Why I voted for Gary Johnson

[garbage can]

Isn't it quicker and easier just to use spellcheck and assume every word whistles as you work?

From what I hear, Matthews has his own spellcheck, it quickly highlights all dog whistles.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Uh oh, I think Chris Uggs is here...

 

[mercury14]

You think you know me...



Ask anyone my stance on the death penalty. Go ahead. Double-dawg dare...

Typical lib attempt at ad hominem.

That wasn't ad hominem.



http://media.twirlit.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/inigo-montoya.jpg

 

[Peregrinator]

Because the motion is purely symbolic. There are things that can be done to fix our political system. I doubt any of them will be done any time soon but I think not only is there a better chance of bringing back some of the older voting practices than of a third party doing anything other than fucking over the guy they would rather have won but I feel like the people who every four years trot out the third party guy, (who half the time isn't a third party guy. I'll admit I'm not an expert on Gary Johnson but everything I've read on him including his website paints him as a Republican who refuses to associate with Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum. I'd rather you clean your house than try to build a new one, knowing full well the savages aren't going to let you be relevant and worse the voices of sanity threw up their hands and walked away) still it's symbolic. If you guys (collectively, not you specifically) were pushing something, anything all the time I'd think you were doing something other than getting up on your high horse so when someone accuses you of agreeing with "x" you can say "I don't support either of these guys.

I'd ask any of those people the questions you cited, and I think one would be a fool not to, given the chance. Ford might not understand robotics, but he sure as hell understood reducing costs. The Wright Brothers might not understand jet propulsion, but they sure as hell understood reducing drag and maximizing lift. And, really? You wouldn't ask Darwin about evolution? His observations are still the best example of natural selection research in history. He might not be a geneticist, but, fuck, dude, he's one of if not the most astute natural scientists who ever lived.

More to the point, the founders of the country based their political theory on existing philosophy. Not much new has come down the pike since. Locke, Plato, and the Iroquois Confederacy haven't yet been refuted. They still have the same validity.

No, I wouldn't ask those men. This is not to say that these men were not brilliant brilliant men. They were, they were brilliant men and pioneers and deserve their place in history. That said no, I wouldn't ask Ford how to build a better factory. I trust the hundred years of advances since then. No, I wouldn't ask the Wright brothers. Reducing drag and maximizing lift are mathematics. What they did was amazing and I couldn't replicate it if I tried but if I'm building a jet excuse me for wanting a rocket scientist. I'm not going to debate if Darwin's observations are the best example, mostly because that's a debate that can't be won. You'll break out the finches, and I'll break out the entire fossil record, you'll counter one man did it all, I'll start with so what and then find something specific that one person did. It's a waste of energy. I still wouldn't ask someone who isn't familiar with both the fossil record and genetics much about evolution.

To your final point perhaps the fact that there are no notable thinkers since then reflects on our humility. The world has changed quite a bit in the last two centuries and it shows. I'm not in the mood right now (but maybe in a bit) but we could go through the Constitution and find lots of things that don't make sense to today's world (as written, such as the 2nd Amendment.), things that were valid fears at the time but aren't today (like the born in America to be president, there are lots of reasons Arnold Schwarzenegger shouldn't be President, his Austrian birth is not one of them however).

Again it's not that didn't have great ideas and some of them are truly timeless, some are not. Most of the time when you (generic) mention the Founding Father's it's code for I don't have an argument. If your only argument is that this is how it was done 225 years ago I don't see why I should even address it.

Okay, noted on your dislike/disagreement with Johnson. Fair enough.

To the rest of your post, really? Would you ask Albert Einstein or Niels Bohr about nuclear physics? Would you ask Louis Pasteur how to make food safe?

Ford was maybe better than anyone else in history at streamlining manufacturing. I'd bet he'd have something to teach any factory owner. The Wrights were not just doing math. They were visionaries, which is the point.

The guys who wrote the Constitution were not just doing math. They were visionaries, towering geniuses who created something entirely new in the history of mankind. And they gave us a means to alter it as time passed.

And the 2nd Amendment is the teeth they gave to the citizens of the country so we could bite if needed.

Mentioning the Founders isn't code for "I don't have an argument;" it's shorthand for "someone already whacked this meatball 225 years ago."

