Why I am voting for bush

[Kid Kaos]

The funny thing about this thread is that most of these pople posting are not old enough to vote anyways.

Nick FDR was voted into office 4 times....I think that makes him a poretty popular president.

[Feoren]

You can continue to say OMG BUT NO PRESIDENT HAS HAD TO DEAL WITH SOMETHING SO BIG AS 9/11. Holy fuck. Did the second world war cease to exist in all history? The Great Depression? The Korean war? The Cuban Missile Crisis, which was probably the closest the world has ever been to worldwide destruction. How about WW1? Did all these presidents fuck up as bad ass Bush? But the thing Bush did wrong at that point in time was, He didn't do anything.

Agreed, wholeheartedly. Well put. 9/11 is not nearly the biggest thing an American president has had to deal with, especially if you include the Civil War (of course it's folly to compare Lincoln to any modern president).

Hmm, some would say Truman did when he dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But In my opinion, that saved more lives in the long run (granted it killed many innocent civilians and in a horrible manner which I would never want anyone to experience).

Einstein once said that he wished he would have known the damage his advancements would cause, so he could have become a watch maker instead. Yes, the atom bombs were a travesty, but it's time to face the truth: they are overplayed. Truman knew that the Japanese would not surrender until they knew for damn certain they couldn't win the war, and they would lose hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of soldiers and civilians (not to mention the American lives lost) before ending the war unless America showed an amazing display of power. So he asked his advisors to choose significant military targets with as few civilian casualties as possible, and the immediate deaths rolled in between 75 and 90 thousand IIRC, and saving the lives of everyone else who would be killed if the Japanese didn't surrender. To put this in perspective, something that is almost never said, but is something we should know, is that 330 thousand were killed in the firebombing of Tokyo, about 4 times as many as from the atomic bomb blast (not including radiation, I know.) Truman considered possible scenarios and chose the one he believed would end the war with the least amount of casualties.

The Bush administration, on the other hand, considers all possible scenarios and chooses the one they believe will provide them with the most money and votes. Everyone should know that Bush's repealing of the estate tax saved him and members of his cabinet's families hundreds of millions of dollars. Everyone should know that through the conservative media, more than half of Americans on a street poll thought that Iraq was connected to Al-Qaeda. Everyone should know how much money Betchel, whose former CEO is VP Dick Cheney, is making off the war. Once they have those facts, it's up to them to decide. And no "facts" from Faux News's "We distort, you deride."

[Feoren]

On Abortion

It is moot to argue the morals of abortion, because nobody really supports it. Of course it's wrong, it's terrible. Nobody is pro-abortion. Those who are against abortion laws are so because they believe the government does not have the right to tell people what to do with their own bodies; that that crosses too far over toward totalitarianism. Even still, arguing pro-choice vs. pro-life is like having a kung-foo fight in quicksand. The issue itself overtakes the debaters, more often then not.

This is why the only thing that I believe really matters about the abortion issue is this: people will still have abortions if it's illigal. And that means coathangers. That means, instead of having abortions in sterile environments with certified doctors, and having the aborted fetus preserved for stem-cell research, women will pay $15 to a shady figure in a back ally to have an infectious coathanger stuck into their body and having their child torn out, to be tossed into a trash can, while the mother-no-more has an excrutiatingly painful experience and an atrociously high risk of death due to infection. That is the abortion issue. Here is my resolution: play it like cigarettes. Abortions should be legal, but no health care plans cover it and they are taxed heavily. That would mitigate the irresponsibility caused from the "I can have sex, because I can always get an abortion" mindset while keeping rape victims from dying of pain shock and vanarial infection.

Still, I maintain that a flat outlaw on abortions is the worst possible resolution there can be.

Remember, issues are never, ever, ever as simple as they appear. Don't ever take anything, especially politics, at face-value.

[Feoren]

I know I'm a rather latecomer to this argument so a lot of what I say probably has no relavence anymore, but anyway:

I think it's highly overlooked but the most important people in history have been philosophers. Without these people who were mostly very learned men who studied a variety of subjects and talked about new ways of thinking, the world would still be in the middle ages, and all the computer/engineering knowledge in the world wouldn't matter.

-Epi

Once again I am impressed with what Epinephrine has to say. I also like it how pv=nrt's rather mindless, almost trolling initial post has spawned such a cool discussion.

I agree with what Epinephrine says here, and in fact, if you look at the first presidents of the US, they really were these kinds of intellectual, enlightenment philosophers. In fact, I think it's telling that they were some of the most liberal thinkers of their time. (I don't quite understand how people can lambast the liberal side, when every major revolution in history that has significantly improved life, such as the abolishment of slavery and women's suffrage, has been the pinnacle of liberalism in its time.)

Really, the Constitution was as much a scripture of a new philosophy and way of thought as it was the foundation for the USA. I'm sure most historians would agree that Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton and Franklin could be classified as philosophers. It's so different today, where the president is more of a showman than an intellectual; people are put on the ticket not for their beliefs, but for their chances of winning; no longer do policitians develop their ideas and beliefs from years of critical thinking and intellectual persuits; instead, they try to "appeal to the public" through polls and preconcieved notions while being told what to believe by their party.

A lot of the problem is the media. If a guy gets paid 6 figures to report about political candidates for an hour a day (way too much) he's gonna do whatever he can to keep his job, and that means labels. That means analyzing every single speech for signs of "wishy-washyness" and "flip-flopping", or the dreaded party-crossover, where a person's rational thought might tempt them to disagree with most of their party on a certain minor issue, and suddenly they're betraying their side. That is the problem with politics today. No longer do politicians develop ideas, then run with them as their campaign. Instead, millions of dollars are spent so they know what they "should think".

