It is a highly cautionary tale, and it’s precisely why a partial, piecemeal reform was doomed to failure (as I’ve argued in other topics). The Republican alternative to “Obamacare” looked a lot more like what New York tried than the comprehensive approach that just passed. Obviously if you have no individual mandate but eliminate restrictions on preexisting conditions you will set the stage for skyrocketing premiums, which is precisely what happened in New York.
Ah, yes. The reason communism has failed everywhere is it just wasn’t done right.
No, the reason what New York did failed was because it was piecemeal, precisely the strategy Republicans in Congress were pushing. There’s no example of a piecemeal approach that is working well, anywhere in the world, or in any state, whereas there are plenty of examples of working comprehensive approaches.
Mitsu offers us—an article from the LA Times!! I guess that’s the final word.
Mr. Frank: you hit the nail on the head. I’m sure Obama and his bureaucrats are doing it right this time. After all, everything they have touched so far has turned to—well, never mind.
Mitsu, can you name a Republican who proposed a bill that would have required insurers to cover pre-existing conditions without imposing an individual mandate? Maybe there are some — I don’t know — but I know one Democrat who argued for just that, showing his utterly clueless ignorance of how insurance works, why people buy it, and what the states have learned about these issues: Obama, during his campaign, heaping scorn upon Hillary Clinton because she wanted to enact an individual mandate.
As for the failure in New York — where I live, and where for many years I either struggled to pay for health insurance, or did without it, as a self-employed person — the problem here does, indeed, stem in part from the piecemeal approach of outlawing pre-existing condition exclusions without considering the consequences. Our legislature is really good at that kind of thing; Congress could take lessons (and would prove to be a fast learner, I’m pretty sure.)
However, that’s only the beginning. Another reason for our skyrocketing health care costs is the many, many service mandates stuffed into every single policy in the state by that same legislature. Chiropractic care is the most infamous one — after highly successful lobbying by chiropractors in the ’90s, the legislature decided that every insurance policy must include chiropractic treatment, whether the insured person considers it quackery or not. There’s at least one study suggesting that this mandate, alone, accounts for 2% of the cost of every insurance premium in the state. But there are dozens more mandates — infertility treatments, treatment by social workers, mandated hospital stays after various surgeries, on and on. As a result of these mandates there’s really no such thing as “catastrophic” coverage in the state — if you don’t have access to group coverage (which is, itself, ungodly expensive) you are not going to be able to find anything affordable, period.
Of course, Obamacare is much the same. No copays for physicals, well-childs, and other preventive care (we have that in New York, too, another reason for the $$$$$$$$ we pay for coverage); that $2,000-ish limit on out-of-pocket costs that will effectively outlaw catastrophic coverage; and who knows what service mandates hidden in those thousands of pages. I have been listening to my self-employed hairdresser bemoan what happened to her last year, when her $900/month family policy with a $7500 annual deductible and 80/20 coverage thereafter cost her a total of $25,000 in premiums and uncovered costs after she and her husband both had surgeries. She is a big fan of Obama and HCR as a result. Just wait until she finds out what all these new federal mandates are going to do to her premiums next year!
I’m not sure what your point is regarding the LA Times, Neo, unless you’ve decided to simply make an ad hominem remark for reasons I cannot fathom. My point is simple, and I agree with you: you can’t address the problem of pre-existing conditions in a way that results in affordable premiums without some sort of mandate and/or a single payer system, a point you yourself made in another post. But if you have a mandate, then you have to have some provision for helping low-income people and small businesses afford coverage, and so forth. You end up with a comprehensive approach. New York’s approach wasn’t comprehensive and thus obviously it wasn’t going to work. I also live in New York and the level of dysfunction of the New York legislature is unbelievable; our lawmakers are a total joke for the most part. Their idea of “health care reform” was obviously doomed to failure.
The approach of this bill at least has a chance of success, as it does at least attempt to address this systemic problem, though as I said earlier I agree there’s a risk in that the penalties for not getting insurance are low, perhaps too low. We shall see.
Mitsu/Siddhartha wants to be a wise one of the old kind… whose truth changes people.
i use Siddhartha since a famous book was written by a certain man, who has similar ideas and worked with others of similar mind.
It starts as Siddhartha, the son of a Brahmin, leaves his home to join the ascetics with his companion Govinda. The two set out in the search of enlightenment. Siddhartha goes through a series of changes and realizations as he attempts to achieve this goal.
Experience is the aggregate of conscious events experienced by a human in life — it connotes participation, learning and knowledge. Understanding is comprehension and internalization.
experience is shown as the best way to approach understanding of reality and attain enlightenment
understanding is attained not through scholastic, mind-dependent methods, nor through immersing oneself in the carnal pleasures of the world and the accompanying pain of samsara; however, it is the totality of these experiences that allow Siddhartha to attain understanding.
Thus, the individual events are meaningless when considered by themselves–Siddhartha’s stay with the samanas and his immersion in the worlds of love and business do not lead to nirvana, yet they cannot be considered distractions, for every action and event that is undertaken and happens to Siddhartha helps him to achieve understanding. The sum of these events is thus experience.
