THE NEED FOR SPEED . . .

The subject of speed limit laws that differ from state to state, and country to country is an interesting subject. In Germany, one can drive as fast as they wish on the autobahn. In California, our max speed on the freeway is 70mph when posted, but I've personally driven over that speed when the traffic was light, and many others were also driving at those faster speeds.

There's a saying that "speed doesn't kill." Those who drive too slowly or without concern for others are the culprit. I think the truth lies somewhere between the two; high speed and sloppy driving habits.

Pleased to hear all is well with family. I presume you still live in San Fran? The last time I went through, we went up to Muir Woods but parking was at premium and we were on a tight schedule so I dropped off the three Texas ladies and left the tree hugging to them. But the drive up the hill with its views down onto the city were magnificent.

Lots I disagree with in your opinions/assertions, of course. But let me take up just two things. I'm going to skip the claims you make regarding who is fostering discord and compromise for another time. It's important but it's a big discussion.

Re homosexuality, we clearly are witnessing a cultural phenomenon but as is often or usually the case there is an intersection with American politics as well (ps...Colin Woodard's work on cultural regions/political traditions is very compelling http://bit.ly/IpumHt ) The demonization of gay people comes now almost entirely from the christian right (and those who seek to gain politically or financially from appeasing/fund raising from that constituency). There are exceptions but they are marginal and irrelevant. There are no equivalents on the left for Phyllis Schlafly or Michelle Bachmann or Tony Perkins. "Conversion therapy" is almost entirely a feature of the American religious right. Activists working over the last decade and longer to institute or solidify legal barriers against gay marriage and to implement a constitutional ammendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman are almost exclusively from this same conservative community. Moves to criminalize homosexual sex acts are nearly exclusively generated by this community. States where conservative administrations hold sway are far less likely to move on policies that grant homosexuals equal rights and far more likely to block such policies. The cheering for Putin's recent laws re homosexuality received no cheers from the left but did from the right. The outcry against the SC finding in Lawrence v Texas arose on the right only. For fun (not really) I invite you to look at the Conservapedia page on "The Homosexual Agenda". Your suggestion that there is an equivalence between left and right in America on this matter is false. Your suggestion that there's no political component to it is false. And yes, I like Ted Olson more than I used to.

You've used the phrase "prrogressive elites" several times in your last few posts. Could you delineate who these people or entities are, how they manage to influence culture and politics, and could you then, please, talk a little bit about the "conservative elites". Surely such a creature must exist as well.

Still in San Francisco, but thinking a lot about the high property, sales, income and capital gains taxes.Meanwhile I enjoy myself.

Opinions about everything vary a great deal across this country and society. I know of no objectively provable "right" way to think about most hotly debated issues in the country. Implicit in our freedoms of thought and expression is the obligation to tolerate those who disagree. By tolerate I mean do no unwarranted harm and do not judge their overall worth as people solely because of one or two features - whether they are black, brown or white; Democrat or Republican; religious or irreligious; supporters or opposers of gay marriage, abortion or any of the other hotly debated issues of the day. I don't detect a great deal of that tolerance in our public discourse today, and I believe a great deal or it - perhaps a disproportionate share of it - comes from progressive liberals, including perhaps, yourself.

By progressive elites I refer to the dominant elements of the print & broadcast media and to the academic establishment (less so in the hard sciences), as well as the political groupies who attend them They have a lot of influence in many quarters of the country (though I suspect it is fading a bit now). These are the folks who welcomed Elizabeth Warren as an obvious Cherokee Indian and who champion a heavily regulated state (with themselves as the chief consultants of course). Rham Emannuael's sputtering brother at Penn State (a chief author of Obamacare is a good example. Their obvious intolerance for those who don't think or believe as they do gives the lie to their self declared progressive objectivity. Their insistence on providing free contraception to women (the standard methods coat less than $40/month ) as a mandatory part of health care insurance, and their demands that abortion inducing drugs be included as mandatory alternatives, even for religious groups which oppose it in principle, tell you all you need to know about their willingness to tolerate others with different views and outlooks.

