Universal Health Care

farfromglorified · February 2007

soulsinging wrote:

the day you got your social security number and applied for a driver's license. you availed yourself of the protections and rights of the united states government and thus entered into a contract with them.

I did not "get" a social security number. One was simply assigned to me, by law. And when I applied for a drivers license, I saw nothing in those documents about "availing" myself of the protections and rights of the state.

I suppose my draft card also signs me up for those protections too? How about my corporate registrations and licenses? All those things you require me to do constitute my "consent" to let you do as you wish to my life and my freedoms? That's a nice racket you're running there.

becos the collective governing body of the united states was here first and owns the piece of land you sit upon.

Hehehehe...it wasn't here "first". It was here fifth or sixth, roughly. And it simply took that land by force, for the most part. Now it has the audacity to say it "owns" it??? How can it "own" something after demonstrating that it doesn't respect the concept of ownership in the first place?

you are only allowed to exercise dominion over it by that government's leave. you don't own it, you're borrowing it.

By your rules, you are entirely right.

they can help protect you from the big bad government that's stealing your toys and kicking sand in your eyes :(

By resorting to that very same government's tactics and morality? No thanks.

soulsinging · February 2007

farfromglorified wrote:

I did not "get" a social security number. One was simply assigned to me, by law. And when I applied for a drivers license, I saw nothing in those documents about "availing" myself of the protections and rights of the state.

I suppose my draft card also signs me up for those protections too? How about my corporate registrations and licenses? All those things you require me to do constitute my "consent" to let you do as you wish to my life and my freedoms? That's a nice racket you're running there.

yup, pretty much. that's availment. shoulda read the fine print. only im not running the racket. we are running the racket, every time we vote. dont like your choices? get off your ass and run yourself. we'll see how your ideas fare in the public market of ideas.

yeah, they took the land by force. such is human history. they own it now. when canada invades, they will own your land. until then, the us owns your land and you're on it by their leave.

im guessing you pay taxes? do you put your money where your mouth is and refuse to pay them on moral grounds? or do you take it like a 2-cent hooker and then just cry about it on here?

farfromglorified · February 2007

soulsinging wrote:

i did? ive been saying intellectual masturbation since high school, before i knew what the internet was.

Fair enough. I just used it in the very first discussion I had with you. Perhaps just a coincidence then.

shall i pat you on the back to stroke your ego then?

That's what you've been doing this entire time. You're free to stop whenever you'd like.

anarchy is an ineffective form of social organization. just like communism.

Hehe...yes, anarchy is an ineffective form of social organization in the sense that it doesn't prescribe a singular social organization. Makes if very difficult to inflict a singular will on people. Unlike communism.

we've got a pretty happy medium here... your ideas are as ridiculous as stalin's were.

Then don't subscribe to them. Stalin needed you for his ideas. I don't, and even if I did I wouldn't have a right to force you to live by them. You, however, are proposing something very Stalinistic. You'll force me to live by your rules.

humans have NEVER been "free" in the sense you use it.

Makes you wonder how anyone ever built an airplane, since no one had ever built one before.

this is abstract philosophical, pseudo-religious psychobabble about the nature of humanity and has no basis in reality. the state you believe in does not exist and never has.

Of course it has and does. The state I believe in exists in me, and it exists in you. It's known as self-sovereignty and it's existed since the dawn of the thinking man. Abdicate it, and you'll get exactly what everyone before you has gotten: the state you propose.

farfromglorified · February 2007

soulsinging wrote:

yup, pretty much. that's availment. shoulda read the fine print. only im not running the racket. we are running the racket, every time we vote. dont like your choices? get off your ass and run yourself. we'll see how your ideas fare in the public market of ideas.

I don't really understand how that's relevant. Why would I want to "see how my ideas fare in the public market", at least in the context of voting?

yeah, they took the land by force. such is human history. they own it now. when canada invades, they will own your land. until then, the us owns your land and you're on it by their leave.