For example, Siddhartha’s passionate and pained love for his son is an experience that teaches him empathy; he is able to understand childlike people after this experience. Previously, though he was immersed in samsara, he could not comprehend childlike people’s motivations and lives. And while samsara clung to him and made him ill and sick of it, he was unable to understand the nature of samsara. Experience of samsara at this point did not lead to understanding; perhaps it even hindered him. In contrast to this, Siddhartha’s experience with his son allows him to love, something he has not managed to do before; once again, the love itself does not lead to understanding.
The novel ends with Siddhartha being a ferryman, learning from a river, and at long last at peace and capturing the essence of his journey
how does that sound Mitsu?
i mean a lot of people turned to eastern religions and philosophies to relieve the malaise that clearly is evident in all that mitsu slides towards.
the americans were not the first to move to hindu and other such teachings…
i fear mitsu is searching for a cure for his Lebenskrankheit?
before piliates to cure things was tried
before maharishnas were tried
before western vegan was tried
before the beatles tried to cure it.
Herman Hess walked the path they followed. and hoped to become like Siddhartha..
its so interesting when i hear someone like mitsu say so much of the same things for the same reasons..
and yet not know a thing about all this.
Like I said before, Artfldgr, I don’t expect to change your mind. I’m simply here for what used to pass as debate in this country. I’ve had many friendly debates with conservatives over the years, though those were far more friendly when I was younger than today. I think the Internet has Balkanized our discourse and turned it into little islands of vitriol where people just talk to other people they already agree with. I think that’s a shame and a loss to the Republic.
Mitsu wants Social Justice, Economic Justice, etc.
this puts him in the same camp as Father Coughlin.
Just as the rest of the nation was obsessed by matters economic and political in the aftermath of the Depression, so too was Father Coughlin. Coughlin had a well-developed theory of what he termed “social justice,” predicated on monetary “reforms.”
His program of “social justice” was a very radical challenge to capitalism and to many of the political institutions of his day.
At the height of his popularity, one-third of the nation was tuned into his weekly broadcasts. In the early 1930s, Coughlin was, arguably, one of the most influential men in America. Although his core message was one of economic populism, his sermons also included attacks on prominent Jewish figures–attacks that many people considered evidence of anti-Semitism.
mitsu should be proud to walk in such progressive footsteps.
of course mitsu doesnt know where his ideas come from… he actually has few of his own…
Father Coughlin & The Search For “Social Justice”
Modern capitalism is destroying itself at both ends. It speaks to the youth of the nation with this bright sentence: “You are inexperienced. We do not want you.” To the matured laborers in industry who are forty-five years of age, it says: “You must retire simply because the compensation insurance rate is too high for us and the insurance companies of this nation do not care to risk you.”
yes coughlin talked about the unfair insurance companies. and how they should be fixed.
lets see if his ideas and thigns match mitsu and obama
I believe that every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just, living, annual wage which will enable him both to maintain and educate his family according to the standards of American decency.
I believe in nationalizing those public resources which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals.
I believe in upholding the right to private property but in controlling it for the public good.
I believe not only in the right of the laboring man to organize in unions but also in the duty of the Government, which that laboring man supports, to protect these organizations against the vested interests of wealth and of intellect.
I believe in broadening the base of taxation according to the principles of ownership and the capacity to pay.
I believe in the simplification of government and the further lifting of crushing taxation from the slender revenues of the laboring class.
I believe in preferring the sanctity of human rights to the sanctity of property rights; for the chief concern of government shall be for the poor because, as it is witnessed, the rich have ample means of their own to care for themselves.
so how does that sound mitsu?
Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel about a Fascist coup in the USA, It Can’t Happen Here, features a “Bishop Prang”, an extremely successful pro-Fascist radio host who is said to be “to the pioneer Father Coughlin” “as the Ford V-8 [was] to the Model A”.
Coughlin was vilified in the press as a Nazi sympathiser by cartoonist Theodor Seuss Geisel, best known for his children’s books written under the pen name of Dr. Seuss.[23] (he was a socialist)
Mitsu: I’m all for friendly debate. But it’s more friendly—and more productive—when people can agree on reliable sources. Today the MSM has become so highly partisan and so tainted that those who rely on it are speaking a difficult language than those (such as myself) who have learned from bitter experience to deeply distrust it (ditto for “research” especially in the health care field and that of psychology, two areas I’m very familiar with).
Also, the more we face hard times, the more serious the issues are and the more heated the discussion will become. Not that there weren’t big issues in the 80s and 90s, but they were small potatoes compared to today. I don’t know how old you are, but political discourse in the Sixties was very very bitter, as bitter as now in my recollection. And there was no internet.
Reason 2.0 why socialist programs don’t work is the government did not spend enough. (sarcasm off)
Like I said before, Artfldgr, I don’t expect to change your mind.
good
I’m simply here for what used to pass as debate in this country.
No your not. as I have clearly pointed out. you will not accept a loss
And you have lost every point of your debate over and over…
And you refuse to do anything but
pop click whir reboot
That’s what this is… you again ignoring two days of stuff…
And pop click whir reboot
I’ve had many friendly debates with conservatives over the years, though those were far more friendly when I was younger than today. I think the Internet has Balkanized our discourse and turned it into little islands of vitriol where people just talk to other people they already agree with. I think that’s a shame and a loss to the Republic.