I don't believe that "the demonization of gay people" is a good thing for anyone and I would call that serious intolerance. That doesn't however require that one enjoy or favor all elements in what may be called gay culture. That said some elements of fundamentalist Christianity (and Islam) are indeed seriously intolerant of homosexuality. In precisely the same way, many self-styled progressives are very seriously intolerant of religious people, even those who are decidedly not intolerant of homosexuals. That unfortunately is little noticed or commented on in our media.

You use the term "Religious Right with fairly high frequency, and I assume you see then as intolerant. What difference is there between theirs and the prejudices of their opposite numbers in our social/political spectrum?

The financial disaster resulted because regulators did not shut down dodgy S & L's as soon as they saw the books were being cooked. What caused the debacle was the rapid drop in interest rates (a reasonable policy on the part of the Fed) as inflation was brought under control. The financial damage was done by the reaction to the prospective failures of the S & L's. Eventually, nearly a third of them failed. The high interest rates of 1979 and 1980 meant that S & L's now had put so much of their short term money (simple savings deposits, cash for certificates of deposit, checking account deposits) in long-term loans at fixed interest rates. S & L's could no longer attract customers as interest rates fell, and--the Fed more than anyone else--regulators turned a blind eye to the almost criminal methods by which S & L CEOs attempted to cook their books. Regulators did nothing while the S & L's used new deposits to pay long-term obligations, effectively making them Ponzi schemes.

Trying to pin the blame on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the consequences is ludicrous. The resultant financial disaster when more than a thousand S & L's went belly up was definitely the fault of banking regulators who did not apply the law, nor use their powers to shut down overextended S & L's immediately, leading to billions of losses for investors and depositors, who, not unreasonably, expect to be protected by banking regulation.

That's not good enough, george. You forwarded the claim that oppression/marginalization/demonization (choose your term) of gay people in America was a cultural phenomenon and not political. I laid out just a few of the very many ways in which this can be seen to be obviously false. You avoid the specifics of this issue and fall back to a generalized assertion that intolerance is a general feature of our landscape and then you tack on, again, your thesis that progressives are possibly or likely more guilty of it than conservatives. You didn't honestly address the issue. You evaded it.

I limited and focused my post to you so that we might do something more valuable than a Team A v Team B pissing match where specifics and evidence fall beneath loyalty to a tribal identity.

Your post makes little sense. What was the issue I evaded.? You appear to have very strict and restrictive views on just what is an admissible argument or point. Unfortunately this is not a trial and you are not a judge. I recognize that you might prefer the discussion to be restricted to turf of your own choosing, and may be unable or unwilling to go beyond it. However that is not a call you are empowered to make in this conversation.

You certainly haven't demonstrated that the notion of a cultural shift with respect to the status of homosexuals has certainly not occurred in this (and other) countries. On the contrary, evidence of this shift cad be seen developing over the history of the past four decades. The changes that have occurred in our laws and court decision are a consequence of that.

I believe the points I made are insightful and valuable. You should consider them seriously. Now I wonder just what is was that you had in mind. In any event if you are unwilling or unable to deal with opposing views, that is your problem, not mine.

Setanta,

There were significant differences in the reserve requirements for Saving & Loans and real Banks, and that played a role in that crisis. I agree there were early indicators of developing trouble that were thwarted by political pressures arising from S&L associations and lobbying groups, and, as you may recall, there was considerable evidence that the Democrat Speaker of the House, Jim Wright was bribed by them.

I agree with your proposition that in retrospect, different actions by Congress and the regulators might have prevented this crisis. However that didn't occur. One of my central points is that perfect regulatory behavior doesn't exist any more than do Plato's Philosopher Kings. Such regulatory failures are common in the real world - in the Eurozone, in the United States and many other countries. Attempting to achieve perfect regulatory behavior is about as fruitless and full of generally unanticipated side effects as attempting to perfect human behavior or create a "new socialist man". It fails and often ends in tyranny.

Once again, I didn't pin the recent financial collapse on Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. I said their contributions were a significant contributor. Moreover the political debate over the excesses of these institutions and their dangerous misuse of implied government guarantees bore a striking resemblance to the earlier debate over Savings and loans. The warning signs were fairly obvious and were noticed. The resistance to them was based on the political and self interest of identifiable political groups and the system that should have regulated and restrained the actions of these institutions failed based on political factors that are implicit parts of the real world.

