Letters to the Editor
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@WT
Show me someone supporting programs focused on market-based solutions to social and economic problems, and I'll show you an enemy of civilization.
That's just nuts. You know what liberated me, far more than any NOW marches? Maytag, Hoover vacuums, ready-to-wear perma-press clothing, contraceptive technology, industrially canned food products & etc. Do you have ANY idea how much time a woman had to spend even 150 years ago running a household that included, say, 5 kids? She had to take each carpet out to the clothesline and beat it mercilessly, might have had to go to the river to scrub the clothes, then hang them up, often had to sew clothes and/or mend them until they were rags, and spend hours tilling a garden and then canning whatever grew. No microwaves, and unless one was wealthy, no option for ordering take-out/delivery dinner at Pizza Hut. It goes on and on like that.
That woman was not going to also earn a degree. No time for it.
Get a clue.
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@ WT
Or should we just call them all Republicans, and let God recognize his own?
-- William Timberman
It would be nice if they stopped rigidly adhering to dogma and believing in utter nonsense (doctors kill more people, etc.) but they won't, so we are likely to be fighting it for years to come.
I do not mind the fact that money is spent to discourage young people from smoking. All in all, I think it is money well spent. If as an adult, a person takes it up, that's unfortunate but that is his choice and according to Peter Van Doren, Assistant Director of Environmental Studies at the Cato Institute, smokers save society money because smokers die earlier than nonsmokers, thus saving society the costs of pensions, nursing home care "and other costs related to conditions associated with old age."
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That got your attention, eh Mona?
And all of this wonderful market-based spiffiness in the service of women has produced -- wait for it -- Elizabeth Dole, Nancy Reagan, and Ann Coulter.
Relax, Mona, we're talking about two different things, as you very well fucking know. Then again, maybe you don't. Perhaps Paul Rosenberg will explain it to you. I haven't the patience.
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bucky1 and Freedom to Choose One's Proctologist!
I might go to a licensed doctor, but why can others not go to whoever they choose --- are they not free?
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Anyway, I am in my 50s --- why can the country not let me pick the guy who sticks his finger ... well, you know.
Of course you should be able to choose (freedom) who you go to .. but .. not just anyone is free to dispense medical advice. Once industrialism kicked-in, we have "professionals" and "experts" and sorry to say by you are not free to just declare yourself one of them; but you are free to go to any of them. At least, that is how I see things.
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When you say...
WT... social and economic problems
Mona sees vacuum cleaners and washing machines. Odd, isn't it?
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Hoover and Maytag accidents...
kill more people each year than doctors and guns combined!
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@ Arne
But we know that these things don't work, Mona (by assumption above). We know that people will get hurt if they use/rely on them. Then what? Would you ban tort claims too?
If the proper releases are executed, then the seller should be immune from liability. But in any event, what you and I agree does not work, is insufficient reason for telling our religious and/or politically misguided neighbor that they MAY NOT choose laetrile [or fill in the blank]. It ain't our bodies Arne, and so not our choice.
I mean, are you going to compel a competent adult to accept the chemo that every doctor says is reasonably likely to work, but which the adult refuses? If not, why disallow their choice for laetrile?
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No, not odd
It's an acceptable rhetorical trick, L.W.M., no more or less reprehensible than my own little troll-like goad.
What it accomplishes, though -- and in this your own tactics have always been spot-on -- is to draw out of people what, beyond the constraints of rational discourse, is actually driving them. The elitism and contempt for lower orders, the desire to restrict power to the members of their own class which is typical of almost all conservatives, and of many libertarians, is often well-hidden. Give 'em a poke -- even an unfair one -- and it all spills out. They really can't help themselves.
Extolling the wonderful benefits of industrial production to poor enslaved womanhood overlooks a lot. Ask the Rosas, Luxemburg and Parks, if vacuum cleaners meant emancipation to them, and you'll kinda get the idea.
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@KB4Hire
Did you ever notice how every discussion with Bucko comes back to the same two points?
1] All governments are evil - period.
2] Citizens should have complete and total freedom to do nearly anything, as long as it doesn't hurt someone.
While I can see certain positives to a very limited set of freedom of choice options put forth by the Liber's I can also see very real danger. And the dangers are something I never hear them talk about.
It's always all or nothing with the crazies.
Sheesh ...
-- KB4Hire
You have to read this:
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/onelesson.html
I'm a bit of a social libertarian. If a person wants to hang himself by his scrotum from the ceiling (thanks for that image, Mona), fine. But most of the economic and anti-statist claptrap goes too far.
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Yes... well
Mona... It ain't our bodies Arne, and so not our choice.
That's all well and good if we are talking about hanging from the ceiling by one's scrotum for fun or even profit. The minute you do it to cure your testicular cancer because some quack suggested it, a line has been crossed. It's called fraud.
Fraud is the homage that force pays to reason.
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@WT -"Let there be peace between us."
And all of this wonderful market-based spiffiness in the service of women has produced -- wait for it -- Elizabeth Dole, Nancy Reagan, and Ann Coulter.
As well as Nancy Pelosi, and literally millions of other professional women who also had families, including me.
Relax, Mona, we're talking about two different things, as you very well fucking know. Then again, maybe you don't. Perhaps Paul Rosenberg will explain it to you. I haven't the patience.
I can only await with baited breath. My great-grandmothers had virtually none of the options I have had, and there is a reason for that beyond feminist politics -- they were working their fingers to the bone maintaining a household. It is not an accident that I am the first women on either side of the family to earn an advanced degree.