Comments

1
I'm surprised the water didn't short circuit him.
2
Maybe splashing ice water is the cure for everything! Let's switch charity and splash for something else now. How about something remotely curable? Maybe gene study in general? What does donating money to "ALS" mean to people? Who follows up to see if these people actually donate? Count me as somebody tired of this self-congratulatory crap.
Just to be a total ass- isn't the cure that people with ALS genes should not procreate? The gene would die out? I understand research about treatments and such but for the 42 million already donated you could provide a very comfortable life for all the remaining people that are suffering instead of all the administrators being paid to distribute it to whatever now.
3
With every article, Paul Constant looks more and more like a white, privileged liberal asshole who has no clue.
Let me ask you this: what if someone cut tax payer funding for an opera house, but went to see an opera themselves and paid for it with their own money? Are they hypocrites? No. They are just saying that what can be fine and good when funded with voluntary donations and/or purchases is one thing but funding it with involuntarily collected tax payer money is another.
And spare me, SPARE ME the whole "well, that's how a democracy works" line. Paul Ryan was also democratically elected and he's going to do what he was elected by the people to do. This may come as a shock, but in fact many people vote for fiscal conservatives in America.
If someone wants to donate to medical research, great. Just don't fund it through money collected by taxation and/or raising the national debt.
But I agree that cutting the non-defense budget is absurd. The imperial budget should also be slashed. What the fuck are we defending ourselves from, exactly?
Paul Constant seems to have this statist mindset that if left alone, without government, the people would never figure out how to take care of the poor, provide healthcare or manage to not drink large sodas. He seems to think that we need a massive government to run our lives for us. Maybe this government should also have the slogan "Believe, obey, fight?" This ignores history (Mutual aid societies existed before the welfare state and had all the benefits while being voluntary, not forced like the welfare state http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_soc… ) common sense and any semblance of intelligence.
Paul, like most whiny white liberals from privileged backgrounds who probably never worked a day in his life aside from writing for Der SStranger, simply does not understand the message of fiscal conservatism. It's no wonder the younger generation is abandoning fiscal liberalism at breakneck speeds: http://www.latinpost.com/articles/18255/…
4
Oh, but may the record show that I still believe Paul Ryan, Romney and most of the GOP are absolute douche bags, for other reasons. Paul Ryan and Romney are just as much big government fascists as the liberals, they just want government to control a different part of our lives.
One party wants state control over our businesses, the other wants states control over our penises and ovaries. In the words of two famous Libertarians it's Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich
5
2, ALS is idiopathic with only approx 10% of cases passed genetically. It also typically strikes well past breeding age, so it won't "die out".

My father recently passed away from ALS. Its a shitty shitty disease.
6
Please word check the link for this page - Thanks
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11…
7
@4 When you stop using the roads, when your business stops hiring people who were educated in public schools, when you have your own food-contamination prevention business and when you've determined who will clear the dead bodies off the street when the corpses of those who would have received social security start rotting, you get back to us and tell us how great your libertarian utopia is. Thanks.
8
Jason Sudeikis? Why Jason Sudeikis?

I'm sorry, but that strikes me as a supremely weird choice. People seem to be mainly nominating close friends or relatives or extremely famous people, but Sudeikis is neither in Romney's case, unless I'm mistaken.
9
@3, you are the reason we can't have nice things.

Raising a couple of million bucks for ALS research is nice, but it's not going to make up for 1.5 BILLION in lost funding.

Medical research WORKS. Public health WORKS. In your libertarian dream world people would die of cholera at 28 like they used to.
10
@2: Are you trolling or are you really that clueless?
11
@7
And government should pay for and roads, public schools, police, fire department, environmental protection etc. What the fuck is your point?
Your "argument" defined: https://thunderf00tdotorg.files.wordpres…
12
@9
Never before has someone so readily ignored a link and explanation. Congrats to you, for the dumbfuck strawman award.
First, there is no dream world or utopia in Libertarianism. Just an understanding that the freer the market, the better things are: WARNING! SCIENTIFIC STUDY AHEAD! LIBERALS DO NOT READ: http://www.eastwestcenter.org/publicatio…
Second, as I said, and you ignored, before government healthcare and regulations people established their own groups and voluntary organizations to deal with healthcare, retirement etc. These organizations, Mutual Aid Associations, were especially important for African Americans. Another link you won't read:
http://mises.org/daily/5388/Welfare-befo…
Now, with the welfare state and regulations, people are taxed to the point that they can't take care of themselves and have enough to help their communities and are also regulated that even if they had the money, they couldn't.
This is the kind of government you seem to be advocating: http://standupforamerica.files.wordpress…
13
@10 Your debate style, illustrated:
http://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7oxzn…
14
@8
Jason Sudekis played Romney on SNL.
16
I'm sure ALS research got a nice big jump thanks to that crisp $100 bill Mittens sent along.
17
@12: Nice to see you haven't changed much.

You claim that government regulation of industry is inherently detrimental and that taxpayers should not be forced to pay for programs that do not benefit them personally. The logical conclusion of such a belief is that government should neither regulate industry nor fund any programs with tax revenue.
Your referenced "SCIENTIFIC STUDY" is not actually a study sensu stricto. It is, rather, a review of the literature along with a rough outlay of mathematical models purported to describe economic systems. Nowhere in it are any data tables or similar provided, there is precious little methodology, and the overwhelming majority of the article is devoted to vague discussion of the concepts involved. It also has very low rigor in my opinion due to the fuzzy way in which it attempts to quantify complex influences on commerce, but that's a liability of attempting to apply mathematical methods to macroeconomic systems in any case.

