Why, in the long run, America will legalize Gay marriage.
Let’s pretend that ½ of the general populace supports it. This seems likely since there’s about an equal number of those who consider themselves conservative as those who consider themselves liberal, and independents will likewise probably be split evenly on this issue. So, let’s just pretend. This ½ of the populace will vote to legalize gay marriage. The other ½ will oppose it.
However, among the ½ who oppose gay marriage, there is a much more difficult set of decisions that must be made, ones that aren’t in the equation for those who support it. Those who oppose it don’t have a harder decision because ‘they know in their hearts gay marriage is a good thing and they know in their hearts that they are just bigots deep down.’ Nothing like that. Those who oppose it have a harder decision because even though they feel it is wrong, they may feel that it is not the government’s job to determine morality, or to decide this particular issue of morality. I personally know some people who consider homosexuality a sin, but who support legalizing gay marriage.
There won’t be anyone in the ½ of America who thinks homosexuality is ok that will vote against gay marriage. But there will be some in the ½ of America who thinks homosexuality is a sin that will still vote to legalize gay marriage, considering it a trampling of rights – that’s what America is all about. Of course, so far, I’m wrong. In 31 states traditional marriage has prevailed, recently most notably and surprisingly in Maine.
Moral Relativists are mean people.
People tell me that evil doesn’t exist. Next time someone tells me that I’ll ask them if they believe that hatred exists. I’m sure they’ll agree.
Evil may best be described as actions motivated by hatred. I don’t think you can do an evil act and not feel hatred in some way, on some level. You can cause harm without out right angry hatred, such as allowing someone to be hurt and you don’t try to help them and that is evil too, derived from apathy. But even if it is out of apathy, there has to be some kind of hatred on some level. This is demonstrated by the fact that you cannot love someone and allow them to be hurt. Obviously this is different from allowing someone to be harmed so they can learn. This could be out of love. The obvious example is letting a kid get (slightly) burned on the stove so that the kid will learn to listen to her mother next time to not touch the stove. But imagine a parent that allowed her child to run into a busy street so that the child can ‘learn’ that cars hurt you. That’s evil (or insanity). Such a parent does not love the kid. The parent must loathe the child on some level. That is evil.
This argument is entirely semantic of course. But aren’t all discussions of evil? When people tell me that evil doesn’t exist, they are saying so because they are trying to argue that morality is a false notion. If you cut it down to evil = hatred, and they must agree that the concept of hatred exists, they will then be forced to argue that hatred isn’t wrong. What a lovely idea.
Glad to have Obama as my president – no sarcasm.
People always talk about how Obama is a bad president, he’s a socialist, he’s inept, etc. Maybe he’s a bad president. But I would much rather have Obama than Putin or the guys who run the West Bank or the guys who run Lebanon or China or virtually any nation in Africa, or the vast majority of nations throughout history. Or for that matter, I’d rather have him than the majority of nations throughout the 20th century. It’s all in the comparison, like poverty, it doesn’t truly exist in America. We just think it does.
Sarah Palin, it’s simple.
Sarah Palin is always big news on the political scene. But I never read anything about her ever. I always skip anything involving Sarah Palin no matter what it is. I only learned two things about her last year and it’s enough for me. These two things are all I need to know to forever vote for her.
1) she fought against her own party who were corrupt and won the governorship in Alaska.
2) her voter approval rating was always astronomically high.
No one fights your own party and wins, and no one has such insanely high approval ratings. That’s a president I’d want to have. I trust someone who fights the corruption of their own party and who everyone on both sides of the aisle support overwhelmingly. People talk about how we’re too polarized as a nation, too partisan. Sarah Palin seems to be a bridge builder of far more acuity than Obama, and she did so by actually doing it, not by saying she would.
The Berlin Wall did not Fall
You read correctly. It did not fall. It was torn down. It was not an inevitable event. It had to be physically broken apart by people, not by time or its own weight. There was no fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a tearing down of the Berlin Wall. The distinction is highly relevant.
Just as Martin Luther King jr. said – “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.”
The wall was built by evil decisions and torn down by good ones. There was nothing inevitable about either event.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
Comparisons
I know I’m such a hard critic of the UN. I mean, should I really expect them to have enough time to take care of the problems of the world when such critical work as the dissolving of Switzerland and the re-drawing of the borders of Italy, France and Germany are at stake?
