Sometimes the left scares me more than the right

Now before you all go off a bitching at me, hear me out:

The RW nuts base a lot of things off the bible: You should go to jail if you are gay, have an abortion, cheat on your spouse, etc.

I know what they want to legislate and put me in jail for - I can read it in their play book.

And they don't plan on changing, which is a plus for us because we do change.

However - I don't see any play book from the left.

Who knew having a smoke while sipping a beer could get you in trouble? Who knew that not wearing a seat belt would get you pulled over and ticketed? Who knew that personal behavior would lead people to want to tax you more and shun you - from what you eat to how much and so on?

I never thought I would see the day that people would back companies for firing you for smoking at home - all the name of the all mighty dollar and health care costs.

And god help us all if we DO get national health care, because I can see folks now lined up to tell me how to live to save THEM $$$$.

Here I thought we were the party of diversity and choice over your own body, of freedom for people to start a small business and run it how they see fit for their customers.

Assisted suicide? Right on. Not wearing your safety belt? Hell no. And it goes on.

Damn it all to hell when MY life becomes something you rule because of money. I won't put up with that shit from the right and I sure as hell won't from the left.

No way in hell I want national health care if the end result is I live under someone else's morals or face fines and jail. Remember the old mantra, my body my choice? That is being thrown out the window except for when it comes to abortion. Other than that, it does not seem to mean jack shit to anyone.

I love our party. I love liberals and progressives. And I am damned glad we have worked so hard on the civil rights of all people. But I will be damned if I sit here and watch people try to control every damned little aspect of my life at the altar of the almighty dollar.

MOST OF YOU are not the ones I am bitching about. And the issues to me go in all directions. Like having to get a fucking permit to have a damned garage sale - all because there were a few people who kept one up for half a year. Punish the many because of the few? Yeah, that will fucking work.

There are so many damned regulations now I am probably a sitting duck for a 50 year prison stint.

Now excuse me while I go have a beer and a smoke in my own home before it is a capital offense. And you best be nice else tomorrow I will go and get a big mac and video tape me eating it for evidence at my soon to be health care trial.

PS - And NO my house is not 30,000 sqaure feet. Thank god, or that might add years to my sentence.

:rofl:

The way I have seen this, beyond there being fundamentalists in all groups, is that your body your choice is fine, until you come down with emphysema, spend all your money on health care, go broke and get taken care of in a tax supported (medicaide?) nursing home. My taxes are paying for the aftermath of your ciggies. That's my take on it.

I wish people could designate where tax money goes, no more wars.

"I wish people could designate where tax money goes, no more wars."

spot on.

We gonna pay for that or only in certain cases?

But then I am one of "those" libruls with low moral values.

if someone is getting a tax payer funded abortion are we going to start sounding like the right? "Only in cases of incest/rape" otherwise you are using my money for birth control kind of crap?

Steak, cheeseburgers, fries, chips and dip,cookies and cake; harmful eating patterns. Working 18 hours a day, pushing employees to work excessive hours, drivers to cheat on their mileage charts; harmful stress patterns. Wine, beer, pot, nicotine, sex, valium; harmful addiction patterns. Skydiving, rock climbing, speeding, scuba diving; harmful extreme living patterns. Mining, farming, logging, fishing; harmful dangerous occupation patterns.

Using your rules, it'll be pretty cheap health care because nobody will qualify.

Not my rules, but hearing others talk on this. Someday we may get into the resources are limited discussion regarding responsibility for choices and things like premature babies and vaccinations. But not tonight.

you never pay. a lot of them.

:rofl:

excuse me while I go draft some legislation on that :)

in which case I was going to try out for American Idol :)

Alas, we will leave it all up to the decider of Oz :rofl: "pay no attention to that dumbass behind the curtain"

put down the beer can and walk away. I don't want any problems, but it is my now non-tax paying citizen's duty to cut off your supply for tonight. ;-)

Isn't that what the Lounge is for?

:shrug:

:)

Uh oh, I bet they are pissed!

and would end up posting drunken rants in the 9/11 forum:

"I swear man, I love you too but there were no planes. And the towers are still standing, I saw em, they got david copperfield to hid em...hiccup...."

once a week.

I dig all that govt.

I hate the drug war though.

can be a bit petty at times. But if the major issues of our society were whether or not we should eat at McDonald's or smoke or something along those lines, I think it would be a major improvement from the war, environmental rape, and corporate corruption that we see under the right. No movement is perfect. Liberals are ultimately about making things better. In our strive for perfection, sometimes we can take things a bit too far. But it's important to remember that the alternative is far worse.

