I have no gaydar. There are people in HS I thought were gay that I later found out were as straight as you can be. I've given up guessing and just assume everyone is either staight, or I wouldn't stand a chance with anyway.
I'm not that great at making new friends, male or female. Most of my current friends are people I met through theatre in HS. I'm friendly with most of the people I work with, but we've never hung out outside of work. And I'm not a real "party animal" so I don't go to many event where I would meet new people, most again are just groups of people I know from HS. I live a sad social life.
We appear to have been separated at birth. You're a theater person too? Admittedly, my gaydar isn't that bad, but I make up for it by falling hopelessly in love with people who are a)completely incompatible with me in most ways that matter and b)hopelessly straight, and homophobic to boot. Actually, it's less "people" and more "a person," but nevertheless it causes severe amounts of emo.
@TywinLannister: Well, a common interest does wonders for any conversation, be it with guys or girls. Unfortunately all my interests are odd, so not much help there except with geeky people and music nerds. As for being "obvious", I have no idea; I'm not out yet, so I can't exactly do polls on the subject. "Excuse me, sir, but on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do I seem like a giant flaming homo to you?"
Eh, most of my friends are female. Most of them I've known forever, so it works out fine, but there was some awkwardness with one friend of mine who had a crush on me. I was predictably oblivious, even though it should have been obvious.
I really don't understand how to talk to most guys. Geeks I can handle, being one myself, but everyone else is difficult. This would impede my relationship options but for the fact that they have other obstacles.
Perhaps I should wander back in here now that I'm returning to the forum somewhat? I'm fairly sure that I'm lost to history by this point, but I was here once at some point...Anyway, greetings from limbo.
Paying for daycare also works if you want your kids in Daycare, you know. I mean, look at it economically:
Mother/Father stays home raising kid = makes no money
Mother/Father pays some money for daycare, goes to work = probably makes some net amount of money.
And that's a lot more stimulating to the economy than some nationwide Daycare program.
A market model would probably work for everyone except the very poor except for the fact that very little daycare is actually provided by the market. As I said before, it's probably a cultural thing. Perhaps the government could offer some incentives to start private daycares and reap the labor and tax benefits in the long run?
Quote from Ultimate Danny »
I don't mean to be a bigot, but serious feminists are usually half crazy in my experience. That could be because I live in the same city as Code Pink.
Indeed they are, but then every Boomer movement, however useful, has some radical wing that the more sensible adherents try to wish out of existence. They do occasionally have some useful ideas, however.
How about it limits the pay of the people working at the center? Since the government is funding it, they won't be paying the workers very much at all. The economy should work better than the government.
You'd be surprised what government workers can earn for what they do. LAUSD teacher's union members, for example. As I said earlier, it would be better for the service to be private, but a limited program for low-income families in conjunction with general incentives would probably be most equitable overall.
Quote from Ultimate Danny »
It does show. I agree that we, obviously, need policemen, fire departments, District Attorneys, and things like that. They're all taxpayer funded. We don't need free daycare, however.
You may not, no. Other people may have entirely different perspectives.
Oh look - someone's attempting to get us back on topic. I'll just fade out, then...
While we're talking about vietnamization, it might be important to remember that such a program won't work if the general populace has no confidence in their government. That was the essential problem with propping up the South Vietnamese government, and while the level of dissatisfaction in Iraq is less severe overall, it's a lot more complicated. What with the Sunnis and the Kurds, a majority-Shiite government is going to have a lot of trouble keeping the country together even without militants of all stripes and Iran knocking on the door.
Honestly, I wonder why no one's suggested a multi-state strategy. Iraq as a state is a colonial anachronism in any case, and the religious and ethnic conflicts aren't going to help when we try and leave the area to stand. My guess is that the policymakers either see a united Iraq as a bulwark against Iran or, if you want to be cynical, they think that it's easier to negotiate oil contracts with one nation than with two or three. I suppose that the other problem would be that the Sunni-Shiite divisions don't parse geographically like the Kurds do; it'd just be the Balkans or Palestine all over again.
That's what makes this a particularly egregious misquote for some on the extreme left to have seized on. McCain very explicitly qualified his statement as Sutherlands has described. The full quotation's somewhere on this thread...
