Oh, lordy. I wish the McCain push-poller would call me. I could give them an earful on Mormon doctrine they probably haven't heard about. (Or I'd start off the phone call by saying, "I was raised Mormon," and see where that went.)

The push-poller was working off a script and very likely didn't know anything about Mormonism.

Besides, push-polls aren't about finding out public opinion. They're about character assassination in a deniable form.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the charisma. One of the things I've wondered is how he manages to hold such an eclectic set of supporters together.

Ah, yes. Our very own, smoked-right-here-in-our-own -back-yard, Libertublican Representative, Ron Paul. I was so used to seeing him run for various state offices on the Libertarian ticket that it quite surprised me when he ran for the House as a Repub, as he has come to espouse the tenets of Libertarianism so strongly, and those tenets so radically contradict everything the Republican party has done in the past 20 years or so. But Texas has a long tradition of being a one-party state, and of preferring to settle everything in its primary election, and for the past ten years or so it's been almost impossible to be elected to any office in most parts of the state unless one is willing to run as a Republican. I'm sure, at some point, that someone offered some financial support if he'd run on the elephantine ticket, and he made his little pact with the DeLayers.

Sure he's nuts, but he really does come across as firmly believing what he says. When I've seen him, there's been none of that word parsing or argument-framing that seems to be the main feature of nearly all other politicians' speech. And morally and ethically, he stands head-and-shoulders over every other partisan in the filthy wallow that is the Texas Republican Party. That being said, there's no way I'd vote for him, for any office. His honest commitment to the very core of Libertarian beliefs and his interpretive projection of them onto American society puts him as far into outer space as Dick Cheney, but on a completely different planet. You're right--he does have charisma, in bucketsful. But I've known schizophrenics who were damn charismatic (and charismatics who were charismatic, and probably schizophrenic, as well!).

On a whole 'nother note, your experience with the polling questions immediately put a picture into my mind of Haley Joel Osment, dressed in Sacred Underwear and with a perfect Mitt Romney haircut, saying "I baptize dead people!"

What I don't get--and I'm not being a smartass; I actually want to know-- is how an alleged libertarian can be so strongly opposed to reproductive freedom. Aren't libertarians supposed to be all about the government staying out of public decision-making? Private decisions like, oh, whether to have (or adopt) a baby without regard for someone else's ideas of when it's proper?

He's like the Republican answer to Lyndon LaRouche: Batshit loco, but good at hiding it (until you start asking real questions anyway).

sorry, the above should read "private decision-making."

He's like the Republican answer to Lyndon LaRouche: Batshit loco, but good at hiding it (until you start asking real questions anyway).

My experience of LaRouche is that he is not good at hiding it, at least if you read the newspapers that his minions hand out in front of the T.

I fondly remember a communal dramatic reading of one of those papers over a good bottle of merlot. As I recall, there was a bizarre obsession with Argentina and an even more bizarre obsession with....Leonardo da Vinci, was it?

So far the Ron Paul Internet People have not taken to singing, either. Time will tell.

(My name-association with Ron Paul is actually Ron Weasley, so that I have to keep on reorienting my mental image of who is saying these things. It's jarring.)

Wasn't LaRouche a Republican too?

(I remember one time when the LaRouchies were picketing the DMV in White Plains, NY, with signs that read "Colonize Mars / Shut Down The Gay Bars." It was bizarre....)

Ron Paul gives me the galloping creeps. I remember reading at one point about a year or so ago an article about some issue upon which he was touted as having stood up to the Republican establishment and thinking, "That's reasonably cool." Then I got to reading and learning more about him and my flesh began to crawl.

If I thought he had even the ghost of a chance of being the next occupant of the White House, I'd be hard at work on emigration plans. Not that I might not do that anyway, just on general principles, given the way things are going lately.

And absolutely, being bugfuck insane does not preclude being wildly charismatic. In fact, when it comes to political leaders, the two traits seem to go hand in hand as often as not, which is frightening.

Annalee @ #5: From what I've heard in radio interviews, the vacating of Roe vs. Wade fits right into Paul's Libertarian views. He does not believe the federal government should have any say over reproductive rights. He believes those decisions should be left up to the states. I've heard him interviewed twice this year, both times by pretty good interviewers, and heard him in a debate a year or so ago, and he's very consistent on this. However, I've never heard anyone ask him, if it's no business of the federal government's, why the state governments should have a say.

He believes in the Conspiracy Against Christmas. This makes me doubt that he's quite as honest as he'd like to have us think.

analee@5: Ron Paul appears to be a "human life begins at conception" anti-abortion guy (he's introduced several bills on the topic). If you believe that and you're against murder as a general rule, you kinda have to end up anti-abortion, it seems to me. And few versions of libertarianism are so extreme that they don't have some sort of government sanction against murder. So I don't find it philosophically inconsistent.

It's not that hard to have that inspiringly forthright, unhesitating tone when you speak, if you've never dealt with the real complexities of the world.

Uncle Jim, I'm pretty sure LaRouche is part of his own special LaRouche party (several of them, in fact, with a variety of names). But he's tried to secure the democratic nomination for president a few times, if wikipedia is to be believed.

My favorite run-in with his followers is when one of them tried to tell me that he has never, in fact, been convicted and served time for any crime, including fraud. Apparently his arrest and incarceration weren't even a government conspiracy to silence his views. No-- they were fictional. The Washington Post made the whole thing up, you see.

I had this encounter only because they had a habit of harassing students near the theatre building of my old school. If you tried to walk past them, they'd follow you. It was creepy as hell.

David @12, thanks for that explanation. I can see the logic there. I don't agree with it, but at least I can point to it on a map now.

Jim, I noticed when I click on the photo for the larger view, it appears that you're making a fist, and are about fourteen inches from punching him. Just wondering what thoughts were going through your head as the shutter snapped. I'm guessing, something along the lines of "Head or gut?"

