Phi for All

! Moderator Note Moved from General Philosophy to The Lounge. Probably because our intent is unknown, our posture is relaxed and our vulnerability is high.

To me, this is where the conversation ends. If you see healthcare reform as giving up your beliefs in freedom, nothing anyone could say will ever sway you. You'll always see everything like this in the light of you giving up some sort of mystical freedom, all the while burdening the rest of us with costs that are twice what the rest of the FREE world pays, just so American capitalism gets to pretend it has a free market while pocketing it's unethical, hypocritical, favoritism-based profits.

I wish more people would realize this. Socialism practically requires that pooled resources are conserved and the general welfare (or at least a greater portion of it) takes precedence. Capitalism requires profit to take precedence, even if that profit comes at the expense of the general welfare, as in the case of our healthcare system, or our road maintenance system. Switching to something like Australia's system for healthcare would save us around half of what we currently pay. Switching to something like Germany's system for road maintenance would mean paying a fraction of what we pay now. As long as we favor business over everything else, and allow our government leaders to be overly influenced by business leaders (or actually be both, like Romney), we'll always have these conflicts of interest, where making money subverts the intent behind various programs. Do we want to be healthy or do we want to make more money from healthcare? We can't really have both. Do we want to drive on glass-smooth roads that wear like iron or do we want to make more money for construction companies? We can't do both. Do we want fewer prisons and felons or do we want to make more money from the prison system? We can't have both, their purposes are at odds. We need to find a better hybrid mix of capitalism and socialism if we want to achieve what most Americans want to achieve, which is basically stability, prosperity and security. We've allowed leaders like Gingrich to take us to where we are right now, and I'd say about 99% of us feel we're lacking in stability, prosperity and security.

You have no idea of the kind of spin money spent here to conflate the term "socialist" with "communist". You might have some idea of the kind of spin money spent here in the past to conflate "communist" with "red-eyed, baby-eating demon".

That's what he may have said, but his voting record was always different. Newt's one of the most moderate "conservatives" we've ever seen in this country. And I could never forgive him for his support of that travesty of a prescription drug act Bush passed. Gingrich moves his lips like a Republican, but all that comes out is more big corporate steamrolling of the free market competition that his party is supposed to be all about. guitaoist, I have to say, with all due respect, if you EVER expect to be taken seriously among educated, thoughtful people, you'd better respect your own opinion enough to ditch the textspeak and spell it out correctly. Your lazy-ass approach to communication is an affront to everyone here who cares enough to take the time to talk to you.

Newt Gingrich is one of the worst Republicans I've ever seen. He is so far off-platform I can't believe he took two states. He is the epitome of why the two party system does a crap job of representing such a large and diverse population as the US. I don't know any Republicans who he could hope to represent. He's not really conservative, he's not a very principled person, he's got some strange records on gun control and he would probably grow the federal government bigger than Bush did. Since he doesn't fit the conservative Republican patterns, he strikes me as someone who's in it only for the power it gives him.

Great, he can be president of your town.

"Misuse of commas and title case can throw off your whole aphorhythm."

I wasn't aware that a general practitioner could tell how much junk food you've been eating. Certainly they can track fitness progress, but I think people's metabolisms are so different that it'd be hard to distinguish between the person who could eat just about anything and never gain weight and the person who eats salads but finds it hard to keep fit. Especially when there might be financial penalties involved. This has been tried, in fact it's how the Tea Party came to be, in organized protest against a law to tax non-diet soda. I've had some really good fruit lately, and unfortunately it came from Chile instead of being locally grown. I don't know how any healthcare proposition would be able to affect the quality of crop production.

But the only ways to monitor behavior are way too invasive. This brings us back to taxing the unhealthy food. Or is there a way to encourage exercise, perhaps allowing a write-off for gym or community center membership?

I've read the Bible probably four times all the way through. The first two times as a believer, the rest later in life after reading a lot of other texts from the same time. It's funny how there aren't many non-Christian texts that mention Jesus or the resurrection. There are lots of pre-Christian stories that talk about resurrections and virgin births and such, but very little else even from that area at the same time. It was actually the religion surrounding Christianity that made me so skeptical about it. My first church was Nazarene, and I could never understand why they didn't allow dancing or singing anything but hymns. I've been to several different flavors of Christian congregations since then, even Catholic, the number one, and they all had problems with each other. In the end, none of them acted the way their Christ was supposed to have, and so I looked around and found that I really didn't need an organized religion. Since then, as I said, I've read the Bible a couple of times as a non-believer, so I guess I have a more well-rounded perspective than you do, DrDNA. I'm not saying there are no deities, but I prefer the explanations science gives for the natural world over blind faith in old stories. The Bible can't be taken literally, so it must be subject to interpretation, so whose interpretation do you follow?

It takes you a year to read the Bible?! It's never taken me more than a couple of weeks, and that's with just a couple hours of reading time each day.

My point is there is a difference between blind belief in a deity that can't be observed, and objectively deciding that your doctor and the drugs he is giving you are going to be helpful. The former I would define as an act of FAITH, the latter an act of TRUST. I'm making a distinction that the two are N-O-T the same.

But who or what it is "faith" in does matter. In the case of God, there is nothing empirical to go by. In the case of a doctor administering drugs made by a pharmaceutical company, their validity and efficacy can be checked by the patient. That takes it from the realm of faith to the realm of trust. You don't have to blindly "believe" in your doctor or his medication, you can check it out so you can trust it. I make the distinction here, despite dictionary references, to point out the difference between religion and science, and our dependencies on both. Science can be verified and therefore trusted, while belief in a deity cannot and therefore must be believed in through the mechanism of faith. And the fuller definition you cited includes, "Depending on the religion, faith is belief in a single god or multiple gods or in the doctrines or teachings of the religion. Informal usage of faith can be quite broad, including trust or belief without proof, and "faith" is often used as a substitute for "hope", "trust" or "belief".

Someone else suggested it, but in the case of a doctor whose credentials and experience can be verified and measured, blind faith is not required for the placebo effect; the mechanism involved here is trust.

Wouldn't it be just as effective to keep Earth resources for Earth and use asteroids for anything we need to build off-planet, at least in terms of net energy gain (if this can be applied to mining mineral resources)? This assumes that by the time we have the ability to mine asteroids, we'd probably have facilities in space for refining and manufacturing. I always thought it would be extremely efficient to build and launch satellites for Earth from a facility on the moon.

Sorry to be off-topic here, but if my calculations correct, with the current exchange rate of about 1.5 dollars to 1 euro, isn't that $10.22 per gallon?! We're at $4/gallon here in Denver. If we went to 2/3 of what you're paying, I can guarantee the screams for hybrids and full-electric cars would keep you up at night over there. And you're right, at that point it wouldn't matter if fossil fuel emissions were affecting the climate.

In this instance, I thought we were talking about privatized roads, not roads built under government contract by private companies. If we sell the tollways to private companies, they're going to charge what the state did PLUS a margin for profit. It's what they've done with all the utilities and other formerly government run projects. Regardless of how you choose to look at the "who has the power" situation, I still maintain that we have more control over our own government than we do over corporations. We don't get to vote for a new CEO at GE. Political advocacy should be much more a part of every citizen's life, that's a big part of what I'm arguing about. At least we can know that promoting the general welfare through our own government can be more effective in the long run than believing corporations who just want to dodge taxes and regulations and send jobs away while promising to create jobs if we lower their taxes and soften the regulations. Absolutely. But the longer we wait, the more the biggest corporations are stacking the deck against us. Wait too long and we may find ourselves on the wrong side of the letter of the law, with nothing but the spirit of the law to hold on to. This is being done now with subsidies and no-bid contracts, all at the taxpayers expense. It's being done by lobbyists who make sure new laws have a public face that we'll approve, but have hidden agendas that favor a few companies over the rest of the market. My PSAs would at least be aimed at helping the public remember a bit of economics they may have learned a few decades ago, kind of like they learned not to litter when they were kids but may not think much about it now. Edit to add: Do you feel the current PSA campaign by the EPA to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle has been "picking and choosing" some companies over others unfairly? Do you wish we'd never funded the campaign? Given how poorly you think of the federal government, was this something big business would have done on it's own as effectively and in as timely a manner?

I just learned a lot about you.

We never left the discussion.

Learn your environment, experience everything you can about it, treat everything as a learning experience, get to know the people who share your environment, absorb it all and let it shape you as a human. Build every day based on what you know and never stop learning. The point is, it's your life to figure out what the point is about it.

But it was you who said that "broken" is shorthand for "mentally defective".

I guess I missed the building churches part. I also don't think of it as celebrating atheism so much as making time for contemplating moral issues in a community of fellow humans. Atheism isn't a system obviously, but ethics and morality are becoming victims of our poorly funded public education and I think having a formal way to share these things with our families and neighbors would be beneficial.

Cool! So what's the objection to using the methodology of reinforcing ethical qualities via repetition, congregation and calendaring?

Where is the "funny"? The title promised me some funny!