Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] [POLITICS] Cindy Sheehan on Bill Kristol

[Rick <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Replies in-line...

On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 19:42 -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
> This isn't about class warfare, it's about the cost/benefit analysis and 
> who makes the call.  Is it worth 5,000 American soldiers lives to obtain 
> the situation we have obtained in Iraq?  If you don't know any American 
> soldiers, you might say "sure," but would you want the 5,000 people to die 
> if they represented everyone from your high school, all of your relatives, 
> all of your friends and a few thousand more people you've met or admired? 
> I doubt it.  Should we give up the life of one person to save the lives of 
> 1,000 others?  Suppose you were allowed to make that call, but suppose the 
> one person was you, or your son, or your dad.

Yes, that is the very idea of a "military". 

> My point is just that you make very different life/death decisions when 
> the lives and deaths are of people you care about.

So, for example, you are a weak but important (e.g., Stephen Hawking)
scientist and have a bodyguard. You have this bodyguard for many years
and become very close. A crazy person attacks you, should you push the
bodyguard out of the way to disable the crazy person yourself? Or let
the well trained bodyguard handle them?

> If I vote against my own interests, I think that automatically implies a 
> certain level of honesty and genuineness and a commitment to an ideal.  I 
> am really not rich.  I figured out the other day that if I could continue 
> to make exactly the same salary in dollars and save every penny of my 
> income before taxes, but with no interest earnings, and continue to do so 
> for 1,000,000 (one million) years, I would be only about 70,000 years away 
> from having the amount of money that Bill Gates is said to be worth today. 
> I am very concerned about billionaires and the power they wield.  Same for 
> people worth more than $10 million.  Economically speaking, I'm a total 
> nobody.  Professors are not rich, believe me.
> 

Are you sure you're not considering a career switch to politics? This is
perhaps the heaviest load of double speak and false assumption that I've
seen from you in some time.

"If I vote against my own interests, I think that automatically implies
a certain level of honesty and genuineness and a commitment to an ideal"
Are you kidding? So, if I throw you a bone on one side, I can kick you
in the face from the other?

Secondly, a comparison betwixt yourself and Bill Gates is irrelevant. If
you chose to make a billion dollars and completely disregarded any other
goal (be a decent person, etc...), could you do it? I'm willing to bet,
that if you really put your mind to that one goal to the exclusion of
all others, you could. Would you want to live with yourself afterward?
Unlikely...

> Mike

-- 
Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than
it will get in practice. 
George Orwell


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