Aaah, he must be an American then.

>You can will yourself to take a different worldview, but you don't have a choice in what direction you end up in :)

I wouldn't go *that* far. One man drives past a shanty town and thinks "This is terrible - how can we change the world so people wouldn't have to live like this" - another thinks "This is terrible, just how stupid and lazy to people have to be to choose to live like this rather than earn a better life ?"

Exactly the same experience - two completely different judgements, and two completely different lessons learned.
All because one of them chose to be empathic and compassionate while the other was aloof and self-aggrandizing.

By analogy - we don't get to choose which classes we'll have to attend, but we get to choose *what* we learn from them.

>It is entirely possible for two intelligent, reasonable people to "learn" and come to different conclusions.

Yes. This does not contradict what I said. Somebody said it was difficult to impossible to change your worldview - I said it is an inevitable consequence of learning.
I said nothing about which worldview you start off with or which one you adopt as you learn or where on the line you happen to be when you finally die - that can be pretty unique - I just said that worldviews change when people learn. Anybody whose worldview has NOT had some pretty rapid changes during the course of their life has not been learning anything.
Me - I was a libertarian in my early 20's - today I would describe myself as an anarcho-socialist who, in the absence of a libertarian system of legislation to participate in vote liberal because I consider civil liberties far more important than economics and therefore I cannot vote for a party that panders to the religious right. I can't understand how libertarians can vote republican - they agree with neither party fully, but what they hate about the democrats is surely infinitely less important (economics) than what they dislike about the republicans (civil liberties erosion to please the religious right).

Today - I despise libertarians, 14 years ago I WAS one. A lot of people I know who were liberals then became conservatives later, a lot of conservatives became liberals.

The point stands: as people learn they change their world-views, often very radically. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, how it changes is determined by their experiences and what they personally value (I would rather be broke and starving than not be allowed to ... well do ALL the things the religious right want banned - many people would apparently rather lose freedom of speech than risk a drop in the value of their portfolio).
I never said they would conclude the same thing- you argued against it but I said nothing of the kind. All I said was: changing world views is easy, not hard.

>And love won't get you broadband.

Obviously you've been "loving" the wrong people...

>In some people's minds, lack of failure is a surer measure of success, than attempting success (and possibly failing, thereby).

The speaker of the house would agree with you - he pretty much said the same thing about congress passing laws not long ago...

>Using the IRS to target political speech they disagree with.
I agree with all your other examples but on this one - the blame belongs with the reps -it was *they* who started and still continue to push for "profiling".
Now the reps profile on race, religion and stuff like that - the dems were actually a notch less evil with their profiling. While the reps were profiling based on things which are either completely uncontrollable (like race) or specifically protected by the constitution (like religion) the dems merely profiled as "like to have cheated on taxes" people and organisations who have PUBLICLY declared their dislike for taxes and their support for ideologies that seeks the abolition of taxation (and frequently encourages tax-cheating to help bring that about).

That's akin to if the reps were arguing that when a rapper sings about his love for weed that's probably cause to get a search warrant (as opposed to "if you're black we get to search your car for weed and if you wear a hajib we get to assume you're a muslim and search you car for bombs because reasons".
It's still evil - but it's a lot LESS evil than what the reps continue to do and support in the same vein.

>I'm not sure being [insert political ideology] is a choice. It's not like you can simply will yourself to take a different worldview.

Of course you can ! The process is called "learning". You should try it sometime.

>No, but the Center for Disease Control thinks that vaccination rates (with the notable exception of Hib3 (whatever that is)) have been constant or increasing for the last two decades (as long as they've been keeping records).

You don't need a percentile change to have a problem - you just need a small decrease in vaccination (much less than one percent) to send herd immunity down the well.

>If what is wanted to be done is kicking sick troops out of their beds for new blankets every day or two

And why would they do that? By this point Europeans had largely discovered concepts like quarantine and it was standard practice in hospitals that when somebody died from smallpox the bedding they had used while ill should be burned (the germ theory of disease may not have taken hold much yet but even the old miasma theory supported this practise). Basic quarantine developed during the black death years and were extensively improved by the time of American colonization.

