Discourse on Government

[Pyra Gorgon]

@ Mr. Pinkerton;

Very relevant analogy you provided. I could only nod and agree while reading.

Since my initial posting of this topic, Obama has systematically sent predator drones to terrorize and murder Yemenese, Afghani, and God knows who else. When the blood of innocents raises the cry and ire of the people's of those countries, then our "pressitute" media bray and cry "terrorist attacks against US". I call it REVENGE of aggrieved parties doling out justice. However, I hope the ones attacked have enough wisdom and understanding of things to know that the average American DOES NOT support or condone these behaviors, and that we are as powerless to stop the US military death machine as other nations.

You see, the US is a POLICE STATE now and our Constitutional liberties and freedoms have been systemically nibbled away to where we only give lip service to having them, we do not actually possess them any longer.

The US government is ROGUE and operating outside of justice or legitimate use of law. Look at the Boston Marathon bombing where they shut down the entire city of Boston and declared martial law, going from house to house, illegal search and seizure, clearly a breach of our Bill of Rights.

We have been forced/ coerced/ run roughshod over into accepting security for liberty.

The American people deserve neither anymore. Not until we can find the courage to fight for our freedom, which never comes freely.

[dashingdarla]

Obama has systematically sent predator drones to terrorize and murder

While I do agree with you, his political opposition isn't any better. Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

War is big business, and in my opinion that's all it's really about - moving money out of public coffers into private pockets.

We have been forced/ coerced/ run roughshod over into accepting security for liberty.

And we allow it because anyone who has read world history knows that liberties and safety are opposing ideals, logistically.

I would rather have more liberty, than safety, but that's me.

[Pyra Gorgon]

Obama has systematically sent predator drones to terrorize and murder

While I do agree with you, his political opposition isn't any better. Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

War is big business, and in my opinion that's all it's really about - moving money out of public coffers into private pockets.

We have been forced/ coerced/ run roughshod over into accepting security for liberty.

And we allow it because anyone who has read world history knows that liberties and safety are opposing ideals, logistically.

I would rather have more liberty, than safety, but that's me.

Yes, Darla, there is a political term for this system: CORPORATISM. (some like to use FASCISM, and in some respects, that does fit okay too)
The USA has the prison industrial complex, the military industrial complex, the cartel of international bankers raping us through our central bank (the FED), Wall Street is a hegemony of old monies and feed the greed and corporate immorality (how can a corporation worship anything other than profits?)

The USA SUCKS now. Seriously. We are a police state which is using 'soft kill' force against us, and most Americans are oblivious, willfully ignorant, or blatantly stupid about all of this.

There are no solutions to fix this country without a HARD RESET being chosen. That is the most bloody, hateful, destructive, and violent way. Why must it always come to this??? Why cant power-hungry gropers just STOP before they reduce the average citizenry to zero?

We compromise on the wrong things. Our values and core principles are not negotiable. Our natural rights are not for the state to take or to give. Hence they are natural...

Depressing. And all the while, our US government generates "haters" around the world that hates Americans, blaming us for this monster that runs amok in the world killing capriciously, as if we have a say or ability to stop it.

I do not believe even intelligent conversations can happen anymore when it comes to this. Conditions are absurd. Our country is run by madmen with too much power and guns and intelligence and technology to kill and enslave.

[Robert Pinkerton]

It looks as if the Administration is searching high and low for a pretext to intervene in Syria. This country needs another war like it needs a hole in the head. I say let the Assad regime and the rebels fight it out right down to the knife; then deal with the victor to the extent he keeps his word.

Before I retired, I carried a handgun in the street, lawfully, for thirty-three years. Part of the process for renewal of my carry-permit was a seminar in the law of deadly force and self-defense. Briefly, deployment of deadly force is permissible only and for no other reason than to save life from immediate danger of deadly attack. The phrase I bolded is very lawyerly; I suspect it was composed by a lawyer. None the less, not only in those seminars each year, before the range exercises, and by myself on my own time, I thought hard on every possible nuance of that phrase.