Well, I'm of the opinion that the withdrawal will end up working out like he wishes anyway, particularly since the Iraqi government has come out in support of it. Although the Democrats are going to be paying later for the "drop everything and leave now" rhetoric of their more extreme adherents. I mean, it's 2008 and they still get slammed about Vietnam.
I do think that whatever presence we leave on Iraqi soil after the main withdrawal is unlikely to be as permanent as the ones in Japan or Korea. Nobody questioned the military and diplomatic necessity of placing them there, and once they were established they just kept on going, even after the end of the Cold War. Leaving any troops in Iraq is going to cause a lot of political hubbub, though, so I'm not sure that the same will apply. Then again, making any guess as to what will happen in the Middle East is uncertain at best.
No, that's why 100-year war is bad. Not just deployment. McCain said that he would be ok with troops being there as long as they're not continuously engaging enemies. So it seems as if you're with McCain on this.
I suppose that I am, if he believes as you say.
Quote from Sutherlands »
Like I said... some laws would need to be kept, but not wanting tons of federal laws does not make someone a racist.
Specify which laws. Would you keep laws against discrimination in hiring, firing, and service? Would you keep laws against hate crimes and hate speech? Laws against voting restrictions? Laws against miscegenation and other marriage restrictions? There's a lot to cover and lot of ground to cover it on if you want to avoid untenable variations in civil rights by geography. Surely a person does not become less free in any way when he or she moves one step over a state boundary.
Quote from Sutherlands »
And?
Well, if you're not willing to accept the existence of real-world concerns in bringing your unregulated utopia into existence, you're going to run into some problems. Democracy, for example.
Quote from Sutherlands »
No. Ron Paul thinks that the federal government is overstepping its bounds according to the Constitution. He says that these powers belong to the states.
Well, to answer whether it is or isn't, I'd have to be a scholar of constitutional law, which I'm not. Generally, though, the judicial branch decides when something is unconstitutional, not the legislative branch or the executive, for that matter. So becoming president isn't going to do Ron Paul much good in rectifying the situation.
Quote from Sutherlands »
I highly doubt that the US would crumble without geographic redistribution of wealth.
Probably not, but the geographic segregation of wealth produces a lot of problems in our country already. The poverty of regions like Appalachia leads to a sense of discontent that, in a more unstable nation, could lead to revolt. More practically, it causes unnecessary misery for the people unlucky enough to have been born in a place with no prospects. The ultimate solution would be economic development, and there's a lot of potential for social entrepreneurship in depressed regions of the US, but the federal social programs do help to soften the blow at least somewhat in the meantime. I'm sure that none of this particularly matters to you, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
But then it wouldn't be a feminist issue; it'd just be an economic issue.
Still an issue, nonetheless - how to help couples become optimally successful even with the time taken by childrearing. This is assuming that society still values both reproduction and the availability of labor towards capitalist ends.
America has its good points but right now the bad points are really standing out.
And they will continue to do so until we all learn that convincing people is so much more effective than shouting abuse at them.
Quote from Sutherlands »
Says who? Even if they were, that's certainly not what McCain wants, or ever said was a good thing.
Well, it's the current situation, which is improving but doing so only slowly, gingerly, and patchily. Seeing as there is unlikely to be a change in this trend, the troops are probably going to have to keep fighting for a while if they stay. You asked why a 100-year deployment is bad, there's your answer.I'm certain that McCain doesn't desire additional battle stress on a bunch of very overstressed people; I was just answering your first question.
Quote from Sutherlands »
I imagine that most, if not all, states today would enact, or already have enacted, many laws that provide for the liberties of local minorities. Perhaps some laws would need to be kept, but certainly not enough that wanting to lower federal government makes someone a racist.
Your first statement depends on forty years' worth of tolerance built up with a great deal of help from federal laws and court rulings. Until Brown vs. Board of Education, most people thought schools would stay segregated forever; who's to say it wouldn't have stayed that way without the federal government forcing them to desegregate from on high? More pointedly, I think that there are quite a few people who would remain unprotected by local law in many places, myself being one of them. Racism is not the only prejudice that can get people hurt. Nor do I think that wanting to reform civil rights laws makes someone a racist; affirmative action could use a long, critical look. But doing so out of a dislike of federal power is, in my opinion, misplaced idealism that could do a lot of harm.
