Empirical evidence driven political policy would be quite refreshing!

I remember in H.S History something about the seperation of church and state..now I could be wrong because history was after lunch and well I wasn't always 100% after lunch (haha) but as I grew up I kept hearing this phrase...but if America was founded on the seperation of church and state and if America was founded to get the hell away from European dictatorship and religion then why in sam hell are we still pulling laws from the bible?? And wha gets me is the selectivity of it all...we shall pull the Marriage Equlaity from the bible or laws such as te one stated in the previose posts....but when it comes to people that break laws lets just house them and pay their way...screw the fact that the bible says an eye for an eye...
I'm an all or nuthin gal...don't tell me I have to live with Jesus's followers and thei idealistic country based on religiouse beliefes and then tell me I cant shoot someone who killed one of my family members...
On the island where I grew up thats what happens..we don't have jails or overcrowding...if you kill someone we kill you back...if you rob someone you then have to support that family for 10 years.
Polotics is a bunch of shananagans(sp?) and a crap ton of lies...I hate it! and yes I vote!

Hmmm...I'm not sure that we want to return to a society wherein if you shoot a member of my family, I kill a member of your family. In the Balkans there are interfamilial feuds that have been going on so long that there is no longer a single person alive who has even ever met the originally aggrieved party. Someone's distant ancestor did something to someone back in the early 18th century whose family took their vengeance. The family of the perpetrator, though, felt that their family member was justified so they took their vengeance. This continues on until such time as we get to, say, WW I where atrocities were spread around quite liberally. Two decades later people are still getting their revenge during WW II. Then the Cold War happens and things get squashed until the Soviet Union collapses at which point Bosnians, Serbs and Croats take up their historical feuds again. This latest round of atrocities are just fuel for the next group of feuds. As one British biologist put it "The human mind has two great sicknesses; the tendency to carry vendetta across generations and to view people as groups and not individuals". As convoluted as our system of laws may appear to be I'll take that over the system where feuds and dueling were considered reasonable ways to resolve disputes.

I'm curious, what would you replace politics with? Given that we are very diverse societies where your enlightened self-interest may not be in complete agreement with my enlightened self-interest, what other system other than politics do you suggest?

I think our problem is as deep if not deeper than you state. We have a stone age brain, using a set of moral precepts created in the early agrarian period, to handle problems of modern societies. I was thinking about your post on my drive to work this morning while listening to a chapter of a book where the author was talking about worldwide demographic changes brought on by technology. What follows is dove-tailing off of both.

Take a look at our sexual mores. There is no more poignant example of the mismatch between our biology, our religiously based moral and ethical systems and modern reality. Our bodies are operating off a program where we enter puberty around 13 or 14 on the expectation that we'll become sexually active and start having babies. For all but the last 100 years that program has worked very well. Our moral systems, conceived when agriculture was relatively new and birth control was, at best, inconsistently effective, assume that people will only be sexual inside of marriage, that women will have lots of children and spend most of their lives taking care of those children, that men will control property and resources and relationships will only end because of death. Yet the lives of most of the people reading this thread have not fit that pattern and for those of us who have kids or grandchildren it is vanishingly improbable that our offspring or descendants will have lives that approximate that pattern. From gay marriage--which makes perfect moral sense in our current moral context where any *necessary* link between sex, marriage and reproduction has been broken--to our laws about abortion or birth control what is taken as the default moral position is horribly out of date. The average age of marriage in the industrialized world is now creeping up toward thirty but people are still entering puberty around 12 - 14. It is simply unrealistic that people are going to spend the next two decades being celibate, it isn't happening for vast majorities of people. Nor does it make sense for two 20 year olds who are both undergraduates to start having children until both of them have *at least* gotten a bachelor's if not an advanced degree. We need to retool our laws and moral expectations to reflect reality. The problem is that we can only do this with a stone-aged brain that will tend to be more in agreement with our Bronze Age religious systems than with our modern lifestyles.

Cheers
Aj

It's bizarre. I understand that politicians speak in generalities but this has gotten elevated to something creepy. It's not quite as bad as what's below but I'm not really stretching things too badly:

Moderator: So, Ms GOP candidate, do you think that hospitals should be able to turn away the same-sex partner of a patient because that doctor or nurse doesn't consider them family?

GOP candidate: I believe in strengthening the traditional family which is a man and a woman.

Moderator: What specific proposals do you have for ameliorating the trouble in the housing market?

