Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Ann Coulter

I actually thought about trying to combine my joke issues in one big issue--the mother of all issues if you will--but couldn't think how. I was thinking something to the effect of a thread to address "whether Israel's occupation of certain lands is justified given that Israel, as opposed to Palestinians, supports abortion rights and homosexuals' rights to marry." I just don't know if the facts assumed in that question are correct!

Just use the old "according to our sources", you should be OK.

If we all took a turn on medic8r's couch and talked about politics for an hour my guess is that even the most "extreme" among us would end up agreeing on most of the issues.

IMO the "right wing vs left wing" divide is always trivialized in the terms of the last issue in the news, so even the most like-thinking people find themselves scattered all over the political map based on specific issues and our willingness to accept specific flaws in the current crop of candidates.

The only real continuum I see might be described as "realist" (right wing) vs "idealist" (left wing) if you want to say it nicely, or "cynical vs utopian" among friends, based on your degree of belief in the "universal goodness of humanity".

I think everyone agrees that we should help those in need, but not go so far as to encourage dependence or abuse. The hard part is that into practice and scaling concepts that work in small groups up to massive size. Our society has a sufficiently wide range of people that any "one size fits all" policy is either going to under-support the people who do really need help or over-support the people who aren't motivated to help themselves.

EDIT - of course the last sentence clearly positions me over on the realist/cynic end of the political spectrum

It shouldn't be possible to do "both" (under-support people in need *and* build a culture of dependency), but it seems that with a sufficiently large bureaucracy and an unlimited supply of taxpayer money many of our governments manage to do it anyways.

Even worse, our countries are big enough that the definition of "enough support" changes with the climate and is not consistent across the country. The first time I vacationed somewhere warm I was shocked to realize that with a bit of land you really *could* live a grasshopper life - hang out in front of your shack, pick fruit from the trees, do a bit of fishing, keep a couple of goats & chickens, and get by doing odd jobs for beer money. In the northern US and much of Canada the grasshoppers tend to freeze to death without government support and you end up with proportionally more ants... so it becomes almost impossible to agree on political direction across the country at the best of times.

In Canada one problem is that we just have too much government. I pay taxes to municipal, county, regional, provincial and federal governments, all pulling in different directions, and that seems like at least 2 layers too many. IMO for a country like Canada all we really need are regional and federal governments, where a region might be a large city plus the surrounding area (bedroom communities, water supply etc..) or a larger area outside the major cities.

The US has roughly the same number of layers but 10x the population, so maybe only 1 layer too many there, but "government for the sake of government" is still a problem and is generally considered the downside of a left-ish (ie Democrat / Liberal) government. The opposite of that should be "just enough government" or even "too little government", but we get the stereotype Republican / Conservative "government for the sake of our business buddies" instead, and it's hard to say which is worse.

One obvious problem is that upper level government jobs are just too damn cushy, so they tend to attract the wrong kind of people and discourage them from leaving, but saying things like that could start the kind of argument that we all swore to never get involved with again so maybe I'll stop here

Post deleted as per use of profanity policy

JP!! WE NEED SOME MEDS QUICKLY!!!!!

Sounds like a good reason to stop going to Ottawa universities, I'll grant you that, but aren't most of the people here American anyways, with a smattering of slightly right-wing Canadians ?

Mark,

Please put down the teabag and back away slowly.

Sincerely,
A fellow American who was, up until this point, enjoying the civil nature of this thread.

People seem to forget that it takes two wings to fly.


Where's that eyeroll emoticon when you need it...

Wow, a real compassionate open-minded guy. No wonder the country is in such a mess.

By the way, the value of your money is "shrinking" by the day, just ask the Chinese.

Yeah, but usually those wings need to be attached to the same object.

Funny, but I don't think of most people here as right wing or left wing, just folks with some common ground (audio) and some differing opinions. Must be somthing wrong with me...