Orton's Arm

You clearly a) don't know what you're talking about, and b) have no interest in learning.

In that case, I suggest making an appointment at a research hospital to see a proctologist.

Stossel makes a number of valid points. But point #7 isn't one of them. The world is getting too crowded. Stossel thinks otherwise because, "Every year we learn how to grow more food on less land." While this has been true in the past, it's impossible for this trend to continue forever. The sun only sends a certain number of solar calories to any given square foot of land each year. No matter how wonderful your technology, you'll never convert more than 100% of those solar calories into food calories. Due to the plant's own needs, and to other factors, you're always going to get considerably less. Past farming improvements may have taken things from, say, 2% efficiency to 4% efficiency, and then maybe 8%. But it's foolish and irresponsible to pretend this can go on forever. There's a hard ceiling somewhere. It may be close to 100%, or it may be a lot lower. No one knows. But if the world's population keeps increasing, with the expectation that farming will keep improving, then sooner or later there will be problems. In fact, there will be outright disaster. Once industrialized nations implemented disease control measures, they waited 30 years or so, and then sharply curtailed their birth rates. Later on, these disease control measures were implemented in Third World nations. It's been well over 70 years since those measures were implemented, but Third World birth rates are still resulting in rapid population expansion. This population expansion has led to poverty, destruction of rain forests, and other problems. Many Third World nations have found it easier to send their surplus population to the U.S. or Europe, than to deal with the underlying problem of population explosion. But this is only a short-term measure. In time, the U.S. and Europe will become part of the Third World; and there will be nowhere to send the extra people. Someday, the problem of Third World population expansion will be solved. If we humans are unwilling or unable to solve this problem ourselves, nature will solve it for us. Nature has many attributes, but kindness and mercy are not among them.

This is the second time in this thread where someone has made the assumption that the Department of Education actually helps students learn more. I'm unaware of any evidence to support the view that the U.S. education system is designed to educate. We spend more per child than anyone else in the world, yet have the worst results of any industrialized nation. Students are often asked to memorize, but seldom if ever are taught memorization techniques. Back in the '70s, history books and other verbal textbooks were dumbed down. Vocabulary, sentence structure, ideas; all were made less challenging. While these changes hurt gifted students the most, they also harmed average students. Only below-average students were helped by this. Moreover, I've read that for every dollar spent on gifted education, $99 is spent on remedial education. The public school system has almost completely abandoned gifted children, and is doing a poor job with average ones too. But the present bureaucrat-choice model of education prevents students from switching away from the schools that have abandoned them. A parent-choice model would allow students to attend whichever schools were most committed to helping students reach their full potential. The fact this model isn't being pursued is a result of two factors: misguided leftist thought, and the self-interested actions of the National Educators Association (NEA). The two go together, because the NEA (not that NEA) is a deeply leftist organization, and until recently was headed by an outright socialist. This powerful union, made up of education bureaucrats and teachers, is guided by the ideology of its leaders. The most relevant part of this ideology is the search for equality. Specifically, it's felt all students should achieve equal results. Slower students are helped as much as possible, while brighter students are deliberately denied material they would find challenging. If we want the U.S. to have a competitive education system, the first step we must take is to eliminate the NEA. In general, government employees shouldn't be unionized, because the unions lobby for more spending and more waste. In this case, the NEA has been a total, complete, and unmitigated disaster. It should be the very first government employees union to go.

I know many people like to ridicule military spending, especially forward-looking military spending such as SDI. So I'll remind you of another futuristic military project that involved preparing for nuclear war. The fear was that a Soviet nuclear attack could knock out our communications system. To prevent this, computers at various points were networked together. Because a hub-and-spoke system would be vulnerable to attack, a net patern was used. The resulting ARPANET was the beginning of the Internet. Maybe an SDI system would also have produced great, unforeseen benefits. We'll never know, because that particular project only received a little pocket change.

Oddly, I find myself agreeing with you on this one. Cheap gas has led to a number of problems: - People driving SUVs and light trucks, when they should be driving fuel-efficient cars. - Poorly designed "car-only" cities. Basically any new growth city, such as Atlanta, Orlando, Los Angeles, etc., will be very spread out; preventing non-car transportation. - Lack of effort into alternative means of transportation. For example, tax codes and other non-technological problems represent an unnecessary barrier to the creation of a maglev train network. With cheap gas, there's no incentive to eliminate these barriers. I don't like expensive gas, because it disproportionately hurts lower wage earners. However, the U.S. has clearly shown that we're just too complacent and irresponsible to handle cheap gas.