The write-up regarding fraternal societies claims that government regulation of the medical field along with the rise of professional licensing organizations are to blame for rising medical costs, entirely ignoring the advances in medicine that have led to vastly increasing specialization and complexity in the medical practice. You don't need to be particularly intelligent to see past this foolish and simplistic position. If you read the news, you see the horror stories that result from doctors attempting modern procedures without being properly trained and qualified. Medicine OF ALL INDUSTRIES should be highly regulated, as a defective product can mean hundreds of needless deaths before the market even puts the purveyor of said product out of business, let alone replaces him!

Your second-to-last sentence is a fantasy entirely devoid of substance. Your last sentence and the associated picture constitute a "strawman", as you misrepresented the argument of someone else in order to dismiss it.

Teal deer: you posted links and more or less said "I posted a link therefore I win". You should be more discriminating in what links you post or you will fall into a sgt_doom-like habit of posting links that provide negligible support to anything you say.

@13: Aaand that's an ad hominem attack. Rather than responding to bigyaz or clarifying your earlier statement, you attacked him by claiming that he's only capable of namecalling.
All those fun little pictures in your /b/ folder are perfectly fine for imageboards, but if you want to convince us namefags of anything, you might want to bring a little rigor to your arguments.
18
@17
Never in the history of the internet has anyone ever typed so much and said so little. Congrats.
First, I NEVER said we should stop licensing doctors, paving roads, etc. There is a difference between "minimal" and "none." Yes, doctors should be licensed but no, they should not be forced to work with huge government agencies for payments and such. Someone who wants minimum government, as in less regulations that aren't about workplace safety and environmental regulations, and less tax payer money being spend on things best left to non-profits and the community (like medical research) and minimal government in our day to day lives (no war on drugs, legal abortions etc) is a Libertarian. Libertarian =/= anarchist usually.

And your comments on mutual aid societies prove your ignorance. What do they have to do with licensing doctors? They were there to FINANCE healthcare, not license anyone. Basically it's like a healthcare co-op. Again, history shows that when left alone, people can and do survive and thrive with minimal government interference (again, MINIMAL, not none)

As for economic freedom creating less poverty, prove otherwise. Go ahead, try it. I'll site more of those third party links that prove the point which you so can't stand. Sorry, but it is not my fault you're the one who doesn't have a leg to stand on in this debate:
http://ideas.repec.org/p/ewc/wpaper/wp60…
http://peterlevine.ws/?p=6471

Oh, and I didn't make an ad hominem. Saying "your a poo poo head" would be ad hominem. I simply mocked the debate style. And actually images are an effective form of propaganda, as anyone who has any understanding of history will tell you.

And I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. I'm simply here to see how the liberal mind works. From what I've observed, they seem unable to use logic, reason, and base their every policy decision on pathos as opposed to data. For this reason, and the general nature of the USA, liberalism is doomed to failure.

It is no wonder that the younger generation is rejecting economic liberalism (social democracy) in favor of free market principles.
19
@18: Now you're in favor of industrial regulation for worker safety? You've previously attested that all such regulation is a way for big business to squash competition. When you're ready to pick a position and stick to it (and no, picking two mutually-contradictory positions and saying you support both does not count) I'll be happy to give you my opinion on such a position and perhaps debate you on the issues.

If you think that I pulled from thin air a connection between fraternal medical organizations and the licensing of doctors by nationwide regulatory organizations, then you don't even bother to read the links you hysterically insist that we're too closed-minded to read. I quote: "The first major blow against fraternalism occurred when the American Medical Association gained control of the licensing of medical schools."

Neither of these points I've just made gives me the warm fuzzies. However, this next one does:

Okay, I expressed skepticism towards the review of the literature you linked previously, and now you want to show me MORE evidence that greater economic freedom leads to better outcomes in the abstract. What's your next move?
APPARENTLY, your next move is to "site" (I think you mean "cite") THE SAME EXACT PAPER THAT YOU LINKED TO PREVIOUSLY. Do you even read your links? Do you make it halfway through the abstract of the paper? Hell, do you even skim the title line? I repeat: the eastwestcenter.org link and the ideas.repec.org link go to THE SAME EXACT DOCUMENT (Hasan, Rana, M. G. Quibria, and Yangseon Kim, 2003).
Your second link, you may be interested to learn, is a post on someone's personal blog. While that someone is Dr. Peter Levine, a dean and professor at Tufts University's Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, it is still a blog, not a peer-reviewed journal or other similarly-reputable source. Also, the point expressed in the blog post is at odds with your claims; Dr. Levine rejects the Mercatus Center's ideas and lays out a tentative line of evidence in support of his own counterclaim.

Name-calling is different from argumentum ad hominem, a term referring to a line of debate in which the opposing speaker's character, rather than his line of reasoning, is being attacked. You posted a picture accusing bigyaz of being incapable of using evidence and instead calling people names. It's somewhat borderline, but I'd say it qualifies as argumentum ad hominem. Remember, you're the guy who can't tell the difference between a sarcastic tone and argumentum ad hominem.

So, to recap:
-you claim to hold two mutually-contradictory positions
-you can't tell by looking whether a paper you found while searching is the same paper you referenced just 29 hours previously
-you can't tell by looking whether a document is a study or a blog post
-you can't tell from a quick reading whether or not a document supports your argument
-you are unfamiliar with the meanings of terms but still try to correct me on their usage
-you (presumably) still think that the noun "sir" is a pronoun

Damn, I'm glad I'm not you.

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