Thank you. Here it is, in plain English, stripped of all the bullshit. The strongman's philosophy. You've described the underlying morality of proposals such as universal health care. Gone is the bullshit about "common good", the idiocy of "altruism", the insanity of "putting life over property".

This is the world your proposing, the world you want, the world you largely have, and, ironically, the world you're accusing me of wanting. The world wherein force rules. The world wherein ownership is determined by a morality of force.

People like you, for as long as I can remember, have referred to me as "greedy", as "selfish", as "cold", as "inhuman". But this is what you're justifying:

"yeah, they took the land by force. such is human history. they own it now."

im guessing you pay taxes?

Of course.

do you put your money where your mouth is and refuse to pay them on moral grounds?

No. Why should I? I'm not violating my morality by paying taxes.

or do you take it like a 2-cent hooker and then just cry about it on here?

Hehe....hookers get paid. I'm losing in this deal, remember?

soulsinging · February 2007

farfromglorified wrote:

Thank you. Here it is, in plain English, stripped of all the bullshit. The strongman's philosophy. You've described the underlying morality of proposals such as universal health care. Gone is the bullshit about "common good", the idiocy of "altruism", the insanity of "putting life over property".

This is the world your proposing, the world you want, the world you largely have, and, ironically, the world you're accusing me of wanting. The world wherein force rules. The world wherein ownership is determined by a morality of force.

People like you, for as long as I can remember, have referred to me as "greedy", as "selfish", as "cold", as "inhuman". But this is what you're justifying:

"yeah, they took the land by force. such is human history. they own it now."

yes, becos force is needed to keep greedy, selfish, cold, and inhuman people like you from abusing the rest of humanity for your own personal wealth and treating your fellow man like a means to an end by spitting on their dying carcass rather than lending a hand in helping them up.

farfromglorified wrote:

Hehe....hookers get paid. I'm losing in this deal, remember?

you get paid too, every time you use a road.

angelica · February 2007

soulsinging wrote:

yes, becos force is needed to keep greedy, selfish, cold, and inhuman people like you from abusing the rest of humanity for your own personal wealth and treating your fellow man like a means to an end by spitting on their dying carcass rather than lending a hand in helping them up.

Wow. I really think you have completely and entirely misjudged farfromglorified. He is one of the only truly interactive people I've known, who operates based on mutual agreement which stems from mutual respect. I think he's one of the most mis-judged and misunderstood on this forum. I see the beauty of the fine lines he talks about and the value of them, even though I would tend to incorporate them differently in the big picture.

miller8966 · February 2007

soulsinging is just upset because farfrom has been owning him in this topic.

jeffbr · February 2007

angelica wrote:

Wow. I really think you have completely and entirely misjudged farfromglorified.

That much has been self-evident for quite some time.

FFG is nothing if not consistent - logically and morally.

farfromglorified · February 2007

soulsinging wrote:

yes, becos force is needed to keep greedy, selfish, cold, and inhuman people like you from abusing the rest of humanity for your own personal wealth and treating your fellow man like a means to an end by spitting on their dying carcass rather than lending a hand in helping them up.

The twisted logic above is frightening.

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH" - George Orwell

This is your world, and I'm not sure you even know that.

You say force is necessary to fight the greedy. Why? To get what you didn't earn.

You say force is necessary to fight the selfish. Why? To fulfill your desires.

You say force is necessary to fight the cold and inhuman. Why? Because apparently their tactics are all you understand.

you get paid too, every time you use a road.

If all I was paying for were roads, then hell yes I'd be getting a pretty good deal. But your system doesn't even care about the deal I'm getting, so I'm not really going to respect that. Even the 2-cent hooker can name her price or choose her clients.

angelica · February 2007

jeffbr wrote:

That much has been self-evident for quite some time.

FFG is nothing if not consistent - logically and morally.

