Imaginos1892 wrote:The E wrote:Why are so many of your posts filled with wild generalizations about muslims? What are you, an islamophobe? That would explain much.
Why generalizations? Because every time I cite specifics on any subject you leftists squawk ANECDOTE!! ANECDOTE!! MEANS NOTHING!
How about the Moslem terrorist that stabbed a bunch of people in London yesterday?
How about the 2019 El Paso shooting that seems to have had a white nationalist background?
The existence of islamic terrorism isn't in question. Whether or not it actually is a mortal danger to western society, as you claim, is. Similarly, your claims that muslim immigrants as a whole are, knowingly or not, part of some giant plot to overthrow western society also needs a little more facts behind it than what you've been able to provide thus far.
I’ve been watching ‘Holmes + Holmes’, a TV show filmed in Canada about fixing houses for people after they’ve been fucked over by incompetent and/or larcenous contractors. The last few episodes have featured a couple whose house was in a deplorable condition, mainly because they couldn’t afford to hire proper contractors to do the necessary work. The wife has endometriosis, and her ‘free socialized health care’ costs them over $18,000 a year, leaving them barely enough to live on.
If you're annoyed that people call you out on your overuse of anecdotes, maybe don't use so many of them? Noone, to my knowledge, has ever claimed that socialized health care systems are entirely perfect, but the mere fact that the overwhelming majority of private bankruptcy cases in the US are caused by medical expenses and that fundraising for medicine is literally a billion-dollar market in the US should give you some pause.
Let alone the fact that whether or not an employer chooses to provide medical insurance, and how much it covers, is a major power imbalance factor. Why do you let employers exert that much power over you, willingly?
Why do patients in the U.S. wait three hours for an MRI scan, while patients in Canada wait three months?
Heh. Yeah, that's what happens when MRI machines are rare and people with medical emergencies get priority treatment.
Tell me, how much does an MRI cost?
But, of course, those are all just ANECDOTES!!
Yes, they are. Because you're choosing to ignore the benefits of a system that serves the overwhelming majority well because edge cases where it doesn't exist.
So, to you, specifics are meaningless anecdotes, and non-specifics are meaningless generalizations. How very convenient.
If you can show, through actual evidence and statistics, that punishing millions of people for the criminal acts of a few thousand is justified and an effective way to deal with the problem of extremist terrorism, I'd be very interested.
And you still haven’t addressed the issue of why your posts are full of childish insults, just flung bullshit and more insults to cause a distraction.
If you're getting distracted by my posting style, that's a you problem.
Do you have precise measurements of solar activity spanning the last 700 years? Can you accurately quantify the effects of changes in solar activity on global temperatures? Because, you see, the sun does have some effect on climate.
Today we have satellites that continuously measure solar radiation. We have found that it varies hour by hour, day by day, year by year, and decade by decade. We have overwhelming evidence that it varies over the course of centuries and millennia, as well. We have proven that sunspots are a consistent indicator of solar activity, though not a precise one, and up until the last 70 years, counting sunspots was the best we could do. We have never been able to measure the sun during a period similar to the Maunder Minimum. We can make only rough estimates of how much heat the sun put into the atmosphere before those detailed measurements were possible.
We have determined that solar activity has been increasing since the early 1800s, and the sun is currently hotter than it has been for the last 8,000 years.
If that's true, then what's the effect of solar output trending downward for the past 4 decades?
And you Believe that all self-interest is inherently Eeevil — except the self-interest of those big-government authoritarians you practically worship. I think I see why. You in Europe are accustomed to being ruled by authoritarians, while our ancestors came to this country to be rid of the rule of kings, emperors and despots. Most of us do not want such rule reinstated.
Self-interest is perfectly fine if you're making decisions that only concern you and do not affect others. But we live in a society; A lot of the actions we decide on are affecting others as well, and humans are somewhat bad at keeping a global perspective.
A philosophy that is predicated entirely on the existence of the rational human being, that assumes a priori that people will make individually benefitial decisions and that the sum of those decisions will be benefitial for all is tragically flawed because of the limited perspective we all have.
Similarly, problems like climate change, which require large-scale responses because there is almost nothing that any one individual can do about it, pose intractable problems for such a philosophy: In these situations, if individual self-interest cannot be transformed into collective self-interest because, as you posit, collective self-interest will inevitably go against the interests of some individuals, the individual becomes powerless and beholden to the interests of the few.
Greedy businessmen can affect our lives only in limited ways. Even at their worst, we can stymie them by moving out of town, or to another state.
Unfortunately, we can't move to another planet just yet. Also, why are we ceding ground to the bad actors?
Government, on the other hand, can take our money, our property, our rights, our freedom, and our very lives, wherever we go. Such appalling power MUST be kept under strict control — but the only mechanism we have to control the power of government IS the government. That is why our government was set up with limited power and built-in controls — but those safeguards are being broken down.
Any system can be exploited; if you refuse to change the system to remove the exploits, then that's what you get.
Maybe your government is comprised entirely of virtuous paragons and saints, but ours is full of greedy corrupt self-serving sociopathic narcissists, of which Hillary Clinton and, to a lesser extent, Bill, are prime examples. They already have too much power over our lives; giving them more would be profoundly stupid.
(Aside: I think it's funny that grammatical ambiguities in the english language create the implication that the Clintons, personally, have too much power over your life)
No, the people elected here aren't saints or paragons. There certainly is enough corruption going on to reassure everyone that the people elected to office are still entirely human.
But: Unlike the american system, which forces binary outcomes, ours forces multilateral outcomes, which ensures that no single party can easily dominate the entirety of the political discourse.
More bullshit. Those solar panels, and the converter, were built by private companies seeking profit. They funded their own research into solar power, to make more profit. Almost all of the companies that did get money from the government were run by political hacks that knew nothing of science, engineering or business. They collapsed, and took our money with them.
Again: That's a you problem. Around here, without our government subsidizing research and development of renewable energy sources, it is unlikely that our wind- and solar farms would be as efficient as they are.
Here in the U.S. the government does not dictate what products are sold on the open market by private companies.
Why do you think this isn't the case here?
Other than by prohibiting some products, that is, or imposing fees and regulations that make other products unprofitable.
Oh, so the same "dictates" we use.
Interesting.
