But the South was essentially Mexico after the war. Economy in ruins, money worth nothing, and almost entirely based on slave labor which was going away at some point whether they liked it or not.

Only GTFO if you're going to be intolerant. If you're willing to be tolerant too, then more power to you, you can stay. But if you're not willing to be tolerant than you're like a disease...a cancer...and you should be excised from society, because your intolerance is infringing on other's rights.

There's that whole matter of the "social contract" and all.

Point me to the original episode. I'll work my way back from there.

Ummmmm.

hehe. i dunno if he was adressing you or me. i know jon and i had a discussion about the south + the civil war a ways back in this thread. not sure where the homosexuality episode was...

The thing that will ultimately doom the planet is overpopulation, so this might be exactly what we need, if it can be somehow be accomplished on a worldwide scale.

:+1:

I don't agree with Jon, but I think DT's stance was pretty intolerant.

That doesn't sound very tolerant.

Pretty much how I feel about those who claim tolerance for the intolerable.

Imagine how much happier would we be with one red & one blue instead of having to be miserable trying harder & harder to find ways to put up with each other in increasingly irreconcilable differences.

Ah, could be. No quote, so hard to tell. I'm sure Jon has discussed both previously at some point.

Jon has over 23,000 posts. I'm not digging through it all to find something for you. If you've missed his posts in the past about the moral decay of the country, then so be it.

No...it actually is justified, as i continue on to say.


If your intolerance infringes upon somebody else's life, liberty (read "civil rights"), or pursuit of happiness then you have removed yourself from the "social contract" and civil society, and thus you abrogate your rights under such and the only sensible thing for the "civil body" to do is to expel you.

If you're not willing to "play by the rules" of a given game, is everybody else going to sit by while you do whatever you want and ruin their game? Nope...they're going to tell you to go home.

That would make an awesome leather-bound coffee table book.

That's fine. I usually don't engage in many of the threads solely discussing moral issues, so that's likely where I've missed a lot of it. Thanks.

Somewhat OT, but this made me curious about what kind of debt countries aside from the U.S. have, so I looked it up: 404 Not Found

Countries with a greater debt as a percentage of GDP than the U.S. (39.7%):

1. Zimbabwe - 304.3
2. Japan - 192.1
7. Italy - 115.2
11. Belgium - 99.0
16. France - 79.7
17. Germany - 77.2
20. Canada - 72.3
22. United Kingdom - 68.5
30. Norway - 60.2
31. India - 60.1
32. Spain - 59.5
42. World Average - 53.6
54. Brazil - 46.8
62. Sweden - 43.2

Countries with a lesser debt as a percentage of GDP than the U.S. (39.7%):

69. Denmark - 38.1
73. Cuba - 34.8
90. New Zealand - 29.3
101. Ukraine - 20.7
105. Venezuela - 19.4
109. China - 18.2
124. Russia - 6.9
129. (last) Equatorial Guinea - 1.1


I'm not drawing any conclusions, as I'm not sure what conclusions to draw, but thought it interesting.

Chapter Seven: I Hope You Get Run Over By A Bus.

I think you can be intolerant and not infringe on other people's rights. I didn't see that as an option in your post, you seemed to be equating intolerance with trampling on others rights. Which, ironically, would put you in that same category. You, I'm sure, are happy to not infringe on others' rights despite being intolerant to their positions. I think others can do the same.

Aaah sorry. No, if you're intolerant and not infringing on other's rights then you're okay (at least in the sense of being a memeber of civil society...moral judgements aside)...I was probably too half-focused here (due to work) to make that clear.

The issue is of course that the vocal wing of the intolerant is so focused on infringing on the right's of others.

But here's the fallacy of both your position and DT's position: what makes you think the seperate countries would or could remain "pure" in their ideology for any length of time?

I think the scenario you're painting is more similar to the Scott Roeder situation. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Jon isn't actively executing gays in public places.

Jon, please correct me if I'm wrong on that assumption.

Don't tempt him.

So you can have your opinion, but you just shouldn't express it? You're sounding less liberal and more authoritarian with every post.

It's worth looking at but also can be misleading. You have to factor in the private sector too though since we offer less services than many of those countries with larger national debt ratios. So while as a government we may have a smaller percentage, our private individuals have higher debt since they are paying for those services individually. I'd rather look at External Debt per Capita.

I'm not sure if DT's intolerance of religious fundamentalists is all that hypocritical, really. While these people are certainly intolerant, they're also a great many other thing all of which (arguably) makes them a net negative on society (arguably).

Of course, if one makes the case to boot a group from the country not because you can't tolerate them, but because their actions actually detract from the common good, then one's not necessarily being intolerant, right?

Wrap your heads around those semantics, bitches!

:D

Except for the fact that it would spontaneously combust from the amount of hate contained in its pages.

He was suggesting this should happen to file sharers

But those people labled as "intolerant" also believe that certain behavior detracts from the common good.

So it all depends on what rights people think they have.

Are we intolerant because we don't allow "consensual" man/boy sexual relationships? Some people think so.

Are people who want ALL reference to religion out of schools intolerant when the constitution and supreme court doesn't require that? I would say yes, and those people that want that are often considered "tolerant liberals".