Quote from Sutherlands »
Yes, and I'm sure Ron Paul knows what the ramifications are, too. That doesn't mean it's not the ideal state.
I'd disagree with you there, but it might be simpler to say this: just because something is the ideal state doesn't mean that getting there will be ideal. (The French Revolution, and many others, contain some fascinating object lessons.) And ideals are not made or unmade by their philosophy, but by the effort of trying to reach them. See communism.
Quote from Sutherlands »
And if the US was paying much lower taxes to the federal government, then they'd be able to pay it to the state governments.
First, wouldn't this eliminate the benefits of shedding the programs in the first place? The overall taxes would be much the same, by your reasoning. Second, not all states and tax bases are created equal. I suspect that some states consume quite a bit more tax money than they produce, and whether you like the geographic redistribution that the federal government provides or not, it's what allows the system to work even as clunkily as it does.
Well Japan and Germany both killed our troops unprovoked so yeah pretty obvious why we stayed there. Fact is we went into Iraq on a hunch so staying there for 100 years is stupid.
Really doesn't matter the amount of troop presence he has in mind when he says 100 years. The USA government now seems to enjoy starting wars unprovoked not finishing them.
Lets go into Darfur next its far more off in a worse scenario then Iraq! America World Police!!!!
I'll respond to you before Sutherland can and politely suggest that overexuberant anti-Americanism is one of the reasons that the Democratic Party loses so many elections. I'll also positively declare that these sorts of arguments are never, never fun to listen to and detrimental to your cause.
So, are you saying that Paul and the OT talks of women in a not so highly way but Jesus taught equality for both men and women? I am perfectly fine with this explanation. Jesus was a good man (if he was even a real person), but his apostles twisted his words and teachings if we are to believe what is said in the Bible. The Bible has some pretty harsh things about women in the Bible. One passage that I read said that in the event of war, a man is allowed to take a woman of the defeated country to be his wife, and if she is bad in bed, you will "shave her head and bare her nails" and then throw her out in the streets. That is some harsh things to say, if not barbaric. If this is what we have come to realize, then why do we believe in the Bible, then?
As Blinking Spirit points out, early cultural prejudices got stuck in there. The rape of the wives of the conquered only recently became unfashionable, and unfortunately parts of the Old Testament preserve this lovely practice.
Quote from KurCE »
Then the Bible holds not merit as being absolute truth. If any person who comes by an interprets whatever they want from it and add and change whatever they feel is correct, then how can it be held as truth?
Various fundamentalists have turned around your argument to bash liberal churches for freely interpreting the Bible. In reality, of course, they cherrypick their verses too and favor certain parts of the Bible over others. Really, though, everyone experiences religion differently. I suppose that there's a kernel of philosophic truth in the Bible that means something to everyone who reads it and believes. I'm not going to dispute your argument much, though, since I don't really have an answer myself.
Quote from KurCE »
EDIT: If it is known that there are parts in the Bible that are considered as possibilities for not being "word-for-word dictations from God" and are considered passages that were altered or dramatized, then why have these passages not been purged from the Bible? Do Christians just push that part of the Bible to the back of the minds and never read or preach those passages?
Um, yes? (See fundamentalist churches above.) Really, though, the people who compiled and edited the Bible were as human as you or I, and as defined by cultural prejudices.
EDIT: Thanks to Blinking Spirit for bringing up a metaphor of use. A discerning eye is of immeasurable relevance in the world of the Bible.
Seems to me that the feminists' real problem is, or ought to be, with this sexist expectation, not with the lack of childcare per se.
True, but even if we lived in a fantasy world where men were equally likely to take over child-rearing responsibilities, free daycare would still help them out for the same reasons.
Actually, the Iraqi government asked for a soft timetable; i.e., this is when we're planning on drawing down troops to this level in such-and-such province, provided things don't start to get ****ed up again. It's based on a condition of control achieved by Iraqi forces. So not quite the coup that the left desires.
