“I am unalterably opposed to discrimination of any sort”, do you agree or disagree?

Barry Goldwater's pronouncement is apparently a "test" which can be used to evaluate a multitude of government actions.

The most important thing about government is what it CANNOT do.





David

You're wrong. I have to admit, I like your spunk, but you are wrong.

Surely, Wandeljw, Barry G must have expanded on his idea, explained what he meant. From Rand Paul and EM, all I've heard is double talk meant to cloud the issue.

Why can't they say what they want to say instead of beating around the bush?

True. EM did not explain how this "test" is supposed to work. EM stated that he or she will not return to A2K until November 3. If tea party favorites lose in November, we may never see EM again.

Isn't that the first rule of frisbee (or something)... "Never say more then, 'watch this'".

One can spin a victory out of pretty much any result.

There is still informed and intelligent political commentary, such as this piece from TNR:

Rand Paul’s touching (and temporary) display of honesty on the Rachel Maddow show last week has triggered an enormous amount of criticism. Liberals and progressives have denounced as morally offensive Paul’s constitutional concerns about certain provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Conservatives, meanwhile, have taken to ridiculing Paul as a political novice who doesn’t know when to compromise his principles for the sake of expediency. But what Paul’s remarks really demonstrate is not that he’s too principled, but rather that the particular principles he’s set out to defend"the principles underlying libertarianism as an intellectual and political movement"are absurdly one-sided.

Speaking broadly, modern government moves between two poles, each of which has a seventeenth-century thinker as its champion, and each of which is focused on minimizing a particular form of injustice. On one side is Thomas Hobbes, who defended the creation of an authoritarian government as the only viable means of protecting certain individuals and groups from injustices perpetrated by other individuals and groups. On the other side is John Locke, who advocated a minimal state in order to protect individuals and groups against injustices perpetrated by governments themselves. Taken to an extreme, the Hobbesian pole leads to totalitarianism, while the Lockean pole terminates in the quasi-anarchism of the night watchman state.

Aside, perhaps, from the pretty thoroughly Hobbesian state of North Korea, every functional government in the world mixes elements of each of these pure forms"and partisan disputes within nations can often be reduced to conflicts over how Hobbesian or Lockean the state should be on a given issue. There are endless examples. Should health care be delivered by the state, by private entities, or by some mixture of the two? How much should the state regulate the market, and in what areas? And as Rand Paul has recently reminded us: Should racist business owners be free to treat black Americans as second-class citizens? Or should the federal government forbid such discrimination? In each case, to favor government action is to lean toward Hobbes; to oppose it is to favor Locke.

What makes Rand Paul’s position (as he originally expressed it on the Maddow show) noteworthy is that it’s a pure, unadulterated expression of Lockean anti-statism with little admixture of Hobbesian sentiments at all. Paul, like many libertarians and Tea Party activists, is so obsessed with the possibility that the state might commit an injustice that he’s indifferent to the reality of actually existing injustice at the hands of private citizens. As far as these radical Lockeans are concerned, the former is tyranny, pure and simple, while the latter is just life: yeah, it’s sometimes unfair, but freedom requires that we (or rather, in this case, blacks living under Jim Crow in the South) get over it.

But the reason why politics normally takes place in the messy middle between Hobbes and Locke"between the maximal and the minimal state"is that most of us don’t get over it. We recognize that both thinkers have a point. Decent politics"properly liberal politics"involves the attempt to combat both forms of injustice in full awareness that seeking to eradicate one form will often produce an increase in the other. The distinctive glory and pathos of liberal politics can be found in the endless effort to achieve and maintain precisely this precarious balance.

Those who give up on that effort and seek instead to realize one notion of justice to the exclusion of the other are history’s political mischief-makers. When untempered by Lockean considerations, the pursuit of Hobbesian justice justifies tyranny in the name of moral righteousness. It is thus a serious danger and a potent threat to civilized life and human freedom. The single-minded pursuit of Lockean justice, by contrast, with its paranoia about imagined wrongs and relative indifference to expressions of actual human suffering, is merely callously ridiculous. But as Rand Paul has helpfully reminded us, it is a form of ridiculousness to which Americans tend to be inordinately tempted.

Those exceptions are called rationalizations.

For everyone in general but for electronic mail in particular:

There is nothing historically about marriage that has to do with the sex of those marrying.

Marriage is essentially a contract to afford protection for personal property.

What a confused statement! Do you want small government or just control of government? Do you want to see America devolve into a caricature of a western movie?

Called that by YOU. U merely sling mud, Plain, with no evidence.





David

Look, calling something a rationalization is not slinging mud.

Oh, that's for sure. If the Democrats only lose n seats in November, they can claim a major victory. N being a number not yet determined or announced.

U just announce your conclusion, without showing any factual reasoning that led to it.
Therefore, no one can judge whether u were correct in your judgment or not.





David

Your post is so incoherent that maybe I misunderstood it, but if you're looking to get married you're not on the right thread.

Why is the "politics" section here on this board divided into "religion", "money" and "israel"? Click on the "politics" forum category if you don't believe me.

Makes as much sense to add "marriage" I guess. Religion is excluded from American politics. Money isn't but listing it under one of only three sub-categories of "politics" is a tad obsessive, and adding "israel" as the third category is nonsensical. Who cares about a tiny shithole with nukes? Other than North Korea, maybe.

Who is the religious fanatic deciding subject classifications on this board? Why are those 3 terms more relevant to "politics" than "elections", "political parties", "candidates" etc?

I'm sorry I didn't think "marriage" is relevant to "politics", that was before I looked up the "politics" forum on this board.

There are no specific 'forums' here on A2K; which is to say, it's all Tag Cloud related. My guess is that those are the most common tags which are also associated with politics, not an affirmative decision that someone decided to just list there for fun.

Cycloptichorn

You're correct, I hadn't planned to return. I came back to congratulate the Dutch electorate, started another thread about their election.

In the primaries our results were mixed but on the whole I found them encouraging, even when they didn't result in outright victory for our candidates.

Blanche Lincoln, by way of example, trounced the unions in her state, an encouraging sign on the creeping decrepitude of the old left.

Thank you, I was referring to the forum list column on the right side of the "new posts" screen. These are no tag clouds, they're subdivisions determined by someone.

I don't have that list on the right side of my 'new posts' screen; however, it is there on the 'Popular' screen. I would ask, though, how you know those subdivisions are determined by someone.

Cycloptichorn