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Originally Posted by Todd
Taxes now consume 42% of our wealth and forcibly buy a multitude of failing programs.
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Taxes aren't the sole domain of liberals. It's true that liberals are bigger on taxation than conservatives. But both are in favor of expanding the government's control. They disagree on what they want the government to control, but they both want to expand it. And that costs money.
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Originally Posted by Todd
Please don't be so emotional.
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And you call Bush fascist, and yet Clinton bombed several other countries while he was in power without asking congress or the U.N. by using his so-called emergency powers.
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Well, I wasn't trying to be emotional. But I like to think I can recognize where certain ideas fall on the political spectrum. I don't think that Bush is a fascist. I don't think that the government is fascist. But the neoconservative movement which is fueling much of Bush's decisions is an ideology that is almost indistinguishable from fascism. And last time I checked fascism was on the extreme right end of the political spectrum. I don't want to make any kind of value judgment about that. I'm just saying it's very conservative.
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Originally Posted by Todd
Conservatives have the right principles
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I'm for both social and economic freedom.
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Okay, you kind of lost me there. One of the cornerstones of conservative belief is social control. How can you be in favor of social freedom and think conservatives have the right idea?
But I agree that both sides can be dangerous. I think that's why I usually tend to sound like a conservative whenever there's a Democrat in office and sound like a liberal whenever there's a Republican in office. I think it's good to have both sides fighting each other. It balances things out. Doesn't work if you just have a bunch of people in the center like during the Clinton years. Then they just take away social AND economic freedom. You need those two opposed points of view. That's probably my biggest concern about the government currently. The Republicans have a little too much power for my comfort.
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Originally Posted by Todd
When an anthropologist lives with their subjects, they behave differently from how they normally would. Anthropologists themselves are quick to point that out. But the most important factor is that no matter how exhaustive their research, they can only a tiny fraction of a percent of what there is to learn. Science is based on facts, measurements, observations, and strict evidence thereof. No anthropologist can conclude scientifically that murder almost never occurs in a certain culture, especially when those cultures don't even have the means to record such facts themselves. Even if there are thousands of studies, it only exposes a glimpse of everything there is to know.
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Anthropology isn't like any other science. It's not like you can take a society and stick it in a lab. You have to actually go there and watch how they live. That means living with the people. Does it have problems? Sure. No method is perfect, even in the hard sciences. But it works. People might not act exactly the same around an anthropologist, but it's not like they're going to change their entire society on his/her account either. Besides, one of the points of living among the people for so long is to become a part of the society so that people don't act different around you.
Yes, there's plenty we still don't know. But we do have enough data about these societies to know about things like the murder rates.
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