Anyways…
When people often spoke of Iraq as a second Vietnam, there were typically two points, or dimensions, they were trying to show. The first is to say that both wars were misguided and wrong in design. The second is to say that we will lose in Iraq like we did in Vietnam (the moral being that we’d better pull out, because we’re gonna lose anyway).
In addressing only the latter dimension, I say phooey. Anyone who has read anything on the military aspect of Vietnam will tell you that the result was unexpected and very unlikely to have happened. The chances were extremely remote that the NVA, even with the Vietcong, would win. It was a great upset in the course of history. As my dad once mentioned to me, the South Vietnamese were a match militarily all by themselves for the North, before ever adding the US Army into the equation. Additionally, the US won every single battle, yet lost the war. Who could possibly account for that, on a military level? The answer is, no one because we didn’t lose the war on a military level.
Now, back to the Iraq war. The US had a much better trained, funded, equipped and prepared military in 2003 than in 1965. Comparing the two wars for the purpose of arguing that we will also lose the Iraq War is like saying ‘well, I got struck by lightning on a clear day on October 5th in 2008, and now it is another clear day on October 5th 2009, so I better not go outside because I imagine I’ll be struck by lightning.’ Who would say that?
One problem with comparing the two wars in order to show we will lose in Iraq is the fact that the casualty rates are extremely different. In six years of war we have lost about 4000 soldiers in Iraq. In the eight years of direct involvement of US troops in Vietnam fifteen times more soldiers died (about 60,000). Wounded rates show a similar disparity with Vietnam involving ten times more than the Iraq war (about 300,000 to 30,000).
I find it difficult to believe we’re going to militarily lose the Iraq war with such low casualty rates. As far as I understand, this is an unprecedentedly low death rate for any conflict of similar scale.
After all this, let me change my mind and state that the comparison arguments are correct: if we lose the post 2003 counter-insurgent portion of the Iraq War,* it will not be because our military failed, it will be because our politics and policies fail. And that is an accurate comparison to Vietnam.
*[because we must acknowledge that technically the US already won the Iraq War by demolishing the old Iraq army and regime in three weeks in 2003].
Now, if we are so awesome, how come we can’t just win these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? The answer is because we aren’t fighting a war with either Afghanistan or Iraq anymore. Both of these countries are great allies with us, since late 2001 and mid 2003 respectively. We are trying to a) stabilize their infant democracies, b) inoculate their governments against corruption, 3) eliminate the extremely evil and violent insurgents and jihadists who blow up schools, mosques and weddings, and 4) train armed forces and police to be self-sufficient in fighting these terrorists without the US.
In case you didn’t know, only the last half of those goals are what the US military does. In fact, only number 3 is what the military really does.
Not only is the military doing jobs it is not meant to do, but it is doing them under conditions that did not exist in other similar scenarios. Let me explain this by comparing the development of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan to that in Japan and the US.
Japan: after World War II it took seven years for the US to export democracy to Japan.
US: declared independence in 1776, but it wasn’t until 1791, fifteen years later, that both the Constitution and Bill of Rights had been created and ratified. However you interpret when the real birth of the US democratic republic was, it was necessarily several years after 1776.
So, as a first comparison, it takes time
Don't expect the current 'wars' which are actually counter-insurgencies coupled with nation building do do wonders instantly.
But there are also some differences to be appreciated:
• Neither Japan nor the US had severe poverty (both peoples at the two times actually being among the richest on earth (although Japan had been devastated by war)). Afghanistan nevertheless had far severer poverty and Iraq wasn’t exactly swimming in wealth, having been bankrupted by Saddam.
• Neither Japan nor the US had intense drug problems like Afghanistan.
• And most stunningly of all, neither Japan nor the US had violently radical factions who are willing to kill their own people in order to kick out the foreigners who are seeking to help their people (which in a word, is insanity).
I’d have to say that these are significant differences. Be patient. Don’t give up. Let the military have all the resources it needs. Let our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan) have all the resources they need. We need more stable democracies in the Middle East.* Heck, we need more stable democracies in the world. We must succeed in Afghanistan because if we do not, then necessarily, yes necessarily, it will revert to the ultra-oppressive, international terrorist-sponsoring, major drug-producing cesspool it was.
*[it would be great to have more than one (Israel), wouldn’t it?]
