that property crimes are easier to repair than say slander.)
R3=Repent; (means to turn, not repeat the sin again).

[Slimprofits]

Re: Political Science

altho i genl'y wont disagree with that, mr a - and dont consider myself a partisan type (voted 4 johnson) my experience/observations/comparisons/contrasts with a number of states i've lived in would suggest otherwise.

Right, you're not a partisan, because you don't always vote R, but you generalize the entire the Corporate Media Bullhorn Complex as being biased against the Republican party...

Great stuff, my man, great stuff.

[lektrode]

Re: Political Science

Right, you're not a partisan, because you don't always vote R, but you generalize the entire the Corporate Media Bullhorn Complex as being biased against the Republican party...

Great stuff, my man, great stuff.

well... thanks - i hope - but, with all due respect, sp - now i dont know if i'm being baited or made the point of derision - i just call em as eye've been seeing them for the past 35years - most of that time self-employed - and the 1/2doz states i've spent enuf time in to see how things function (or dont, as the case may be) - and if anyone thinks there's no diff?

they either havent got around very much, are fooling themselves, have been guzzlin the koolaide for too long or are a beneficiary of the Give it Away, Give it Away, Give it Away, Now party/politix.

[reggie]

Re: Political Science

OMG, fascinated to see that they employed GQ magazine and a Florida(?) politician to rekindle this dialectical "debate". Guess the public needs a little shove in the back-side in order to move us further into Scientific-subserviance (ie "Scientism").

.....A consequence of scientism is that any
critique of science can be dismissed as anti-science and such a response tends to be a
recurrent anxiety for would-be Continental philosophy of science - to the extent that
one collection, Continental Philosophy ofScience, promotes itself as refuting the view
that twentieth-century Continental thought is anti-scientific (Gutting 2005).

Nevertheless, scientism is entrenched within Western culture as a whole, as Tzvetan
Todorov has analysed it, starting:

from the hypothesis that the real world is an entirely coherent structure.... [and]
... can be known ent~rely and without residue by the human mind. The task of
acquiring such knowledge is delegated to the requisite praxis, called science. No
fragment of the material or spiritual world ... can ultimately resist the grasp of
science. (Todorov 2003: 19-20)

From the scientistic point of view, there will be 'no room for more than one version of
scientific truth; errors are many, but the truth is one, and so pluralism becomes
irrelevant.' (Todorov 2003: 21) Presupposing the distinction between scientism and
science as he does, Todorov is no more anti-science than Husserl (or Heidegger or
Nietzsche). Todorov thus echoes Nietzsche's original insight into the parallels between
science and religion, and, like Nietzsche, he valorizes the still-unfulfilled promise of
the ideal of science: '[W]hereas the general rule in scientific activity is to be as open as
possible to criticism, totalitarian societies require blind submission and the silencing of
all and any objections - just as religions do' (Todorov 2003: 20)

Philosophy of Science
Babette E. Babich

May I suggest, to those interested, revisiting the Ontological Argument started by Anselm of Canterbury n 1078, and furthered by Descartes, Leibniz and Goedel. (links follow)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/de...s-ontological/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_ontological_proof


On Edit: Found following article that provides historical overview of arguments and thinkers who have crafted them...

History of the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God
http://www.ontology.co/ontological-proof.htm

[lektrode]

Re: Political Science

This reminds me of a post you made responding to me from about a year ago. It was one which I really appreciated, and so I've pasted the relevant part below:

boy dc, i just had to say how much eye appreciate watching y'all hash this stuff out - cant even begin to keep up with it all, but i do like watching/learning from the voluminous/verbose comments.

and i still say you missed your calling sir... the art of the debate is whats really missing from modern politix and you are one of the best.

[photon555]

Re: Political Science

Spontaneous , random creation of life is possible - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/sc...pagewanted=all
Given the size and age of the universe and delving into quantum physics multi-universe theories anything and everything is possible.