I'm big on social programs, myself, having benefitted from them to a large degree, and yet I cannot deny the logical points he (or yourself) make on these subjects. What I have a hard time with is when people misconstrue what he's saying and then ascribe traits to him that he does not exhibit. Like that he'd spit on the dying carcass of someone. Or that he's greedy, selfish, cold and inhuman. Within the past month, farfromglorified volunteered to help me financially and emotionally to make it to a meet up with some people on the board. That is far from a crucial life situation and yet he readily demonstrated both generosity and compassion without so much as being asked for either.

It is not easy integrating the fine lines between a left and right view. Once we get into judgments and mudslinging, we're definitely not moving in the right direction.

jeffbr · February 2007

angelica wrote:

I'm big on social programs, myself, having benefitted from them to a large degree, and yet I cannot deny the logical points he (or yourself) make on these subjects. What I have a hard time with is when people misconstrue what he's saying and then ascribe traits to him that he does not exhibit. Like that he'd spit on the dying carcass of someone. Or that he's greedy, selfish, cold and inhuman. Within the past month, farfromglorified volunteered to help me financially and emotionally to make it to a meet up with some people on the board. That is far from a crucial life situation and yet he readily demonstrated both generosity and compassion without so much as being asked for either.

It is not easy integrating the fine lines between a left and right view. Once we get into judgments and mudslinging, we're definitely not moving in the right direction.

Excellent insight. I think the part that keeps being overlooked when people are judging FFG are the issues of force and obligation. Nowhere have I read FFG saying he'd leave a man dying, or would spit on his carcass. What I get from him is that he doesn't want others imposing or forcing the obligation to care for that dying man on to him. I believe he would freely help someone in need.

As for the mudslinging, that's where I need some work. If someone slings mud, I'm happy to jump in and start slinging back. FFG, and you (and a few others here) seem to be good about donning a teflon suit, smiling, and letting the mud slide off.

angelica · February 2007

jeffbr wrote:

Excellent insight. I think the part that keeps being overlooked when people are judging FFG are the issues of force and obligation. Nowhere have I read FFG saying he'd leave a man dying, or would spit on his carcass. What I get from him is that he doesn't want others imposing or forcing the obligation to care for that dying man on to him. I believe he would freely help someone in need.

People have to tune out the value of what he has publicly detailed about his business, ethical, or interpersonal practices in order to see him as inhuman and cold. I agree with what you are saying that because he disputes the force/obligation aspect, it seems people assume other things based on his arguments.

As for the mudslinging, that's where I need some work. If someone slings mud, I'm happy to jump in and start slinging back. FFG, and you (and a few others here) seem to be good about donning a teflon suit, smiling, and letting the mud slide off.

I can't recall you mudslinging, at all. Maybe I'll have to go back and check your posting trail.

I've seen you call people out, or being bothered by people, but not slinging mud. I respect your reasoning.

I may let the mud slide off a lot of the time, but I'm definitely not always smiling!

soulsinging · February 2007

miller8966 wrote:

soulsinging is just upset because farfrom has been owning him in this topic.

im just annoyed becos trying to talk to him about reality is like trying to play tennis with a brick wall.

soulsinging · February 2007

farfromglorified wrote:

The twisted logic above is frightening.

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH" - George Orwell

This is your world, and I'm not sure you even know that.

how disingenuous of you. so anyone who believe government is necessary is advocating big brother eh? im one of the stauncher defenders of civil liberties around here, but im also a man of common sense. i understand all the ideological points you make and all of your abstract games of logic. my point all along has been that none of this is practical in the real world and all you offer is abstract platitudes that allow you to get on your soapbox and browbeat anyone who disagrees with you with these meaningless logic games. you greet any attempt to find some sort of common ground or compromise with you as a smug victory for yourself while you wax about how oppressed you are by a government that is one of the most responsive to its people in the history of human society.

but go on, play your games. im a libertarian at heart. you know you've gone off the deep end when your ideals are mind-blowingly bad to even a libertarian.

you say you're a staunch believer in liberty. but your ideology reveals that all you truly care about is ensuring that you never have to lift a finger to help anyone but yourself.

farfromglorified · February 2007

angelica wrote:

He is one of the only truly interactive people I've known, who operates based on mutual agreement which stems from mutual respect.