;)

LaRouchies have been trying to whitewash their savior on Wikipedia since the project began, so you'd be wise to double-check anything you read there on the topic. We ban them consistently, but it's hard to keep out fanatics 24/7.

They're actually worse than the Scientologists in terms of that, though the existence of a bigger and better-organized anti-Scientology contingent online probably has a lot to do with why combating the Scientologists proved easier.

If a newly-conceived zygote were truly on the same order as a newborn infant, a twelve-year old child, or a fifty-year-old adult, then we would hold a funeral on the occasion of every miscarriage, even every late menstrual period that finally shows up. You could claim a fetus as a dependent on your taxes, too.

Neither is the case. I find that very informative with regard to the legal status of the unborn in this country. Abortion, while a regrettable incident no matter what the circumstances, is completely reconcilable with our society's general view of the boundaries of human life.

#15: Actually, I'm clutching a wine glass that doesn't appear too well in the photo.

Where I'm from, he's being put forth as someone who "doesn't believe in evolution," is against a woman's right to choose her own religious beliefs, who supports prayer in schools, and who opposes gay rights.

I think he's a right-wing nut job.

What am I missing?

BTW -- I HATE it when jerks coopt the names of otherwise reasonable political philosophies and turn them into objects of buffoonery, stupidity and ignornance. I'm just sayin'.

Dave Neiwert at Orcinus has been doing an excellent job of documenting Paul's links to right-wing extremists. What's scary is that otherwise liberal and progressive people are saying "Sure, he's being backed by Stormfront and David Duke, and he's made racist comments in the past, and he's nuttier than the cereal I just got at TJ's but he's going to end the war, so he's okay by me!"

I love push pulls.

"If I told you McCain was convicted of cocaine possession, would that change your opinion of him?"

"McCain used blow?"

"No, but if he did, would it change your opinion of him?"

"er"

"It's not that hard to have that inspiringly forthright, unhesitating tone when you speak, if you've never dealt with the real complexities of the world."

Or are, ahem, reality-challenged.

We're doomed. Doomed!

Jim, you say "charisma", and I say "Get me outa here." Charismatic people scare me silly; the damage they can do is so enormous. I believe you that the guy is gifted, magnetic, persuasive -- and either wacko, or very very sure of himself in a mode that appears to be indistinguishable from wacko. NOT the dude I want to have control over the red phone -- do they still have one of those? who's on the other end? -- and the football.

His supporters sound like True Believers, and that scares me, too. We've had quite enough of those guys the last six years.

Retcon redux.

#7, Caroline said:

"So far the Ron Paul Internet People have not taken to singing, either. Time will tell."

Alas, Ron Paul's internet support has taken to singing about their one true politician. The results are ... oh, words fail me.

I've done some more tangential research on RP's views and some of those websites, I don't want my PC's browser touching them without milspec security and anonymity.

Well, let's see. LaRouche was basically promising that if elected he would invade Britain, since that paragon of evil, Queen Elizabeth II has access to weapons of mass destruction. Then Bush II promised the same thing, was elected, and made good on the promise. ** What, he didn't promise? Then why did we elect him? **

So if Ron Paul is elected, where's he going to invade? Grenada? No, Ronnie Raygun already did that. Oh, I have it! Venezuala.

Here in the UK, I've met a few low-grade politicians, ordinary MPs who aren't really in the running for the positions of authority. Mostly, they're decent people. They have to toe the party line, much more than in the USA, but they work hard for their constituencies, and the local issues.

I've also met government ministers. They're different. It's maybe understandable that that they are so much more certain about the rightness of the official policy--it could be seriously awkward to to agree with a criticism--but they come across as alien. Proto-Slitheen.

And, under the British system, they still have to do all the work of any other MP, representing the constituency.

Luckily, we don't have to elect our head of state, but some of our politicians maybe need a reminder that a Prime Minister is not a President.

I remember one time when the LaRouchies were picketing the DMV in White Plains, NY, with signs that read "Colonize Mars / Shut Down The Gay Bars."

1. The DMV runs space colonization projects? Who knew?
2. There are gay bars on Mars? Who knew? (Well, I suppose the planet is sort of pinkish...)

Are push-polls an American thing?

And Dave:
Here in the UK, I've met a few low-grade politicians, ordinary MPs who aren't really in the running for the positions of authority. Mostly, they're decent people. They have to toe the party line, much more than in the USA, but they work hard for their constituencies, and the local issues.

I've also met government ministers. They're different. It's maybe understandable that that they are so much more certain about the rightness of the official policy--it could be seriously awkward to to agree with a criticism--but they come across as alien. Proto-Slitheen.

That's generally in line with my experience. What I find interesting is that Special Advisors are more like ministers than like anything else. I do wonder if there's something toxic in the water of the Westminster Village (and probably the same thing in the Beltway) and the politicians that spend more time representing their constituents than playing machine politics are immune.

It strikes me that high personal charisma has the potential to be deleterious to your personality and your approach to life and philosophy -- if you have the gift to say forthrightly outrageous things and all around you nod and cheer, you're not going to be getting a whole lot of reality correction that a position about gay bars on Mars, or extreme interrogation, or wife-beating (cf. Ike Turner) has a lot of flaws in it. Especially as you'll attract a coterie of fans who cheer you on....

It strikes me that high personal charisma has the potential to be deleterious to your personality and your approach to life and philosophy -- if you have the gift to say forthrightly outrageous things and all around you nod and cheer, you're not going to be getting a whole lot of reality correction that a position about gay bars on Mars, or extreme interrogation, or wife-beating (cf. Ike Turner) has a lot of flaws in it. Especially as you'll attract a coterie of fans who cheer you on....