You don’t know what debate means…
Debate or debating is a formal method of interactive and representational argument. Debate is a broader form of argument than logical argument, which only examines consistency from axiom, and factual argument, which only examines what is or isn’t the case or rhetoric which is a technique of persuasion. Though logical consistency, factual accuracy and some degree of emotional appeal to the audience are important elements of the art of persuasion, in debating, one side often prevails over the other side by presenting a superior “context” and/or framework of the issue, which is far more subtle and strategic.
You just keep hammering the same wrong point… you have no art, no strategy. You completely take a non falsifiable position, and you refuse to actually debate.
Your not debating… your basically repeating things over and over like a parrot till we get tired and give in, we don’t give in and then you go
pop click whir reboot
Your lamenting poor debate should make you take a look in the mirror.
How many times have I couight your facts made up?
In what form of debate is the facts and contexts made up?
But I can tell you why the debates you get in are so poor..
This quoted from wiki Informal debate is a common occurrence, the quality and depth of a debate improves with knowledge and skill of its participants as debaters.
The more time your on the left, the more your debate points are based no revisioned history, lies, false premises, false dichotomies, and a whole bunch of other things.
The only decent debates you can have are with others who also are of the same delusions and carry the same false facts and so the process forces you to return to the world where everyone is wrong but agrees.
You have reminded me more than once of the people who came from the soviet union who had a certain history from the period they are from. such people found debate horrible, as they had tons of wrong facts and ideas and they didn’t know what was good what was bad, and so they would spout what would work in an artificial world constructed of lies, and they would get the same reaction that you do.
And like you, they cant blame themselves, they wont blame the ideology, so instead they blame the other person. for what? for being mean. Why are they mean? Because we debate and they don’t agree… but isnt a debate a synthesis over two Hegelian points? yes. But then how can you expect to agree? I don’t know, they are just mean
The major goal of the study of debate as a method or art is to develop one’s ability to play from either position with equal ease. To inexperienced debaters, some propositions appear easier to defend or to destroy; to experienced debaters, any proposition can be defended or destroyed after the same amount of preparation time, usually quite short. Lawyers argue forcefully on behalf of their client, even if the facts appear against them. However one large misconception about debate is that it is all about strong beliefs; it is not.
So again.. you don’t know what debate is…
So whatever your missing, it sure wasn’t debate.
I will tell you, that when a person is an expert at debate, they LOVE me as an opponent.
Pick a side, any side..
The Bronx Science Speech & Debate Team – History was made in 2009 when the Bronx High School of Science Speech and Debate Team, one of the most historically prominent and successful forensics programs in the country made history by becoming the first program ever to win both Lincoln-Douglas debate and policy debate at the Harvard National Invitational.
but that’s ok.. we also beat your school in fields medals, Pulitzers and (EARNED) Nobel prizes.
Each year, more than 25,000 eighth graders in New York City take the Specialized High School Admissions Test (containing both math and verbal questions) to gain entrance to one of the city’s Specialized High Schools. The cut-off score required for admission to each of the eight specialized testing high schools varies from year to year depending upon seat availability. Less than 4% of the applicant pool is accepted to Bronx Science. The result is a student community characterized by cultural, ethnic, and economic diversity bound together by intellectual curiosity and talent.
I was doing college level work in grade school Mitsu.
and to others that don’t believe I do all I do, this might explain a lot of it.
Let me just point out some alumni achievements..
(and I am not dead yet… I am currently doing some interesting stuff with a genetics professor and stem cell research… but that’s my hobby, not my job)
Seven Nobel Laureates in Physics, more than any other secondary school in the nation:
– Ray G. Glauber ’41, 2005
– Leon N. Cooper ’47, 1972
– Melvin Schwartz ’49, 1988
– Sheldon L. Glashow ’50, 1979
– Steven Weinberg ’50, 1979
– Russell A. Hulse ’66, 1993
– H. David Politzer ’66, 2004
Six individual Pulitzer Prize winners:
– William Safire ’47, author and columnist at The New York Times
– Joseph Lelyveld ’54, Executive Editor (1994-2001, 2003) at The New York Times
– William Taubman ’58, Professor at Amherst
– Bernard L. Stein ’59, Editor of the Riverdale Press
– William Sherman ’63, Reporter at the New York Daily News
– Gene Weingarten ’68 at the Washington Post
Seven alumni have won the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest scientific honor bestowed by the U.S. President:
– Charles Yanofsky ’42 (2003), Prof. of Biology, Stanford
– Bruce N. Ames ’46 (1998), Prof. of Biochemistry, UC Berkeley
– Peter M. Goldreich ’56 (1995), Prof. of Astrophysics and Planetary Physics, Cal Tech
– Stuart A. Rice ’49 (1999), Prof. of Chemistry, U. of Chicago
– Steven Weinberg ’50 (1991), Prof. of Physics, U. of Texas at Austin
– Leonard Kleinrock ’51 (2008), UCLA Professor of Computer Science
– Robert J. Lefkowitz ’59 (2008), Duke U. Professor of biochemistry, immunology and medicine
So mitsu… I LOVE a good debate.. an honest debate… etc.