GOP candidate: We don't need government in the housing business. If we let the free market drive the housing business then it will work out the best solution.

Moderator: Do you support non-discrimination laws in housing or employment?

GOP candidate: I believe that the free market will reward companies that behave well and punish companies that behave badly.

Moderator: Are there any military bases you would close or weapon systems you would like to see the Pentagon not purchase?

GOP candidate: America is free because we have the best and strongest military in the world. I support our troops.

Moderator: Are there any non-military functions you think the government should be involved in?

GOP candidate: Throughout American history we've seen that we do best when we embrace free market principles.

Moderator: What place do you think religion should have on public policy and law?

GOP candidate: America was founded as a Christian nation and our rights come from God.

Now, is there anything above that you think is too over-the-top to come out of the mouth of some GOP pol when asked one of those questions? I took some of those answers, nearly verbatim, from the GOP presidential debate last night. Those answers are empty. They are mantras not responses. One would not be stretching the matter too much if you were to imagine a GOP call and response chorus

"Jobs?" "Free market!" "Pollution?" "Free market!" You get the idea. The GOP has become a party of theology. By that I mean that they have completely divorced their ideology from the real world. It simply does not *matter* what the empirical facts are any longer. All that matters is that they believe it to be true and that is enough for them. Anyone who does not believe is an infidel.

Cheers
Aj

Actually, Jesus didn't say "an eye for an eye" that was in the OLD testament. In the New Testament that old law was removed and was replaced with:

""You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also"
Matthew 5:38-29

I have no idea what island you grew up on (I can't tell if that was a metaphor or not?) but it doesn't sound like somewhere that I would want to be, if you really do get to just run around killing people for doing you wrong.

Revenge sucks.

(Also - overcrowding in prisons has NOTHING to do with not getting to just willy-nilly kill all the bad guys. It's got everything to do with a fucked up legal system that locks people up for stupid shit (drugs, really?) and locks some (not white) people up faster and for longer than others.)

well here's a funny thing........read the whole article just for fun...the article is dated May 23, 2011

http://www.thecalifornian.com/articl...ates-by-33-000


The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that California must drastically reduce its prison population to relieve severe overcrowding that has exposed inmates to increased violence, disease and death.

The decision, however, doesn't mean the prison gates will swing open in an uncontrolled release.

The high court's 5-4 decision calls on the state to cut the population to no more than 110,000 inmates. To get there, state officials have two years to either transfer some 33,000 inmates to other jails or release them. California has already been preparing for the ruling, driven as much by persistent multibillion-dollar budget deficits as by fears for the well-being of prison inmates and employees. The state has sent inmates to other states. It plans to transfer jurisdiction over others to counties, though the state doesn't have the money to do it. <snip>

Ike always said beware the military-industrial complex. It has become the prison/military/industrial complex.

I also wanted to add that the prison system is a HUGE money maker for some people. So long as there are for-profit privately run/owned prisons there will -always- be overcrowding and people locked up for no good reason.

Whenever I hear someone talking about how much better it would be if we just shucked the messy legal system (with its rights of the accused, etc.) in favor of a more ad hoc and informal system (read vendetta) I am always brought back to a familial story on my mom's side of the family. One of her brothers had up close and personal experience of this kind of 'justice'. To put it bluntly my uncle was lynched for bumping into a white woman in small town Alabama in the 1920s. From the point of view of the people in the town at the time, my uncle had 'done something' to this white woman and he had to pay for his life. There was no trial, he was not 'charged', he ran home and later on some people came to my grandfather's farm, surrounded it and threatened to put the house to the torch if he did not give up his son. Here was 'justice' as done by people who get to determine when a crime had been committed and what punishment there should be for that crime.

Now, some might argue that this isn't what they mean when they talk about frontier 'justice' but it is rarely said what is actually meant. Since the whole idea behind the ethic of taking an eye for an eye is that there are no *laws* to be obeyed there is nothing to prevent some family from deciding that, for instance, the Hispanic family next door *must* be criminals and therefore burning them out of their home. Another objection might be raised that my family could have taken revenge on the people who lynched my uncle. However, that would only have meant the absolute obliteration of my mother's family. So a world of ad hoc 'justice' is a world that favors the powerful over the powerless and defines powerful as whoever can have the most guns still held by people with breath at the end of the day. Justice, then, becomes 'whoever won the gunfight'. It reminds me, a bit, of the story of Kaiser Soze in 'The Usual Supects'. After his family is murdered, Soze kills the perpetrators and then goes after the families of the perpetrators, people who live in the same neighborhood as the perpetrators, people who owe the perpetrators money, etc. This leaves no one to take revenge against Soze.