 

[KingOrfeo]

I think LBJ and his great society were capitalist lefties. Obama is a socialist.

Socialist?! He's a fucking Eisenhower Democrat, you idiot!

 

[Peregrinator]

That's all fine and dandy, but if you're serious about seeing more plurality in U.S. politics, it needs to start locally, from the bottom up.

Voting for a third-party candidate in the presidential election is a waste of time. There's no foundation, no infrastructure to support a third-party vote on a national level. It needs to start in the municipalities, third-party candidates for mayor, commissioner, state representative, etc.

Until we see that, there's no chance for a third-party candidate for president.

Uh, well, he was, as Johnny points out, governor of New Mexico and was rather popular in the post. He got term-limited out of office. There's no job that qualifies someone to be prez better than governor.

And voting for third-party candidates is the best way to create that infrastructure and give them some attention from the MSM.

 

[Peregrinator]

You think you know me...



Ask anyone my stance on the death penalty. Go ahead. Double-dawg dare...

Typical lib attempt at ad hominem.

I'll vouch. You have been consistently anti-death penalty and anti-abortion for as long as I've been paying attention to your political positions.

 

[KingOrfeo]

More to the point, the founders of the country based their political theory on existing philosophy. Not much new has come down the pike since. Locke, Plato, and the Iroquois Confederacy haven't yet been refuted. They still have the same validity.

Plato has. From A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell, Chapter XIV, "Plato's Utopia":

. . . Although all the rulers are to be philosophers, there are to be no innovations; a philosopher is to be, for all time, a man who understands and agrees with Plato.

When we ask: what will Plato's Republic achieve? The answer is rather humdrum. It will achieve success in wars against roughly equal populations, and it will secure a livelihood for a certain small number of people. It will almost certainly produce no art or science, because of its rigidity; in this respect, as in others, it will be like Sparta. In spite of all the fine talk, skill in war and enough to eat is all that will be achieved. Plato had lived through famine and defeat in Athens; perhaps, subconsciously, he thought the avoidance of these evils the best that statesmanship could accomplish.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Uh, well, he was, as Johnny points out, governor of New Mexico and was rather popular in the post. He got term-limited out of office. There's no job that qualifies someone to be prez better than governor.

And voting for third-party candidates is the best way to create that infrastructure and give them some attention from the MSM.

Unless you're a Mormon.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Plato has. From A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell, Chapter XIV, "Plato's Utopia":

This subsequent appeal to Greece, as the presumed holder of the original title-deeds of socialism, has been made on two grounds. On the one hand, Greece, in its highly variegated political life, is presumed to have given examples of the actual functioning of the communistic way of life. Here, of course, it is pre-eminently Sparta that has fascinated later ages; though Crete also enters into the picture — and to a much lesser extent, Lipara. On the other hand, Greece has supplied the theory and the vision of Communism. On this side, needless to say, it is Plato, in The Republic and The Laws, who in himself very largely constitutes the legacy of Greece. Before approaching Plato, the begetter of much socialism which he would have disowned, it may be advisable to glance, even if hastily, at Greek communism in practice.

http://mises.org/daily/6237/Ancient-Spartan-Communism

Aristotle is the father of reason.

Plato is the god-father of the witch-doctor and the brother of Atilla.

 

[garbage can]

Socialist?! He's a fucking Eisenhower Democrat, you idiot!

Edited....off current topic.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Okay, noted on your dislike/disagreement with Johnson. Fair enough.

To the rest of your post, really? Would you ask Albert Einstein or Niels Bohr about nuclear physics? Would you ask Louis Pasteur how to make food safe?

Ford was maybe better than anyone else in history at streamlining manufacturing. I'd bet he'd have something to teach any factory owner. The Wrights were not just doing math. They were visionaries, which is the point.

The guys who wrote the Constitution were not just doing math. They were visionaries, towering geniuses who created something entirely new in the history of mankind. And they gave us a means to alter it as time passed.

And the 2nd Amendment is the teeth they gave to the citizens of the country so we could bite if needed.

Mentioning the Founders isn't code for "I don't have an argument;" it's shorthand for "someone already whacked this meatball 225 years ago."

I'd ask Einstein, math doesn't change and you could probably bring him up to speed in a heart beat. Pastuer. Nope. We know so much more now than he did and have so much more available to us that asking is pointless. We can keep going down the list but with very few exceptions (if you've been dead for more than a century don't expect me to care much what you think).