Just ask anyone here..
i might be the only alumni with a Cleo credit. 🙂
I’m glad you have all those great achievements in school, Artfldgr. I’m not sure what that has to do with debate. If you want my childhood achievements… My IQ was measured at 198 by the Stanford-Binet test when I was 5 years old. I tested at the 12th grade level in reading and math when I was in 3rd grade. I won the California State Science Fair Sweepstakes Prize for all grades when I was in 8th grade with an artificial intelligence project using a stochastic evolutionary algorithm on state machines for pattern recognition. I graduated top of my class from Polytechnic School in Pasadena, one of the top prep schools in California.
All of this, as you know, however, is quite irrelevant to any sort of reasoned debate about this or any other subject!
Neo: Well, I hope we can at least TRY to have a reasoned debate. I am 44 years old, too young to remember the 60’s directly. I came of age in the 80’s, and we had fairly reasonable debates back then across party lines. But I’m also thinking of folks like William F. Buckley who had the sort of temperament I associate with civil debate, regardless of the issue.
I dunno, Mitsu. I’m 43, and grew up in a liberal area. There were no real debates with others, IIRC since we were all Dems. When Reagan was shot, we students broke into applause. (I’m ashamed to admit it now, but we were exposed to only one side of the political spectrum.) We were reprimanded, but didn’t care.
I think this time of much more reasoned debate didn’t exist everywhere. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it expect when the sides are equally stacked.
I agree that even then debates across party lines weren’t that common, but they certainly happened quite a lot for me in high school and college, in my experience. And when they did happen, I just think the tone was different (i.e., William F. Buckley vs Glenn Beck.)
Ah Mitsu, William Buckley and civil debate! You are young, aren’t you.
Take a look and a listen. That Golden Age of civility existed only in your imagination (although they do have quite the patrician accents, don’t they?).
I believe it was William F. Buckley who said he would rather be governed by the first thousand names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. The state of Alabama is better run than the state of New York or California. All those people in the White House who have never run a business, turned out a product, or been in the military are out of touch with reality. They are destroying America. What is unclear is if that is a bug or a feature.
Actually, I think I can post the Buckley-Vidal video directly here. Let’s see:
Haha, that’s pretty amusing, Neo. But however animated Buckley got there, I watched plenty of Firing Line episodes in which Buckley managed to keep his cool, for the most part. At least more so than with the typical discussions about the “other side” these days.
Mitsu reminds me so much of the “of so bright, sensitive and caring ” who threw eggs on my Class A’s and ruined my ribbons. Yeah, all that caring debate, and the utterly well thought out points, Gosh, thanks for helping me understand all of that . That 198 IQ certainly lets me know who my betters are. I mean, Christ, with that kind of IQ , I could regurgitate all those cool talking points, turn logic on its head and reverse course so fast fast a gyro can’t keep up .
Guess i’ll just have to suck it up and keep making things work in real life . Good luck with the civilized debate from the left .
Well, I may have a high IQ, but I don’t have a Cleo credit. Also, I have no idea what a “Class A” is, or why anyone would throw eggs on one, much less several, but clearly you were traumatized by that incident, and I apologize for bringing back such an awful memory…
You fail in so many areas.
When will you read Hayek? That’s all I care now. You have so much to learn
Mitsu, honey, they’re saying you have a GIGO problem.
You’re not the only bright spark here, either.
I have a lot of people to read, and Hayek isn’t high on my list. However, I have read a fair number of lay articles on Hayek and many other economists. Obviously I agree with his general critique of central planning: planners cannot possibly have enough information to do their jobs accurately. I also understand and roughly agree with his basic idea that price is a signal which, in a distributed environment can lead to efficient distribution of goods and services.
However, Hayek’s views are quite old fashioned these days. There’s so much more to economics than Hayek. For example, there’s a lot of exciting new research into behavioral economics, in which the rather simple notion of the rational consumer and producer is replaced with evidence-based research into the actual psychology of economic participants. In other words, people are not always rational when making economic decisions. Furthermore, the relatively new field of information economics agrees with Hayek that neoclassical economics got it wrong in assuming perfect information; but he assumes that markets act efficiently despite the fact that market participants lack perfect information — but according to information economics this is not correct:
Anyone who tells people his precise IQ has serious self esteem issues.
Well, at least I didn’t list out all the Nobel Prizes alumni of my school have won.
Mitsu, which part of the Constitution gives Congress the power to require me to buy anything?
One way of thinking of it is that it is similar to a tax, except that you get a tax credit for the full amount of the tax if you buy health insurance. It’s more of a tax incentive system than a “requirement”; you are free not to buy it, but then you don’t get the tax credit.
Oh — and I should also note that the Wyden Amendment allows states to do health care reform in their own way, including not having a tax penalty for not buying insurance, if they can figure out how to cover a similar number of uninsured via their own system.
IRA Darth Aggie asks the question of the day. Can the Feds tell you you have to buy something? If the cattle industry were on the ropes, could the government force everyone to buy 5 pounds of ground beef every week and demand quarterly receipts be sent to the IRS? If the answer is yes, there is no economic activity by individuals that would be beyond federal government reach.
I’m surprized folks know what their IQ is.
I have no clue what mine is and don’t care.
I’ve experianced many “smart fools” in my life time.
All I know is this HCR ain’t honest along with most of the .Gov.
The truth shall prevail. It always does.
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It is a highly cautionary tale, and it’s precisely why a partial, piecemeal reform was doomed to failure (as I’ve argued in other topics). The Republican alternative to “Obamacare” looked a lot more like what New York tried than the comprehensive approach that just passed. Obviously if you have no individual mandate but eliminate restrictions on preexisting conditions you will set the stage for skyrocketing premiums, which is precisely what happened in New York.