Now during the Cold War, I was one hard hawk. My mother's side of my ancestry is Polish, with small sides of German and Russian; from her relatives I learned of the atrocious conduct from the very beginning, of that continuing criminal enterprise called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I often ended letters, "...ceterum censeo delendam esse Muscoviam" I would have loved to have seen a Nurenberg-style exposition to the world of Soviet atrocities against their own people, as we did after we had soundly thrashed the Hitler government in Germany. A family friend who had had experience in the spook trade, said that, with the sole exception of gas chambers (which had not yet been invented) both the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 replicated every atrocity of the German Revolution of 1933. Suffice it I think his assessment is accurate. To make a long story short, I believed that the USSR was nothing less than an implacably mortal threat to this, my country; for which reason I advocated preventive nuclear war knowing that recoil effect in the aftermath would mean lean times for this country -- but it would still be free. For reason of believing that the USSR was an implacably mortal threat, I donated money I had inherited to the first Reagan campaign. Later, when the Soviet Union fell without a war, I shredded my vocal cords cheering.

Although I do not regret that, I simply cannot see some Near Eastern state lacking in ability nor opportunity to harm this country, as the kind of threat the Soviet Union had been. Nor do I see any other cause for not only the probable involvement in Syria, nor the imbroglio in Iraq, nor for the mission-creep in Afghanistan; in all of these, we are throwing deadly force all over.

I have been a science fiction fan for sixty-two of my sixty-nine years. Now in Robert Heinlein's novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, he makes one of his characters, "'Professor' Bernardo de la Paz," ask, "When is it right for a group to do what is wrong for one member of the group to do?" It is right to use deadly force to protect one's own life from immediate danger of deadly attack. Does Syria present such a danger to the United States? I believe not.

[Robert Pinkerton]

One of the influences which misled me into the error of voting for Bush II in 2000, is the fact that, when he was governor of Texas, he signed into law an amendment to the criminal code permitting use of deadly force to forefend the immediate threat of sexual assault. I fully approve of that.

[dashingdarla]

Why cant power-hungry gropers just STOP before they reduce the average citizenry to zero?

Because power corrupts. After a while, enough isn't enough anymore.

We compromise on the wrong things. Our values and core principles are not negotiable. Our natural rights are not for the state to take or to give. Hence they are natural...

Absolutely. But, as the late George Carlin said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

I did not vote for Bush II either time. It pained me greatly to vote for his opposition for they were just as bad (but in different ways).

I don't vote for presidents based on one position (such as George W's position on deadly force for example, which I agree with Robert on), but rather the man's entire voting history, his track record, and his ability to lead.

If one looks at him closely, he was a propped-up failure from day one. He continued that trend while leading our country.

I couldn't vote for McCain either - his several decade political track record was lockstep with corporatism and the current Republican agenda. That is not a "maverick". And the thought of him passing in office and having Palin run the show frightened me to no end.

The one thing that impressed me about Obama, pre-election, was that he put his health-care proposal online and made it available to anyone who wanted to read it's 1200 pages. I did across evenings of a week, and it was an impressive proposal. I didn't agree with everything that was included and written, but it was the first time in MY lifetime I saw a politician running for a major office anywhere in the world, put their big idea on paper, and make it available for all to see and review, and scrutinize. I mean, wow.

I'm not native to the USA, I came here as a teenager. Even though my homeland is a terrible place politically, they have state healthcare and all the bullshit about government healthcare sucks and people wait years for this and that, I assure you is bullshit. I'm retiring in five years and I am terrified.

None of this will change until we respect ourselves and each other, THEN unite against the corrupt machines that plague us.

I'm not interested in bickering about abortion, death penalties, religion-based legislation, or any of the other things we fight amongst ourselves on which distract us from the really big issues we as "the people" should be focused on - corruption, holding our leaders accountable, and demanding responsibility and frugality.

As far as the USA's involvement in world politics, tall fences make for great neighbors.

[Robert Pinkerton]

Pyra, what you call "Corporatism" is Pareto's axiom in action: The democratic republic is the metamorphic precursor of the plutocratic (plutos = rich man; kratein = [to] rule, in the heavy sense of naked command) oligarchy (oligos = few; archein = [to] rule in the sense of guidance). (Feel free to correct my Greek. It has been fifty-five years -- and no one in that class liked the teacher. I am sure there is room for improvement.) The transition is as "good(?)" as complete.

