Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Debate with an Obama fan
I was looking for the speech by Michelle Obama made at UCLA, a very populist class warfare speech. I found a website of the video posted by 29 year old avid Obama fan, and we entered into an interesting exchange click here. Exchange between Adam and me. Or as the saying goes, I post you decide.
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6 comments:
Great debate. I'm sorry Adam didn't have the stomach for it. I also posted late in the discussion, then was called "one of these folks who only gives a damn about how many 0s are in his bank account and little else." His reply to my post offered little of substance, only tired bromides about how there is too much selfishness in the world.
Then, conveniently, he ended all discussion by closing the comments on his thread. Apparently, speech is only free if you say the right things.
Hey Martin,
Thanks I noticed the same thing. I also like the colorful language the libs like to use.
I pointed out just one of his hypocritical statements: “I would never be responsible for an abortion, but it is not my place to impose my own values on somebody else. Then again, I’m not a Republican.”
His response to my observation was to call me names and avoid the only point I was making: that Democrats want to impose their own values as much as or more than Republicans.
I wanted to respond to Adam's rant, but was prevented from doing so. Thanks for providing a forum for my response, which was as follows:
Adam, if you knew me personally, you would not make such a generalized statement as in your opening sentence. But this isn't about me, so I won't get off-track with a personal defense. Suffice it to say that my point is that government wants a monopoly on everything it gets its hands on, even charity, and the left has no problem with that. If the government's chosen method for solving the hunger problem, for example, is inconsistent with MY values, I don't have a choice as to how my charitable "donation" can be better spent. Like any monopoly, a government monopoly sets up an orthodoxy of bad methodology that is extremely difficult to break. I can give you tons of examples, if you like.
But to get back on my original topic, your rant above illustrates my point beautifully. My original complaint about your post above was this statement: "it is not my place to impose my own values on somebody else."
The fact is, nearly every statement you made above was a value-statement. To wit, partially:
1. You want to keep Christ out of schools (consistent with your values), and it's ok by you if it's done with government force.
2. You want to eliminate "excess" (as defined by you--no imposition of values there?) and it's ok by you if it's done with government force.
3. You want to limit the overall quality of available health care for everyone, so long as it's distributed evenly, and it's ok by you if it's done with government force. (This is an example of the primacy of egalitarianism over merit...another value judgment.)
4. You want to purge the country of "greed" (as defined by you or the government elite) and, presumably eliminate "acts of greed" (again, as defined by you) by force.
I'll stop there, but your entry is rife with further examples.
I'm not even saying I disagree with everything you say. But I am saying that you should at least admit to yourself that you actually have no problem whatsoever imposing values on someone else, so long as they are your own.
C'mon, Adam...own up to your own hypocrisy. You’ll find it liberating.
Hi Martin,
I was surprised Adam let it go on as long as he did.
You made some good points. Everyone makes value judgements, otherwise we would never outlaw murder.
Of course Democrats don't consider that a life is a human being is a human being before it is out of the being.
Of course, then I am forced to ask, what happens when the child is premature? You should still be allowed to kill the child if it can't live on its own, and if you believe in a soul, when does God decide to drop in the soul, two months after conception, three months.
Kind of a hard question to answer. Then if you consider the fetus a human being, the only other alternative is you are murdering a human being.
I think I would rather choose life.
that second paragraph made no sense whatsoever. I meant. Democrats don't consider an unborn child a human being. They only consider it a potential for life.
Well, to be honest, I believe that a baby is a baby in or out of the womb, and I could never be a party to an abortion myself. But I admit that my own belief is based more on my religious upbringing than on science. Therefore, I have serious reservations about granting rights to a fetus over a living, breathing, thinking individual. I see both sides, but my tendency is always toward less government, not more.
If we continue to chip away at abortion rights (that is, to let government creep into the decision making process) imagine where this is heading...someday there could be a government bureaucracy set up specifically to decide whether a certain girl's situation merits an abortion. By the time the decision is made and the appeals have run to their conclusion, the child will be out of high school. I don't want such a personal decision to be made by some goon in Washington.
You and I both know that we can't trust them with our money. Could they be any more trustworthy with our personal decisions about our bodies?
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