A number of people deserve credit for the fall of the Soviet Union. You're right to point to Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II. I'd also include Lech Walesa, the leader of the Polish Solidarity movement. Margaret Thatcher did more than her share to help the Soviet Union fall, as did Boris Yeltsin. But Ronald Reagan rose above the rest. He did the following: 1. Built up the American economy. 2. Used the resulting economic strength to build up the military. 3. Made it so that the Soviet leadership was more focused on Reagan than on their own citizens. 4. Reagan put forth a vision of freedom, so simply and clearly it even penetrated the censored realm of the Soviet Union. The Soviet government lacked a similarly compelling vision with which to explain their own actions. In fact, Soviet moves to a more open society seemed to be guided by Reagan's vision. Legitimizing Reagan's vision in this way ultimately did a lot to cause that government's fall.

If you're unwilling to accept this kind of responsibility, I suggest abstaining from jury duty.

There's too much truth to what you're saying. But imagine an intrinsically honest man or woman at a local level; doing a good job. Now this person wants to run for governor. Unwilling to make compromises with big corporations or unsavory PACs, this politician's war chest is a little low. But regular people can make up for this by making heavy contributions to this person's campaign. If this happened at every level, this politician could eventually become president. I know it's unlikely, given our deeply flawed, largely plutocratic system. But it could.

A real hero Bob Dole may have been, but he was no real leader. He had no vision for the future, nor a particularly great track record of Washington-based accomplishments. On the other hand, your criticisms of Clinton are spot-on. The election of 1996 was one which both candidates deserved to lose. The same could be said about the elections of 1992, 2000, 2004 . . . well you get the point. We need to radically reform ourselves, so that we don't again suffer from the embarrassment of a Clinton presidency. Only then will we have the legitimacy to impose our views and our systems of government on the Iraqs of the world. Not that this should be our goal. But right now, it's absolutely ridiculous for a country with as many problems as ours to impose our system elsewhere. To give just one example, the percentage of GDP consumed by the government is on a long and steady increase. I'm not just talking about the Bush years or the Clinton years; I'm describing a decades-long trend.

This is a terrible way of thinking. Suppose an honest man were to go into politics. He'd get no benefit from his honesty from people like you, because you'd just assume he was as much of a crook as the rest. I grant this is a messed-up system, and that a deeply cynical attitude is more than justified. At the same time, honesty is vital. We need to be on the lookout for it; so that if an honest politician does come along, we can reward him or her with a high level of support.

Clicking on the link led to a general Lou Dobbs website, without any poll about how Americans have trusted their government through the decades.

But it just comes naturally!

I'd thought the sarcasm of the original post was a little more obvious than all that. No, of course the original post isn't my true opinion. It's the opposite of everything I believe. You say you're not the right person to judge who belongs on this earth, and who doesn't. A criminal justice system which accepted this logic would fail to function. Is any of us truly worthy of deciding who gets jail time, and who goes free? A criminal justice system unwilling to make such judgements has no function.

Let me put it another way. I've heard opponents of the death penalty use the following logic: - Violence begets violence. If the government kills convicted murderers, it will only inspire more murders. - Moral equivalence. Supposedly, executing a convicted murderer is the moral equivalent of killing an innocent person. I wanted to illustrate how silly these ways of thinking seem when applied to stealing and to kidnapping. They are equally nonsensical when applied to the death penalty.

I feel the government should no longer impose fines for stealing. There are two reasons for this: - Confiscation begets confiscation. If people see the government forcibly taking people's money away, it will beget a culture of theft by force. - If the government fines people for stealing, it becomes as bad as the thieves themselves. There is no moral difference between breaking into someone's house and taking their things, and imposing an equivalent fine on such behavior. Then there's the issue of kidnapping. Say that a man imprisons a woman for a year in some shack in the middle of the forest. The judge that sentences this man to a year of jail is just as morally repugnant as the criminal himself. To punish the man in this way will only create a culture of imprisonment; which will actually lead to more kidnappings! What about the idea that the punishment should fit the crime? Forget that! The punishment should fit my inflated self-opinion. I like to think of myself as a generous, understanding person. It makes me feel good to exercise generosity towards criminals; and I don't really care about the larger issue of whether such generosity may be creating a pro-crime culture. What about deterrent? There's no way fines would deter anyone from stealing. There's no way jail time would deter anyone from kidnapping. And there's no way the death penalty would deter anyone from murder. To illustrate this last point, consider nature. If you kill a bear cub, the mother bear will kill you. Do you think this fact has ever deterred anyone from killing bear cubs? I don't.