Ah, yes. The reason communism has failed everywhere is it just wasn’t done right.
No, the reason what New York did failed was because it was piecemeal, precisely the strategy Republicans in Congress were pushing. There’s no example of a piecemeal approach that is working well, anywhere in the world, or in any state, whereas there are plenty of examples of working comprehensive approaches.
For more on this subject:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/21/nation/la-na-health-insurance21-2010feb21
Mitsu offers us—an article from the LA Times!! I guess that’s the final word.
Mr. Frank: you hit the nail on the head. I’m sure Obama and his bureaucrats are doing it right this time. After all, everything they have touched so far has turned to—well, never mind.
Mitsu, can you name a Republican who proposed a bill that would have required insurers to cover pre-existing conditions without imposing an individual mandate? Maybe there are some — I don’t know — but I know one Democrat who argued for just that, showing his utterly clueless ignorance of how insurance works, why people buy it, and what the states have learned about these issues: Obama, during his campaign, heaping scorn upon Hillary Clinton because she wanted to enact an individual mandate.
As for the failure in New York — where I live, and where for many years I either struggled to pay for health insurance, or did without it, as a self-employed person — the problem here does, indeed, stem in part from the piecemeal approach of outlawing pre-existing condition exclusions without considering the consequences. Our legislature is really good at that kind of thing; Congress could take lessons (and would prove to be a fast learner, I’m pretty sure.)
However, that’s only the beginning. Another reason for our skyrocketing health care costs is the many, many service mandates stuffed into every single policy in the state by that same legislature. Chiropractic care is the most infamous one — after highly successful lobbying by chiropractors in the ’90s, the legislature decided that every insurance policy must include chiropractic treatment, whether the insured person considers it quackery or not. There’s at least one study suggesting that this mandate, alone, accounts for 2% of the cost of every insurance premium in the state. But there are dozens more mandates — infertility treatments, treatment by social workers, mandated hospital stays after various surgeries, on and on. As a result of these mandates there’s really no such thing as “catastrophic” coverage in the state — if you don’t have access to group coverage (which is, itself, ungodly expensive) you are not going to be able to find anything affordable, period.
Of course, Obamacare is much the same. No copays for physicals, well-childs, and other preventive care (we have that in New York, too, another reason for the $$$$$$$$ we pay for coverage); that $2,000-ish limit on out-of-pocket costs that will effectively outlaw catastrophic coverage; and who knows what service mandates hidden in those thousands of pages. I have been listening to my self-employed hairdresser bemoan what happened to her last year, when her $900/month family policy with a $7500 annual deductible and 80/20 coverage thereafter cost her a total of $25,000 in premiums and uncovered costs after she and her husband both had surgeries. She is a big fan of Obama and HCR as a result. Just wait until she finds out what all these new federal mandates are going to do to her premiums next year!
I’m not sure what your point is regarding the LA Times, Neo, unless you’ve decided to simply make an ad hominem remark for reasons I cannot fathom. My point is simple, and I agree with you: you can’t address the problem of pre-existing conditions in a way that results in affordable premiums without some sort of mandate and/or a single payer system, a point you yourself made in another post. But if you have a mandate, then you have to have some provision for helping low-income people and small businesses afford coverage, and so forth. You end up with a comprehensive approach. New York’s approach wasn’t comprehensive and thus obviously it wasn’t going to work. I also live in New York and the level of dysfunction of the New York legislature is unbelievable; our lawmakers are a total joke for the most part. Their idea of “health care reform” was obviously doomed to failure.
The approach of this bill at least has a chance of success, as it does at least attempt to address this systemic problem, though as I said earlier I agree there’s a risk in that the penalties for not getting insurance are low, perhaps too low. We shall see.
Mitsu/Siddhartha wants to be a wise one of the old kind… whose truth changes people.
i use Siddhartha since a famous book was written by a certain man, who has similar ideas and worked with others of similar mind.
It starts as Siddhartha, the son of a Brahmin, leaves his home to join the ascetics with his companion Govinda. The two set out in the search of enlightenment. Siddhartha goes through a series of changes and realizations as he attempts to achieve this goal.
Experience is the aggregate of conscious events experienced by a human in life — it connotes participation, learning and knowledge. Understanding is comprehension and internalization.
experience is shown as the best way to approach understanding of reality and attain enlightenment
understanding is attained not through scholastic, mind-dependent methods, nor through immersing oneself in the carnal pleasures of the world and the accompanying pain of samsara; however, it is the totality of these experiences that allow Siddhartha to attain understanding.
Thus, the individual events are meaningless when considered by themselves–Siddhartha’s stay with the samanas and his immersion in the worlds of love and business do not lead to nirvana, yet they cannot be considered distractions, for every action and event that is undertaken and happens to Siddhartha helps him to achieve understanding. The sum of these events is thus experience.
For example, Siddhartha’s passionate and pained love for his son is an experience that teaches him empathy; he is able to understand childlike people after this experience. Previously, though he was immersed in samsara, he could not comprehend childlike people’s motivations and lives. And while samsara clung to him and made him ill and sick of it, he was unable to understand the nature of samsara. Experience of samsara at this point did not lead to understanding; perhaps it even hindered him. In contrast to this, Siddhartha’s experience with his son allows him to love, something he has not managed to do before; once again, the love itself does not lead to understanding.