It's tought to fight it. It's often difficult to wade through the bullshit and get to the core values of a politician, but it's something I'm beginning to do with Kerry, and so far, I'm impressed. Honestly, it was never something I was able to do with Bush. In all these years, I was never able to wade through the Bushit and get to his core beliefs, and that scares me. So, I'll go by his track record: nearly 1 trillion dollars went from the Government to Bush's "base", the families of the Bush administration get to keep hundreds of millions of dollars because of tax cuts Bush made, and we have lost the largest number of soldiers in any military action since Vietnam. And as much as I hate the bipartisanism of America, I'm gonna be voting for Kerry, just because I could not imagine the dire straits the entire world might plunge into with another 4 years of George War Bush in office.

[froedrick]

Einstein once said that he wished he would have known the damage his advancements would cause, so he could have become a watch maker instead. Yes, the atom bombs were a travesty, but it's time to face the truth: they are overplayed. Truman knew that the Japanese would not surrender until they knew for damn certain they couldn't win the war, and they would lose hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of soldiers and civilians (not to mention the American lives lost) before ending the war unless America showed an amazing display of power. So he asked his advisors to choose significant military targets with as few civilian casualties as possible, and the immediate deaths rolled in between 75 and 90 thousand IIRC, and saving the lives of everyone else who would be killed if the Japanese didn't surrender. To put this in perspective, something that is almost never said, but is something we should know, is that 330 thousand were killed in the firebombing of Tokyo, about 4 times as many as from the atomic bomb blast (not including radiation, I know.) Truman considered possible scenarios and chose the one he believed would end the war with the least amount of casualties.

Right after what I said bout the Atom bombs, I said I believe they were necessary

[Feoren]

Right after what I said bout the Atom bombs, I said I believe they were necessary

And I was agreeing with you.

[Vykromond]

I think it's highly overlooked but the most important people in history have been philosophers.

I didn't see this until Feoren quoted it, but it's important. I wonder if you're making an allusion here to the Platonic idea of "philosopher-kings."

[Ilya]

i almost died today

[Pandagirl!]

How

[Ilya]

i was driving to hotlanta on the hi-way and there was a chair in my lane and i was sneezing so i didnt see it until i was right behind it so i swerved to the other lane while a car was turning to it and he honked his horn at me so i honked mine back and he honked it at me again and i honked it at him and he honked it back and then i yelled "fuck you" and he didnt yell it back cause he didnt hear me.

[Fit of Rage]

Atlanta is a dangerous place. You badass, you.

[Ilya]

Atlanta is a dangerous place. You badass, you.

CHAIRS EVERYWHERE

[Epinephrine]

I didn't see this until Feoren quoted it, but it's important. I wonder if you're making an allusion here to the Platonic idea of "philosopher-kings."

What I was mostly thinking about was the idea that with all the science and all our inventions, it's ideas such as liberty, individual freedom, scientific thought (the scientific process, not science itself persay), the idea that questioning things is good... all of that has changed the world and made the world the way it is today. If we had a world that simply had technological advancements, but didn't have the ideas which were put forth in the Enlightenment (aside from the necessary thought to make better technology), we'd be living in a very different world today.

Look at the countries of SouthEast Asia and you will see. Even though for instance Japan is considered a demoncracy, and is by all accounts one of the richest and most advanced countries in the entire world... yet the way their country works is very different from the Western world. Things such as feminism, equality, racism, nepatism, and the idea that some people are 'superior' to others a priori.. those things are very different from the Western world. Why? It's because although they have the money and the technology and USA-Imposed democracy, the ideas of the Enlightenment and afterwards still haven't really penatrated their society fully. Much worse are other SouthEast Asian countries that have even less of a Western influence, as technologically advanced as those are.

So I say, it is important that education focuses on learning, and not merely on job training. I do believe my school did the right thing, then they mandated that every science major has to have one credit in humanities and one in social sciences, but perhaps they didn't do enough. I think it's a huge mistake to blindly train people for jobs in the future if we don't train people how to think, because it is only by thinking and actively debating our ideas of today can we through ideas alone (and the laws that follow ideas) create a better world for tomorrow.

As for the Clinton stat, I've heard about that too. I believe the stat was he had the highest rating of any president the day he left office since they started doing opinion polls with around 61%. I think they said they only doing such accurate polls after Kennedy in the article I read, but I'm not sure it was a while ago and it was on CNN.com (never so accurate).

As for the atomic bombs... civilian casualties aside (ignorning the millions of Chinese the Japanese randomly decided to rape and murder in their years of occupation), the Japanese would have never surrendered if it wasn't for the bombs. Hell they didn't want to surrender after the first bomb, and it was the 2nd one that made them. Yeah it sucks people died, but Truman made the right call. When you're in a war to the death, it's always better if one million less of your own countrymen die (which was what the projections were saying would happen if they fought on).

As for politics, I believe the advent of television has changed politics more than anything ever before. Roosevelt would have never been elected if there was television back in his day. People simply would not have stood for a handicap president, and may still not. Hell Roosevelt himself knew this and had elaborate contraptions set up to make it look like he could sorta walk around without help while he was campaigning.

-Epi

[Squeezer]

I like Atlanta.....its hot and dirty there....kinda like a certain Female Anatomy part

[Amok]

haha, armpits, yeah