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Chicken farms, global warming and water-boarding

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Thursday, November 01, 2007 11:29:04 AM
I read the other day that chickens live their lives in pain because their bodies are too big for their bone structure, when they are raised in mass production, right next to one another. I've thought of quitting my eating of chicken, but that won't lessen the pain of any chicken. The system is in place and I've had no part of establishing the system. As one person I'm powerless. Are chicken farms immoral? Depends on where you start your analysis. Since America and the world has allowed it's population to grow and the population needs to be fed or it will starve and the mass production of chickens helps keep Americans from starvation, it comes down to an "Us or them" situation.

So, if Al Gore stopped flying in private jets would it affect global warming? No. My problem is the morality of assuring that chickens will live their lives in pain and Gores problem is the morality man-made warming. I can't do anything about chicken production, but Gore just might help change the global warming system.

So, the morality of water-boarding. The system is bound and determined to keep water-boarding as an option.  Is water boarding even one individual immoral or is immorality situational, like chicken production versus starvation? Can we change the system if we act in concert?

I think conservatives are being too emotional is their attacks on Gore. If conservatives attack Gore they should also, to be consistent, give up eating chicken
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College Students Are Taught To Be Leftists?

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Tuesday, October 30, 2007 9:22:59 AM
Isn't this the height of condesention by Prager? It's essentially a tabula rasa proposition. It leaves Prager in the position of, ultimately, arguing that since most Americans are center right then most center right Americans are not college graduates (since college graduates have been taught to be leftists).

Family values guy Prager denies that entering freshmen bring any values that their parents and religious teachers have taught them. Prager implicitly denies that incoming freshmen have any intelligence or can think rationally for themselves. Prager portrays incoming freshmen as victims of the evil liberal professors, against whom the freshmen have no defense and are turned into leftist zombies.

It's good science fiction, Dennis. But that's all it is.
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With Israel It Depends Upon Where You Start

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Monday, October 29, 2007 1:26:05 PM
Now that Israel is an established country I'm not in favor of eradicating the country and see if blown to smithereens. But listening to Dennis Miller today I was reminded that conservatives distort their viewpoints by their choice of where they start their history.

There was a fellow named Jabotinski in Israel, I think in the 1930s, author of The Iron Wall. The Jews who were emigrating to Israel from Europe were avidly learning to speak Hebrew. Jabotinski admonished them, howerver. He said that learning Hebrew is well and good, but even better they should learn how to shoot a rifle. He declared that the Jews were engaged in a colonialist endeavor in trying to take the land away from the Arabs who lived there. He declared that there were two peoples fighting over one land and the Jews would have to take it by force.

That's all history, of course. The author Robert Kaplan's books recount many instances of one culture invading another, so it's not like Israel is unique in history. But, it also demonstrates that it's important where you start looking at history to support your rationalizations for current policies.
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Why Own A Gun If It Doesn't Kill?

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Monday, October 29, 2007 9:57:43 AM
The very purpose of owning a gun to protect ourselves is to use it to kill or wound if the circumstance arises.
If a gun didn't kill we'd have no use for it. If it didn't kill the bad guys would have no reason to be afraid. Russian would not have been afraid to attack America if the atomic bomb doesn't kill.
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If Guns Don't Kill Why Should IEDs?

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Monday, October 29, 2007 9:26:36 AM
We'd like to keep IEDs out of the hands of people that we know will use them to kill American soldiers, even though they'd find less efficient ways to kill without the IEDs. The killers in Iraq are an easily identified population.

We also know that a small percentage of people will use handguns in the commission of a crime and in murder. But this population is not easily identifiable, even though they might find less efficient ways to rob and kill without their handguns. The underlying problem with armaments, then, is that of knowledge of intent (or future circumstance which will provoke a gun owner to kill.)

The NRA, it seems, has saddled us with a LIE. Armaments do kill. Saddled us with a LIE for their own self-interest. Be honest with the American people NRA. The problem with handguns is an inability to foresee the future. They do kill. This is an example of a sophistry in rhetoric whose intent is to LIE.
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Iran rockets & IEDs don't kill

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Sunday, October 28, 2007 11:50:46 AM
Iraqis kill. The NRA makes the point and conservatives back them up that the availability of guns shouldn't be constrained because the guns themselves don't kill. It is the human beings who have a motivation to kill and the will to squeeze the trigger who kill. And, the NRA points out that if someone wants to kill someone else they will find a way, even if they are denied guns.

Now, that's a perfectly logical argument (if you happen to be a conservative). What's of interest to me, and we saw this on Fox this morning, is the complaint that the Iranian Guards are furnishing Iraqis with missiles and IEDs and the whole blame gets dumped on the heads of Iran. No one, including the left as far as I can see, ever mentions that it is the Iraqi militias who want to kill Americans. It is the Iraqi militias who kill Americans with the IEDs and rockets. If the NRA logic is consistent we should not be focusing on the IEDs and rockets, which after all don't kill people, we should be focusing on the NRA point that if the militias want to kill Americans they will find a way to do it whether they have IEDs and rockets at all.
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Age of military killed in Iraq

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Sunday, October 28, 2007 10:58:17 AM
Has anyone besides me noticed that the average age of military killed in Iraq has been getting higher over a number of months. I watch Stephanopolous post the names and ages of those killed. In the beginning most of those killed were quite young, 18, 19, 20, 21. Then, a few months ago I noticed that a lot more of those killed were in their 30s and 40s. I've wondered what that indicates.
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Finestein & Hunter