The novel ends with Siddhartha being a ferryman, learning from a river, and at long last at peace and capturing the essence of his journey
how does that sound Mitsu?
i mean a lot of people turned to eastern religions and philosophies to relieve the malaise that clearly is evident in all that mitsu slides towards.
the americans were not the first to move to hindu and other such teachings…
i fear mitsu is searching for a cure for his Lebenskrankheit?
before piliates to cure things was tried
before maharishnas were tried
before western vegan was tried
before the beatles tried to cure it.
Herman Hess walked the path they followed. and hoped to become like Siddhartha..
its so interesting when i hear someone like mitsu say so much of the same things for the same reasons..
and yet not know a thing about all this.
Like I said before, Artfldgr, I don’t expect to change your mind. I’m simply here for what used to pass as debate in this country. I’ve had many friendly debates with conservatives over the years, though those were far more friendly when I was younger than today. I think the Internet has Balkanized our discourse and turned it into little islands of vitriol where people just talk to other people they already agree with. I think that’s a shame and a loss to the Republic.
Mitsu wants Social Justice, Economic Justice, etc.
this puts him in the same camp as Father Coughlin.
Social Security history
http://www.ssa.gov/history/cough.html
Just as the rest of the nation was obsessed by matters economic and political in the aftermath of the Depression, so too was Father Coughlin. Coughlin had a well-developed theory of what he termed “social justice,” predicated on monetary “reforms.”
His program of “social justice” was a very radical challenge to capitalism and to many of the political institutions of his day.
At the height of his popularity, one-third of the nation was tuned into his weekly broadcasts. In the early 1930s, Coughlin was, arguably, one of the most influential men in America. Although his core message was one of economic populism, his sermons also included attacks on prominent Jewish figures–attacks that many people considered evidence of anti-Semitism.
mitsu should be proud to walk in such progressive footsteps.
of course mitsu doesnt know where his ideas come from… he actually has few of his own…
Father Coughlin & The Search For “Social Justice”
Modern capitalism is destroying itself at both ends. It speaks to the youth of the nation with this bright sentence: “You are inexperienced. We do not want you.” To the matured laborers in industry who are forty-five years of age, it says: “You must retire simply because the compensation insurance rate is too high for us and the insurance companies of this nation do not care to risk you.”
yes coughlin talked about the unfair insurance companies. and how they should be fixed.
lets see if his ideas and thigns match mitsu and obama
I believe that every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just, living, annual wage which will enable him both to maintain and educate his family according to the standards of American decency.
I believe in nationalizing those public resources which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals.
I believe in upholding the right to private property but in controlling it for the public good.
I believe not only in the right of the laboring man to organize in unions but also in the duty of the Government, which that laboring man supports, to protect these organizations against the vested interests of wealth and of intellect.
I believe in broadening the base of taxation according to the principles of ownership and the capacity to pay.
I believe in the simplification of government and the further lifting of crushing taxation from the slender revenues of the laboring class.
I believe in preferring the sanctity of human rights to the sanctity of property rights; for the chief concern of government shall be for the poor because, as it is witnessed, the rich have ample means of their own to care for themselves.
so how does that sound mitsu?
Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel about a Fascist coup in the USA, It Can’t Happen Here, features a “Bishop Prang”, an extremely successful pro-Fascist radio host who is said to be “to the pioneer Father Coughlin” “as the Ford V-8 [was] to the Model A”.
Coughlin was vilified in the press as a Nazi sympathiser by cartoonist Theodor Seuss Geisel, best known for his children’s books written under the pen name of Dr. Seuss.[23] (he was a socialist)
Mitsu: I’m all for friendly debate. But it’s more friendly—and more productive—when people can agree on reliable sources. Today the MSM has become so highly partisan and so tainted that those who rely on it are speaking a difficult language than those (such as myself) who have learned from bitter experience to deeply distrust it (ditto for “research” especially in the health care field and that of psychology, two areas I’m very familiar with).
Also, the more we face hard times, the more serious the issues are and the more heated the discussion will become. Not that there weren’t big issues in the 80s and 90s, but they were small potatoes compared to today. I don’t know how old you are, but political discourse in the Sixties was very very bitter, as bitter as now in my recollection. And there was no internet.
Reason 2.0 why socialist programs don’t work is the government did not spend enough. (sarcasm off)
Like I said before, Artfldgr, I don’t expect to change your mind.
good
I’m simply here for what used to pass as debate in this country.
No your not. as I have clearly pointed out. you will not accept a loss
And you have lost every point of your debate over and over…
And you refuse to do anything but
pop click whir reboot
That’s what this is… you again ignoring two days of stuff…
And pop click whir reboot
I’ve had many friendly debates with conservatives over the years, though those were far more friendly when I was younger than today. I think the Internet has Balkanized our discourse and turned it into little islands of vitriol where people just talk to other people they already agree with. I think that’s a shame and a loss to the Republic.
