Check Out Our Shop
Page 2 of 2 FirstFirst 1 2
Results 26 to 45 of 45

Thread: State vs. federal power and its effect on liberalism vs. conservativism

  1. #26
    Join Date
    Sep 2001
    Location
    Alco-Hall of Fame
    Posts
    2,997
    Quote Originally Posted by Telenater View Post
    Actually, I know a little bit about fire ecology and barring that this is a significant generalization, I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with his statement.
    I think we've been over this before but:

    1. Native Americans were not engaged in setting fire to the giant western pine forests being discussed here.

    2. Generalizations regarding the so-called fuel load/understory problem are just that: generalizations. Generalizations that in fact apply only to very specific types of forests.

    3. I'm not gonna let the 100 yr number stand either, I'll give 50 or 60 years where humans have been arguably effective at controlling fires. Even then I doubt it's impact is as stated even sort of as great. This ties in with #2 as well. 50-60 years isn't that big a deal in a forest "designed" to burn every 150-200yrs (or more).

    4. Logging is not in and of itself better than burning.

    5. Beetle kills cannot be stopped by logging (save for logging everything), drought is what kills these trees in a beetle infestation. Selectively thinning the great western pine forests is an unpossible task. And again, logging is not in and of itself better than letting the beetles do their thing.

    I could go on but I won't. Regardless, none of that is to say that I'm against all logging (I'm not) or that I'm against forest fires (I'm not).
    "It is not the result that counts! It is not the result but the spirit! Not what - but how. Not what has been attained - but at what price.
    - A. Solzhenitsyn

  2. #27
    Join Date
    Sep 2001
    Location
    Alco-Hall of Fame
    Posts
    2,997
    All of which has absolutely nothing really to do with the fact that libertarianism as conceived in this country is a raw deal
    "It is not the result that counts! It is not the result but the spirit! Not what - but how. Not what has been attained - but at what price.
    - A. Solzhenitsyn

  3. #28
    Join Date
    Apr 2002
    Location
    Gare du Lyon
    Posts
    4,896
    Just like steadman getting all of Oprah.

    I'm going to start a protest.

  4. #29
    Hugh Conway Guest
    Quote Originally Posted by Odin View Post
    Just like steadman getting all of Oprah.

    I'm going to start a protest.
    I've already engaged Steven S. Dallas, ESQ to litigate for her liver.

  5. #30
    Join Date
    Dec 2003
    Location
    funland
    Posts
    5,255
    Wildland fire use > logging. let it all burn

  6. #31
    Join Date
    Sep 2001
    Location
    Babylon
    Posts
    13,832
    could all you tailgunning humerlous fucks get out of the way ad let Uncle Crud & spats debate this issue.
    Knowing both these gentlemen and thinking highly of their minds if not always their ideas I would be really interested in this give and take on an issue that intrigues me.

  7. #32
    Join Date
    Apr 2002
    Location
    Gare du Lyon
    Posts
    4,896
    No love for oprah? She has viewpoints.............

    Naked Ones.

  8. #33
    Join Date
    May 2002
    Location
    Warm, Flat and Dry
    Posts
    3,307
    Quote Originally Posted by lemon boy View Post
    I think we've been over this before but:

    1. Native Americans were not engaged in setting fire to the giant western pine forests being discussed here.
    That is very regional, but in most locations that I've read about, the Native Americans did set small fires.

    Quote Originally Posted by lemon boy View Post
    2. Generalizations regarding the so-called fuel load/understory problem are just that: generalizations. Generalizations that in fact apply only to very specific types of forests.

    3. I'm not gonna let the 100 yr number stand either, I'll give 50 or 60 years where humans have been arguably effective at controlling fires. Even then I doubt it's impact is as stated even sort of as great. This ties in with #2 as well. 50-60 years isn't that big a deal in a forest "designed" to burn every 150-200yrs (or more).
    Your 150-200 year range is much longer than the accepted fire return intervals for much of the western conifer forests. Ponderosa Pine forests had very frequent low intensity fires 2-12 years. And the northern Rockies had a much greater variety cited in several literature sources as 25-250 years (yes an order of magnitude change), but that there were significant microclimates that burned at the lower end of that range.
    "if the city is visibly one of humankind's greatest achievements, its uncontrolled evolution also can lead to desecration of both nature and the human spirit."
    -- Melvin G. Marcus 1979

  9. #34
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Location
    in ewe
    Posts
    1,285
    The fact that you keep using this phrase "western pine forests" tells me you have no idea what your talking about Lemon Bitch.

