Displaying 31 To 60 Of 1,300 Comments Some Not Very Strong Arguments Against Action in Libya Oh, don’t think for a moment that they want to. They are all breathing a huge sigh of relief that Obama just did this. My own congressman has been bleating that Obama does not have the constitutional authority to do this. God, do I hope I am drawn into a different district next year. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 22, 2011 @ 3:10 pm “World Mafia” is a bit over the top. Yes, we should have acted in the Sudan, but neither Congress nor the American people would have stood for it. And we are some sort of democracy, after all. We will help when it suits us to help. Nothing to be proud of, but there you have it. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 22, 2011 @ 2:49 pm The House as well. Thanks. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 22, 2011 @ 2:45 pm Ask around here. I don’t shy from the controversial opinion. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 22, 2011 @ 2:07 pm “The resolution was passed by two-thirds of Congress”. Sounds pretty authoritative to me. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 22, 2011 @ 1:59 pm Just to repeat: “If one is not prepared to ask if the harm done is less than the good achieved is to not make a serious argument.” » Posted By KevenSeven On March 22, 2011 @ 1:54 pm As Teddy Roosevelt would doubtless have said: “Bully, Madam!” (Bully meant “well done or said”) » Posted By KevenSeven On March 22, 2011 @ 1:51 pm I’m not buying into any discussions of a body count. You are the one making the perfect the enemy of the good. You cannot deny 1) that Qaddafi is going to kill tens of thousands if he is not checked. 2) that the people of Libya want him out and want our help in ousting him. So I reject your premise completely. It is the Libyan people who have deemed the collateral damage of suppressing and hopefully removing Qaddafi to be acceptable. They got there before me, so that argument of yours falls flat on its face. The Libyans are prepared to take casualties to get rid of this lunatic. As for the power to declare war, Congress surrendered that a hundred years or more ago. US presidents have embarked on something like 200 wars. Congress did not interfere. The Admin has not declared war, BTW. It is, however, blowing up Libyan equipment. As for “violation of boundaries” that was resolved for us by the UN. The Admin’s actions are well within international law. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 22, 2011 @ 1:48 pm A valid argument. I think the chances are better than 50-50 that the Libyans will be substantially better off in every measurement that we would likely care about. But I could be wrong about that. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 22, 2011 @ 1:40 pm A Little Truth About Business and Taxes Good stuff. Does not fit on a bumper sticker, more’s the pity. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 9, 2011 @ 2:29 pm Yes Virginia, There is Class Warfare Did anyone see Michael Moore’s speech in Wisconsin? http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/03/06/michael_moore_america_not_broke/index.html » Posted By KevenSeven On March 6, 2011 @ 10:19 pm Mike Huckabee: The Craven Christian Took him long enough, didn’t it? Well, 1600 years may be late, but better than never, I suppose. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 11:01 am Mittens is not original with me, but Hick-He-Be is. Feel free to spread it around! » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 9:19 am Marion: I’m afraid you are in for considerable disappointment if you hope to see politics and religion separated. In point of fact, I challenge the concept that a policy of separation of church and state implies a similar separation of religion and politics. You simply will never see it come to pass. The religious, for reasons that elude me, are not happy with simply getting together on Sundays and reminding each other of what the other believes (as if one would forget over the passage of six days), but they just cannot go thru a day without attempting to foist their folly on their fellow citizens. Spread the good word! That said, I agree with your take on Hick-He-Be. He is perhaps the most dangerous of the opposition’s bench. He has to my eye the most frightening mix of electability and retrograde belief systems. He is an Everyman, and Americans do so despise Elites and prefer Everymans, that he has a real chance of getting the nomination, and if the unemployment rate is not substantially better in a year or so, he will have a real chance of defeating Obama. I fear Mittens much less, if only because I don’t believe him to be a deranged reactionary extremist. Oddly so, considering that he is a Mormon, and by definition a rube who has bought into one of the most transparent religious con jobs ever foisted on humanity. Not that most of them are not blazingly transparent. Yes, Hick-He-Be is dangerous. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 8:30 am And I would say that anyone who can develop morals (ie not a sociopath or psychopath) can do so without buying into any religious dogma. Religion is utterly unnecessary to achieve morality. Morality is utterly achievable without religious dogma. By any person of normal capacity to achieve morality. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 2:54 pm Beach Chick, I’m not entirely sure that morality is perfectly locked to the ability to reason. Morality depends in no small part on empathy, and I believe that empathy is innate in humans; after all, many species of other animals are empathetic, and I don’t know that you can say that they are capable of reason. If you want to say that reason is necessary for complex morality, like understanding the difference between murder, manslaughter, self-defense and warfare, then I will certainly grant you that point. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 2:46 pm Oh, I despise the Manichaean outlook, but I think you confuse my point with the Socratic Method, which is where I start from. The truth is found by competent debate. That is different between saying that there are absolutes. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 10:58 am When I say “American people were thrilled” I do mean to say that the majority reaction to the bombing was positive. I did say that war has a nasty effect on people’s empathy, did I not? I used a modifier before “disease”, read it again. Obviously researchers can expose volunteers to the cold virus without acting immorally, but could not do the same with the AIDS virus. Yes, you feel differently about the atom bomb than you do a flight of 300 bombers dropping tens of thousands of tons of conventional explosives on a single target in a single day, but the devastation of life is the same. I am aware that Oppenheimer had deep qualms about the bomb, and he deserves respect for that. If al Qeada were to kill 100k people with arrows and make the town in which they live toxic to life for a century, then yes, I am as outraged as I would be if they achieved the same crime with a single a-bomb. I wrote extensively about the mass slaughter of civilians in WW2, did I not? I cited several instances of the US and Britain carpet bombing German and Japanese cities, instances that killed between 70k and 100k civilians in a single day. And I cited the monstrosity of the Japanese, who attempted a Holocaust against the other peoples of Asia, just not in quite the systematic and industrial style managed by the Germans. And we can throw in Stalin for laughs. And no, there is a clear distinction between the slaughter of a racial group, by either the Germans or Japanese, and the deeply regrettable loss of military life. From where do you get the idea that I think otherwise? I was talking about science. We I think all agree that there is a difference between murder and warfare (although all warfare is a crime.) My point remains: The Bomb is not an indictment of science, but of politics. That there are moral questions in science is obvious. How is it moral that Americans with AIDS for the most part get treatment that will extend their lives by decades but the same cannot be said of Africans? Is that an indictment of science, politics, economics, or what? Or, when we as a world finally come to agreement that Climate Change is a happening thing that must be reversed, we will be forced to seed the skies with sulfur particles to lower the earth’s temperature. Who gets to decide where the thermostat should be set? The Russians and Canadians may not want it reset to 1800 levels. That is both political and moral. And economic….. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 10:55 am I did not say it was disconnected. I say it is an unnecessary structure created by man that could be supplanted easily by philosophy, and to the better. Religion is not needed to achieve a well developed morality. Some consideration of one’s fellow man certainly is, but abasing one’s self before a non-existent god is an inefficient way to get it done. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 9:48 am Why would you NOT superimpose your standards (morals) on you kids? » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 9:29 am Wow. I cannot claim to have a very broad experience of children, as say a teacher with 30 year’s experience, but my observation of children, as a parent, has it that they are just about as moral as the adults that I know. I do believe that morality is inherent in the human animal. And in many other animals. Do we sharpen it as we grow and mature? Sure. But it all starts with empathy, and children of almost any age are empathetic to the same degree as are adults. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 9:27 am The hydrogen bomb is not any sort of condemnation of science. A hydrogen bomb is just a weapon, as is an arrow or a machine gun or a knife. The morality is not in the fabrication of the weapon, but its usage. As a matter of fact, the American people were thrilled in 1945 that we bombed Japan. They were exhausted with five years of war, and saw the Japanese slaughtering 10 or 15 thousand Asian civilians per week during the last two years of the war. Americans wanted an explanation as to why the hydrogen bomb was not dropped BEFORE Iwo Jima. Fact is that on several occasions in 1945 America and Britain slaughtered 70k to 100k civilians in a single raid (Dresden, several cities in Japan) using conventional weapons. We had near free use of the air, and devastated many cities and killed a third of a million or more, old people, women, children, burned to a crisp in a fire storm or if they were lucky, the oxygen was sucked out of their lungs as the city around them went up in flames. You may as well blame the Wright brothers for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for having invented the delivery device. The blame goes rightly to the fascists running Japan and the politicians in the US who made the decision to use the bomb. The bomb’s horror is really all about how much damage one plane carrying one bomb can inflict. People are much less troubled by carpet bombing that kills just as horribly and effectively. War inevitably descends into barbarity, no matter how noble the intent of any of the participants. Which is a thing to remember whenever considering prosecuting a war. As for Tuskeegee, again, it is not scientific method that is on trial there, but rather clinical morality. It is in opposition to the Hippocratic oath to deliberately infect subjects with destructive diseases. And to do so surreptitiously to peoples one considers racially inferior is a crime separate from the first. But neither are an indictment of the scientific method. The scientific method is undeniably a good thing. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 9:17 am Well, had he proposed one side or other of a debate, then perhaps you could find something to bite into and argue….. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 8:54 am “I don’t think I ever really had a point.” Yes, I was beginning to wonder myself. That said, I will express an opinion: Religion is surplus to the concept of morality. In other words, Humans are by definition moral, and do not need religion to express that morality. It happens all the time. » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 8:53 am “A moral code is a codification of various moral concepts that eventually from our sense of morality. ” Form, not from? » Posted By KevenSeven On March 4, 2011 @ 8:35 am If the baggers want to pretend that they are not flaming racists, or the Rethug party for that matter, they can all just kiss my grits. Does anyone remember the Southern Strategy? » Posted By KevenSeven On March 1, 2011 @ 7:52 pm Memo to Members: How We Choose Front Page Posts and Other Editorial Policies Insert annoying smilie-con here…. » Posted By KevenSeven On February 23, 2011 @ 8:34 pm You refer to HP’s sellout as if it were a recent event…… » Posted By KevenSeven On February 23, 2011 @ 11:30 am Huh? Thru most of America’s history, I wager, the media was owned by barons looking to influence the electorate. Citizen Kane, anyone? » Posted By KevenSeven On February 21, 2011 @ 6:40 pm There have been many periods in America’s history when “journalism” was no more competent than it is today. I cannot think of any real “Golden Age” of American journalism. » Posted By KevenSeven On February 21, 2011 @ 8:26 amComments Posted By KevenSeven
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