You make a great point. So why on Earth would I, a black woman, defend the criminal justice system over a system of vendetta-based 'justice'? Because legal systems have rules--I understand that we're supposed to find those rules distasteful because it gets in the way of engaging in emotionally cathartic but cruel behavior--we can't torture people and we can't just shoot people without trial--but *at least* those rules offer up the prospect of fairness and redemption. For all its flaws, if reasonable doubt can be established in my trial then I go free. Even if I was mistakenly convicted, if new evidence comes to light then I will be exonerated. I won't get my years of incarceration back but if I'm dead I can't even be exonerated. It is also demonstrably the case that the *sole* reason for prison overcrowding is the inconsistent application of drug laws in our absolutely insanely stupid 'war on drugs'. When the only other countries that are in the same neighborhood as you when it comes to locking up prisoners (and I don't mean absolute numbers, I'm talking about percentages) are nations that are either totalitarian dictatorships (China) or theocratic dictatorships (Iran) you *know* you are doing something seriously wrong.

Cheers
Aj

There is some huge ass number of folks in CA prisons and jails who have been convicted on non-violent drug offenses (many of them male POC). How about, they ALL get to go free and we end the stupid fucking 'war on drugs'.

That would be a good start. You know what drives me to distraction about this ill-conceived policy? We've seen this movie. We *know* it doesn't work. It was called Prohibition. There is absolutely no reason to make narcotics illegal. There is no more logic behind it than there was making booze illegal. But it certainly 'feels' good in that it makes us believe we're doing 'something'.

What's even more disturbing is that this undermines our criminal justice system in a very profound manner. Think about the differential fates of the following people:

1) Young middle-class black woman gets caught with a pipe and a quarter ounce of green bud. She is going to go to jail, possibly prison for a few years.

2) Young, upper-middle class white woman gets caught with an eight-ball of coke. She gets community service and maybe rehab.

3) Young, poor black man gets caught with three or four rocks of crack cocaine. He's going to prison for a decade.

4) Young, upper-class white man does a sophisticated three-card monty game on the stock market, brings three or four companies to their knees, causing a couple of thousand people to be thrown out of work, ten percent of those folks lose their homes. He winds up a hero with his face on the cover of Business Week and a billion dollar bonus in his pocket.

Do those fates--and it is very difficult to argue that this sketch isn't realistic--seem reasonable to anyone here given the magnitude of effects these actions have in the real world?

I would argue that, in fact, the severity of punishment should be almost precisely the *opposite* of what you see above. The stock market con artist should be looking at spending most of the rest of his natural days behind bars, the middle two drug offenders should be given the option of rehab if they have a problem and otherwise let go and the first person should never even find her day disturbed by the police at all.

Cheers
Aj

I wish I could remember who said this, because it was the most sensible one-line argument against the "war on drugs" I've ever read.

Why do they feel they have the moral high ground? All they’ve done is make bad people rich. (Talking about supporters of the war on drugs)

Thank you. The number of non-violent offenders in prison nationwide who are there purely for drug offenses is insane.

As a society it would be far cheaper (not to mention more humane and sensible) to provide rehab services.

Prisons are big business...big, profitable business. That's scary.

Hey, AtLast! :-)
 

Two quick things to clarify...unless there has been an update to this information (which there certainly could have been):

1) Weiner did not say what he was going to treatment for and I don't believe that he has claimed sexual addiction.

2) The 17 year old was from Delaware and supposedly told "authorities" (whatever that means) that she did have contact with Weiner, but that he did not say anything inappropriate (meaning, sexual) to her at any time.

Did anyone hear anything different from the above today (don't want to give misinformation)?

There is some assumption that if you are in jail for drugs, you are a drug addict. I do not buy it. Not everyone who does legal or illegal drugs is addicted or needs rehab.

I am a believer that ALL drugs be made legal. Yep...legal heroin, coke, crack, other white powder and smoke. Regulated, taxed and safe ways to get safe product. It's a frigging waste of money and time and resources to keep them illegal.

It'd be safer for the people who are using the drugs -and- for everybody else if it were legal.