Including a Creator God named Yahweh who created the earth in six days? Did you read the article? The experiment doesn't prove random creation of life is possible. There is still the problem of one-handedness as well as the creation of the other three base pairs. After that there is the real roadblock which would be coding all the information into the RNA and then surrounding it with all the various other chemical compounds which all need to be exactly constituted. Really, I am a Christian but I don't have that much faith to buy into this idea called evolution, that is macro evolution. Micro evolution, or natural selection is a given, but it is almost always a one way street for the individual organisms involved. That is they are adapting according to their inherent coding to a subset of the overall environment but they lose fitness for any different subset of the environment.
Then there is the problem of mutations. Almost all mutations are nearly neutral, but in the aggregate they are harmful to the organism. But since they are individually nearly neutral there is no meaningful fitness penalty attributable to any specific mutation. Which means these mutations will accumulate and over time degrade the performance of the species. Evolution happens, but it happens in reverse. We are all mutants, with an accumulating burden of mutations increasing with each generation. Even if a mutation is fatal it can be passed on if the organism survives long enough to reproduce. But this is expected as a result of the implications of information theory, a very well founded branch of science and engineering. All modern (and ancient) communication systems are subject to information degradation. Information degrades over time and the process cannot be prevented. Whether the information is being stored, copied, or transmitted it degrades. The term for this is the bit error rate or BER for short. By using various schemes the BER can be reduced to an arbitrarily small number, but it can never be zero. There is no reason to suppose that organic molecules that form the basis of life are immune to this law. The implications of this are very damaging to the theory of macro evolution.
The idea of science as a monolithic structure could not be more wrong. Science is the story throughout history of individuals making contributions to human knowledge, and often as not the true pioneers have been regarded as fools. Later they are hailed as genuises. A little over a hundered years ago it was thought by many physicists that everything had been discovered, until the ultraviolent catastrophe collapsed the magnificent structure they had constructed. Out of that destruction of the then current scientific consensus came modern physics including quantum mechanics which has made possible electronics and all its applications. So today we have an elaborate structure of scientific truth, but there is data that just doesn't fit anywhere in that structure. What does it mean that comets are not dirty snowballs as so long thought. What then produces the comet's tail? What about the appearance of electric machining on the surface of comets? This data is ignored by most because it doesn't fit the current theory. Google SuperNova 1987, or SN1987. This periodic structure is supposedly caused by random collisions. Perhaps there is another explanation but it would require another revolution in cosmology, and few are willing to jeopardize their tenure or access to grants. Yes science has been politicized into a largely monolithic structure that dare not allow truly revolutionary thinking and research. Cosmology and Evolution are the two most powerful third-rails in the modern monolithic structure of science today. To even question the current reigning theories is to commit professional suicide. BTW, multi universe "theories" are pure speculation. Any cosmologist will tell you that no information can survive passing through the Big Bang or even a black hole.
Special Relativity is well established, but exactly which one of the many theories of special relativity is most congruent to reality is another matter. Anyway, the speed of light is a constant according to SR, instead of time. Now c = 1 / sqrt (epsilon 0 * mu 0 ), where epsilon 0 is the permittivity (think capacitance) of free space and mu 0 is the permeability (think inductance) of free space. The zeroes actually stand for nought, or without any coefficient. But is the speed of light a constant over time as well as space? Has the speed of light changed in the past thousand years for example? Today we measure c by relating it to the number of vibrations of a particular atom. However, I was taught in physics that atomic vibrations as well as rates of radioactive decay are dependent on c itself. The current cosmological theory states that the Big Bang happened about 15 billion years ago and that the universe has been expanding ever since. This does not mean that galaxies etc. are speeding away from each other as is the common perception; rather space itself is expanding or stretching out carrying everthing with it. So if mu and epsilon are properties of space itself or the space time continuum, do they change with the expanding/stretching out of space? If so, then c may be changing over time also. Are you interested in exploring/learning, or is the latest pronouncement from "Science" good enough for you?

[Woodsman]

Re: Political Science

I am the onetime classmate of the grandson of a world-renown televangelist (one of the first, I believe) who seems to be on the calling list of every presidential candidate since Eisenhower.

In our discussions over the years, it's clear to me that he sees no inconsistency between the lavish salaries and lifestyles afforded to his grandfather, uncle and other family members and the teachings of Christ (by way of Luther and Calvin). He is convinced that his family's wealth is evidence of his unconditional election arising out of God's irresistable grace.

When I pointed out numerous passages from the Gospels such as Matthew 19:16-30 where Jesus counsels the rich man to sell his possessions and give to the poor, he countered that Jesus also said that "What is impossible with men is possible with God" and it was only through God's grace that his family were able to amass such wealth. He added that since the largest share of that wealth goes to evangelism, it is yet more evidence of God working his will through his family and that so long as the family continues on this righteous path, then God will continue to provide them the wealth necessary for them to carry on.