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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (130125)	8/6/2005 2:32:19 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793755

RE PETA, the government funds activities related to the killing of animals, for example, they inspect meat. The killing and eating of meat is a private activity. The inspection is just for human safety. The animals were killed before government inspections and would continue to be killed after. To the extent that the government actually subsidizes the production of meat I'd share PETA's desire to remove the subsidies. I would argue that aggressive war isn't about security I would disagree completely. It may not actually help make things more secure. It may in some cases be wrong. That would just make it a poor decision about security not a decision that isn't about security. In any event, there is a continuum involved. Almost everyone accepts self defense as a justification for killing. When it comes to an aggressive war, that's another matter. I don't think it's useful to bundle it all up as security. I don't think you can always provide security for a country just by playing defense. Even if the specific attacks our government has made might be argued to be unjustified, attacks outside our country can indeed be about security, and do fall under the core responsibilities of government even if they are at times a poor attempt to deal with those core responsibilities. Compare dispatching a Siberian tiger vs. an embryo languishing in a freezer and I think the vast majority would care more about the tiger. We are talking about PETA not "the Siberian tiger defense association". Its not "don't kill Siberian tigers". Its "no fur, no meat, no use of leather, no animal experiments (even relatively humane ones done for important medical or scientific reasons). Its also not "no federal funding of meat/leather/fur/animal experiments/ect.", but rather support for a ban on such things. If government is already funding numbers of comparable inappropriate activities, you can't argue that it shouldn't fund this one activity because it's inappropriate independent of the others. Why? If he government does inappropriate activities A, B, and C, and potentially inappropriate activities D,E, and F, and controversial activities, G, H, and I; I don't see why that should stop us from complaining about inappropriate activity J, and controversial activity K. But once you get above the handful level, does it really matter if it's three percent of the population or nine or fifteen? Size does matter. <g> Maybe 25% doesn't matter 12 1/2 times as much as 2% but it does matter more. You can have a lot more people than a handful be kooks, and if you give something like 1% a real veto, or even something close to one, you can't do almost anything. Of course if say 20% with really strong beliefs can stop government action in peripheral areas than you are indeed limiting what the government can do. But I would consider that a plus not a minus. To look at it another way, issues like Vietnam (even when opposition to Vietnam was still a minority position but a significant minority), and abortion, have caused a lot of stress on society. The abortion issue would cause even more stress and conflict if it was routinely paid for by the federal government in just about any circumstance. Eating meat (where the opposition is small) has not. Farm subsidies (where most people don't care a lot, and while there are millions opposed it isn't a vital moral issue for most of them) have not. This way of looking at it is more a practical one than a bedrock principle, but your usually a practical person so you might appreciate it. But I don't know that size matters and I don't know if defunding is a sound or useful construct as a compromise between supporting and banning. I think its often a very useful compromise. I'd like to see it used more often. Not necessarily defunding in every case because that implies that there already is funding. In other cases there will be no funding to start with, but the ideas is pretty much the same. I particularly like it as a compromise at the federal level. Federalism at work. If the population of a state strongly wants to subsidize something they can do it without making the whole country subsidize it. Tim