Wow -- thank you. This is one of the nicest compliments I've ever received in my life. It's funny how basically the exact same set of words can lead to the insults I've received on this board as well as compliments like this. The fundamental morality I hold for interpersonal action is found in these words you used:

"mutual agreement which stems from mutual respect"

That is the effective definition of exchange, the highest ideal of human interactions, IMO. Thanks for the understanding, angelica.

soulsinging wrote:

im just annoyed becos trying to talk to him about reality is like trying to play tennis with a brick wall.

This is actually a very nice compliment as well, though I doubt it was intended as one. Reality is very much a brick wall, soulsinging.

soulsinging · February 2007

farfromglorified wrote:

This is actually a very nice compliment as well, though I doubt it was intended as one. Reality is very much a brick wall, soulsinging.

yeah, but luckily for me, i can put the racket down and walk away. you can't walk away from reality. unless you join up with those militias. but i doubt you've the guts to back any of your convictions with action... you just like to whine about them. it's easy to be an armchair man of principle.

angelica · February 2007

farfromglorified wrote:

Wow -- thank you.

You are welcome.

This is one of the nicest compliments I've ever received in my life.

Good. You deserve it, because when I say "one of the only...I've known" you are maybe the top 1...or 2nd or 3rd at worst. Granted, I'm not sure how computer world translates in reality, but that you have the theory down is very impressive in my mind.

It's funny how basically the exact same set of words can lead to the insults I've received on this board as well as compliments like this.

I know, the humour is not lost on me. I still can't integrate my own thinking completely on this to harmonize the varying aspects that I see. I'll just chalk it up to a paradox.

The fundamental morality I hold for interpersonal action is found in these words you used:

"mutual agreement which stems from mutual respect"

That is the effective definition of exchange, the highest ideal of human interactions, IMO. Thanks for the understanding, angelica.

You're welcome. Thanks for seeing the fine lines in the world of mutual respect.

farfromglorified · February 2007

soulsinging wrote:

how disingenuous of you. so anyone who believe government is necessary is advocating big brother eh?

No. People who rely on contradictions like this are:

"yes, becos force is needed to keep greedy, selfish, cold, and inhuman people like you from abusing the rest of humanity for your own personal wealth and treating your fellow man like a means to an end by spitting on their dying carcass rather than lending a hand in helping them up."

That is the contradictory logic of "war is peace, slavery is freedom, ignorance is strength". That is the doublespeak Orwell was so famous for highlighting in his novels -- that's why I used that passage, not just as a blanket response to anyone who believes in government.

The simple belief in government does not make one an advocate of big brother. In some instances, it doesn't even make one "bad", in my book. However, when that belief is tied to contradictory logic, it becomes exceptionally dangerous.

im one of the stauncher defenders of civil liberties around here, but im also a man of common sense.

Yes, you are.

i understand all the ideological points you make and all of your abstract games of logic. my point all along has been that none of this is practical in the real world and all you offer is abstract platitudes that allow you to get on your soapbox and browbeat anyone who disagrees with you with these meaningless logic games.

If none of it is "practical", what are you so annoyed about? If all I'm doing is getting on a soapbox, so what? I've illiceted a strong emotional response from you in this thread, and that means there's more to it than the above.

you greet any attempt to find some sort of common ground or compromise with you as a smug victory for yourself

I don't greet common ground here or compromise in any way. On this issue, you and I share little common ground. Furthermore, I have no desire to "compromise" with you since your system offers me little that I want. Finally, "compromise" is completely alien to what you're proposing. You're simply going to force me to do what you want anyway, by your own definition.

while you wax about how oppressed you are by a government that is one of the most responsive to its people in the history of human society.