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Sunday, October 28, 2007 10:50:41 AM
It was interesting this morning that while Finestein and Hunter agreed on just about everything, Hunter was the one to make it at all political, in talking about push back against environmentalists. Finestein uttered not a political word, but concentrated on practical specifics. Interesting.
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Join the "Hillary Pray-a-thon"

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Saturday, October 27, 2007 11:21:20 AM
on December 8th at 8:00 a.m. We're expecting a million of the faithful to pray to God simultaneously at 8:00 a.m. on December 8th to make Hillary our next president. We feel sure that God will hear our prayers.
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If God loves America HE'll make Hillary the next president

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Saturday, October 27, 2007 11:12:16 AM
I catch about 30 seconds to one minute of Glen Beck every day. The man is a hater and I believe is reflective of an evil strain that infects some conservatives these days. If God loves America he'll see to it that this strain of conservatives never get a whiff of political power and HE'll return the Clintons to power just as he did in the 90s.
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Should there be a constitutional amendment

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Saturday, October 27, 2007 11:07:25 AM
giving Red Sox batters four strikes and the Rockies batters three strikes?

No. Government should remain neutral and not consciously create and enshrine a class of people as second class citizens, as the Rocky batters would be if this amendment passed.
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"Balanced" doesn't mean "Conservative"

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Tuesday, October 16, 2007 6:42:22 PM
Listening to Hannity today cite the beliefs of a few hundered scientists that man does not contribute to global warming, as against thousands of scientists who do believe man does contribute to global warming, it occurred to me that if you find someone who believes the earth is flat you don't have to say that "there is a difference of opinion, the jury is still out and to be balanced you have to give the one person who believes the earth is flat the same weight as you would the millions who disagree."

For years and years there was only one person in the world who didn't think that man contributes to global warming and he resided at the Cato Institute. Somehow conservatives picked up his beliefs and started demonizing the idea that man helps create global warming as a "liberal" idea. Would someone please tell me how this came to be a "liberal" idea.
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Economic Social Costs of Capitalism

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Monday, October 15, 2007 12:53:06 PM
Truth Teller posts a blog about the Noble Prize winners in economics who take the social costs of capitalism into consideration. The interesting thing about economics and economiists is the discoveries they continually make that changes broad economic theory. Of course liberals have stressed "externatlities" for some time in our critique of conservatives rhetoric about capitalism. But its also of interest that economists continually discover things that the average person has known forever. I think it's been just a few years since economists began formally recognizing that emotions play a great part in the values people have and the economic decisions they make and that has become "financial economics." I read an interesting book recently about the long puzzle about why one of Adam Smith's formulations wasn't playing out in the real world, how one economist finally found the answer and that it didn't make much difference to anybody after he'd found out.
The moral of economics is that the simple description of the free market that we get from conservatives leaves much to be desired and ought not to be relied upon for policy guidance. 
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"Thou Shalt Not Murder" Is A Political Statement

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Monday, October 15, 2007 12:14:54 PM
I grew up with the commandment "Thou shalt no kill." And as near as I can tell it's only in the last five to ten years that the commandment has come to be rendered "Thou shalt not murder." I think this was changed to justify the collateral damage of war and killing of innocent citizens of a foreign, "enemy" State. But the thought behind this I think clearly has the United States and its enemies in mind.

In fact, this puts God in the position of condoning any killing of civilians in any war, including Japanese atrocities and German's lining civilians up against a wall and shooting them dead. This is because every State defines murder for itself and a State that invades another and kills civilians in the process will define this as collateral damage rather than murder. Thus, God becomes an agent of the State, unless we are willing to acknowledge that God has free will to render a judgment on the foreign policies of individual States. We come inevitably to the proposition that "God is on our side." So it becomes clear that the proposition that "Thou shalt not murder" contains the unstated assumption that "God approves of our politics and so our collateral damage is different than their collateral damage."
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How Many Innocents Would You Murder To Save Yourself?

Posted by The Proud Liberal on Monday, October 15, 2007 11:31:31 AM
if  "yourself" were the United States. A poignant story about the Navy Seal tragedy posted by The Patriot this morning put me on a train of thought. The Seals decided not to kill three goat herders who had discovered the Seals, knowing that the goat herders would probably report them to the Taliban, which they did. They Taliban attacked and killed three of the Seals and wounded the fourth. The Patriot says that this proves that America doesn't have the will to wage total war and defeat its enemies. But ultimately the story asks how many innocents we should be willing to murder as a nation, either because we're the good guys or because of self-interest in our own survival, regardless of whether or not we are the good guys.

Suppose the United States went to war with Syria and we were on the verge of losing the war and being taken over as a country by Syria. Would we be justified in nuking Damascus, which would certainly result in the death of hundreds of thousands of Syrians? Surely that would be done entirely on the basis of self preservation, since it might be questionable whether we were still the good guys after nuking a whole city just to preserve our own skin.

Yet, certainly some people will see us still as the good guys and take the long view, which is that over all and in the long term we're the good guys and we know it and the world will ultimately be a better place if the U.S. survives instead of Syria, and so the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians is justified.

The confrontation of the Seals with the goat herders was a microcosm of this dilemma. Who were the good guys? How far should the Seals go to save their own skins and would they still be the good guys after it was all over? Was the ultimate good in their minds justification?

The Blackwater incidents raise the same question in miniature. Is murdering Iraqi civilians justified by the long term good that the good guys will do?

Is the value of human life to be judged on a sliding scale of long term good?
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