What uniform didn't the Bills always lose in during the TD era?

Great post.

There's no obvious answer to the question of when exactly life begins. But it is a question that absolutely has to be answered in the eyes of the law. Ultimately, a discussion like this has to end by someone imposing their morals on someone else. Let me illustrate. Suppose someone came up with the idea that the defining characteristic of human life was unique intelligence. Under this theory, you don't truly become human until you're smarter than any animal. According to an MIT researcher, a macaw has the intelligence of a five year old child. Hence, according to this way of thinking, four year old children and many Florida voters are animals, because they're no smarter than certain animals. So if a mother wanted to kill her four year old child, she could do so. To most people, this would be an act of murder. But to a woman who bought into the above line of thinking, it's a matter of personal choice. Should we believe this woman when she says we don't have the right to impose our moral views on her? After all, we don't have to kill our children if we think human life begins before age four. If her views on when life begins are different than ours, shouldn't she have the right to act on these beliefs? The answer is clearly no, she shouldn't have this right. Someone else's morals should be imposed on this woman, to prevent the murder of her child. If you believe someone is a living human being--as the pro-life faction believes for unborn babies--you are justified in asking this person's life be legally protected. What I'm asking you to see is that the pro-lifers' positions are reasonable if you accept their starting premise that life begins at conception. I find this idea a little hard to swallow myself.

That depends on how much freedom you give people to invest in those private accounts. If you let them choose individual stocks, then sure, a lot will put all their savings into the next Enron. But if their choices are "small cap index fund" "large cap index fund" "investment grade bond index fund" and the like, there's only so much pain people will suffer.

A good point. But let's say you're a recent Harvard MBA grad, and you wake up with a sudden urge to accumulate $100 million over the course of your lifetime. You could start your own company, and run the risk of failure. Or you could try to work your way up the corporate ladder, running the risk of not getting promoted. There's no risk free way to accumulate $100 million of wealth either way. Now, you say that the guy working his way up the corporate ladder took on less risk than Gates. That's true. But his upside is also more limited, so it evens out.

I don't want to do a search! Anyone who says, "Life begins at X period," leaves himself open to serious objections, no matter how X is defined. To illustrate: View: Life begins at conception. Objection: a conception is, as you point out, not a pregnancy. In any case, a single celled organism such as a zygote sure seems less human than someone you'd see on the street. View: Life begins at the onset of pregnancy. Objection: we're still talking about a very small organism here; only a few cells. It seems silly to believe that a simple organism becomes a human being by sticking to the uterine wall. View: Life begins when the fetus could exist outside of the womb. Objection: this is a moving target, because babies can survive being born more and more prematurely. View: Life begins at birth. Objection: if a baby born five months after conception is considered human, how can an unborn baby be considered inhuman eight months after conception? Obviously you have to draw the line somewhere. But science can only give a certain amount of help in deciding where. The further away from conception someone gets, the more they resemble an adult human being. All science can do is to tell us this same story, but in greater detail. The deeper question of where to draw the line is not something science can solve for us.

Please elaborate on this. Precisely what do you feel science has established with respect to when life begins? Do you feel scientists have established a range--life begins no earlier than three months after conception, and no later than six months after, for example?

Abortion is one of the few controversial issues I don't have strong feelings about, so I'm not going to sit here and tell you that you're wrong or that the pro-lifers are right. That said, these people do believe the rights of unborn babies are being violated through current abortion law, and would like to see this change addressed via legislation. They have every bit as much right to advocate such legislation as Jessie Jackson does to advocate affirmative action programs, or some leftist has to advocate a new wasteful social program. In any of these cases, people are proposing legislation to protect what they believe to be people's rights. But, you say, the concept of unborn babies' rights was inspired by religion, and therefore lies outside the legitimate scope of governmental legislation. However, according to the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . ." The U.S. has a long and rich history of people being open to religious inspiration when determining people's legal and constitutional rights. Such determinations can be misguided; they can sometimes do more harm than good. But they are not intrinsically intolerant.

Thanks to you, and to Nick, for making my life more interesting, and for having an intelligent discussion without turning things into a shouting match. I wish more conversations on TSW were like this.