From what I recall, they've been leaning in the direction of a gradual pullout for a while now. Considering the overall reduction in violence and the large quantities of anti-US sentiment, gradually replacing American-gained security with Iraqi-assured security seems to be the solution that makes the most sense. As for a rapid departure, that's generally en vogue now with quite a few people, left or not. I'm supposedly "the left," and I think a sudden pullout is an awful idea.
Quote from Sutherlands »
This is one of the most ignorant things I think a person can say about McCain. What is bad about having troops in Iraq for 100 years (similar to what we've done in Japan and Germany), and what has McCain said that makes him agree with whatever you think it is that is bad about it?
It's complete partisan propaganda, yes, but that doesn't mean you should take a contrarian stance and say it'd be wonderful. The example of Japan and Germany is entirely different. An army stationed in Iraq would be in a continuous state of battle against various nebulous forces much like it is today, at least for a while yet. In Japan and Germany, all the armies did was temporarily supervise the reconstruction of their postwar states and remain as a standing bulwark against possible Soviet advance.
Quote from Sutherlands »
Well, let's go in order. Please answer these:
1) Why does the federal government need to make laws about race/gender/sexuality and what laws it needs to stop the states from making that aren't already stopped by the US Constitution?
2) Why does wanting to stop social programs make him a nutjob crazy instead of just a Republican?
3) How does he want to strip the government of power and hand it to corporations, instead of handing it to the state governments?
1. Before the government made such laws, life as anything other than a white, protestant, heterosexual male contained a lot of misery and oppression that I suspect you would not want to experience. It still does in many places, too. Our constitution has a bill of rights to safeguard the minority against the tyranny of the majority; civil rights laws are just an extension of this principle that was not expressed in the original Constitution because people didn't talk about such things back then. As for federal laws, we do so because the Northeast et al. can make all the civil rights laws they wish (not that they did, of course, since racism is a many-splendored thing) and still leave millions of southern blacks in misery and racist oppresion. Surely the abrogation of human suffering is worth something. Of course, I'm biased since I'd like not to be crucified on a fence stake, but the point stands.
2. Many, many people depend on those programs to alleviate at least some of the burden of poverty and misery. Clearly they need reform, yes, but most Republicans don't quite reach the levels of small-government mania that he espouses in terms of flat-out eliminating social programs. Have you considered the effect of the rapid destruction of a social safety net that millions of people depend on? Few things can spark a riot these days, but that just might go over the edge.
3. Probably he does want it to go to the states. Many states don't have anywhere near the resources to carry out the programs, though, so quite a bit of the safety net would devolve upon the market, which is to say it would cease to exist.
Quote from Sutherlands »
As for your other comments, the smartest people I know support Ron Paul, so I find your flame to be quite off the mark.
He appeals to many intelligent and well-educated people for two reasons. First, several of his principles are actually quite sound - take farm subsidies, for instance. Second, he has the personal integrity and attractively pure philosophical positions that attract people tired of hypocritical politicians with amorphous positions. Unfortunately, while philosophy is useful for understanding the real world, it is often singularly unhelpful when you try to force the world to its ends.
Don't get me wrong; I don't think he's the monster from Hell that Tuss would make him out to be. Some of his ideas are interesting and perhaps useful, and that idiotic racism argument has already been disproved several times. (A note to fire-breathing lefties: if you want a condemnation to retain its value, don't waste it on people you merely dislike. The conservative pundits have already picked up on this unfortunate tendency and made it part of all their favorite liberal caricatures.) I think that he's a very principled person who merely follows some highly impractical principles.
SCHOOL. Btw, is FREE DAYCARE really at the top of your priority list? Like, if the USA balanced the budget and had a surplus, you'd want free daycare, first and foremost?
And here I thought that half of the problems with schools result from them being forced to act as daycare where none exists rather than, y'know, teaching. You can't exactly put infants in school, in any case. And no, it's not my top priority, just a useful illustrative example.
Quote from Ultimate Danny »
Women have done fine for the past 50 years without Free Daycare - my mother did it, so did yours - why do they need it now?
