I don’t usually post about hot-button things that will get people riled up, but things are boiling over in my head right now, and I need a place to vent some of them. There are a lot of arguments being made about the direction America should go under the next president. I have to take issue with a lot of the things being said, because a lot of them just plain don’t make any sense. I feel like a lot of the points being made by the candidates, their surrogates, and the pundits on TV, are taking things at face value that are just plain flawed in their logic. It’s driving me insane. Not that the policies themselves are nonsensical, but that the arguments being used to support or attack them make some fundamental assumptions that are VERY important to consider. So what follows is a random catalog of things that I believe are true and why… you can decide for yourself whether I’m full of it, and whether these things are even relevant to the issues being discussed in the presidential election.
- Taxes, by their very nature, are designed to “spread the wealth around”. Any tax structure that you could devise would, by definition, be taking money from some people to give to other people. Even if we eliminated every federal program except the military, we’d still be taking money from everyone to give to soldiers and arms manufacturers. The question at hand isn’t one of whether we should “spread the wealth around” or not – it’s one of who that wealth should be spread TO.
- Socialism is not a four-letter-word. We have a history of treating socialism just like facism or terrorism – as something to be feared as an oppressive form of government. People confuse socialism with Stalinism. They aren’t the same. Most other industrialized nations have political parties with openly socialist platforms, and most of those same nations also have elements of socialist policies at work in their governments. They get along just fine. Most people are afraid of the word without even knowing what it entails, because it conjures up images of and aggressive USSR. They’re not the same.
- Adam Smith-style capitalism doesn’t work in modern, global economies. The system works fine in the pre-corporation era where competition was ensured because no one could establish an oppressive hegemony over their market and then start buying congressmen to advance their interests. But blind faith in the market as some irrebukable gospel has proven dangerous, and even destructive in the past month. The fundamental underpinning of the US ideology, as framed by the founders, is that you can’t trust people with power. Yet we’ve allowed a situation to develop where unfathomable amounts of power (money) are concentrated in the hands of increasingly few people (witness the flurry of corporate mergers and buyouts post-2000), and where we simultaneously trust those people to play by the rules and look after our interests. It goes against everything we believe as Americans to think that system could work, but we’ve got an emotional attachment to the idea that unregulated free markets are somehow congruent with the American ethos. The founding fathers would turn in their graves if they knew the extent to which we allowed power to concentrate, unchecked, into the hands of the wealthy. Ironically, the medicine prescribed to fix the mess amounts to socialism. Funny that – a massive, government-ordered redistribution of wealth is the only way to fix our broken markets, yet we still cling like scared children to the simple equations of socialism = bad and capitalism = good. Things aren’t that simple in the world we live in.
- You can’t fix something you don’t understand. You wouldn’t trust someone who can’t tell you what a cylinder head is to fix your breaks, would you? Same applies for elected officials. Having a deep-seated, earnest desire to fix a broken Washington does you no good if you’re completely ignorant of how it would look if it DID work.
- “Elite” is not the same as “elitist”. One implies a high station in life, whether economically, socially, or intellectually. The other means condescention on the basis of your status. They don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. People need to stop inferring one from the other.
- The mortgage / foreclosure crisis in this county is not the fault of “predatory lenders.” That’s like saying you cheated on your wife because of a hot girl. Or that you got a DUI because of the bartender. Yes, those things all contribute to making it easier to do the wrong thing, but for a nation that prides itself on individual responsibility, blaming foreclosures on lenders is quite a cop-out. Our credit crisis has a lot to do with the fact that most Americans are very comfortable buying things they can’t afford with money they don’t have. We wouldn’t be in this mess if people at every level of society were living within their means. We might have eventually been screwed by over-leveraged banks and rampant speculation anyway, but the current mess we’re in… it’s not Wall Street that got us here, at this moment in time. It’s the millions of people out there who bought houses they couldn’t pay for. Until we can own up, as a society, to the fact that WE screwed up, and stop pinning the blame on everyone else, we’re just doomed to repeat the same lessons. We might be the most prosperous nation on Earth, at this moment, but it’s all been bought with borrowed money, and that money DOES eventually have to be paid back, one way or the other. (Edited to add – just read an article on CNN, a partial interview with Fareed Zakaria, who makes basically the same point. Most people consider Fareed a pretty smart guy. Check out the article here.)