  10. #35
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Location
    in ewe
    Posts
    1,285
    Bark Beetle infestations can be stopped, by helping our forests get healthier. Healthy forests and trees are resistant.

  11. #36
    Join Date
    Oct 2007
    Location
    State of Disbelief
    Posts
    602
    I thought the pine beetle infestation was due to the fact the trees need a couple of weeks of continuous very cold temps to kill off the bug. Which we haven't had for many years.

  12. #37
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    Summit County
    Posts
    5,055
    Quote Originally Posted by Spats View Post
    I posted most of this at the end of one of the Ron Paul threads, but I think it deserves its own discussion.

    The current progressive dogma is that a "strong federal government" benefits left-wing policies, whereas a weak federal government benefits right-wing policies. This is a misapprehension based on the abuse of the term "state's rights" by the neo-cons, by which they mean "states can do anything we like but not anything we don't like". What would happen if the power of the federal government were restricted to its Constitutionally mandated powers? (See Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.)

    First, decreasing the power of our national government does not mean government magically goes away. There is a reason our country is called the "United States": in the Constitutional vision of government which Ron Paul espouses, the states have equal or greater power to govern themselves than our national government currently asserts. (Read on for the surprising yet common-sense result.)

    We currently think of state government as a weak entity somehow inferior in power to national government: this is because the national government takes and redistributes so much money in taxes, and asserts so much regulatory power, that it doesn't leave much room for states to make meaningful policy decisions. (This is a recent development. The 16th Amendment did not pass until 1913, and most of the government regulatory agencies we think of as eternal were created since WWII.) A less powerful federal government would leave the states to take up the slack, or not, as each saw fit.

    So how will stronger state vs. national government affect us as residents of one of the United States?

    Current national policy is not representative of our people, because the Senate does not represent population equally. 36,457,000 liberals in California get the same Senate representation as 515,000 conservatives in Wyoming. Blue New York (19,306,000) gets the same representation as Red Montana (944,000). Blue Illinois (12,831,000) gets the same representation as Red Alaska (670,000). States with high populations, whose people are massively underrepresented in the Senate, are mostly Democratic. States with low populations, whose people are massively overrepresented in the Senate, are mostly Republican.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._by_population

    Because of this, it's easy to see that the right-wing mountain and agricultural states influence national policy far disproportionate to their tiny population, and that as a result, the federal government has become much more conservative than the average American. (Remember, Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 by a margin of several million.) Therefore, decreasing the power of the Federal government will allow states to, on average, become more liberal in their policies.

    Let's go a bit deeper. States do not receive the same amount of money back from the federal government that their citizens pay in taxes. Here's a chart showing the states that benefit the most (dark blue) and that lose the most (light blue).


    The full report is available here:
    http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/sr139.pdf

    Notice how the dark blue "taker" states are almost all conservative Republican states with low populations? And the light blue "giver" states are almost all liberal Democratic states with high populations?

    Californians, for instance, receive only 79 cents back from each dollar that we pay to the Federal Government. How much would California benefit if we weren't paying 27% of our tax dollars to subsidize red states? We could have statewide health care, high-speed rail all over, and a tax cut besides. Same with New York ($0.79), New Jersey ($0.55), Illinois ($0.73), Minnesota ($0.69), and most of the upper Midwest and East Coast.

    In summary: the federal government is more conservative than the United States population as a whole, and it takes hundreds of billions of dollars each year from liberal states and gives the money to conservative states. Therefore, a weaker Federal Government will strongly benefit liberals and liberal states.

    Progressives: do you still feel so enthusiastic about that "strong Federal government", now that you know how much more power a few public land welfare ranchers in the West have than you do over its policies? Now that you know how much of your federal taxes are simply welfare payments for red states, how smart does more federal power seem? The red states all want to "get that dang gummint off our backs!" Why don't we do just that, and see how they feel about subsidizing their own dams, highways, and grazing and mineral giveaways on public land?
    Are you from Virginia?
    "The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money" --Margaret Thatcher

  13. #38
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    Making the Bowl Great Again
    Posts
    13,817
    Quote Originally Posted by danimal's dead View Post
    The fact that you keep using this phrase "western pine forests" tells me you have no idea what your talking about.
    This is exactly what I was thinking.

    Ponderosa and lodgepole aren't exactly comparable.