It strikes me that high personal charisma has the potential to be deleterious to your personality and your approach to life and philosophy -- if you have the gift to say forthrightly outrageous things and all around you nod and cheer, you're not going to be getting a whole lot of reality correction that a position about gay bars on Mars, or extreme interrogation, or wife-beating (cf. Ike Turner) has a lot of flaws in it. Especially as you'll attract a coterie of fans who cheer you on....

Theo @19:

is against a woman's right to choose her own religious beliefs

*blinks*

Wtf? Would be very curious to read more on this, if you have useful links.

#17 Summer Storms, here in Ohio we had a bill introduced (and I think it passed) where miscarriages can qualify for death certificates which then leads to burial in cemetaries (need one of those to get in, apparently).

Must remind myself to pull Douglas Adams' "Zaphod Plays It Safe" ("Salmon of Doubt") off the shelf and pencil in "Pauls" over "Reagans."

Nick @#34
Theo @19:

is against a woman's right to choose her own religious beliefs

*blinks*

Wtf? Would be very curious to read more on this, if you have useful links.

Wants to impose his religious beliefs about conception and abortion onto women who disagree...

Theo - thanks for putting it that way, it's a good point.

So you're the one who sent all those Ron Paul supporters over to my site! I was wondering how they found me.

#29 Ajay 2. There are gay bars on Mars? Who knew?

Well, given that Mars needs women, the Martians sorta hafta y'know....

Theo #19:

...is against a woman's right to choose her own religious beliefs

This is true in the same sense that people who don't want public money spent on Christian-themed holiday displays are carrying out a "war on Christmas," right?

Gosh, Zak @ #25, I could have gone my entire life without hearing that. And now that I've heard it, I have an earworm singing "constitutional champion of the woooorld." First, The Shrubbery teaches us that the whole world needs Demockercy, and now RP's followers impress the world's need for a constitution. What an educational millennium, so far!

#37 Keith I was wondering how they found me.

Well, maybe. But the comment spammer (Hairstyles for Men!) probably found you on his own.

Francis D #30: They were pretty famously featured in Bush's smear campaign against McCain in the 2000 election. I don't know how common they've been other places, but I thought both parties had sworn off using them.

If I recall correctly, the McCain push-polls asked something about his black love child, which was a real winner in the South. (He and his wife adopted a Bangledeshi child, so you could find pictures of him with a black-looking kid he was apparently raising as his own.) I have to say, it was a real stroke of evil genius to figure out a way to smear him for adopting a very poor child from a third-world orphanage.

Oh, if you want a link to that story (from the first link that popped up on Google):

smear campaign

Zak @ 25: Oh no. Choral arrangements on the street cannot be far away.

Anyone who talks about the War on Christmas is automatically full of it, if you ask me. (I like my mother's reaction to this. "So, no one's telling me I can't say Merry Christmas. No one's forbidding me from going to church on Christmas Day. I just can't force everyone else to say Merry Christmas to me. Excuse me if I don't feel terribly oppressed.")

#39 -- sorry, but I don't get your point. Literally, I'm not understanding what you're trying to say. Sorry.

I think the "war on Christmas" thing is absurd rhetoric. I don't think public money should be spent on religious holiday decorations, but to call it a war on Christmas is simply absurd.

(I could, however, be persuaded to mount a war on St. Patrick's Day but only for very different reasons.)

On the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with someone expressing what it is the righteous right has been trying to do everyone in this nation for the past twenty years -- and that is interfere with the faith of millions.

Until science can prove when Human life begins and dumb matter ends, it's a matter of conscience. Matters of conscience are guided by religious/spiritual beliefs (including the decision not to believe). Therefore, it's a matter of taking away a woman's right to choose her religion.

Cloaking it in the government's responsibility to prevent and punish "murder" is just a red herring. Let's call it what it is -- is imposing religious beliefs on others.

Ursula @ #36 -- thanks for saving me the trouble of explaining my phrase.

Summer #17:

On the other hand, a stillbirth or a late miscarriage is really devastating, and the parents absolutely do grieve. And I think most people would consider a criminal intentionally killing the 8-month fetus inside a mother as something way more serious than just a nasty case of assault against the mother. I knew a woman who delayed chemotherapy for long enough to deliver her baby (the cancer was discovered after she was pregnant), and it's quite possible that this decision cost her her life (depending on whether the chemotherapy would have helped her anyway). You might think that was a good or bad decision, but it's the sort of decision that made sense to her because she thought of the fetus growing inside her as a baby. It looks to me like we treat fetuses as something in-between babies and extensions of the mother, but with lots of variation for different individuals.

The problem here is that law (and many moral codes) needs a bright line, and biology almost never gives you one.

The two easy-to-define bright lines are at conception and at birth, and they're neither one very easy to defend against the sort of +/- ten seconds arguments. (The birth control device that sterilizes the egg ten seconds before conception is birth control, the one that does so ten seconds after conception is murder; the person who kills the baby ten seconds before delivery has carried out an abortion, the person who kills it ten seconds later has committed murder.) This is the reason why anti-abortion folks argue for bans on very late-term abortions, even those are a vanishingly small fraction of abortions, and are apparently all really horrible cases where no good outcome is possible for the mother or baby.

I think this issue is contentious largely because there is not an obviously right place to draw the line, and no good way to resolve where to draw it.

James @41: yeah, I've got the spam filters turned up to 11 yet they still sneak on through. But hay, I'm sure there's a fair number of Ron Paul supporters looking for a new hairstyle.

It doesn't really surprise me that Ron Paul in person is charismatic. If you take a cursory glance at his polices and aren't well versed on some of the more nuanced forms of crazy talk, he sounds innovative and straight forward. But he usually manages to throw a curve ball, like telling you all about how he'll get us out of Iraq and then using that as a springboard for why we also need to get out of the UN.

It's like a Lovecraft story: he caries you along, with just enough plausible breadcrumbs that by the time he gets to the part about Shagoths and the howling abyss, you're fairly well convinced he's onto something. Except, the howling abyss here is the Federal Reserve, for some reason.

If you want real nuttiness you have to go to the letters of marque and reprisal.

Theo #45: I mean that you're using overheated rhetoric that implies something *way* broader than what you're really talking about.

Nobody is talking about making womens' religious decisions for them at all. They're talking about whether a particular thing (abortion) will be made illegal or not, and if so, under what circumstances.

If we were talking about women having their religious beliefs decided for them, that would look completely different--it would involve women not getting the choice of which church to attend or stay away from, women being compelled to study certain kinds of religious teachings and forbidden others, etc. There would be public campaigns by the anti-abortion folks to impose those things, if that were their goal. But it's not; there's zero support for any such thing.

#39: A libertarian friend of mine had no problems with abortion, merely the public funding of abortion. That would be the position that's analogous to the so-called "War on Christmas" as you've stated it. Based on what I've read, Ron Paul hasn't merely introduced bills to eliminate public funding of abortions, he has also introduced bills to establish that life beings at conception. It's hard for me to not read this as being against more than merely abortion's public funding. (The so-called "War on Christmas" equivalent might be introducing a bill affirming that God is a matter of mere belief and faith, with no basis in fact.)

Steve @ #35: I know, or rather, I should have remembered that. I'm in Cleveland. Chalk my forgetfulness up to lateness of the night, I think.

It's just one more indicator that my poor state is run by people with some very odd views. Cleveland's one of the sanest (IME) and most liberal areas of the state, so perhaps I'm a bit more insulated from it here than, say, when I lived in Cincinnati (the most outrageously conservative large city I've ever inhabited). After all, this is the land of Sherrod Brown and Dennis Kucinich, and of the sort of people who support them.

I've gotten two push-polls so far this cycle. The pro-McCain/anti-Romney one last night, and a pro-Paul one about a month ago.

Both of them sounded like they came from a boiler room in Bangalore. (The pro-Paul guy had an accent so thick that I had to ask him to spell some of the words.)

I'm wondering if out-sourcing the telephone spam for staunch pro-American politicians to third-world countries is going to become standard. Couldn't they at least Buy American for their campaigns?

Albatross @ #39: No, it isn't even remotely the same. Prohibiting the expenditure of public monies on religious decorations does nothing to prevent members of that religion from acting in accordance with their religious beliefs. Preventing a woman whose religion permits abortion from seeking and obtaining one because YOUR (generic "your") religious beliefs prohibit it does interfere with her right to act in accordance with her beliefs and represents an attempt to impose another's upon her.

Since we're all fairly science-minded here, my suggestion to anyone who wishes to see abortion become a thing of the past is that you either actively participate in (assuming you have the background and skills) or alternatively, provide funding to, research and other activities that will lead to the following: the prevention of all birth defects and all medical conditions that might threaten the health of pregnant women, 100% safe and effective birth control (no, abstinence is NOT the answer for everyone - some women who have abortions are married, for example), UNIVERSAL access to and education regarding said contraceptive measures, and the development of a means by which an embryo or fetus of any gestational age can be safely (for both parties) and easily removed from one womb and placed in another or in an artificial gestation unit to be brought to term and raised by willing parents. While you're at it, please work to eradicate the sort of poverty and economic uncertainty that lead some women to abort, provide full support in terms of childcare options and related needs to parents of either gender - something that is seriously lacking in our society - and do something to ensure that no woman or girl will ever have to feel coerced by her family, her boyfriend, her husband or her religious community to take OR avoid any action that does not square with her own free will.

THEN you will be able to have your world sans abortion.

Sidenote: My town Prescott AZ, which bills itself as "America's Christmas city," certainly doesn't seem troubled by any anti-Xmas "war". They already have some decorations up, the year-'round Xmas shop is presumably doing a brisk business, and -- like everywhere else in the US -- the chain stores have tons of holiday product on display. All of which is kind of disconcerting when it's over 70 degrees outside! If not for the falling leaves, I might think it was May.

52: maybe it's a bluff - so people who receive the calls will think "what a POS that McCain is - spreading slander about his opponents, and not even hiring American workers to do it!"

Darkrose @20: What I don't get is how fast Americans have forgotten that getting out of Iraq is perfectly consistent with right wingnut philosophy. So he wants out of Iraq. That doesn't endear him to me in the slightest, given his reasoning. His brand of isolationism makes me throw up in my mouth a little.

PS (more on topic): Hitler seems to have had lots of charisma too. Jo Walton's female actress is quite smitten with him when he visits England in Ha'penny (due out next month in the US).

We already had this ... vigorous discussion ... in the earlier Ron Paul thread. Can we please not have it all over again in this one?

Calling it "overheated rhetoric" doesn't make it overheated.

Imposing laws that have the effect of imposing religious beliefs -- what's the difference between that and deciding what church a person ought to go to? One is just a matter of what the proponents think they can get away with (but they'd try to interfere with the other just as well).

The Religious Right have learned their rhetoric. They cloak their arguments in things like "we're just trying to outlaw murder." "You're opposed to murder, aren't you?" It's really no different from push polls (the other topic at hand).

Framing the debate as "just a law" -- that's rhetoric. Framing an argument for something other than it is -- that's rhetoric.

#53 - Summer Storms -- you've said it far more eloquently than I have. Thank you.

James D. Macdonald@48:

If you want real nuttiness you have to go to the letters of marque and reprisal.M

I think that was the clue-in for me. The gold Standard thing, as weird as it is, can at least be debated within the context of economic policy (really, horribly, no good, very bad economic policy, but still) The Letters of Marque and reprisal idea just shouts "I'm a thirty-third degree Kook!"