- You can support the troops without supporting the war. I’m offended by the notion that wanting to bring our men and women in uniform home is somehow doing a disservice to them, while asking them to do 3 or 4 back-to-back tours of duty is supporting them. I’m proud of our armed forces, and they are honorable people doing heroic things. Which is why I’d rather have them back here, where they’re not getting shot at. Most people who oppose the war in Iraq feel the same way. They’re good men and women, and they shouldn’t be fighting a war that shouldn’t have been started anyway. The decision to send them there wasn’t made by the troops on the ground, therefore they don’t really bear the blame. Honor them by bringing them home, not asking them to keep dying because we’re too proud to admit we’re wrong to have gone there to begin with.
- The “Iraq War” is not a war, it’s an occupation. Wars end when you have defeated the enemy’s military and toppled their government, or else agreed to stop fighting. Wars have to be authorized by Congress, and this one wasn’t. This was an executive branch-led invasion of a soverign nation which, as it turns out, posessed no threat to us whatsoever. Our troops in Iraq are a police force, overseeing the installment of a US-sanctioned government. Continuing to talk about it like it’s a war is a dangerous mischaracterization of the reality of the situation. “War” implies immediate and present danger to our survival. Iraq presents no such threats, despite what apologists say about its implications for the war on terror (not a war, either). Viewing it through the distorted prism of a “war” scares people into supporting things that they wouldn’t support during peacetime. We need to stop calling it a war, because it’s not, and it never was.
- Finally, and this is unrelated to the election-year arguments we’ve heard this year, but I’ll say it anyway – Ike was right. If there’s one thing that concerns me about the US of A at this moment, it’s not national security, and it’s not the economy. It’s the military-industrial complex. Nearly half – HALF! – of our tax dollars goes to the military. That’s about 1.5 TRILLION dollars in 2009. Our paranoid obsession with perfect national security, stoked by neverending doom and gloom from the White House, and reinforced by an entrenched bureaucracy that is built to grow indefinitely, has resulted in a situation where we spend as much on national security than the next 15 highest spenders… COMBINED! And for all of that, our oil supply is in more peril than anytime in the last 30 years, and no one can say with any certainty that we’re any more safe than we have been since the end of the Cold War. We’re spending for the sake of spending, borrowing nearly a trillion dollars next year to do it, and it WILL bankrupt our nation. My kids will be paying the bill, but I’m reasonably certain that they won’t be any safer for it. They will, however, be worse off for the money we’re NOT spending on education, healthcare, and infrastructure. I can only imagine how much better off our country would be with even a fraction of that money spent on building things instead of blowing them up. We are a warlike nation, and we endlessly glorify combat and violence. We talk endlessly and self-righteously about a “culture of life,” while spending obscene sums of money sending our sons and daughters to kill and die. Anyone who sees fault in that situation is tarred and feathered as unpatriotic. If there’s any reason that our country is morally bankrupt, it has nothing to do with whether we let gays get married or whether you can say “shit” on TV – it has EVERYTHING to do with our obsession with war, and our constant glorification of death and violence.
amy schubert
amen
Oct 24, 2008 @ 11:00 am
AmandaD
Bravo! Very well said & excellent points.
Oct 24, 2008 @ 11:08 am
nate kaiser
AMEN DOUG!!! well put and presented :)
Oct 24, 2008 @ 11:45 am
Rodney Mickle
It’s like reading my own thoughts.
Cosigned!
Oct 24, 2008 @ 11:47 am
josh solar
That’s what I love about you…you have the BALLS to speak your mind. Excellent points and very thought provoking!
Oct 24, 2008 @ 11:51 am
Michael Connor
How can you say all of that?? Haven’t you been listening to anything they are saying on the commercials?! If so, I know you wouldn’t spill this filth.
All you are trying to do is fan the flames. It is a slippery slope when people start reading garbage like this. Next thing you know, they are thinking for themselves and acting accordingly.
After all, do you really think McCain and Obama would spend all their (I mean “our”) hard-earned money on ads that weren’t true? Come on!
;-)
Oct 24, 2008 @ 11:51 am
mary
i love common sense and people with it.
Oct 24, 2008 @ 11:57 am
admin
Thanks for all the comments! I gotta stop adding pictures now and get work done… so damned distracted by politics lately.
Oct 24, 2008 @ 12:02 pm
jac
well said my friend!
Oct 24, 2008 @ 12:31 pm
chenin
In case y’all are wondering what we do all day in Boutwell-land… it’s pretty much this. I *guarantee* you we’re on some government watch-list somewhere.
