Political Ramblings

Google does evil…

Google sinks a little bit lower – I used to be a big fan of Google, but as the years have gone on, my respect for them gets a little bit less every so often. Today is one of those days.

If you visit the site often, or even if you don’t, chances are that you have heard of the Google Doodles. Google likes to mark some occasions with a different “Google” image that is relevent.

But of course being the bastion of liberalism that they are, someone somewhere decided that Memorial Day and Veterans Day are not worthly to get a doodle.

So far as I can tell, the official response is:

Google celebrates a wide variety of holidays with Google Doodles. Doodles are generally reserved for international holidays and famous birthdays.

Which all sounds well and good on the surface, but the more that I think about it, that does not cut it. Last time that I checked, Chinese New Year, Persian New Year, National Library Week, Bastille Day, and others – not international holidays.

I do realize that it is Google is a company that serves the world, not just America, but they are based here, and make lots of money here (just ask the Menlo Park Real Estate Agents), and I would think they could find it in their corporate hearts to pay some tribute to those that have given their lives for the freedom that our country takes for granted.

And yes, most of their doodles are light hearted and fun, but then so are most holidays. Every once it awhile it does us good to give some thought and tribute to others who have made our lives a whole lot better.

Thoughts on MLK day

The company that I work for recently changed the officially observed holidays, adding Martin Luther King Jr. Day and changing President’s Day to a optional floating holiday (can be taken on any day of the year.) This prompted a primal scream of “Communists!!!” from my gut, and since my group is currently between projects (read “nothing much to do”) I decided to do a little research to see if I have been duped by the “vast right wing” into believing ill of a great leader, or if my gut reaction is valid.

So I hit Google to see what I could find, and ended up on the Seattle Times area dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. (hereafter MLK.) I read some stirring speeches and selected portions of MLK’s writings, which were on the subject of the Civil Rights movement itself and his views on both the movement specifically and on civil disobedience in general, most of which I agreed with wholeheartedly. I was starting to think that maybe I needed to have a change of heart about MLK, but then I hit the last link, which was a chapter entitled “Where We Are Going” from his 1967 book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”, and hit on why I had the reaction that I did, although I have decided that “Socialists!!!” is probably a more accurate reaction. Here is the quote that stood out to me:

Two conditions are indispensable if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure. First, it must be pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income. To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions. Second, the guaranteed income must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total social income grows. Were it permitted to remain static under growth conditions, the recipients would suffer a relative decline. If periodic reviews disclose that the whole national income has risen, then the guaranteed income would have to be adjusted upward by the same percentage. Without these safeguards a creeping retrogression would occur, nullifying the gains of security and stability.

So here is the problem. If you start handing out this guaranteed income that is set at a level of that of the median income, is there anyone who truly believes that most of those who are now working their tails off to get ahead, ie to a good standard of living, ie to somewhere around the median income, will continue to do so when the option is now available to stop working altogether, and achieve that goal immediately? I think not.

Lets follow this through to its logical (at least for me) conclusion. Suddenly most people who are making less than the guaranteed income will quit working, and start receiving the guaranteed income. Now there are very few people who are making less than the guaranteed income, so we raise it so that it is the median again. Lather, rinse, repeat, instant socialism, and instant economical collapse. No, I do not think that everyone would quit their jobs and go on welfare if they could receive the same income level, but I would claim that the majority of people would, and I do not think that anyone could dispute that so many people would take that offer, that those who still are working would have no chance of being able to support everyone else who is not working.

Defining “poor” dynamically as less than the average means that the only way to eliminate poverty is to have everyone make exactly the same amount of money, so that no one makes less than the average. Human nature people, if you are guaranteed to make exactly the same no matter whether you work hard, or hardly work, the economy is going to go in the crapper really fast – does no one remember what happened to the U.S.S.R?

As a parting shot that I should probably leave out, I am not sure how MLK could claim as a preacher that we can eliminate poverty, in light of Jesus’ words in Matthew 26:10-11 that there will always be poor. I am by no means claiming that we should not do anything to help the poor, quite the contrary, but I do not believe, given human nature, that we will ever eliminate poverty.

Why is it so wrong to legislate moral actions?

Something that presidential candidate John Kerry (thank God it stopped at just candidate!) said sometime in the weeks leading up to the election was that while he held the belief that certain things were right or wrong (I forget whether the context was abortion or gay marriage), that he did not feel that he could legislate his beliefs on others.

This is a very scary statement to me. When did it become wrong for our laws to have some basis in morality? Is it merely because the belief is question came from his religious beliefs, rather than from beliefs that he arrived at through other influences? Why is it OK to legislate enforcement of some things that are right/wrong, like murder or stealing, but not other things, like abortion or gay marriage?

To narrow the focus, take abortion (no, I mean it, take it please – I don’t want it in my country!) Very few people would argue that it is not OK to force others not to commit murder, or at least to punish them for doing so after the fact. (Some will argue rehabilitate, but that is a whole other discussion that I am not going to take on here.) But when it comes to abortion, we are not supposed to say that it is wrong, because it is the woman’s right to choose. Right to choose what? To take another’s life because in doing so it will make one’s own better, or not as bad? What about the right of the baby to life?

