Living is a prerequisite for every single other freedom.
"Am I my brother's keeper?" You'll find that Cain's retort to the Lord in
Genesis 4:9 is self-evidently valid in a great many instances, excepting the context in which it originated.
I'm afraid I have no good answer. Unlike you, I don't accept that there is any valid moral requirement to ensure that every citizen in this country enjoys a minimum standard of living. I do think that, at some point, we all take responsibility for ourselves, come good or ill. My support for universal healthcare is instead instrumental: I think it will improve the national well-being. The nature of our current political system means that I can impose this view on others who disagree. I don't pretend to have the moral high ground, though.
Well you have a limit Kast but the rest of us who are in the country will have to pay into the program that is being created
You will pay because it is required that you pay.
... I'm going to pretend that you never wrote that.
It's true for a great many Americans. Perhaps the strongest reason that Guantanamo and waterboarding and torture exist in this world is that so many go comfortably down to sleep each night, pushing out of mind the evil done elsewhere.
Is that representative? He seems unable to thread out the rationale for actions- namely while counter insurgencies may kill people, civil wars will kill even more. I've seen it before- Noam Chomsky works the same way.
The book ends with the following conclusion:
More than anything else, "the responsibility to protect" is a right to punish but without bein gheld accountable - a clarion call for the recolonization of "failed" states in Africa. In its present form, the call for justice [in Darfur, and elsewhere] is really a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonize Africa.
(Mahmood Mamdani,
Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), p. 300)
And how does he know this? How does this "Joe" know that health care reform is bad? Because he is told that. And how does he know the people who are telling it to him are right? Could it be because they are Republicans?
And only a handful of those Republicans are fully cognizant that "death panels" are not at all what the legislation prescribes.
It's been explained to you and others before that a guiding assumption of most Republicans is that government is always an inferior steward of resources than the private individual. This leads directly to a secondary assumption that health care, where the government is concerned, will be a massively expensive canard that results, inevitably, in hang-ups, red tape, and cost-cutting. Combined with the fear that a "liberal agenda" will animate any program crafted by a liberal president, one gets death panels and other like stupidities.
Apparently war kills a shit load of people and is not something to go into so casually. People got rather pissed because they felt they were lead into the war under false pretense and that the government was lying to them. And they managed to be right because of luck? You think it might be that the protestors looked at the situation and were suspicious?
People who argued that they "knew" Saddam had been disarmed did so from a position of ignorance. The correct answer was, "We can't be sure, but there is a strong probability that he is not dangerous to an extent that requires military action."
Actually the people who were in the crosshairs were Saddam's neighbors (Iran, Kuwait). There is no way Iraq could have threatened Europe, except with missiles and even then it would be rather pointless. After all, the US is the one with the bases. An outside threat to Europe is in our interests because it makes their objectives more in line with our own.
And many people were utterly ignorant of the differing objectives and interests in play, internationally. They tended to look at the situation, consider European responses, and act as if they were equally valid in the United States
for precisely the same reasons .
Agreed. However, you should be willing to admit that there is a difference between "hearing the other side's arguments and misunderstanding them" and "refusing to even hear the other side's arguments".
There's certainly a difference, but I disagree that "the Left" in the United States does not include millions who fall safely within the first category.
Nobody is saying that Moore is perfect. But it is still possible for an anti-capitalist movie in America to be a good idea even if it's not "balanced", because the prevailing ideological atmosphere in America is so ridiculously pro-capitalist that we still have plenty of citizens who lived through an era when you could be brought up on charges for thinking communist thoughts.
Moore is producing a movie about the evils of deregulation, not capitalism per se; the title is obviously only a hook that provokes ire, and thus interest. Even in Europe and Canada, which are the clear "ideal" in Moore's film, capitalism has only been modified, not abandoned. If I go to France and demand baguette, they will still demand Euros every time.
I'm making a normative statement; you're still trying to defend Moore from accusations that I've admitted are essentially irrelevant in his case.
Perhaps you do. But that doesn't really speak to the point I was making here.
Because we've begun to talk past each other again, I think. We're in agreement. We can all go get beers.
As "civil" as they can be when telling you that you're evil and deserve to suffer forever.
Listen. Frankly, I think it's going to boil down to a personal level. I'm saddened that others think things like that, but I learn to live with it, and they anyway assure me that it doesn't mean we can't enjoy friendship and the like. One can still discuss matters to the point at which they're asked to substantiate that the Bible is, in fact, the Word of God. Many of them cannot do it satisfactorily even in their own minds.
So? Michael Moore tends to find interesting footage of things that we might not already have seen, and a lot of the content of his films speaks for itself, regardless of his narrative bias. I've long said that his voice-over narrative is often the weakest aspect of his films anyway.
Again, I'm just bemoaning a truth: many people will go to see that film and leave in no better position to really grapple with the other side of the issue. I said it was tragic, not that Moore had to solve it for me.
We don't have a limit to do gooding because we have to pay for it to.