Oct 24, 2008 @ 12:31 pm
echard wheeler
Doug, you really put it so well. I’ve always thought your were cool…but now, i have to say, you are way cool. I’m amazed at the masses of americans who eagerly suspend common sense logic to justify acts of blatant stupidity. Cheers to Freethought!
Oct 24, 2008 @ 12:36 pm
Sara
AGREED!
Oct 24, 2008 @ 12:38 pm
Mikael
Are you reading my mind?
Oct 24, 2008 @ 12:39 pm
Gabi
Amen! I want my Husband back too!
Oct 24, 2008 @ 12:40 pm
Lanne
I am not american and not really political… but it was awesome to read someone’s assessement of the situation which is well thought out, is reflective, and NOT dramatic… and doesnt boost one team or the other openly (always a problem on a business/pro blog I would think).. Well said. :) Thank you for sharing.
Oct 24, 2008 @ 1:27 pm
jessica
very well put!! seriously… it was like reading my own thoughts. thanks for sharing :)
Oct 24, 2008 @ 2:16 pm
Robert
Nice Doug … while I agree with most of your points and firmly stand on the right, I applaud you for spelling out your frustrations and beliefs — I do take umbrage on one of your points.
Socialism is a bad thing because it is the reduction of free choice; socialism produces more equality but only by cutting down the top, not building up the bottom. Capitalism builds at all levels, not at the same rate but at all levels.
While we find ourselves in a real quagmire here in these times, I don’t think there will be real change until we get on with the business of re-building this country from the bottom up … I hope I’m not alone with my thoughts.
Oct 24, 2008 @ 2:20 pm
admin
@ Robert – I can definitely see some of the pitfalls of socialism, and as a total government solution it’s lacking. However, there are some things that a socialist approach can do a good job with. I think that our fear of socialism in this country – not just rational rejection, but for most people outright fear – keeps us from considering situations where government can better handle things than industry, at least in theory (the reality of inefficient bureaucracies erodes the advantage, but still)
Healthcare is one of those… The reality of our system, as it stands today, is that the healthcare industry makes money when people are sick, and doesn’t make money when people are well. When you combine that with the corporate profit motive, you end up with a scary scenario. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but if there was a cure for cancer – not a treatment, but say a pill you could take that would beat it – do you ever think it would see the light of day in the US? How much money would the drug companies pay, who profit enormously from people suffering from cancer, to buy that research, and shut it away in a vault forever? It sounds horrible and morally reprehensible, but it’s one of those areas where the fundamental principles of market economics run directly at odds to human decency. If history can be used as a guide, human decency doesn’t stand a chance against money, and the odds don’t look any different this time. Witness the goatfuck of a healthcare system we have today. Insurance companies are built to produce profits, and in fact their shareholders demand it, but they only make money when they deny claims. Doctors only make money when you are sick enough to go. It’s totally backwards, and socialized medicine seems to be, at least in principle, a better solution, even if not ideal. But we’re so afraid of anything that even hints of socialism that we can’t have an intelligent dialogue about the failings of capitalism when it comes to addressing that. We dogmatically believe that the market is king, even when that market is denying us the surgery that would save our child’s life, or the treatment that would keep our grandmother around a few more years. We have to move past that fear, and start looking as rational adults at areas in our society where market economics don’t work. It doesn’t have to be a black and white world.
Respectfully,
-db
Oct 24, 2008 @ 2:50 pm
Robert
Doug,
I hope your blog isn’t gonna take a turn in the toilet over this conversation and I respectfully am aware that conversations as these can serve to complicate, however, if I may respond:
It is such a danger to a free-market society (a society that relies on competition in the open marketplace) to have governmental involvement in such a critical industry to our well being as Health-Care.
The undesirable aspects of the current health-care system are not the result of failing capitalism, but rather are the outcome of decades of governmental intervention in the health-care industry. As one that has had and continues to have dear family members walking the halls of medical institutions here in the Southland and throughout private research facilities in this country doing the work it will take to cure cancer which is a misnomer by it’s nature; I hear the frustrations with government intervention on a daily basis.
Eliminate the intervention and shift power from impersonal bureaucracies to consumers spending their own money, would control costs and let the American people have the kind of medical care they want. It’s the government interventions that raise costs higher than they otherwise would be — they do that by artificially stimulating demand and artificially constricting supply. The problem is simple: the government pays for about half the health care purchased in this country, through the ‘national’ health insurance for the poor and elderly known as Medicaid and Medicare. These patients pay little or nothing for healthcare, they demand more of it than they would otherwise and they have no need to shop for the best value.
