Uh, I believe those two sentances are contradictory.
One of the reasons you despair of debate is because we, as a nation, no longer entertain anything more than rhetorical questions and vicious parting shots that really don't come to grips with the issues, and are often mere ad hominem attacks, which sell well to the uninformed.
You identify as Republican because the Democrats are bad at military planning... although the previous Republican administration was barely better.
No, I don't.
If people are closeminded you aren't trying hard enough!
If people are close-minded, and you seek change, then you're obviously going to have to change their mind, or declare defeat.
“They do not deserve the same quality of health care the soldiers fighting deserve, and they [the soldiers] need all kinds of things we don’t need,” Kristol said.
The idea that all discussions of social worth stem from Calvinist doctrine has no basis in reality. Bill Kristol is furthermore a practicing Jew.
The conservatives you know are probably the ones who are militists.
Incorrect. The conservatives I know are frequently persons of strong faith -- persons who believe that social issues and domestic policy are the most important issues of our day.
Because they can insure that the money goes to deserving people.
No, it's because they wrongly differentiate social welfare from private charity. While they may claim that distribution through a church or social network is somehow more accountable, it is not because churches routinely avoid needy communities of all types.
Not at all. The point is not to convince the hard-core conservatives who will die before changing a single idea but to snag the fence-sitters and middle-of-the-roaders who have yet to be convinced of anything.
A crass caricature that anyway does you little good, considering that the number of Independents ready to sway one way or the other is at an all-time low.
Republicans also talk about unlucky people who weren't rich enough to buy decent insurance or couldn't make the mortgage as those who "made bad decisions" or "didn't work hard enough" and therefore aren't worthy of help "I should have to pay for". We've seen that in spades with the mortgage assistance debate as well as the healthcare debate. They literally have developed selfishness into a multilayered philosophy centred around justification of every and any argument to abandon millions to their fates.
This is your analysis -- that there is no excuse for supporting the idea that one should keep all or the vast majority of what one has earned if others need assistance, and that therefore any attempt at justification reflects a consuming selfishness. This conveniently ignores behavior such as private charity or tithing, as well as the fact that most conservatives truly believe, even if incorrectly, that government-run programs are inefficient wastes of money that never deliver the amount of social goods promised, and are unlikely to help people achieve lifestyle reform, the presumptive requirement for lasting change.
We're not talking about your subjective feelings. Kindly leave such irrelevancies out of this discussion.
Only if you will kindly do the same.
The moment an argument is made in which people are separated out into categories of "worthy" and "unworthy" for aid based on a wholly subjective standard of worth, that is the Calvinist mechanism in operation right there. Kristol simply switches military service as the standard rather than wealth as his test for purposes of this discussion with Stewart, but he is still drawing a line between the preferred few and the unworthy many. That's exactly how John Calvin divided the world in his mind and that is the same basic ideology informing conservative thought on social questions.
You have done no such thing as prove that all discussions of worth reflect Calvinist doctrine. Bill Kristol is, in fact, a Jew.
Kristol is obviously working to avoid having to endorse the idea that anybody has a "right" to health care, or that it can be administered effectively to large populations by a government agency. Rather than admit his bias directly, he tells us that soldiers have special value -- and therefore may receive this government healthcare, which, his explanation implies, is more expensive than the norm.
Next time, try a rebuttal of substance. You do not refute any of the factual bases for the article with that little exercise in handwaving or your shabby Appeal to Motive. Nor do you refute anything with the Red Herring of Christians who give to charity —especially as the article also concedes the fact of Christians who do not subscribe to Calvinist ideology and more likely to identify as liberal or moderate.
Next time, don't accuse a Jew of being a Calvinist.
Kast, the problem with your assertions about what conservatives supposedly mean simply does not pan out in the real world. There is a massive disconnect between that claim and the actual experience of talking to conservatives (this forum is not the only place where I engage in debates and discussions) and no matter the venue, it always boils down to the same things.
With whom do you engage in these debates? I've moved progressively south since first arriving on this board in high school. I have met plenty of people who tell me that faith is the guiding force in their lives. I have met folks who insist that Obama is a dictator-in-waiting. I have met people who spin all the tall tales discussed here on these forums. Where are these people who don't listen? Maybe, unlike you, I don't regard complete conversion as a criteria for considering the discussion successful. What I want to do is prod these people to recognize chinks in their own arguments, not bring them around to my position or die trying. Refuting their examples, or questioning how they have logically come to a given point of view is often enough. Even when they dance up and down and claim I am not being "fair," I get through to them. I make them uncomfortable. It's a start. That's not what's being done on TV, or from TV, where everybody carefully avoids debate to opt for insults.
So yes, it's fine to take the approach of reasoned discourse for a few posts and when it (almost inevitably) becomes clear that there is a doctrinaire refusal to actually discuss anything, it's time to switch to ridicule and contempt because you might as well just entertain the audience and induce heightened blood pressure in the opponent for wasting your time.
That just makes the problem worse, since these people who have not been made to question themselves are now grappling with the fact that you've given up talking, not them. That makes you seem unreasonable.