Oh, and as for seat belt laws, I fully support them. I once saw the severed leg of a child on a highway that hadn't been wearing his seat belt, not to mention what was left of his body after it had been thrown from the car and the pavement took off most of his skin. If he had been wearing his seat belt, he'd probably be alive today. Trust me, seat belts are our friends.

But I hear you on a lot of the other stuff.

We want things to improve (ie, get rid of the idiots on the right) - but we can also improve our own party (and, ummm, seeing the candidate threads here I am not alone in my criticism of our party).

Good post and thanks for keeping the gasoline and matches at home :)

to ridicule people who object to belittling others with words like the N-word or the like.

Nevertheless, it does get a little tiring when you can't hang out with people and drink a Coke because it has Aspartame in it, or, God forbid, eat at The Olive Garden. There are certain things I do consciously as a consumer to try and help the world such as never shop at Mall Wart and I don't wear Nikes, but at some point we have to realize that few things in our society are truly clean and green. I try and focus on the big issues such as changing labor laws and getting true progressives into office. If people want to smoke or eat Big Mac's, well it's their lungs and their arteries, so be it.

That's just some asshole trying to tell you how to live your life.

The righties want you to go to church and luv Jesus and never have an abortion, amen. That's their "political correctness" if you will.

I tune out much on both sides unless I have a good reason to implement in my life. But it has to make sense to me, not just someone else spewing their POV.

I've always said if the left and the right were to implement every 'utopian' law they advocated, we would be unable to leave the couch without breaking one of them. There are social laws I support, but I'd bet I'd be willing to dump all liberal social laws if all the right wing bullshit were dumped at the same time. Imagine, no more prayer in school, God in the pledge, birth control, abortion, gay marriage debates. No more War on Christmas!! I'd be willing to dump seat belt and cigarette and trans fat laws to get rid of all their idiocy!

A lion running towards Marty Perkins from Mutual of Omaha's wild kingdom.

RW Guy: Shoots the lion "I killed him before he used his weapons to kill others"
LW Guy/girl/insert race here/clean and articulate: Shoots the lion "I shot him before Marty was injured and sent my health care through the roof. I saved money."

I'm having a beer and a cigarette with you. Just don't tell the animal rights activists -- I have two dogs and they are inhaling my second-hand smoke, after all. By the way, one post above alluded to the fact that tapayers shouldn't have to pay for ilnesses due to the life choices of others. I wonder if we should start screening people who have HIV-AIDS and decide whether their promiscuity put them in such a sad state. Maybe the state should only help cover medical costs of people who contract illnesses involuntarily. That would sure would make universal health care a great deal cheaper. But then again, I guess it wouldn't be UNIVERSAL care, now would it.

I have two dogs and a bird. I can see me now on America's most wanted :)

Sleep it off..... zzzzzzzzzzz

I have felt like this for a damned long time.

And not just about issues affecting me either.

WTF is up with our liberal leaders and the crap that went down with gays in the military?

We need to watch our own like we watch those assholes on the right.

These are issues that DEMAND introspection. They have for over 10 years.


Tonight may not be the time (superbowl tomm. and all that)...



Just kick back and crash for tonight.

Tommorrow is another day.... it's late. We're all tired.

Sleeping is not something on the old mind right now :)

But thanks for posting here and keeping it nice, very much appreciated.

time for my shows, and I need to roll some more smokes!

And at last, I may just have a beer as my work is done mostly :)

carry on ....

Abortions for some...NIH for some....tiny american flags for others....

see ya in lala land.....

as the right at times. the issues are different but, the same feeling of being told what to do and how to think and behave.
I deal with the issues of the day but, am not so correct in my life as the ideal lib. I smoke, I don't always recycle and sometimes I drive my car to the corner drug store when it's raining or really cold though it is so close I should walk every time. Shame on me.
Because I don't always get worked up over everything and try to understand the way things really work after 10 years in governement and social services. I don't go all wild and want to storm the bastile like I did in the 80s when I railed at Reagan all the time. I learned it may clear your frustration but, gets you very little. Better to learn to learn some reality and how things work so you know what is going on.
But, the left can be as silly as the right in short sightedness and silly slogans and demanding people agree with them.