All the military had to do was use the blankets that would otherwise have been burned *anyway*.

"There is nothing, no act of cruelty and torture and maiming ever contemplated by the worst sociopaths that can't be gleefully repeated by an average family man just doing his job and following orders. He who knows this, knows all he needs to know to rule the world" - Terry Pratchett "Small gods".

And we see the truth of this around us all the time - we see it in business and we see it in politics and in the military (just go look at the personality profiles of the Abu Ghraib soldiers - just average, friendly well-liked family minded people, a run-of-the-mill girl with a happy smile whose friends spoke of her incredible generosity - now remembered for all time as a torturer and near-rapist).

When the number a decade ago was near-zero - 175 is massive, because it predicts that this years number will be much higher, it's the beginning of the breakdown of herd immunity.

Are you actually suggesting the the antivaxer (sorry, that's not politically correct - I mean the "pro-disease") movement has had zero impact on vaccination rates ? This should be news to the medical fraternity - you better inform them !

So - simply separate legal liabilities (such as lawsuits or fines) from other liabilities. You can retain the (possibly legitimate) reason for limited liability without having to create a get-out-of-jail-free card for corporate criminality.
Or -better yet - allow certain classes of civil disputes to be escalated to criminal trials of the offenders with jailtime as a real risk.

Of course, just why it would suddenly go up a the same time vaccination rates are at such a massive low that we're dealing with major outbreaks of formerly all but eradicated diseases I'm not sure but I'm certain that you could understand if you had her PHD (Pretty Hump of Distraction).

>It's not "logic", it's a question.

Are these mutually exclusive concepts in your book ?

>Well, you can think that all you want, but that's not how arguments or reasoning work.
Actually, yes, that is exactly how they work. The burden of evidence is on the extraordinary claim - which is, in this case, that none of the massive changes in our society over the past decades could possibly cause the event to have a different outcome than it had before.

>Economics is quite clear: automation generally improves the standard of living and makes society better off,
No it isn't. That's just not true. What would be a true statement is: "Economics is quite clear that up until now automation has generally improved the standard of living and made society better off and has not hitherto caused mass unemployment".
  Anything beyond that is unproven, untestable and unscientific and no economist worthy of his degree would dare say it (so what does that tell you about those who might ?)

I gave you no less than two examples of aspects of the context which may very well cause the outcome this time to be different - your unwillingness to consider even the possibility that they may change the outcome is narrow-minded to say the least.

>If you want to convince people that a theory that has been empirically tested time and time again doesn't apply this time,
You don't seem to know how economics work - this is not a theory and it hasn't been tested. Economics is not "science" in the classic sense of the word - to quote economist Stephen Levit - economics is more a form of a mathematical engineering that develops tools used to identify trends from large sets of data which can be used to draw useful conclusions.
But these trends are contextual. Change the context - and the trend MUST change as well. Good economics must consider all the aspects of the historical context on the event - it cannot just assume that the trend will apply.

> you need to come up with some pretty good reasons and data. So far, you're only handwaving.
No I don't actually since I am not questioning the theory at all - I'm telling you that you don't know what the theory actually says.

Its a bit like this - you perform an experiment in a lab, you get a certain result, but you cannot be assured that outside the lab in an uncontrolled setting the result would be replicated because there are so many factors which may interfere - even the cat knocking over the beaker could prevent the reaction you were expecting from happening. An experiment is considered repeatable if another lab under the same controlled circumstances can get the same result - there's no requirement for the result to happen in all circumstances, all the time.
What you are doing is to ignore the "lab conditions" of the theory. The theory accounts for what was observed over the 19th and 20th centuries - in the industrial context of the time. It does not and cannot predict that the same thing will happen in all contexts all the time - not least because the "lab" here is the entire human race and everything that impacts them and their behaviour and responses - something which is most certainly not a constant.

As it happens the theory is limited to national observations not international ones (no such theory exists that speaks for internationally) so the ease of modern day international trade along with it's side effects like outsourcing massively changes the dynamic (in the Cartesian meaning of the term - what I have described using the layman's term "context") and may very well cause the outcome to change.

It does, the process is called "Rain".