Saturday, December 29, 2007

Ten Reasons Not to Vote for Ron Paul

Let's be honest: Ron Paul doesn't have the slightest chance of winning the presidential election next year. Not even a shred of hope for him. Given that I don't think any of the candidates are particularly good ones, why am I wasting my time arguing against one that is marginal at best? Simple education. A lot of good, smart, left-leaning people are falling for the Ron Paul libertarian shtick, the same way a lot of the same people in Texas fell for Kinky Friedman in the governor's race. It breaks my heart, frankly, to see reasonable people supporting unreasonable politicians.

So let's get to it.

I intended to give ten reasons not to vote for Ron Paul. When researching the post, however, I found one on another blog that covered precisely all the bases that I would have, so I will give credit where credit is due and point you there for the facts while summarizing the list here... with my own commentary as well.
  1. Ron Paul thinks women and minorities are second-class citizens. Oh, he disguises it in pro-rights rhetoric. "We do not get our rights because we belong to a group. Whether it's homosexuals, women, minorities, it leads us astray. You don't get your rights belonging to your group. A group can't force themselves on anybody else." Sounds reasonable, right? And it's true, if taken at face value: groups don't have rights, individuals do. One of those rights is the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex or race. Unfortunately, this right is violated on a massive scale every single day, and so we have a system in place to help compensate for that: affirmative action. And when you realize that Ron Paul was talking about affirmative action when he said those words, you realize that he was implying that women and racial minorities simply being represented proportionate to their numbers is leading "us" astray. To Ron Paul, women and minorities don't have the right not to be discriminated against in education and employment. But it's hard to be surprised that someone who said that the 1964 Civil Rights Act had "nothing to do with race relations" thinks that women and minorities being as represented in the workplace and school as they are in the population at large is them "forcing themselves" on us white menfolk. And it's pure coincidence that racist folks like David Duke love him.
  2. Ron Paul thinks a single cell has more important rights than a woman. "I can assure you life begins at conception. I am legally responsible for the unborn, no matter what I do, so there's a legal life there. The unborn has inheritance rights, and if there's an injury or a killing, there is a legal entity. There is no doubt about it." Yes, that's right, Ron Paul thinks zygotes have inheritance rights. Look, there is wiggle room about late-term fetuses, or even early-term fetuses if you really want to be pedantic, but the idea that life begins at conception is so wrong on so many levels it is almost silly. For one thing, sperm and eggs are alive already -- life doesn't begin at conception, life began a few billion years ago and hasn't stopped since. It is morally irrelevant that a fertilized egg is alive; so are plants, but I bet Ron Paul doesn't want to criminalize salad. The only way for the living fertilized egg to be morally different from the living sperm and egg is magic: that's right, Ron Paul believes in that special type of magic called "God." And if that were the extent of his kookery it could slide, but he believes that the "rights" of single cells to... float around? implant in uteruses? divide? are so sacred that they override the rights of women not to be forced against their will into carrying a growing organism inside them. Yet, somehow, when asked about what the legal penalty should be for a woman who has this sacred cell-ball killed -- this being with full legal rights -- he thinks it should be zero. "Abortionists" (better known as "doctors") are the ones who should be punished, since they're the ones doing the killing. So if you want to kill your neighbor, husband, or boss, elect Ron Paul for president and hire a hitman, because only the one actually killing is responsible. This silly contradiction in his moral and legal reasoning makes sense when you remember that opposition to abortion isn't really about saving babies, it is about controlling women.
  3. Ron Paul thinks poor people have it way too easy. What with their lower-than-poverty-level minimum wage and all. And to think poor people actually want things like safe working conditions and retirement benefits. Ron Paul thinks that companies, driven solely by profit motive, will magically provide these things to their workers, despite a couple centuries of evidence to the contrary. That's, like, why we had to have things like minimum wages and OSHA and Social Security in the first place.
  4. Ron Paul wants a bunch of really rich people to have all the money. Not only does he want poor people poorer, he wants rich people richer. Abolishing minimum wages and other forms of economic regulation means that companies can make more profit -- and of course by companies I mean the people who own and run them. But that's not enough! Since Paul wants to cut all manner of taxes on the super-rich (the estate tax, for example) and replace them with at most a flat tax or national sales tax, these folks will get to keep even more money earned off the labor of all the people actually doing the work.
  5. Ron Paul to Earth: "Fuck you!" He wants all the things that damage and destroys the environment, from pollution to global warming to deforestation, to be perfectly legal. See, it's not our job to stop companies from killing everyone. The market will do it on its own!
  6. Ron Paul to Earth: "Fuck you! Again!" Isolationism. Enough said.
  7. Ron Paul hates the gays. You would think a libertarian would support things like, I dunno, liberty. The freedom to do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. But Ron Paul doesn't want lesbians and gay men to have the liberty to do many things. Get married, for instance. He sponsored the Marriage Protection Act, proposed legislation that categorically describes homosexuality as unacceptable, and supports the bigoted continuation of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
  8. Ron Paul loves killing. And he really wants it to be extremely easy for anyone to kill anyone else anytime. Automatic weapons in the home? Great! Guns on school campuses? Go for it! Want to slaughter animals in national parks full of tourists? Go right ahead! The Founding Fathers in their infallibility fully intended for assault weapons that hadn't been invented yet to be in the hands of all citizens at all times. Nothing settles an argument like a grenade launcher.
  9. Ron Paul wants kids to grow up stupid. Now this one is kind of tricky. It sneaks in there like his racism, sexism, and homophobia does. I am all for local control of schools. However, I also fully recognize that until we have equality between localities, it is impossible for all schools to be on an even footing in providing the same quality of education to all students. In our present system, dropping equalizing measures such as credential requirements or fucking desegregation for god's sake is the surest way to ensure that only those who already have all the advantages in life pull that much farther ahead.
  10. Ron Paul thinks "God did it" is science. Paul supported the encouragement of promoting creationism, agreeing with the idea that disallowing it in science departments is "dogmatic indoctrination." Yes, Ron Paul thinks letting scientists do science is dogma, and pointing at the Bible and saying it has all the answers is, I don't know, free inquiry or something. Of course, he consistently ignores the fruits of research anyway, supporting abstinence-only sex education that has been proven to fail. And it's no real shock he thinks God-centered theories should have special treatment, since Ron "small government" Paul wants tax money spent sending kids to Christian schools, and Ron "Constitution" Paul doesn't want the courts to be able to decide whether "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional. Not to mention that whole sponsoring a constitutional amendment for school prayer thing he did...
There you have it. Far from being a "reasonable" Republican, Ron Paul is in fact the worst of the Republican candidates. A United States under the policies of Ron Paul would be a hellish place to live in, while one under any of the others would just be more of the same nonsense the last eight years have seen.