1) I made the claim that movement conservatism has been shy in granting liberty/freedom/equality to certain sectors of the population, including gay people.

2)You made the claim that opinions and values regarding homosexuals is a cultural and not a political phenomenon and that oppression of them couldn't be mapped along a political framework.

3)I demonstrated many examples in our current real world where oppression of gays in America is almost exclusively a phenomenon that arises on the right.

4)You evaded all of those examples and evidence through falling back to generalities and assertions which you treat as axiomatically true.

I'm no longer interested in pissing contests or in careless argumentation. One has to take a thing down and analyze it with care and then move on to some other thing.

I'm not interested in discussions whose bounds are established exclusively by you and in which you demand responses to your points but refuse to reciprocate. That's an interrogation, not a conversation - a childish game designed to protect the insecure and those who refuse to consider different viewpoints.

I'm sure you can find other interlocutors who will play.

Oh george. Over the last many years, three of my daily morning reading stops have been NRO, The American Conservative and Weekly Standard. I read Gerson and have missed few columns, etc etc. I'd be confident with the wager that you do not attend to left wing media entities in anything like that sort of regularity, if much at all (this re your suggestion I refuse to attend to different viewpoints).

My notion that productive discourse involves focus on defining terms and clarifying specific claims and the questioning of unstated premises is hardly a Bernie invention. And some process like that is the only way we might avoid talking past each other, "I think X is true" "Oh yeah, well I think Y is true, so there, bub". A common barrier to productive discourse occurs where three or four quite separate and imminently debatable truth-claims arrive in three or two or even a single sentence. That does not make for clarity but rather will obscure.

And why on earth would you fall to insinuations of character flaw or emotional instability as you've done? Surely I have such things but a demand for concision and care in argumentation or for evidentiary support isn't evidence of them.

Yes! Us Krauts are born with a lead foot. I was there a few weeks ago and
drove around 120 mph AND was passed by other cars.

Here in the U.S. I don't speed anymore - a ticket is too expensive these days. My newly licensed daughter got a very hefty fine for driving 44 mph in a 25 zone - $ 690.00 - and she has to work it off.

Hi George! Feisty as ever, which means you're doing good!

That's excessive, but I guess California has to get its money where it finds it.

Roger, I think because she is a teenager, the fines are extra high - as a deterrent so to speak.

Oh yeah? Well my Dodge Charger with the 426 Hemi can beat anything you put up against it into a cocked hat.

(See subject of thread.)

I've ridden with Urusla at the wheel, and they wouldn't have passed her.

When I was about 14, my uncle came home with an XKE, the first sold in BC. Not long after, the highways department finished off the section of Highway 1 (TransCanada Highway at that time) between our town and Vancouver, about 60 miles. The night before it officially opened, my uncle's wife, a red-haired Irish girl, sneaked the Jag around a barrier and did the sixty miles of pristine asphalt with no other cars anywhere on the road. She got there quickly.

I figure its about 480 mph. That's the speed it would take not to realize your dead by any sense.

Think of that as the speed to discorporate. The minimum speed to not realize that corporation isn't. This is an important (to me) as instantaneous reality has limits.

I really want to go the speed of discorporation.

Rap

Bernie, your revisionist outline of the "argument" above (presumably as you saw it) is seriously incomplete and inaccurate. You have selected from the various points made in a way , apparently to suit your own perspective and the points you wish to pursue. However you have not accurately represented the ideas I expressed and, in several particulars, your own.

That's OK by me - you can write or express anything you want. However, don't expect a serious participant to passively accept your imposed construct of what the dialogue is about and which elements of it constitute the "meaningful thread" of the conversation. While these may be your (after the fact it appears) version of the conversation (or at least the part you heard) they are not mine. I don't have any interest the attempts of others to put words in my mouth or to unilaterally define the terms of any conversation, and simply don't continue.

The specific rules and purposes four the discussions you suggested, are not mine. I have not agreed to either them or the revisionist reconstruction you created. That you believe them creates no obligation for me. I'm surprised you didn't consider that obvious fact.

I made no" insinuations"of character flaws or emotional instability" on your part. If you saw some, they are entirely of your imagining, and not my doing.

I'm not angry or vindictive. I simply don't put up with that puerile bullshit