Try talking to a serious feminist and you'll see how incorrect this can be. The lack of institutional childcare is one of the things that keeps women in the home or at part-time jobs, since they're usually the ones expected to be caring for children. Families with a certain amount of income can avoid this (for example, I had nannies when I was younger since both of my parents work full-time), but that's not necessarily true for lower-income families. There are extreme feminists who believe that the lack of quality free daycare is an intentional effort by the government to force women to stay at home or only take part-time jobs, but I'm more inclined to say it's as much an indication of women's attitudes as an antifeminist bias - not everyone wants to work full-time, after all.
Quote from Ultimate Danny »
Sure it does - but it also takes away incentive to work. Not from the mothers, but from the rich who are getting taxed to pay for the daycare program. THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A GOVERNMENT PROGRAM THAT DOESN'T TAKE AWAY SOME INCENTIVE TO WORK, AS LONG AS IT RUNS ON TAX DOLLARS.
Surely we can realize that the moderate amount of money required for a daycare program, when spread out among millions of wealthy and upper-middle class taxpayers, does not so abrogate their incentive to work that it isn't worth the benefits to the mothers it serves. Unless you're arguing that it limits the recipients' incentive to work, which is fairly unlikely as well. "Oh, my child is being cared for safely during the day. I guess I really don't need to work to feed and clothe her, or to have enough money for her medical care, or to have anything for my own needs."
Quote from Ultimate Danny »
I'm not advocating a libertarian system, since that would backfire as badly as communism. (Monopolies are bad)
Well, that's nice to know. I'll assume that you, like me, think that some reduction in work incentive by government programs is unlikely to destroy the fabric of society and that it just doesn't show through your positions.
We appear to have been separated at birth. You're a theater person too? Admittedly, my gaydar isn't that bad, but I make up for it by falling hopelessly in love with people who are a)completely incompatible with me in most ways that matter and b)hopelessly straight, and homophobic to boot. Actually, it's less "people" and more "a person," but nevertheless it causes severe amounts of emo.
I really don't understand how to talk to most guys. Geeks I can handle, being one myself, but everyone else is difficult. This would impede my relationship options but for the fact that they have other obstacles.
A market model would probably work for everyone except the very poor except for the fact that very little daycare is actually provided by the market. As I said before, it's probably a cultural thing. Perhaps the government could offer some incentives to start private daycares and reap the labor and tax benefits in the long run?
Indeed they are, but then every Boomer movement, however useful, has some radical wing that the more sensible adherents try to wish out of existence. They do occasionally have some useful ideas, however.
You'd be surprised what government workers can earn for what they do. LAUSD teacher's union members, for example. As I said earlier, it would be better for the service to be private, but a limited program for low-income families in conjunction with general incentives would probably be most equitable overall.
You may not, no. Other people may have entirely different perspectives.
Oh look - someone's attempting to get us back on topic. I'll just fade out, then...
Honestly, I wonder why no one's suggested a multi-state strategy. Iraq as a state is a colonial anachronism in any case, and the religious and ethnic conflicts aren't going to help when we try and leave the area to stand. My guess is that the policymakers either see a united Iraq as a bulwark against Iran or, if you want to be cynical, they think that it's easier to negotiate oil contracts with one nation than with two or three. I suppose that the other problem would be that the Sunni-Shiite divisions don't parse geographically like the Kurds do; it'd just be the Balkans or Palestine all over again.
Well, I'm of the opinion that the withdrawal will end up working out like he wishes anyway, particularly since the Iraqi government has come out in support of it. Although the Democrats are going to be paying later for the "drop everything and leave now" rhetoric of their more extreme adherents. I mean, it's 2008 and they still get slammed about Vietnam.
I do think that whatever presence we leave on Iraqi soil after the main withdrawal is unlikely to be as permanent as the ones in Japan or Korea. Nobody questioned the military and diplomatic necessity of placing them there, and once they were established they just kept on going, even after the end of the Cold War. Leaving any troops in Iraq is going to cause a lot of political hubbub, though, so I'm not sure that the same will apply. Then again, making any guess as to what will happen in the Middle East is uncertain at best.
I suppose that I am, if he believes as you say.