I used to think that the argument must be that about when life begins, because that was the only thing that made sense to me. I mean, sure, if you feel that life does not begin until birth, then I can understand how you would feel that abortion was OK. I could not agree, but at least I could understand and have a place to start a discussion from. But the more people that I have talked to, the more I have realized that this is not the right argument, because most people that I have talked to don’t believe that life begins at birth, that it begins earlier.

But this leaves me out in the cold, because this seems to be very inconsistent. I mean, how can you say that the baby is a human, that it is alive, but purely and solely because it lives inside another person, that person somehow has the right to take away the life of the baby. But somehow, at the magical instant that the cord is cut between mother and child, the child achieves the right to life? What am I missing here? So many people that I have talked with hold strongly to this set of beliefs, but are unable to verbalize why this is a consistent viewpoint.

When I am involved in a discussion about political/moral issues like this, I am usually able to take into account the other beliefs and feelings and starting points, and be able to understand why the person feels the way that they do. Then at least I have a starting point from which to discuss. Two people just throwing their viewpoints at each other is a waste of time and never going to change anyone’s mind unless you can somehow understand each other. At least for me, because I do not enjoy an argument just for the sake of the argument. But I can just cannot understand the thought process that allows you to come up with contradictory beliefs, and somehow be OK with this.

Can anyone explain how this set of beliefs (murder is wrong, murder is taking the life of a human for personal reasons, an unborn child is a human, abortion is OK) is consistent?

A (the?) difference between liberals and conservatives…

Seems to me that when you boil it down, that one of the main differences between the conservative viewpoint and the liberal viewpoint has to do with how they view the social strata. A caste system in America? Say it isn’t so!

The typical liberal view seems to be that there are the haves and the have nots, the rich and the poor, the evil and the good (not all are willing to cop to this last one, and it does not work really well with the whole relativism BS, but…) But the way that your bleeding heart liberal sees of fixing this situation, is that the poor and downtrodden must be given a hand (not a hand up) in struggling from paycheck to paycheck. Not to better one’s situation, but merely to live more comfortably within it.

Contrast this with the conservative feeling that the poor and downtrodden just need the right opportunity, and the right amount of grit and determination, and they too can better their situation, live the American dream. To put it bluntly, get up off the couch and make something of yourself, go find your dream, don’t expect it to come find you.

It is sad that the American dream, which used to be the opportunity to make something of ones self, to create one’s own destiny, to be able to make gobs of money if that was what one decided was his dream, has somewhere along the way changed into just making gobs of money. It used to be that we all had the right to the “pursuit of happiness,” but now too many people seem to think that the right is to “happiness” itself. No work. No effort. I am owed it just because I exist.

I think that the conservative perspective is gaining (at least I hope the recent election points in this direction) popularity with the common man in large part to the fact that the Democratic party is becoming more and more run by the rich elite of the party who think that their task is to make the lives of the lower class easier, but they truly think that their is no way that the lower class could ever become one of them, because, well, that just never could happen because they are so much better than those scum, ah, less fortunate persons.

So is it taking advantage, or not?

I heard another person bemoaning that fact that if we didn’t have illegal immigrants around to pick produce, clean hotel rooms, landscape lawns, and any number of other menial jobs, that these things would not get done. Apparently, the lazy citizens of this country will never be willing to work for that little money, and the market will not bear the cost if even minimum wage was paid to do these jobs. But apparently it is OK to allow this to continue, because after all, it allows the illegal immigrants a means to make money to support themselves (and send money back to the motherland).

All I have to say in answer to the question of “Who would do X” is, “Someone, no one, or a machine.” (In giving credit where credit is due, I believe I first heard this quote on “Armstrong and Getty”, a radio talk show.)

Now for a different, but related, topic. Sweat shops, the bane of the earth, taking advantage of workers in under developed countries, making them work in substandard environments, paying them very little money, and not giving them the benefits (health insurance, time off, etc) that we expect in our country. Evidently this behavior by the money grubbing corporations of America must stop or else, or else…

Now lets compare the two situations. In both cases, the workers are paid substandard pay (compared to what can be made in America), have a substandard working environment (compared to working environments in America), and no benefits (compared to benefits in America). But here is the difference – the workers here have to live here, and the workers elsewhere have to live there. This may seem like stating the obvious, and yes it is, but I do so to make a point.

Working and living here in America, the illegal immigrants live in poverty, and I doubt that anyone would argue otherwise. But for the workers that work and live in under developed countries, many of the things that we consider substandard, are actually above standard for the place that they live. It does not really matter to them that their entire years wages might buy them a loaf of bread and a half gallon of milk here in America, because they do not live here, they live in a place where they are, many times, making more than anyone else in their community, and they can buy much more than a loaf of bread and half gallon of milk in their local market.

So can someone please explain to me why it is considered OK for them to continue living and working in poverty because if we do not the economy will apparently collapse, but we should stop corporations from giving people living in third world nations a better job, with better pay, than they could possibly get doing any of the (few) other jobs that are available to them? Is this really the end justifing the means? Is this, by any chance, yet another hypocrisy of the left?