Imposing laws that have the effect of imposing religious beliefs -- what's the difference between that and deciding what church a person ought to go to?

Ummm--that all laws impose some kind of moral belief that's at bottom unproveable? ("Men and women are equal" is a moral position.)

What I really don't get is why "issuing letters of Marque and Reprisal" is crazy. They are the 18th-century names for "hiring and regulating military contractors in accordance with international norms." If we're going to hire Blackwater, I'm rather strongly in favor of doing so in a way that actually regulates them in some internationally-accepted fashion.

Issuing letters of marque and reprisal is crazy because that's what you do when you're a struggling young wannabe nation and you need to put together something approaching a navy on the cheap.

Whatever else you might say about the US of A, we're not so young and broke that we need to go shopping for a navy at Wal-Mart. Or even Costco.

If one keeps pushing the "imposing religious beliefs" line, Friedrich Nietzsche is going to come through and sweep the whole legal system away. I'm just saying.

Are you sure that's not Duncan in that pic? I'm not convinced...

Three guesses which standard arguments we're not having in this thread, either.

Now, Summer's done it right. She's talking about the larger social and political context, which is exactly the thing most brtn rgmnts lack. It's also the thing missing from too many arguments about rlgn nd th stt.

If it needs to be stated as a rule: engaged discussions of negotiable and evolving positions not based on violations of known fact or non-falsifiable assertions are generally okay.

Hi, Jamie!

That has to be Jim, not Duncan -- Jim's the smaller, shorter one.

Debra Doyle @62:
Issuing letters of marque and reprisal is crazy because that's what you do when you're a struggling young wannabe nation and you need to put together something approaching a navy on the cheap.

Whatever else you might say about the US of A, we're not so young and broke that we need to go shopping for a navy at Wal-Mart. Or even Costco.

But if you're trying to break the government while at the same time waging a globe spanning war against terrorists, then you need something that can get the job done. And if you're a Free Market Fundie like Paul, Letters of Marque sound good.

You issue letters of Marque to Blackwater and let them do all the heavy lifting. And by Heavy Lifting, I mean hunting humans for fun and profit. Terrorists (and lots of innocent people in the vicinity) get good and dead and the US Army gets to keep their hands clean. Plus, Blackwater makes a bajillion dollars (or Euros, since the dollar will be worthless once we switch to the Gold Standard). Everyone wins! Except for the millions of poor people created by this horrific situation. But in the eyes of Supply Side Jesus, poor people=sinners so, no worries!

Teresa @ 65... Three guesses which standard arguments we're not having in this thread

I cannot guess, for the life of me.
Knitting?
Baking?
Star Trek?

Thanks, Teresa.

Nic, #34: This is a partial reframing of the anti-choice position. Virtually all of the people who want to outlaw abortion are (a specific sort of) Christian -- at root, it's a religious argument. Those of us who have chosen to follow a different faith (which includes the majority of American Protestants) aren't necessarily required to buy into the notion that abortion is murder. Ergo, to outlaw abortion is to interfere with our freedom to hold a different religious position on that specific issue.

I agree with this argument, but I don't think it's a strong one in terms of convincing other people. To grok it properly requires the ability to step back a bit from one's own culture, and many people never learn how to do that.

Theo, #59: It's effectively the same thing as outlawing peyote ceremonies in Native American religions because they make use of "illegal recreational drugs". Few people would try to argue against that being interference with someone else's religious beliefs, but the abortion issue is much more touchy.

Teresa @ #65: Thank you. I was sincerely hoping I had not overstepped a boundary here. The subject begged to be addressed, but definitely from solid objective ground, rather than the shifting subjective area in which it is often argued and will probably never be settled.

Moving right along, and back from the edge of the abyss:

What really gripes me about RP is his woefully inaccurate interpretation of the Constitution, in both letter and intent. Now, given that no one alive today can say with absolute certainty exactly what went on in the minds of the framers of that document, I suppose there is indeed a fair bit of wiggle room available in modern application of their work. But that also supposes (and rightly so, IMNSHO) that indeed it is the spirit, rather than the letter, of the law that is of ultimate import. RP's take on many of the items is so far beyond wiggle room as to be in the realm of the seriously unstable, and he appears to have abandoned all attention to the spirit of Constitutional law in favor of slavish service to the letter instead. From where I sit, it is clear that form does not trump function, and I have to wonder what RP's real agenda is, as I must imagine that he, too, is aware of the ridiculousness of his positions, should they be taken to their ultimate level of application.

Shorter assessment: how much liberty would really exist in a country where the federal government was prohibited from exercising discrimination, enforcing religion upon the citizenry, regulating private sexual practices or any of a number of other personally intrusive actions... but each individual subunit of that country was completely free to engage in all of the above?

Teresa@66:

I've never had the pleasure of meeting Jim, but I've had lunch and dinner with Duncan on multiple occasions (he lives just over the Occoquan in Prince William Co.), and I swear, now that he's out of the Navy, he looks just like his brother (that picture doesn't give me a sense of scale...I have no idea how tall either the esteemed Lunatic from Texas or Jim are).

If it needs to be stated as a rule: engaged discussions of negotiable and evolving positions not based on violations of known fact or non-falsifiable assertions are generally okay.

Actually, thank you very much for stating that. Triangulating purely on the basis of some reactions (or perhaps the basis of my interpretations of said reactions) in this thread and the other, I was beginning to wonder whether it was simply any argument about abortion, period that was Not To Be Tolerated. And given that this a discussion of Ron Paul, I was beginning to feel like I was watching Godwin's Law being invoked in a discussion of WWII.

It sounds very much that where The A Word is concerned, it's best to keep discussion in the context of real world events and policies ("What will Ron Paul try to do about RvW if elected"), and stay out of the realms of pure proselytization ("it's murder!" "Is not!" "Is so!"). Have I got that right?