  14. #39
    Join Date
    Feb 2003
    Posts
    6,110
    Anyone catch the Nancy Pelosi interview on NPR today?

    On *every single issue* her reply was "Well, we tried to get out of Iraq/fix tax loopholes/tighten pollution standards/etc., but we didn't have the votes to get past a Senate filibuster, so nothing happened." I think that proves the first part of my case very eloquently.

    I'm staying out of the forestry argument

    SSD: "A Jeffersonian Republican I am not, I guess." That's actually a legitimate difference of opinion. I would argue, though, that the Constitution is strongly Jeffersonian and that if we want it to be otherwise, we need to pass quite a few amendments instead of simply pretending that everything is somehow a function of interstate commerce.

  15. #40
    Join Date
    Feb 2003
    Posts
    6,110
    Quote Originally Posted by uncle crud View Post
    With these things in mind, Spats, I find that study you reference to be nothing more than ideologically driven conjecture. It makes for an interesting start point in conversation, but I'll be damned if I'd find it convincing or conclusive on anything but matters of opinion.
    I fail to see how tables of government expenditures and tax receipts taken from official government documents are either a "matter of opinion" or "ideologically driven conjecture", or how factless opinions constitute a rebuttal to them.

    Quote Originally Posted by uncle crud View Post
    I'd also suggest that you might want to examine what Ron Paul truly represents before you stump so heavily for someone who is so poorly qualified to lead anything other than a failing obstetric medical practice.
    Please enlighten me, then. All the counterarguments I've seen so far have either been 1) factually, demonstrably false (see: Cliff Huckable, likwid) or 2) dark intimations, such as yours, of the form "I have discovered a truly wonderful proof of this statement which this margin is unfortunately too small to contain."

    Also, you need to either document or retract your statement that his medical practice failed. (He has continued to deliver babies even while serving in the House, which, coupled with the fact that he's delivered over 4000 babies in his career, are pretty solid arguments against your charge.) This is the sort of sneaky attack the Republicans perfected over the last few elections: start a really bad false rumor by mentioning it in passing, as if it's a fact that everyone already knows. I'm not letting you sneak that sort of bullshit through the gate.

  16. #41
    Join Date
    Jan 2006
    Location
    France
    Posts
    3,440
    I really wonder why Spats would want Paul to run the White house.
    I heard he's a failed obstetrician.
    "Typically euro, french in particular, in my opinion. It's the same skiing or climbing there. They are completely unfazed by their own assholeness. Like it's normal." - srsosbso

  17. #42
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    Summit County
    Posts
    5,055
    Quote Originally Posted by Spats View Post
    Anyone catch the Nancy Pelosi interview on NPR today?

    On *every single issue* her reply was "Well, we tried to get out of Iraq/fix tax loopholes/tighten pollution standards/etc., but we didn't have the votes to get past a Senate filibuster, so nothing happened." I think that proves the first part of my case very eloquently.
    that doesn't prove anything. Democrats can and have employed the same tactics.

    what she is doing is called "punting" or "passing the buck". oddly I didn't hear you bring up your problems with how our senators are elected when Tom Delay was complaining of democrat filibusters when the republicans were trying to confirm judges.
    "The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money" --Margaret Thatcher

  18. #43
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Location
    Stuck in perpetual Meh
    Posts
    35,244
    Dude - Spats joined your team while you were away.

  19. #44
    Join Date
    Feb 2003
    Posts
    6,110
    Quote Originally Posted by Tippster View Post
    Dude - Spats joined your team while you were away.
    Don't get his hopes up. I would vote for the reanimated corpse of Josef Mengele before I would vote for Giuliani, Huckabee, or any of the other Republicans in the field.

    If Ron Paul doesn't get the nomination I will hold my nose and use a rubber glove to push the button for whomever the Democrats nominate, because at least it'll give me a few more years before our country completely collapses, financially and socially.

  20. #45
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    Summit County
    Posts
    5,055
    Quote Originally Posted by Spats View Post
    Don't get his hopes up. I would vote for the reanimated corpse of Josef Mengele before I would vote for Giuliani, Huckabee, or any of the other Republicans in the field.

    If Ron Paul doesn't get the nomination I will hold my nose and use a rubber glove to push the button for whomever the Democrats nominate, because at least it'll give me a few more years before our country completely collapses, financially and socially.
    atleast you won't have to change your hair for the post apocalyptic US.
    "The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money" --Margaret Thatcher

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •