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Pastimes : The Boxing Ring Revived -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (2651)	2/20/2002 1:59:13 PM
From: goldworldnet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7720

Conservatives primarily want to be left alone. It is liberals who want to change them. Personally, I have never cared much for bossy people. * * *

To: Neocon who wrote (2651)	2/20/2002 2:45:15 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7720

I am having difficulty seeing both sides as equally implicated in the complaint. Perhaps you can help me think of some things I have overlooked....... Here is my reaction. My purpose is to hold up a mirror for you. Take it for what it's worth. You chose to respond by evaluating the worthiness of the various causes. In doing so, you've interpreted them in terms of your values and sympathies, which coincide with your politics. I mentioned before that your essay sounded like you were supporting efforts for issues you liked and calling those you disliked frivolous. The nature of your response tends to support that as your motivation. What alternatives might you have used? Well, you had said that your concern was the public resources expended. You could list all the issues, both liberal and conservative, that are not critical and then rank order them by the amount of resource "wasted." For example, the public costs of spray painting fur coats is negligible. A few insurance claims. Some police presence when groups of spray painters gather. Chicken feed. On the other extreme, there are enormous costs associated with spotted owls. Heather and the Ten Commandments in schools are each somewhere in the middle. And free speech is pretty cheap, in the neighborhood of fur coats. I don't mean to start an debate over how much this or that costs, only to point out that rank ordering potential frivolities by cost is an alternative approach, one you did not choose. If your primary concern is cost, why wouldn't you evaluate the candidates by cost? A third approach might be to establish the status quo as a baseline, or some other baseline, and then charge the side that initiates the change to the status quo with frivolity while giving the moral high ground to the holder of the status quo. Using that model, it would be deemed frivolous to move to hang the Ten Commandments, since it's not currently hanging, or to ruin a fur coat, since it's not currently ruined. I don't know how practical this last approach is. I was just trying to illustrate that there are at least two other approaches to assigning the "frivolous" label that you did not choose. Your choice suggests that your real interest is in establishing the initiatives you like and labeling the ones you don't like as frivolous. Which is fine, but then you can't claim that your concern is public cost. My perception, FWIW. Karen