Anyways…
When people often spoke of Iraq as a second Vietnam, there were typically two points, or dimensions, they were trying to show. The first is to say that both wars were misguided and wrong in design. The second is to say that we will lose in Iraq like we did in Vietnam (the moral being that we’d better pull out, because we’re gonna lose anyway).
In addressing only the latter dimension, I say phooey. Anyone who has read anything on the military aspect of Vietnam will tell you that the result was unexpected and very unlikely to have happened. The chances were extremely remote that the NVA, even with the Vietcong, would win. It was a great upset in the course of history. As my dad once mentioned to me, the South Vietnamese were a match militarily all by themselves for the North, before ever adding the US Army into the equation. Additionally, the US won every single battle, yet lost the war. Who could possibly account for that, on a military level? The answer is, no one because we didn’t lose the war on a military level.
Now, back to the Iraq war. The US had a much better trained, funded, equipped and prepared military in 2003 than in 1965. Comparing the two wars for the purpose of arguing that we will also lose the Iraq War is like saying ‘well, I got struck by lightning on a clear day on October 5th in 2008, and now it is another clear day on October 5th 2009, so I better not go outside because I imagine I’ll be struck by lightning.’ Who would say that?
One problem with comparing the two wars in order to show we will lose in Iraq is the fact that the casualty rates are extremely different. In six years of war we have lost about 4000 soldiers in Iraq. In the eight years of direct involvement of US troops in Vietnam fifteen times more soldiers died (about 60,000). Wounded rates show a similar disparity with Vietnam involving ten times more than the Iraq war (about 300,000 to 30,000).
I find it difficult to believe we’re going to militarily lose the Iraq war with such low casualty rates. As far as I understand, this is an unprecedentedly low death rate for any conflict of similar scale.
After all this, let me change my mind and state that the comparison arguments are correct: if we lose the post 2003 counter-insurgent portion of the Iraq War,* it will not be because our military failed, it will be because our politics and policies fail. And that is an accurate comparison to Vietnam.
*[because we must acknowledge that technically the US already won the Iraq War by demolishing the old Iraq army and regime in three weeks in 2003].
Now, if we are so awesome, how come we can’t just win these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? The answer is because we aren’t fighting a war with either Afghanistan or Iraq anymore. Both of these countries are great allies with us, since late 2001 and mid 2003 respectively. We are trying to a) stabilize their infant democracies, b) inoculate their governments against corruption, 3) eliminate the extremely evil and violent insurgents and jihadists who blow up schools, mosques and weddings, and 4) train armed forces and police to be self-sufficient in fighting these terrorists without the US.
In case you didn’t know, only the last half of those goals are what the US military does. In fact, only number 3 is what the military really does.
Not only is the military doing jobs it is not meant to do, but it is doing them under conditions that did not exist in other similar scenarios. Let me explain this by comparing the development of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan to that in Japan and the US.
Japan: after World War II it took seven years for the US to export democracy to Japan.
US: declared independence in 1776, but it wasn’t until 1791, fifteen years later, that both the Constitution and Bill of Rights had been created and ratified. However you interpret when the real birth of the US democratic republic was, it was necessarily several years after 1776.
So, as a first comparison, it takes time
Don't expect the current 'wars' which are actually counter-insurgencies coupled with nation building do do wonders instantly.
But there are also some differences to be appreciated:
• Neither Japan nor the US had severe poverty (both peoples at the two times actually being among the richest on earth (although Japan had been devastated by war)). Afghanistan nevertheless had far severer poverty and Iraq wasn’t exactly swimming in wealth, having been bankrupted by Saddam.
• Neither Japan nor the US had intense drug problems like Afghanistan.
• And most stunningly of all, neither Japan nor the US had violently radical factions who are willing to kill their own people in order to kick out the foreigners who are seeking to help their people (which in a word, is insanity).
I’d have to say that these are significant differences. Be patient. Don’t give up. Let the military have all the resources it needs. Let our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan) have all the resources they need. We need more stable democracies in the Middle East.* Heck, we need more stable democracies in the world. We must succeed in Afghanistan because if we do not, then necessarily, yes necessarily, it will revert to the ultra-oppressive, international terrorist-sponsoring, major drug-producing cesspool it was.
*[it would be great to have more than one (Israel), wouldn’t it?]
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