Without going on and writing a thesis of which I could, I’ll just say the resulting health care system in this country is not driven by the good people out in the trenches working hard to make it better it’s being driven by the quasi-socialist government that has created the quagmire of patients and providers that have no incentives to keep costs down.
Keeping our governments hand out of the health care cookie jar will keep Hobson’s choice from becoming an unpleasant consequence to more of the same …
respectfully … rm
Oct 24, 2008 @ 6:27 pm
Bernadette
I need to print this. And in my travels through blogland, refer back to it often when I get bogged down in reading some of the other stuff floating around as compelling arguments as to why or why not x. Though I do love the back and forth you and Robert have going on here. Very passionately argued and yes…I think government in health care is good. I cede the point that medicaid/care folks might use the system disproportionately without directly shopping around for the best price. But refer to point 6 of Doug’s well thought out points to get a full grasp as to why “consumers spending their own money” (or their own money that someday they’ll try to refinance themselves into) is probably never going to win me over as to how Americans with money in hand are going to do the right thing and purchase health insurance over that new pair of shoes (or that awesome wedding photography). Especially those that have not been sick in years (months, weeks, days…) and so have no idea what the real cost of health care is beyond their insurance.
Insurance to most is, I pay it every month for my car. If I don’t, it is because I’m presuming if I get into a fender bender, I can afford to pay to get my car fixed or get a new car. Most folks have no IDEA how much it costs to set foot into an ER when you don’t have a regular doctor to make an appointment with. Heck, most have no idea how much it costs to go to a regular doctor if it were not for a $10 or $20 co-pay.
I fear the day we let individual consumers decide that they’ll take their chances.
Oct 24, 2008 @ 8:56 pm
Chris
Good to see someone posting their thoughts on the subject. While I completely agree with half your stuff and partially disagree with others, I still totally respect you for being an educated voter. If I hear someone say to me “We just need a fresh of breath air” one more time without having any idea what they are actually talking about, I may have to slap them. And I am not a Republican, so it isn’t just a R vs D thing.
I don’t agree that all tax systems are socialistic in nature, but any type of graduated tax system is. We already spread the wealth around as you pointed out. Even the Fair Tax has a graduation of taxes in it. When we start spreading it around to the point where we are trying to make people all equal is when things start to go south.
Glad to hear you call out the people on the mortgage crisis and economic meltdown. Everyone wants to blame Wall Street, but it is really the people of our society. We live in a “Now Society” and the age of entitlement. Everyone feels entitled to everything right now and don’t want to work or save for it.
Totally agree that the war is not really a war and never was. It was just us being World Police, which never works out well.
Your last statement is false though. I checked all the websites I could find on budget expenditures, and national defense has never broken the 25% barrier. Check for yourself on a number of the open budget websites run by watchdog groups.
http://www.nationalpriorities.org/FY2008%20total%20outlays%20as%20proposed
Oct 25, 2008 @ 5:55 am
admin
Totally glad that there’s some intelligent discussion going on here. I can see the points that Chris and Robert made about the inefficiency of government in dealing with healthcare, graduated vs flat tax systems, and the budget figures I quoted. I should have thrown links in there for support.
So the defense spending figures that I threw out there differ from the ones Chris points to because his example throws Social Security and Medicare into the mix, and doesn’t include spending on veterans’ benefits and interest on military debt. That, and there are a lot of ways to slice up a pie chart, depending on what your agenda is. Having looked at the figure I quoted again, it’s clear that the group definitely has an agenda, and probably takes a little bit of liberty with the numbers to make their point. Nonetheless, their numbers are defensible:
http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm
The article I was LOOKING for yesterday, but couldn’t find, is here – more of a simplified overview, but it comes straight from CNBC, not a radical left-wing group. They put defense spending at 42% or so. Interestingly, they get their figures from the National Priorities Project website as well. Not sure why the huge discrepancy:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/24033281
Another article pins it at 43% – http://www.fcnl.org/pdfs/taxDay08.pdf
So I’m even more confused than when I started, but without getting out a calculator and going line-by-line, it’s hard to figure out what a fair estimate is. Anti-war groups say nearly 50%, but the federal government, who has an interest in disguising how much is spent on war, wants to say 20%, by splitting up the actual cost of the military across several categories, and then throwing Social Security into the mix. Who knows what to believe.