Specify which laws. Would you keep laws against discrimination in hiring, firing, and service? Would you keep laws against hate crimes and hate speech? Laws against voting restrictions? Laws against miscegenation and other marriage restrictions? There's a lot to cover and lot of ground to cover it on if you want to avoid untenable variations in civil rights by geography. Surely a person does not become less free in any way when he or she moves one step over a state boundary.
Well, if you're not willing to accept the existence of real-world concerns in bringing your unregulated utopia into existence, you're going to run into some problems. Democracy, for example.
Well, to answer whether it is or isn't, I'd have to be a scholar of constitutional law, which I'm not. Generally, though, the judicial branch decides when something is unconstitutional, not the legislative branch or the executive, for that matter. So becoming president isn't going to do Ron Paul much good in rectifying the situation.
Probably not, but the geographic segregation of wealth produces a lot of problems in our country already. The poverty of regions like Appalachia leads to a sense of discontent that, in a more unstable nation, could lead to revolt. More practically, it causes unnecessary misery for the people unlucky enough to have been born in a place with no prospects. The ultimate solution would be economic development, and there's a lot of potential for social entrepreneurship in depressed regions of the US, but the federal social programs do help to soften the blow at least somewhat in the meantime. I'm sure that none of this particularly matters to you, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
Still an issue, nonetheless - how to help couples become optimally successful even with the time taken by childrearing. This is assuming that society still values both reproduction and the availability of labor towards capitalist ends.
And they will continue to do so until we all learn that convincing people is so much more effective than shouting abuse at them.
Well, it's the current situation, which is improving but doing so only slowly, gingerly, and patchily. Seeing as there is unlikely to be a change in this trend, the troops are probably going to have to keep fighting for a while if they stay. You asked why a 100-year deployment is bad, there's your answer.I'm certain that McCain doesn't desire additional battle stress on a bunch of very overstressed people; I was just answering your first question.
Your first statement depends on forty years' worth of tolerance built up with a great deal of help from federal laws and court rulings. Until Brown vs. Board of Education, most people thought schools would stay segregated forever; who's to say it wouldn't have stayed that way without the federal government forcing them to desegregate from on high? More pointedly, I think that there are quite a few people who would remain unprotected by local law in many places, myself being one of them. Racism is not the only prejudice that can get people hurt. Nor do I think that wanting to reform civil rights laws makes someone a racist; affirmative action could use a long, critical look. But doing so out of a dislike of federal power is, in my opinion, misplaced idealism that could do a lot of harm.
I'd disagree with you there, but it might be simpler to say this: just because something is the ideal state doesn't mean that getting there will be ideal. (The French Revolution, and many others, contain some fascinating object lessons.) And ideals are not made or unmade by their philosophy, but by the effort of trying to reach them. See communism.
First, wouldn't this eliminate the benefits of shedding the programs in the first place? The overall taxes would be much the same, by your reasoning. Second, not all states and tax bases are created equal. I suspect that some states consume quite a bit more tax money than they produce, and whether you like the geographic redistribution that the federal government provides or not, it's what allows the system to work even as clunkily as it does.
I'll respond to you before Sutherland can and politely suggest that overexuberant anti-Americanism is one of the reasons that the Democratic Party loses so many elections. I'll also positively declare that these sorts of arguments are never, never fun to listen to and detrimental to your cause.
As Blinking Spirit points out, early cultural prejudices got stuck in there. The rape of the wives of the conquered only recently became unfashionable, and unfortunately parts of the Old Testament preserve this lovely practice.
Various fundamentalists have turned around your argument to bash liberal churches for freely interpreting the Bible. In reality, of course, they cherrypick their verses too and favor certain parts of the Bible over others. Really, though, everyone experiences religion differently. I suppose that there's a kernel of philosophic truth in the Bible that means something to everyone who reads it and believes. I'm not going to dispute your argument much, though, since I don't really have an answer myself.
Um, yes? (See fundamentalist churches above.) Really, though, the people who compiled and edited the Bible were as human as you or I, and as defined by cultural prejudices.
EDIT: Thanks to Blinking Spirit for bringing up a metaphor of use. A discerning eye is of immeasurable relevance in the world of the Bible.
True, but even if we lived in a fantasy world where men were equally likely to take over child-rearing responsibilities, free daycare would still help them out for the same reasons.