Keith @#67--Thank you, I was having the same sorts of visions, although given some of the people I know who'd be standing in line to get these letters, some of the privateers would have an amzing resemblence to The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight.

But yeah, gangsters, on the high seas, with naval altillery. Legally.
Because privateers are pirates who have a license to pillage.

Debra Doyle @#62--Neither our local Wal-marts, nor our local Costco have navies available, at least not in a scale that would be useful for actual open water use. I'd put this down to being a good way from the ocean here in Tennessee, but they don't even offer a brownwater version, which would be highly useful for assaulting river-based gambling casinos. I feel that we're getting short shrift here; would complaining to the regional distribution centers help. do you think?

Fidelio,

No, no, no. When you need cut-rate military options, there's only one mass-market source:

Dollar General.

*ducks flying vegetable matter and slinks thataway*

John Chu @ 50: A libertarian friend of mine had no problems with abortion, merely the public funding of abortion.

Memorable National Lampoon headline:

Stand and Deliver, Supreme Court Tells Pregnant Rabble

fidelio @ 73

I didn't see any navies in my local Costco last Sunday, unless they have motorboats available on special order. There wasn't space enough in the parking lot to hide one, either.

Summer Storms @ 74... I prefer shopping at Target.

Nicole @72:
...where The A Word is concerned, it's best to keep discussion in the context of real world events and policies ("What will Ron Paul try to do about RvW if elected"), and stay out of the realms of pure proselytization ("it's murder!" "Is not!" "Is so!"). Have I got that right?

I am of course not Teresa*, but that's an approach that certainly has my support.

-----
* nor was meant to be

Abi... So would I, but I am a bit dubious about a discussion going from what RP would do re RvW without its degenerating into why he'd do what he says he'd do, and whether or not he should or should not do what he says he'd do. Next thing you know, there'd be a huge smoking crater in the middle of the thread and the air would be filled with Kirby crackle.

re 65: Actually, she is making one of the standard arguments.

And while I don't want to drag the whole abortion argument over here, I think it's highly ironic that Ron Paul is, after all, an OB/GYN.

I happen to have a bunch of libertarian "Catholic" friends who are very gung ho about him. I think a great deal of his appeal is his (apparently accurate) image of being a man of principles, wacky though they may be. In a lot of ways, he is the Republican version of Obama: articulate, charismatic, dusted with experience but not poisoned with too much history, and therefore potentially attractive to the "sick of the same old losers" vote. (Romney could have attracted some of the same attention except for having to rise above the Mormonism question all the time.)

Faren Miller@57: Ha'penny is, in fact, already out in the US; has been since October. But incidentally, I thought the scene you reference did a really nice job of getting the point across.

#80: I think Ron Paul definitely more history than Barack Obama. (insert joke here about Ron Paul having served in national office since the previous century.) As for being poisoned by it, the link that Uncle Jim included in the previous Ron Paul post seems pretty poisonous to me, but I guess that's a function of personal views.

Ron Paul has definitely inherited the "Republican man of integrity" mantle that John McCain had in the previous Presidential election cycle, at least among his supporters. This is definitely why he's gotten some traction. I don't know if the media has joined the bandwagon yet (as they had for McCain). I'm trying to remember what I heard on the news that makes me disbelieve that he really is a man of principle, but it's not coming to me.

Romney tried to give the impression that he's a man of principle. But, right now, he's having problems convincing his target demographic that he truly has disavowed the positions he took to win the Massachusetts Gubernatorial election.

I don't know whether I should be happy about this, or sad that the "I've since learned things that have caused me to change my views" argument apparently never works. Maybe it's that he hasn't articulated exactly what he learned as governor of MA which has caused him to change his positions? I know he keeps trying.

C. Wingate @ 80: Frankly, I think the standard argument over the "A-word" ought to be grounded in societal necessities. Pregnancy is, yes, the way that Nature (or God, or Evolution, or whatever) intended for humans to reproduce, but it's still at least potentially medically dangerous for the mother, and she therefore deserves to be the one who decides whether or not to brave that danger. Therefore, the best - and probably only - way to prevent abortion without putting women at risk and denying them the ability to opt out (try being a married woman and telling your husband there will be no more sex because your age or your high blood pressure or makes pregnancy a risk you aren't willing to take) is to prevent the situations that lead women to seek abortions in the first place. That includes foolproof contraception (and RP appears to be opposed to certain contraceptive methods as well, btw) as well as education and empowerment for women regardless of socioeconomic class or any other factor. Improving family economics and providing adequate support systems for parents and children plays a major role as well, since women who fear being unable to support and successfully care for their children are more likely to abort than women for whom these things are not a concern. Libertarianism tends to be rather short on the concept of support systems, as does modern Republicanism. So you bet this is topical.

As to RP's being "a man of principles", so have been any number of other figures throughout history, of varying repute. The real question is whether one's principles have genuine merit in their application to the real world.

Serge @77: I prefer shopping at Target.

Serge, is that as in:

"Please, Mr. Custer, I don't wanna go..."

(g,d,r)

A quick touch back to the LaRouche part of the thread. One of the most surreal experiences I've ever had involved a LaRouche robo-call.

I was working as a communications tech installing phones and I had just connected one in the 23rd floor service elevator bay of a large American company. The number was not one that had been reassigned from another phone, but a brand new number freshly activated by our switch programmer not ten minutes earlier. I installed the jack. Mounted the phone, plugged the line into it, stepped back to see whether it looked all right, and...it rang. Just about jumped out of my skin, because A, it was a new number and B, it was a service elevator phone.

I picked up the phone and a voice said, "This is Lyndon LaRouche." Aiee! Weirdest thing ever. Oh, and at that point, I hung up.