Seriously. Splash out a zillion safe-injection sites and watch the HIV rates drop. And the death rate. And the fucked up forever rate.

I fail to see how saying we should provide rehab services implies in any way that everyone who uses drugs is an addict. Providing does not equal requiring....it simply means making them available to those who need them, yes?

Yes, infidels, every one!

What you speak to in terms of mantras and empty GOP cheerleading resonates with me. I see it with the Dems at times during elections as well and it just plain angers me. Say something often enough, it gains truth status- even in the face of solid research data that refutes it. This is the dumbing-down of the general voting public rhetoric within politics today that leaves me seething.

Believing that the free market system will self-correct to the benefit of anyone that is not wealthy is just plain false. In fact, this very free market system is at the root of our economic strife right now for the general US population. And the very people that shout out the perils of government regulation and size live totally outside of the same reality of middle, lower-middle and working class people.

I can struggle internally about some of government restrictions on small business- and I am talking about real small businesses- not S status businesses that make tens of millions of dollars in profit each year and enjoy tax exemptions that if applied to median income people would make a very big difference to them. Some regulation does get in the way of small businesses being able to keep their work force employed- but the big, multi-national S corps making record profits in the billions are withholding job creation in the private sector and are the ones that profit by relocation in other countries. Franchisees like, your local Ace hardware, for example, do have a hell of a time staying afloat these days in paying an inordinate amount of taxes as compared to giants of industry like Shell Oil, etc.

The free market system benefits a very small group of elite corporations at the top- not the businesses most of us interact with in our everyday lives.

But, I digress.. yes, the mantras prevail and for the life of me, I did not see one thinking human being on that stage Monday night that had a substantive proposal to actually create more jobs that the US can look foreword to having in the future in a very different time than post-WWII. What worked economically then, will not now and we have to face this truth.

Without keeping talent that gets educated in the US only to return to another country due to our insane immigration/citizenship policies along with accepting that science and technology is the present and future economic road to advancement- we are not going to get out of this economic rut. Our educational system is very broken and we are the laughing stock of the world in terms of this. We can't allow mediocrity to prevail in our schools- we do need the best and the brightest teaching in our schools which means much higher standards and pay for our educators. And this is going to take much more in early childhood education bolstered with quality supports for at risk kids. Trying to change things later in schools is just stupid- start from pre-school ages (the least respected and paid educators in the US). And we need to face the fact that not every kid is “college material” and there is nothing wrong with this- but build trade education and apprenticeship programs up.

When are we going to call out the mantra cult-like state of our politicians and say ENOUGH? I don't believe this will change, however, until or unless we have publically funded election systems and stop all private contributions. Silly me. I can’t help but think about what the billions of dollars spent on elections in the US could mean for building a state of the art educational system that actually is equal in opportunity and addresses the skills and potential contributions of all children. I know, I’m a dreamer.

I can not believe that F++++++ Anthony Weiner resigned!!!

I can not believe that the F++++++ Democrats pushed him to resign!!!

One of the strongest liberals in Congressed has been forced to lay down his cudgel and go home.

Seems I remember when Democrats were liberals. What the f+++ happened?

So now the f++++++ Republicans have yet another weapons to use against the Democrats. Amazing how those family values a+++++++ hold other people to higher moral standard than they hold themselves.

S+++!!!

Can you tell I'm upset?

Smooches,
Keri

I love how I can sit here and read so many different posts written so many different way and a lot of them say the same thing. Politics is a twisted game. I cant remember a single time when I remember hearing the truth...the first time around...It's always Oh I diddnt do it then...oh yea I did! It cracks me up. As far as republicans and democrats and liberals and the tea party (wich just the name cracks me up) they all have one common goal and thats their own agendas! Gay rights, abortion, the markets, the economy these are all touchy subjects, I think they just try to find the touchiest of them all, wich seems to be sexting latly, find the biggest affected crowd and then side with them! It's like a sick cat and mouse game...under what egg will the attention fall today?
Prisions are overcrowded, hell yes they are...rehab services?? I have known a lot of people that went to rehab and well they diddnt turn out so great!
My idea..in all my infinite wisdom...PUT THEM TO WORK!
give them tents and stick them someplace where there is work to be done! build something, clear something hell for once in your life do something that the tax payers are paying for anyways!
I love that guy in AZ that stuck them all in pink and made them work for a living!
I'm just sayin!