From what I recall, they've been leaning in the direction of a gradual pullout for a while now. Considering the overall reduction in violence and the large quantities of anti-US sentiment, gradually replacing American-gained security with Iraqi-assured security seems to be the solution that makes the most sense. As for a rapid departure, that's generally en vogue now with quite a few people, left or not. I'm supposedly "the left," and I think a sudden pullout is an awful idea.
It's complete partisan propaganda, yes, but that doesn't mean you should take a contrarian stance and say it'd be wonderful. The example of Japan and Germany is entirely different. An army stationed in Iraq would be in a continuous state of battle against various nebulous forces much like it is today, at least for a while yet. In Japan and Germany, all the armies did was temporarily supervise the reconstruction of their postwar states and remain as a standing bulwark against possible Soviet advance.
1. Before the government made such laws, life as anything other than a white, protestant, heterosexual male contained a lot of misery and oppression that I suspect you would not want to experience. It still does in many places, too. Our constitution has a bill of rights to safeguard the minority against the tyranny of the majority; civil rights laws are just an extension of this principle that was not expressed in the original Constitution because people didn't talk about such things back then. As for federal laws, we do so because the Northeast et al. can make all the civil rights laws they wish (not that they did, of course, since racism is a many-splendored thing) and still leave millions of southern blacks in misery and racist oppresion. Surely the abrogation of human suffering is worth something. Of course, I'm biased since I'd like not to be crucified on a fence stake, but the point stands.
2. Many, many people depend on those programs to alleviate at least some of the burden of poverty and misery. Clearly they need reform, yes, but most Republicans don't quite reach the levels of small-government mania that he espouses in terms of flat-out eliminating social programs. Have you considered the effect of the rapid destruction of a social safety net that millions of people depend on? Few things can spark a riot these days, but that just might go over the edge.
3. Probably he does want it to go to the states. Many states don't have anywhere near the resources to carry out the programs, though, so quite a bit of the safety net would devolve upon the market, which is to say it would cease to exist.
He appeals to many intelligent and well-educated people for two reasons. First, several of his principles are actually quite sound - take farm subsidies, for instance. Second, he has the personal integrity and attractively pure philosophical positions that attract people tired of hypocritical politicians with amorphous positions. Unfortunately, while philosophy is useful for understanding the real world, it is often singularly unhelpful when you try to force the world to its ends.
Don't get me wrong; I don't think he's the monster from Hell that Tuss would make him out to be. Some of his ideas are interesting and perhaps useful, and that idiotic racism argument has already been disproved several times. (A note to fire-breathing lefties: if you want a condemnation to retain its value, don't waste it on people you merely dislike. The conservative pundits have already picked up on this unfortunate tendency and made it part of all their favorite liberal caricatures.) I think that he's a very principled person who merely follows some highly impractical principles.
And here I thought that half of the problems with schools result from them being forced to act as daycare where none exists rather than, y'know, teaching. You can't exactly put infants in school, in any case. And no, it's not my top priority, just a useful illustrative example.
Try talking to a serious feminist and you'll see how incorrect this can be. The lack of institutional childcare is one of the things that keeps women in the home or at part-time jobs, since they're usually the ones expected to be caring for children. Families with a certain amount of income can avoid this (for example, I had nannies when I was younger since both of my parents work full-time), but that's not necessarily true for lower-income families. There are extreme feminists who believe that the lack of quality free daycare is an intentional effort by the government to force women to stay at home or only take part-time jobs, but I'm more inclined to say it's as much an indication of women's attitudes as an antifeminist bias - not everyone wants to work full-time, after all.
Surely we can realize that the moderate amount of money required for a daycare program, when spread out among millions of wealthy and upper-middle class taxpayers, does not so abrogate their incentive to work that it isn't worth the benefits to the mothers it serves. Unless you're arguing that it limits the recipients' incentive to work, which is fairly unlikely as well. "Oh, my child is being cared for safely during the day. I guess I really don't need to work to feed and clothe her, or to have enough money for her medical care, or to have anything for my own needs."
Well, that's nice to know. I'll assume that you, like me, think that some reduction in work incentive by government programs is unlikely to destroy the fabric of society and that it just doesn't show through your positions.