Lori @ 84... "Please, Mr. Custer, I don't wanna go..."

That reminds me of Gary Larson's cartoon titled "Custer's Last Sight". You don't see him, but you see what he sees - a bunch of Indians looking down at him with a big grin.

Ummm--that all laws impose some kind of moral belief that's at bottom unproveable? ("Men and women are equal" is a moral position.)

Some laws, however, impose a moral principle that is not tied to a particular religious belief, while others are (impermissibly) tied to a specific religious belief. This is an important distinction in the US system, because if the only rational for a law is religious, you've got establishment clause issues.

Also, because if you believe that your personal religious beliefs should be the basis of law, you're not going to limit that belief to the single issue of abortion. You're going to believe that what you think is right is absolutely and religiously right, and not open to argument or dissent.

With someone like Ron Paul (and with most of the politically powerful forced-pregnancy people) their reason for banning abortion is very much religious. And they don't see a problem with using that as the basis for law making. They don't even seem able to consider that their religion's definition of right and wrong might not be the proper definitions for legal and illegal. The issue of abortion brings out the problems most clearly, but when people think this way, it affects every policy they make.

Their religious belief leads them to basically ignore opposition for other reasons, such as concern about legislators interfering in the doctor-patient relationship, the forced use of one person's body to benefit another, etc. In the same way that Shrub ignored opposition to the invasion of Iraq, and the specific concerns of others.

It also leads to a willingness to lie, such as with claims that women never need abortions for health reasons. Because the belief is seen as an absolute good and necessity, there is a strong desire to allow the end to justify any means. In the same way that Shrub was willing to like about WMD to justify the war he thought necessary.

And to self-delusion, such as people imagining that if abortion was illegal, women wouldn't have sex if they weren't wanting a child, or that they'd somehow always be happy to be pregnant if they didn't have the option of abortion. Or not seeing the element of force and coercion they're advocating. The same type of delusion that made Shrub and Co. think that they could invade and occupy a nation, and be "greeted with flowers."

There is also the problem that this type of belief is best enacted by banning what you consider wrong, rather than addressing issues that lead people to choose the thing you oppose. So forced-pregnancy folk aren't out there advocating for easy access to affordable birth control, and ample support for health care, child care, and the other needs that, if left unmet, make raising a child overwhelming enough for abortion to be preferable, all they do is argue for banning abortion. Or with the "war on terror" the emphasis is only on punishing those associated with the wrong, not addressing the injustices that lead to people hating US policy with good reason.

There is also the problem of thinking that you know, based on an abstract ideal, what is better for others than they can know with their specific information. So if you "know" that no woman needs an abortion for health reasons, you think you know more about this issue than the woman and her doctor who are considering the actual facts of her case. In the same way that Shrub thinks he knows better than the Iraqi people (or the US people) about how they should be governed.

When a leader believes that "what I believe on issue X is an absolute truth, and must be imposed" there is going to be problems, because they're interested in theocracy (with themselves defining "god") not democracy. Abortion is an issue where they can be public about this mindset, and therefore a decent weather-vane for seeing how they'll think as other issues arise.

Kelly @ 85: That would have freaked me out, too.

Damned autodialers.

Some laws, however, impose a moral principle that is not tied to a particular religious belief, while others are (impermissibly) tied to a specific religious belief.

Ursula,

You are correct that the Establishment Clause prohibits laws from being made which are tied to specific religious beliefs. For instance, a law forbidding the consumption of meat on Fridays or working on the Sabbath would obviously be unacceptable.

However, to which specific religious belief is the position that an abortion kills a human being tied?

Jim: I was really sad to read that he waffled on the torture issue. Damn.

Jen @ 89: It doesn't have to be the beliefs of one specific religion, nor does it have to be a belief that is specific only to religion, to qualify as a religious belief.

If it is held by enough people for religious reasons, and prevents someone else from following the beliefs of their own religion, then it still runs counter to religious freedom.

Frex: were I given to virulently militant atheism to the extent that I opposed any and all publicly-visible religious observations and/or symbology, and on that basis I lobbied to have all religious displays outlawed even on private property, citing them as "obscene" or something, how would that make me any different from someone who belonged to a religious sect that held religious symbology to be evil and therefore fought to have it outlawed in order to force the general public into line with that particular sect's practice?

I asked Paul to say, point blank, “Americans do not torture.” He waffled.

Hmm... I can sort of see a waffle.

Do you mean "Americans should not torture" or "What Americans do isn't torture" or "If Americans do it, it isn't torture"? The current administration might well say "Americans don't torture" meaning that what we're doing we're not going to call torture.

The statement I want to here is "What Americans are doing under the current administration is torture, and I will stop it, hold everyone who participated in it criminally liable, and work to enact laws that make it clear that this should never happen again."

Analee #56:

"Isolationist" gets thrown around a lot, but it's nice to define what you object to.

The sensible looking parts of what I understood from RP's positions were:

a. Getting us out of the empire business, pulling most of our troops out of most of the world, and generally not trying to, say, decide what kind of government the Iranians, Bangladeshis, or Ukranians should have.

b. Radically downsizing our foreign aid, as part of getting us out of that business.

c. Getting some control of immigration and our borders. The current situation, where we have a huge population of second-class (non)citizens here illegally and can get as many more as we need to keep bottom-tier wages low, is seriously messed up. I don't know how to solve that in a decent way, and I doubt RP does either, but the way we've been handling it for many years is a mess.

The wingnut parts amounted to the fear that we're going to make a North American Union in imitation of the EU, which just doesn't make any sense, and the idea that we need to bail out of all our international agreements. Stuff like the WTO seems to me to be pretty valuable for resolving trade disputes short of an actual tradewar, though this isn't something I've studied much. The UN never has had the authority to send us to war, and the rhetoric about it on Paul's website is silly--we used the UN resolutions as a justification to do what we wanted, but absent those resolutions, we'd have done the same thing anyway.