Our tax system is definitely a mess. On paper, a flat tax seems more democratic, and believe me, I’d love to be paying the same tax rate I did when I was waiting tables. But people who make a lot of money have the luxury of sheltering a lot of their income from taxes via various schemes, while poor people don’t. For instance, my wife and I can contribute up to $90k a year to a retirement plan, and have that grow tax-free until we are eligible for disbursements. When we were making about $15k a year, not that long ago, we didn’t have a single penny left to do that with. I have a friend whose corporation pays their housing and their car. It’s an S-corp on paper, but it’s basically a one-man show. That money not only stays on the corporate side of the balance sheet, but also then gets deducted from that, resulting in a lower personal income rate, but also a sheltering of that income from taxes on the corporate side. Is it shady? Hell yes. But that’s the kind of stuff people with money do all the time, and that’s at least part of my own personal justification for a graduated tax system… the more you pay, nominally, the more opportunities you have to stash that money away in an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with the IRS. When I was making $15k, that just wasn’t a reality. I did my 1040-EZ, and that was that.
What we really need to do is just simplify the damned tax code, and stop using it as a vehicle for economic and social experiments. There are so many provisions in there that are designed at using the tax structure as a policy tool, that its complexity has become astounding.
And as for healthcare – I agree that our government, in general, is pretty inefficient when it comes to administering itself, but that’s not inevitable…. that’s just because our bureaucrats suck. That doesn’t eliminate the fundamental moral quagmire that results in for-profit business being responsible for our health. As a counter-example, and an illustration of my point, consider my wife, Chenin. Chenin was born with a rare and, at the time, not very well understood heart condition. It gradually became worse over the years until, at about the age of 13, they were having to stop her heart and restart it in order to control it. She was in the ER constantly. There were two doctors in the country – just 2 – who had developed an experimental surgical procedure to fix the problem. They petitioned their healthcare provider constantly, who adamantly refused to authorize the operation. Finally, Chenin’s father had to take the issue to the president of the company he worked for who, God bless him, gave the insurance company an ultimatum: pay for this operation or we take our healthcare policy for several hundred employees and find another provider. They finally caved, Chenin got the operation, and she’s lived a normal, healthy life ever since. Without that operation, she would have never made it to adulthood. And if they had been on an individual plan, the kind that my wife and I are on today… forget it. The insurance provider ultimately responded to the only kind of thing that makes sense to them – they stood to lose more in the long run with that client gone than by saving a life. Hooray for doing the right thing.
That kind of story repeats itself all over America every day. It might be inefficient to let government handle the system, but the current state of things is morally wrong. That’s where I’m coming from, anyway…
Glad this has stayed respectful and intelligent!
Oct 25, 2008 @ 9:02 am
Sam Patel
Bravo Doug,
I just read Fareed Zakaria’s book and that is one smart muther.
You think like I do…
sam
Oct 26, 2008 @ 5:09 pm
Cheryl
A voice of reason in conservative OC – thank God!! I’ve been literally sick to my stomach at all the lies that are being slung around by the conservative right. Its truly frightening that such simple minded idiots yeild so much power (I guess fear tactics do work). Thank you for saying so eloquently what I totally agree with – I wish I had your way with words, whenever I start to disagree with someone on these points all I can think to do is vomit on their shoes. In case any other locals are reading this: PEOPLE – stop stealing our “NO on 8 signs!”, all that does is encourage us to order more “yes on 8 signs” and throw them away just to waste that campaigns money. so stop it!
Oct 27, 2008 @ 12:21 pm
dav.d
Doug, thank you for your insightful comments – intelligent dialogue is what the United States needs. I am so tired of the bumper sticker slogans that sum up all political thought for 99% of this country.
dav.d
Oct 28, 2008 @ 11:02 am
Susanne
Thanks for adding the part about supporting the military men & women even if you don’t support the war. As a military spouse I greatly appreciate that.
Oct 30, 2008 @ 11:41 am
Nic
Well said Doug! I’m pretty sure that I’m voting exactly opposite of you, but it’s great to hear that there are people voting for the opposition that really know why they’re voting that way.
Oct 30, 2008 @ 1:08 pm
GoGirl
Doug, I remember feeling this way when I was in college. That was 20 years ago. At 40-plus, I see things a little differently. In my humble opinion, your post shows sincere frustration but significant assumptions based on half-truths all pulled together into one narrow rant.
America is certainly facing challenges right now – we always will. But guess what? The rich have never been richer and the poor have never had so much help … even as we deal with a volatile economy. Yet some people still have to blame others for their own personal circumstances and bash people with conservative views.
It’s amazing how negatively people see the country even when their lives have been so good. Yes, we need to change some important things, but remember just how much everything is mis-reported on all sides in today’s media.