Are you REALLY trying to compare/contrast????//

also concerns someone else in the mix, such as smoking. While you would say that safety concerns in mining should be followed, the same doesn't hold true in a bar? Smoking is something that you decide to do, whether or not it is a wise decision, is up to you. When you expose someone who is working for a living to a danger that YOU have decided to do, then it is not fair to the person who has to work there. And then there are people who has asthma or other difficulties breathing, would it be fair to them to expose them to your smoke, because you made the decision to smoke. While some people say it is to save money on medical expenses, I think that is purely a twofer, some saw the benefits of not smoking in their medical premiums. And, no one has the right to say what you can or can't do in your own home, unless it is dangerous to other people, like making explosives.

As for seat belts, it was found that those that wore them, lived much more often in an accident than those who didn't. This fact was especially true for children, and it was much easier to say all should be buckled in then start to make exceptions. If it was for money, then they wouldn't have made the rule, as many more died than got injured, and it's cheaper for a funeral than an extended stay in the hospital.

The garage sale thing is to protect small business owners. There is a lot of rules, regulations, paperwork and taxes that is required to run a small business. I'd bet the guy down the street is not the only chronic garage sale holder in the city, otherwise they could just make the rule of one garage sale a year and watch him. No, there probably was many more and they probably saw the number rise over the years, and had to do something to curb it. Or, it could be just as simple as some guy who holds many garage sales pissed off a city councilman with all the traffic generated on his street.

Some are left leaning rules, some are right leaning rules. My whole thinking is that if it doesn't impinge on someone else, it's okay.

zalinda

I was thrown out of a car and the paramedic told me that is what saved my life. This was years ago. I resent that I am breaking the law. I am a grown woman. I can make up my own mind.

busy settling scores and securing the revolution that enforcing a few petty smoking regulations would be very low on our list of priorities.

:-)

associated with the left - in my life the divide over who does and doesn't support these things isn't left/right.

Maybe because you are on a left-of-center board and many people support these policies you think it's something that only people on the left support?

I'm just wondering if there is some kind of evidence that people on the left want these restrictions and people on the right don't.

about legislating over money than I do over moral issues. DO NOT tell me I cannot have an abortion for any reason because you think it's wrong.

When I was back in the states, I frequented non-smoking establishments when I could after I quit smoking. Here on Guam, such establishments are a bit harder to come by since the smoking ban was lifted.

Frankly, I'm coming to the point where I don't see why smokers act like stepping outside to have a cigarette is such a damn hardship. I got used to it when I was a smoker and lived in South Dakota. Non-smoking sections are a joke unless the smoking sections are physically isolated with a really good ventilation system that works to keep the smoke out of the non-smoking section. Some restaurants divide the restaurant so aribtrarily that you'll have smoking tables right next to non-smoking tables. Ridiculous.

And from my experience of an NHS, this does not result in the government legislating health habits as such. I am not going to go to prison if I smoke (I don't), drink alcohol, eat too much chocolate or drink too much coffee (the latter two are my big temptations!)

What COULD happen with an NHS, especially under a cost-cutting government, is that people with 'bad' health habits could be denied certain medical treatments that are available to those with 'better' health habits, and might have to 'go private' for it. But I suspect that similar issues could come up with private health insurance schemes, that might charge you much more if you're deemed to be a risk-taker.

In the long run, I think it's a fallacy in any case to imply that people with 'bad' health habits necessarily cost the NHS more than those with 'better' health habits. At the age of 60, a hard-drinking fat-eating hard-smoker will probably cost the NHS more than an abstemious non-smoking teetotaler of the same age (though not always). But at the age of 90, the former will probably have moved on to the great health service in the sky, while the latter may be costing the government a lot of money in terms of provision for elderly people. So perhaps the cost-cutting governments of the future will start positively ENCOURAGING everyone to smoke and drink and eat as much as possible, so as to reduce longevity and thus cut the costs of old-age pensions and geriatric services! I'm being very flippant and black-humour-ish her; but my basic point is that having an NHS will NOT necessarily motivate even a nasty and cost-cutting government to regulate private health behaviour.

A lot of regulations are to protect others, not to impose morality or cut costs. After all, smoking bans are often to prevent unwilling people from being forced to breathe your smoke, or to reduce fire risks. This doesn't justify smoking bans in one's own home, of course; or in most open-air areas.

Right now, in the UK, we do have a government that is preoccupied with trying to 'manage' everyone's behaviour (and certainly not just in the area of health). But it is not an especially left-wing government; and it seems to be more based on Blair's personal style and love of 'targets' than on anything to do with our having a welfare state.

I believe that 'Prohibition' in the USA was introduced by Republicans, and strongly supported by arch-rugged-individualist Herbert Hoover, and abolished under FDR. As I said earlier, I think such issues are pretty distinct from liberalism or even socialism.

many of them on this board,who make the "church lady" on SNL look tame by comparison.