Ursula: It is not clear to me that the belief that a human being becomes a "person" at birth is less religious in nature, by your definition, than the belief that this occurs earlier.

I think that as long as arguments are put forth from a secular philosophical standpoint, it doesn't run afoul of the Establishment Clause.

It's hard to believe that this nation will ever be isolationist as long as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, et al depend on the billions of dollars of arms sales to foreign countries.

Summer #70:

I'm not sure if we'd have more or less freedom under that kind of federalism. Turning more and more policy decisions into things decided at the federal level has two big advantages:

a. It makes it easier to get a single nationwide answer, so that moving from Minnesota to Maine doesn't involve getting used to a radically different set of laws and rules and expectations.

b. It means that when the feds are pursuing a better set of policies than your state would pursue, you get the benefit of the better policy.

But this works the opposite way, too. If the feds want worse policies than your state would like, they may pre-empt your state's policies. And having exactly the same laws everywhere means a lot less room for local variation, for laws that make sense in Oregon but wouldn't make sense in Georgia. Some part of that local variation is driven by local beliefs.

One advantage of a "patchwork" of different laws in different states is that you can change the laws under which you live by moving. If you think marijuana should be legal, you can move to some state where it's legal. (Note that the Republicans have been very eager to pre-empt states on *that* issue.)

The biggest example of a good change imposed from above is civil rights laws; who knows when those would have happened in the Southern states otherwise? A good example of a bad change imposed from above is the war on drugs; without federal pressure, we'd likely have some states with very strict drug laws, many with much more lenient ones, and widespread decriminalization of marijuana.

James D. Macdonald #52: I'm wondering if out-sourcing the telephone spam for staunch pro-American politicians to third-world countries is going to become standard. Couldn't they at least Buy American for their campaigns?

Perhaps it's a passive-aggressive way for candidates to subtly announce their views on immigration vs. outsourcing. We have congresscritters who ably represent Disney, why not some for Bangalore? They could save some bribery dollars by just cutting out the lobbyist middlemen. In any case, it's long been known that the Buy American meme is bad for our nation's suffering and downtrodden millionaires and billionaires. (snerk)

If it is held by enough people for religious reasons, and prevents someone else from following the beliefs of their own religion, then it still runs counter to religious freedom.

No no no no no.

This might be true if you replace "beliefs" with "requirements" (e.g., peyote); it's not true when the issue is a religiously-motivated stricture in an area where you have none.

For example, "blacks and whites have equal rights" is a moral position; it was originally religiously motivated; making it the law doesn't infringe the religious freedom of an Episcopalian.

Jen @ 94,

I'm not going to get involved in the rest of the argument, but this bit:

It is not clear to me that the belief that a human being becomes a "person" at birth is less religious in nature, by your definition, than the belief that this occurs earlier.

Strikes me as silly. It is pretty much universally accepted that after birth a human fetus is a human being is a "person." This is the case across the board regardless of religious affiliation. Now, that set of the whole clearly contains subsets of people who for whatever reason believe that personhood comes earlier than birth, but they are still a part of the greater set that believe in post-birth humanity. If everybody, regardless of religious affiliation agrees on that, it can hardly said to be a religious opinion.

Radically downsizing our foreign aid

You ought to check the numbers on that: foreign aid is really a small part of the budget.
here is a pair of tables: the total of all foreign aid programs for FY2006 is less than $23 billion.

(Like space program spending, foreign aid spending is generally overestimated.)

My apologies; I didn't phrase that clearly enough. When I said "becomes a 'person' at birth," the "becomes" was key. It necessarily implies "was not a 'person' prior to birth." This is not at all a universally-held view.

Shoot, in some cases, they don't become persons until their mid-thirties.

Hey, I'm 35, and I'm still working on it.

Summer Storms @ #83 and previous: You already said most of the stuff I'd have wanted to say about abortion, probably better than I would have. Especially the point that it's the mother who faces the risk of pregnancy, so its the mother who gets to decide whether to go through it. (I would have gone wandering into gender-specific evolutionary imperatives. B-) )

I'll also point out that the very idea of "every person has an equal right to {live,breed,etc.}" is a strictly modern idea. Besides being in no way supported by natural law, it begs a couple of questions, especially "what counts as a person?". That's not just about defining Homo sapiens either... consider how the child-welfare movement followed after the animal-welfare movement.

Lori 84: (g,d,r) [*]?

Xopher @105:

(g,d,r) -- short form for "grinning, ducking, and running" when you think the other posters may start throwing things at you...

Ah. Thanks.

Lori Coulson @ 106... short form for "grinning, ducking, and running" when you think the other posters may start throwing things at you

Now, now... If people around here really threw things (even metaphorical ones) at a person because of a bad joke (or a bad pun), I'd be dead by now.

re 104: And the unborn child has nothing at risk?

One of the things one hears quite plainly from parts of the anti-abortion movement is their identification with earlier "these weren't considered real persons" movements. Constantly one hears RvW equated with Dred Scott. And seeing as how it's been done now, one of the things that annoys me about the discussion here is how much toleration there is for this overheated demonization of abortion opponents. They are a hugely diverse group, from Fatimid Catholics to PLAGAL. If we are going to ground this in the real world, then we have to foreswear these self-serving generalizations.

*throws anvil at Serge*

*uses feather as a baseball bat to hit anvil back at Xopher*

*anvil falls on coyote. anvil always falls on coyote.*

how much toleration there is for this overheated demonization of abortion opponents

Huh? We can tell you're opposed to it. I think what we're looking for is an acknowledgement of some kind that that isn't the Only Right Answer.

One Size does not Fit All.