You seem to be treating these people as if what they did was so special that nobody else would ever have figured it out had it not been for this one person. It might have taken longer, ten years, twenty, thirty but someone would have come up with it and it's probable someone came up with it before and for whatever reason was lost to history. More to the point years and years of taking from their knowledge cessing out what was wrong and building from there just means that the new generation inevitably surpasses the older.

The second amendment doesn't say guns, it says arms. We live in a world today where we almost universally agree that we have the right to tell other COUNTRIES what sort of arms they can and can't have. Stop and wrap your mind around that for a second. We tell sovereign nations what kinds of weapons they can and can't have.

Where do you honestly think the Founding Fathers would have fallen on modern weaponry? At the time that it was written guns were single shot, horses were transportation and the idea of sending your remote control toy to kill someone weren't even dreamt of. Without a time machine it's impossible to know but I suspect that if you gave them a glimpse of what we can do they at the very least would have worded things a bit more tightly.

Or to quote Thomas Jefferson: The dead should not rule the living.

Note: I have said several times that these are great men worthy of respect, I merely think that just because some guy did it 225 years ago is no reason for me to do it tomorrow.

And seriously, you've been on Lit more than long enough to know exactly who uses "As this country was founded, the intentions of our Founding Fathers, our Founding Principles" etc. It is short hand for I have no intelligent argument. Half the time if you take the time and trouble to dig through history you'll find that it was wrong anyway but that's not the point at all.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I'll vouch. You have been consistently anti-death penalty and anti-abortion for as long as I've been paying attention to your political positions.

She doesn't care and will never be back.

She forgets that we have had the same conversation at least a dozen times with the same exact charge; all you r-wingers are for the death penalty and against abortion ergo, hypocrisy.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Maybe it's because I'm an idiot that I don't see it that way....Seems I remember Ike warning about the military industrial complex, not sure how that fits with Obama being a socialist.

It doesn't. You needn't be a socialist to be concerned about the MIC.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Maybe it's because I'm an idiot that I don't see it that way....Seems I remember Ike warning about the military industrial complex, not sure how that fits with Obama being a socialist.

And the governmental-educational/science complex.

Go read the speech.

Same way FDR warned against Public-Sector unions.

 

[Peregrinator]

Plato has. From A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell, Chapter XIV, "Plato's Utopia":

Plato has...what?

 

[KingOrfeo]

Plato has...what?

Been refuted. By Bertrand Russell. In political theory, that is. His metaphysics were refuted much longer ago, by Aristotle.

 

[JohnnySavage]

Been refuted. By Bertrand Russell. In political theory, that is. His metaphysics were refuted much longer ago, by Aristotle.

Link?

 

[KingOrfeo]

Link?

You can find it in Russell's book; no online link that I know of.

 

[BoyNextDoor]

Campaign finance reform will have to come first. No third party will ever be relevant with the Dems and Reps each having billion-dollar war chests.

Disagree.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Disagree.

Well, which party do you think could be relevant without the big bucks?

 

[Sean Renaud]

Well, which party do you think could be relevant without the big bucks?

Both, probably the Dems more so than the Republicans but still.

 

[BoyNextDoor]

Well, which party do you think could be relevant without the big bucks?

I disagree that "Campaign finance reform will have to come first."

 

[KingOrfeo]

I disagree that "Campaign finance reform will have to come first."

I think what will have to come first is all the third parties making a strategic alliance to push for changes in the electoral system -- instant-runoff voting or approval voting, proportional representation, ballot fusion.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I think what will have to come first is all the third parties making a strategic alliance to push for changes in the electoral system -- instant-runoff voting or approval voting, proportional representation, ballot fusion.

No, that is just the usual Democrat wish list of things that they think work in their favor.

A third party needs no more than a solid underlying philosophy and the internet.

The problem for Libertarians, is that not unlike the two big parties that they have such a variety of thought not based in any philosophy that they are not united in any way. Too many of them want no government when it comes to their social proclivity, but lots of government on the "Big Causes" of the day. Karen Armstrong (Holy Wars) is right, you can take the Christianity out of our culture, but you cannot remove the clarion calls to crusade.