You don’t know what debate means…
Debate or debating is a formal method of interactive and representational argument. Debate is a broader form of argument than logical argument, which only examines consistency from axiom, and factual argument, which only examines what is or isn’t the case or rhetoric which is a technique of persuasion. Though logical consistency, factual accuracy and some degree of emotional appeal to the audience are important elements of the art of persuasion, in debating, one side often prevails over the other side by presenting a superior “context” and/or framework of the issue, which is far more subtle and strategic.
You just keep hammering the same wrong point… you have no art, no strategy. You completely take a non falsifiable position, and you refuse to actually debate.
Your not debating… your basically repeating things over and over like a parrot till we get tired and give in, we don’t give in and then you go
pop click whir reboot
Your lamenting poor debate should make you take a look in the mirror.
How many times have I couight your facts made up?
In what form of debate is the facts and contexts made up?
But I can tell you why the debates you get in are so poor..
This quoted from wiki
Informal debate is a common occurrence, the quality and depth of a debate improves with knowledge and skill of its participants as debaters.
The more time your on the left, the more your debate points are based no revisioned history, lies, false premises, false dichotomies, and a whole bunch of other things.
The only decent debates you can have are with others who also are of the same delusions and carry the same false facts and so the process forces you to return to the world where everyone is wrong but agrees.
You have reminded me more than once of the people who came from the soviet union who had a certain history from the period they are from. such people found debate horrible, as they had tons of wrong facts and ideas and they didn’t know what was good what was bad, and so they would spout what would work in an artificial world constructed of lies, and they would get the same reaction that you do.
And like you, they cant blame themselves, they wont blame the ideology, so instead they blame the other person. for what? for being mean. Why are they mean? Because we debate and they don’t agree… but isnt a debate a synthesis over two Hegelian points? yes. But then how can you expect to agree? I don’t know, they are just mean
The major goal of the study of debate as a method or art is to develop one’s ability to play from either position with equal ease. To inexperienced debaters, some propositions appear easier to defend or to destroy; to experienced debaters, any proposition can be defended or destroyed after the same amount of preparation time, usually quite short. Lawyers argue forcefully on behalf of their client, even if the facts appear against them. However one large misconception about debate is that it is all about strong beliefs; it is not.
So again.. you don’t know what debate is…
So whatever your missing, it sure wasn’t debate.
I will tell you, that when a person is an expert at debate, they LOVE me as an opponent.
Pick a side, any side..
The Bronx Science Speech & Debate Team – History was made in 2009 when the Bronx High School of Science Speech and Debate Team, one of the most historically prominent and successful forensics programs in the country made history by becoming the first program ever to win both Lincoln-Douglas debate and policy debate at the Harvard National Invitational.
but that’s ok.. we also beat your school in fields medals, Pulitzers and (EARNED) Nobel prizes.
Each year, more than 25,000 eighth graders in New York City take the Specialized High School Admissions Test (containing both math and verbal questions) to gain entrance to one of the city’s Specialized High Schools. The cut-off score required for admission to each of the eight specialized testing high schools varies from year to year depending upon seat availability. Less than 4% of the applicant pool is accepted to Bronx Science. The result is a student community characterized by cultural, ethnic, and economic diversity bound together by intellectual curiosity and talent.
I was doing college level work in grade school Mitsu.
and to others that don’t believe I do all I do, this might explain a lot of it.
Let me just point out some alumni achievements..
(and I am not dead yet… I am currently doing some interesting stuff with a genetics professor and stem cell research… but that’s my hobby, not my job)
Seven Nobel Laureates in Physics, more than any other secondary school in the nation:
– Ray G. Glauber ’41, 2005
– Leon N. Cooper ’47, 1972
– Melvin Schwartz ’49, 1988
– Sheldon L. Glashow ’50, 1979
– Steven Weinberg ’50, 1979
– Russell A. Hulse ’66, 1993
– H. David Politzer ’66, 2004
Six individual Pulitzer Prize winners:
– William Safire ’47, author and columnist at The New York Times
– Joseph Lelyveld ’54, Executive Editor (1994-2001, 2003) at The New York Times
– William Taubman ’58, Professor at Amherst
– Bernard L. Stein ’59, Editor of the Riverdale Press
– William Sherman ’63, Reporter at the New York Daily News
– Gene Weingarten ’68 at the Washington Post
Seven alumni have won the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest scientific honor bestowed by the U.S. President:
– Charles Yanofsky ’42 (2003), Prof. of Biology, Stanford
– Bruce N. Ames ’46 (1998), Prof. of Biochemistry, UC Berkeley
– Peter M. Goldreich ’56 (1995), Prof. of Astrophysics and Planetary Physics, Cal Tech
– Stuart A. Rice ’49 (1999), Prof. of Chemistry, U. of Chicago
– Steven Weinberg ’50 (1991), Prof. of Physics, U. of Texas at Austin
– Leonard Kleinrock ’51 (2008), UCLA Professor of Computer Science
– Robert J. Lefkowitz ’59 (2008), Duke U. Professor of biochemistry, immunology and medicine
So mitsu… I LOVE a good debate.. an honest debate… etc.
Just ask anyone here..
i might be the only alumni with a Cleo credit. 🙂
I’m glad you have all those great achievements in school, Artfldgr. I’m not sure what that has to do with debate. If you want my childhood achievements… My IQ was measured at 198 by the Stanford-Binet test when I was 5 years old. I tested at the 12th grade level in reading and math when I was in 3rd grade. I won the California State Science Fair Sweepstakes Prize for all grades when I was in 8th grade with an artificial intelligence project using a stochastic evolutionary algorithm on state machines for pattern recognition. I graduated top of my class from Polytechnic School in Pasadena, one of the top prep schools in California.