Doug, I dig your fuck-em and think-out-side-the-box persona when it comes to your journey in the photography industry. It’s refreshing and inspires creativity. However, your political views seems more like a new group of photoshop actions still being sorted out.
-G
Oct 31, 2008 @ 7:28 am
admin
In the interest of full disclosure – Chenin and I will get hosed under Obama’s tax plan. We live on a lovely street in the suburbs, in a predominantly white, affluent neighborhood. I used to have a lot of pent-up anger toward people who did better than us, taking to heart the angst of the Jello Biafras of the world. Now I am that person I used to rant against, at least economically speaking, so it’s hard for me to parse the world that way anymore. I don’t really have anyone to blame for how we’re doing, because we’re blessed to be doing pretty well. So this isn’t the same rant against yuppies and Reagan that it was for me in college, nearly a decade ago. I’m not leaning left because my miserable financial state has me begging for a government handout, or because I can’t do well for myself and therefore expect Uncle Sam to coddle me.
I guess the thing that bothers me the most, and that’s at the core of all the points I’ve made, is that I see more and more people eschewing reason in favor of fear, trading thinking for feeling. In so many of the important issues facing our nation and its future, the dialogue is centered around a childlike dread of the unknown. We’ve been told so many times over the last 8 years that the world is a scary place, and that we should hole up inside ourselves and be afraid. Don’t end the war in Iraq, because then our enemies will become emboldened and attack. Don’t change the tax system, because it will hurt the rich, and if we piss them off they’ll take it out on the poor. Don’t take our guns, because then we’ll become helpless victims of crime and an oppressive, totalitarian government. Don’t mess with free markets, because anything different than the current system will turn us into North Korea.
I completely agree that the media, regardless of political affiliation, is a big reason we see the world this way. Scary news sells, and it’s mostly the bad stuff that gets reported.
So I’ll accept the critique that the above points are, at best, a little disorganized. They were meant to be a collection of random thoughts about the assumptions we make in our political discourse, not necessarily a unified treatise on America. I DO take issue with the notion that they’re half-truths… I can support the arguments I’ve made every bit as well as anyone can attack them. They might be arguable points, but half-truths is going a bit far. They’re assertions, and I can’t prove them any more than anyone can disprove them. That’s just the nature of discussions like this.
And I really don’t mean to bash people with conservative views, in general. I know a lot of those points were thinly-veiled attacks on the McCain campaign’s talking points, and I won’t try to hide from that. What I DO think is that conservatives in America deserve better than the people who’ve represented them for the past 8 years. There are a lot of conservative viewpoints that I agree with, and I just wish that the Republican party could come up with someone better to espouse those views. Government, in general, is too big, and taxes, in general, are too high. But the GOP doesn’t represent small government anymore. Instead, I just see everything being reduced down to “vote for me because the other guy is the boogeyman.” The GOP, and indeed the country, deserves better than that.
Which brings me back to point #1, an idea that should have been the organizing thread through this whole discussion. What I see happening in the national conversation is, at its core, a culture war. A war for how America is to be defined. On the one side, you have people who think rationally about the problems we face, perhaps to a fault, and believe that ingenuity and innovation can fix the problems we have. On the other side, you have people who seem to reject the idea of IDEAS, content instead with dogma, feelings, and tradition – people who mistrust ideas in general as elitist, and who are offended and angered when their viewpoints are attacked (witness that Obama’s “professorial” demeanor is panned by pundits). THAT’s the thing I fear, and that I think we need to fight. We can’t talk intelligently about the problems we face if an increasing number of people are content to be ignorant. We have to stop reducing our politics to fear and slogans, and start using our heads again. All I was trying to do was undermine some fear-based assumptions that poison our discourse, so that we could all get back to debating things on their merits – as adults, and not as scared children.
Oct 31, 2008 @ 9:14 am
admin
Oh, and by the way – thank you everyone who’s commented SO MUCH for having this discussion with me. It’s hard to find intelligent discourse anymore. I rarely bring stuff like this up, so sometimes it just simmers over until I can’t contain it anymore. We’ll return to your regularly scheduled programming after 11/4 ;)
Oct 31, 2008 @ 9:38 am
Gui Saraiva
Hey Doug, i was wandering if you had a place where we can upload pictures to… i took a picture about 1 year ago or so that i think you would really like, specially because it is at the beach. thanks
Oct 31, 2008 @ 11:53 am
gilcelia
you guys are so cool…
seriously.
few people can put it in words that well…
bravo.
Oct 31, 2008 @ 5:05 pm