Darla, you speak of "state health care," a.k.a. socialized medicine. This has been a "Holy Grail" of the Left in this country for as long as I can remember. However, even if the patient does not (directly) pay, someone must pay to keep the system appearing to be a going concern. That "someone" is the State, out of our tax money (and Chinese loans to make up the budget shortfall). The State in this country has nanny tendencies from its origin among people who colonized for religious purposes, most especially the Puritans of New England. At the same time, since the State pays the immediate costs, like any wealthy person, it wants to cut costs. One obvious target for cost-cutting, is illness resulting from smoking tobacco. As a result, we smokers are faced with the modern equivalent of Nurenberg (Germany, 1935) laws, aimed at driving us out of public life (and, yes, I acknowledge that I exaggerated for emphasis) as the cited original aimed at driving Jewish folk out of German public life. These have the added "benefit(?)," from the puritannical/nanny perspective, of curtailing a pleasure that is aesthetically offensive to the nanny-type. Thus has smoking become "politically 'incorrect.'"

(Do not, however, err by thinking that I believe tobacco companies are "innocent" or more sinned-against than sinning. I fault the tobacco companies, and fault them hard, for introducing cigarettes into the market, hitherto cigars and pipe tobacco. Cigarettes are the excremental result of tobacco companies' pleonexia {insatiable greed}, and an abuse of and against good tobacco. They are full of chemicals, and they burn so hot that one cannot taste the smoke. Too, unlike the containment of a pipe, they strew ashes all over hell-and-gone. I, for one, simply would rather not smoke at all, than smoke cigarettes. Yes, like every other smoker, I started with cigarettes; but I gave them over for good-and-all directly I caught the knack of the pipe.)

[Robert Pinkerton]

Darla, you wrote: "As far as the USA's involvement in world politics, tall fences make for great neighbors." I agree foursquare, and I go further when I say this country made a definite wrong turn in life when it failed to adopt a citizen-soldier/militia type of national defense -- say, similar to Switzerland but adapted to American conditions.

[dashingdarla]

Darla, you speak of "state health care," a.k.a. socialized medicine. This has been a "Holy Grail" of the Left in this country for as long as I can remember.

I fully support socialized medicine.

Socialism is not a bad thing for certain functions of the government. Healthcare in my opinion is one of them. The USA is the only 1st world nation that doesn't have it, to the detriment of the people.

The USA has allowed insurance companies to block socialized medicine as long as I can remember so they can continue to fleece the people, the corporations that employ the people, the medical industry as a whole, while lining their executive pockets.

The anomaly of insurance in general, is the insurance company collects premiums with the promise of protection, yet have full authority to decide whether or not you actually get that protection when you need it.

Socializing medicine in the US will partly solve the problem. Other changes need to be made as well, and without those changes taking place simultaneously, socialized medicine will fail here in the US.

[Robert Pinkerton]

Darla, you wrote: "Socialism is not a bad thing for certain functions of the government." Once again, I agree in principle. Two problems: 1. Socialists today. 2. Reach and catchment. Even though both our national enemies of the twentieth century called themselves "socialist," I never had intrinsic objection to the idea of State ownership of certain functions of society.

In my opinion, for what it might be worth, for socialism to work it must be strictly limited in scope, in depth, and in its bite from the assets of each individual citizen -- and, yes, I see necessity (scope) for limiting access to benefits rigorously and exclusively to citizens though equally rigorously irrespective to ethnic ancestry or skin-color of those citizens: An austere State-owned social-insurance welfare state. Too, once again for what it is worth, in my opinion, for that socialism of limited scope and depth and bite to succeed, it depends on social character unbalanced toward the Apollinian end of the Apollo-Dionysus continuum. Too, the optimal character is mostly self-reliant and self-responsible, taking quiet pride both in productiveness and in contributority -- contributory because of a recognition that misfortune can strike and we are all in this together. This is not the current state of socialist advocacy or character. Limited to a strong but exclusive safety-net of social insurance for characters experiencing a feeling of honor-boundness not to abuse the system, fine. Wide open to every freeloader on this side of the planet?