All of this, as you know, however, is quite irrelevant to any sort of reasoned debate about this or any other subject!
Neo: Well, I hope we can at least TRY to have a reasoned debate. I am 44 years old, too young to remember the 60’s directly. I came of age in the 80’s, and we had fairly reasonable debates back then across party lines. But I’m also thinking of folks like William F. Buckley who had the sort of temperament I associate with civil debate, regardless of the issue.
I dunno, Mitsu. I’m 43, and grew up in a liberal area. There were no real debates with others, IIRC since we were all Dems. When Reagan was shot, we students broke into applause. (I’m ashamed to admit it now, but we were exposed to only one side of the political spectrum.) We were reprimanded, but didn’t care.
I think this time of much more reasoned debate didn’t exist everywhere. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it expect when the sides are equally stacked.
I agree that even then debates across party lines weren’t that common, but they certainly happened quite a lot for me in high school and college, in my experience. And when they did happen, I just think the tone was different (i.e., William F. Buckley vs Glenn Beck.)
Ah Mitsu, William Buckley and civil debate! You are young, aren’t you.
Take a look and a listen. That Golden Age of civility existed only in your imagination (although they do have quite the patrician accents, don’t they?).
[Here’s a transcript, in case it’s hard to hear the audio.]
I believe it was William F. Buckley who said he would rather be governed by the first thousand names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. The state of Alabama is better run than the state of New York or California. All those people in the White House who have never run a business, turned out a product, or been in the military are out of touch with reality. They are destroying America. What is unclear is if that is a bug or a feature.
Actually, I think I can post the Buckley-Vidal video directly here. Let’s see:
Haha, that’s pretty amusing, Neo. But however animated Buckley got there, I watched plenty of Firing Line episodes in which Buckley managed to keep his cool, for the most part. At least more so than with the typical discussions about the “other side” these days.
Mitsu reminds me so much of the “of so bright, sensitive and caring ” who threw eggs on my Class A’s and ruined my ribbons. Yeah, all that caring debate, and the utterly well thought out points, Gosh, thanks for helping me understand all of that . That 198 IQ certainly lets me know who my betters are. I mean, Christ, with that kind of IQ , I could regurgitate all those cool talking points, turn logic on its head and reverse course so fast fast a gyro can’t keep up .
Guess i’ll just have to suck it up and keep making things work in real life . Good luck with the civilized debate from the left .
Well, I may have a high IQ, but I don’t have a Cleo credit. Also, I have no idea what a “Class A” is, or why anyone would throw eggs on one, much less several, but clearly you were traumatized by that incident, and I apologize for bringing back such an awful memory…
You fail in so many areas.
When will you read Hayek? That’s all I care now. You have so much to learn
Mitsu, honey, they’re saying you have a GIGO problem.
You’re not the only bright spark here, either.
I have a lot of people to read, and Hayek isn’t high on my list. However, I have read a fair number of lay articles on Hayek and many other economists. Obviously I agree with his general critique of central planning: planners cannot possibly have enough information to do their jobs accurately. I also understand and roughly agree with his basic idea that price is a signal which, in a distributed environment can lead to efficient distribution of goods and services.
However, Hayek’s views are quite old fashioned these days. There’s so much more to economics than Hayek. For example, there’s a lot of exciting new research into behavioral economics, in which the rather simple notion of the rational consumer and producer is replaced with evidence-based research into the actual psychology of economic participants. In other words, people are not always rational when making economic decisions. Furthermore, the relatively new field of information economics agrees with Hayek that neoclassical economics got it wrong in assuming perfect information; but he assumes that markets act efficiently despite the fact that market participants lack perfect information — but according to information economics this is not correct:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Information.html
Hayek was clearly a brilliant economic thinker but his views have been superseded by newer theories.
It’s somewhat interesting that David Brooks, the moderate conservative columnist for the New York Times, wrote today about this topic:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/opinion/26brooks.html
Anyone who tells people his precise IQ has serious self esteem issues.
Well, at least I didn’t list out all the Nobel Prizes alumni of my school have won.
Mitsu, which part of the Constitution gives Congress the power to require me to buy anything?
One way of thinking of it is that it is similar to a tax, except that you get a tax credit for the full amount of the tax if you buy health insurance. It’s more of a tax incentive system than a “requirement”; you are free not to buy it, but then you don’t get the tax credit.
Oh — and I should also note that the Wyden Amendment allows states to do health care reform in their own way, including not having a tax penalty for not buying insurance, if they can figure out how to cover a similar number of uninsured via their own system.
IRA Darth Aggie asks the question of the day. Can the Feds tell you you have to buy something? If the cattle industry were on the ropes, could the government force everyone to buy 5 pounds of ground beef every week and demand quarterly receipts be sent to the IRS? If the answer is yes, there is no economic activity by individuals that would be beyond federal government reach.
I’m surprized folks know what their IQ is.
I have no clue what mine is and don’t care.
I’ve experianced many “smart fools” in my life time.
All I know is this HCR ain’t honest along with most of the .Gov.
The truth shall prevail. It always does.