2 comments:

  1. With a lot of these points you raise, Ron Paul doesn't not support some people, he just believes that those issues should be resolved state by state, and not by a big powerful central government (ex: abortion, FEDERAL court deciding about the "under God" issue, etc). If communities get to decide more of their own policies, they grow stronger and government involvement increases. I agree with you in a lot of the points you make, particularly the things you say about taxes, but his policies just don't line up with some of the things you say about him.
    Also, the Department of Education wasn't set up until the 1970's. If you will recall, that was AFTER desegregation happened. Just get more familiar with your history before you make generalizing statements like that, or about isolationism, when you see in American history that the biggest disasters have been when we've dug ourselves in too deep in foreign affairs that are really none of our business (see Vietnam and Iraq).

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  2. With a lot of these points you raise, Ron Paul doesn't not support some people, he just believes that those issues should be resolved state by state, and not by a big powerful central government (ex: abortion, FEDERAL court deciding about the "under God" issue, etc).

    So he believes that basic human rights (such as the right not to have one's body used without permission) aren't universal, and shouldn't be protected universally. Gotcha. If a state wants to enslave women by forcing them to carry fetuses, they can. Yes, Ron Paul is a champion for individual rights!

    And of course federal courts should decide about "under God": the separation of church and state is in the federal Constitution! Ron Paul, like most libertarian crazies, only cares about the parts of the Constitution, and the particular states' rights, that he likes. "Fuck the first amendment, but let me carry a concealed bazooka!"

    And don't get me wrong, I'm sympathetic to anti-big government talk in the sense of power. I do think that most decisions should be made on a local level, by the people affected by them, in proportion to how much they are affected. But rights are held by everyone, and thus should be protected for everyone.

    Also, the Department of Education wasn't set up until the 1970's. If you will recall, that was AFTER desegregation happened.

    I'm sorry, when did I say otherwise? And what does that have to do with Ron Paul being a nutjob?

    Just get more familiar with your history before you make generalizing statements like that, or about isolationism, when you see in American history that the biggest disasters have been when we've dug ourselves in too deep in foreign affairs that are really none of our business (see Vietnam and Iraq).

    Of course we shouldn't get into affairs that are none of our business. And I'm a pacifist, so I'd be against those wars anyway. I am talking about withdrawing from international treaties, agreements, and the UN. I am not talking about his opposition to interfering in other countries -- I'm talking about his opposition to cooperating with other countries.

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