This government is one of the most responsive to its people in the history of human society. I completely agree. In a relative context against other states, I will typically staunchly defend the United States Government. However, that certainly does not mean that it is free of serious and often times fundamental flaws.

but go on, play your games. im a libertarian at heart. you know you've gone off the deep end when your ideals are mind-blowingly bad to even a libertarian.

Hehe....that's pretty cute actually.

you say you're a staunch believer in liberty. but your ideology reveals that all you truly care about is ensuring that you never have to lift a finger to help anyone but yourself.

No, it doesn't. That's the system you're proposing. You're forcing me to lift that finger to appease your moral responsibilities. Every single person in this world has a primary moral responsibility to themselves. Your systems allow people to abdicate that responsibility and put it on the shoulders of others. If that is what people want for themselves, so be it. That, however, is not what I want. I will fulfill my responsibilities to myself and I will choose the responsibilities I have to others.

soulsinging · February 2007

farfromglorified wrote:

If none of it is "practical", what are you so annoyed about? If all I'm doing is getting on a soapbox, so what? I've illiceted a strong emotional response from you in this thread, and that means there's more to it than the above.

becos you're a relatively smart guy and we could use more smart people actually trying to solve the problems we've got out there, rather than just avoiding them.

farfromglorified wrote:

I don't greet common ground here or compromise in any way. On this issue, you and I share little common ground. Furthermore, I have no desire to "compromise" with you since your system offers me little that I want. Finally, "compromise" is completely alien to what you're proposing. You're simply going to force me to do what you want anyway, by your own definition.

no, what im proposing is that we air our views and find a practical ground that benefits as many as possible. that is what government is and does and is supposed to be. sometimes this means a little sacrifice. sometimes it means you get benefits. but on the whole, everybody wins more than they lose. you dont always get it your way. this is the united states, not burger king. suck it up. you're still better off than most of the world. so you can sit out the game and let me have my way, or you can participate and try to get the best deal possible for yourself. some form of national health care is coming... that's just the way it is. the popular support for it is growing and the outrage at the way we turn our back on the poor is mounting. so you've got two choices... cross your arms and pout in the corner becos we're not playing the game you want and let us have our way with your tax money, or throw your hat in the ring and try to make sure that it is done the best way it can be while minimizing its impact on you.

farfromglorified wrote:

No, it doesn't. That's the system you're proposing. You're forcing me to lift that finger to appease your moral responsibilities. Every single person in this world has a primary moral responsibility to themselves. Your systems allow people to abdicate that responsibility and put it on the shoulders of others. If that is what people want for themselves, so be it. That, however, is not what I want. I will fulfill my responsibilities to myself and I will choose the responsibilities I have to others.

im not proposing any system. im saying this is the system we've got, like it or not. us representative democracy. everyone pays. nobody abdicates we just enlist our fellow to help. you must be a lot of fun to have around. do you get pissy when people offer to buy you drinks becos they will get to choose what you drink and that is a horrible infringement upon your liberty?

farfromglorified · February 2007

soulsinging wrote:

yeah, but luckily for me, i can put the racket down and walk away. you can't walk away from reality. unless you join up with those militias. but i doubt you've the guts to back any of your convictions with action... you just like to whine about them. it's easy to be an armchair man of principle.

Hehe...you know so little about me personally that this makes absolutely no sense.

Understand this: the principles I hold are behind nearly every decision I've made in my life in the last 10 years. They are behind my entrepreneurial efforts, my friendships, my relationships with my family, the wealth of all kinds that I have earned and the charity of all kinds I've granted. Those principles define the things I love in this world and the things I dislike in this world, and they define who I am as the primary guiding force in my life. Nearly all of the great amount of happiness I've experienced can be attributed to living by them and most of the small amount of sadness I've experienced can be attributed to forgetting them.

If those principles are not for you, so be it. I have no interest in forcing them upon you and I have no expectation that you will hold them or value them in any way. However, when you speak of armchair principles I'd encourage you to look at the men and women who propose, via the use of someone else's violence, forcing other people to give them the world they seek.

Universal Health Care

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