Isn't the Constitution essentially laws governing tolerance? Saying you have to accept the fact that everyone has these rights and you can't take them away from anyone.

I don't think DT is saying that you can't express your thoughts within those confines, I think he's saying you can't be intolerant to the point where you trample someone else's rights. In a crude way, the Constitution is saying " be tolerant or GTFO".

The question is "does your expression of it infringe on the life, liberty (read "civil rights"), happiness, or property rights" of others. If it doesn't infringe on those...express away. It's when it infringes upon those that it becomes unacceptable.

It depends on who's determining the common good. This is in essence the argument made by folks who wanted to send emancipated slaves back to Africa in the mid-19th century, and to a certain degree the same attitude professed by believers in eugenics in the early 20th century.

It's the difference between protesting at abortion clinics and blowing up abortion clinics.

Or, hey, the difference between advocating for gun rights and just shooting people who vote for gun control.

Honestly, let's use a little common sense here, people.

But the constitution doesn't contain a right to say, gay marriage.

But it certainly does appear to give states a right to determine that issue on their own.

So when "rights" people feel they have conflict - who's being intolerant?

You're probably going to want to find another way of phrasing that, or at least remove one of the criteria.

Expressions that claim some "right" to aberrant behavior (as one example, there are plenty of others but we'd be hear for days trying to list 'em) definitely infringe on my happiness. You'll probably need to remove the "liberty/civil rights" thing too since you're also attempting to infringe on my right to express a belief in a specific set of values, so that one is out too.

in the case of pedophilia - the argument would certainly be that the child is a minor in the eyes of the law, and lacks the maturity to enter into a sexual relationship with an adult.

And frankly...the pedophiles should all be strung up and castrated, and then impaled on stakes and left out to die when they come out to complain about "tolerance of them." That'd make the country a much much better place.

Nah, you're safe as there as ample options well short of that step.

You're still just making a moral judgment there, just like others do with homosexuality in general. It's just a moral judgment that almost all of agree with. Some other people have moral ideas that are less popular.

Yeah, but objectively these people were wrong.

If we sent the emancipated slaves back, we never have the NBA (OK, maybe a bad example). And as Star Trek taught us, if we have eugenics, we end up with a world-destroying civil war.

:D

And with this argument you would have told abolitionists to shut the fuck up about property rights.

Where do you get the phrase "life, liberty, happiness, or property rights" of others? And in a government of, for, and by the People, don't the People as a body determine whether or not something is a valid exercise of a civil right through either the legislative process or through a constitutional amendment?

It just sounds like your arguing in favor of a society that doesn't argue, which strikes me as exceedingly unrealistic.

no, we've already said, you're allowed to express a belief in it. just not allowed to express that belief in a way that infringes on someone else's rights (such as by outlawing it).

and the word "happiness" there is not my construct, but is of the "locke/jeffersonian" origin.

if you really want to get into that that's a whole nother hairy discussion, but suffice it to say (and i know you know this and are just trying to be difficult) that it doesn't mean "whether you're happy with your life."

So DT is just saying that we should all obey the law? Why didn't he just say so?

This was DT's original comment:
If you can find a "hey, let's all just obey the law" statement in that, you're better at reading between the lines than I am.

Those people are idiots because they don't understand the concept of informed consent.


Those people are idiots because they don't understand you can't teach a number of subjects without referencing world religions.

Go ahead, give me some more examples, but I'll bet for most there's a middle 75% of the country* who will say "of course not, that's dumb. Are you high?"

:D

*pure speculation

But outside the confines of what is specifically spelled out, the concept of "rights" is essentially a moving target determined by a variety of social & political influences. In other words, the majority of those "rights" are subject to change at any given moment subject to the applicable process (i.e. amendment) or sufficient influence by some point of view (i.e. political authority to appoint SCOTUS etc).

edit to add: Heck, because of the amendment process, even the ones that are spelled out really are subject to change as well (a point I didn't really take into consideration on the first typing)

We tried 8 years of conservative authoritarianism, and we all saw how that turned out, so let's now try 8 years of liberal authoritarianism. Change that I, at least, can believe in.

:D

It also doesn't contain a right for us to watch football on Sunday. Or fly a space shuttle to the moon.

It does give the states to determine issues that are not prohibited by the Constitution. Which is why a State can't ban black people from attending public schools because it violated the Equal Protection Clause. The same can be said for gay marriage.

Once it is outlawed that supposed "right" no longer exists.

"life, liberty, property" is a paraphrase of locke. throw happiness in there and it's jefferson.

Do not smoke in any public place that I am at, please.

Where do I fit in the spectrum?

But who "allows" the belief, and who says someone is "not allowed" to outlaw something? It's "The People" in both cases, but you're saying that "The People" have the power to allow something, but not the power to restrict something? Well, that's an interesting constitutional theory to say the least.

Taking this another direction:

Obama plans $33 billion tax credit for jobs and wages - Jan. 28, 2010

So we'll raise minimum wage and force you to provide healthcare for your employees, but we'll give you the money to offset that? What again?

It only infringes on your happiness if you are forced to do them. No one is forcing you to have gay sex. No one is forcing you to think about them either. You are the one who is infringing on your pursuit of happniess by allowing it to have a negative impact on you.