making a better world or flapping our gums

Maybe that is a problem. I have not been thinking of this like school, but I have rather been seeing it as a formal debate, well maybe not formal, but as a debate. You know it’s my dream that reasonable people of varying beliefs will come together and lay out their beliefs and melt them in the crucible of logic and see which one best passes the test, and then they will all adopt the truest of the beliefs and shake their hands and walk away to convince their fellows in like manner, and they will all hold only the truest beliefs and we will all be able to walk forward shoulder to shoulder to, oh I don’t know, build a better world I guess.

That’s not too much to ask is it? Well of course it is, I don’t expect anything like that to happen, but I think it is something that we should aim for, I thought that was one of the goals of the Beaglesonian Institute.

But not so, says Beagles, it is a conversation. A conversation? Oh I don’t know, I have conversations all the time, they’re okay, some are better than others, but to devote an hour of my time every day to a conversation, oh I think this, and you think that, how about that? I have to tell you I’m not so interested in that. If I’m not boiling that stuff in the crucible to make a better world well, I might as well be watching tv.

Well I know I’m too argumentative and too much of a know it all. I have toned down the know it all, sometimes when I am bloviating I have enough sense to make myself stop, but the argumentative thing is kind of who I am. If I didn’t do it I wouldn’t be me, and who wants to go through life being somebody else? Let others be somebody else, since they already are anyway.

But I can’t accept that because there is a difference of opinion on some matter that you can just choose which side pleases you the most. There is a difference of opinion on most all things, to pretend that this means all opinions are equally true is balderdash, balderdash I tell you.

I never find anything that is probably not true very interesting. I read a couple liberal sites and sometimes what they say is pure balderdash and I dismiss it out of hand. I do not write it up in this blog because well, it is an opinion, and all opinions are equal, so let’s see what Beagles has to say about it. I don’t want to waste Beagles hunting, fishing, and tuning time. I just wish he would dismiss things out of hand more often.

Raising the minimum wage is something the conservatives are against, ostensibly because it is messing with the sacred infallible hand of the marketplace, but mostly because their media is dominated by fatcats who want to pay their workers as little as possible. Liberals are for it because they have warm hearts and feel for the downtrodden, and think that if a guy is working a regular job he should be able to pay his rent and feed his family. The downside is that some people will lose their jobs and maybe you will have to pay an extra nickel for that burger. The upside is the guy will be paying his rent and feeding his family and won’t be on section eight or food stamps and can probably afford health insurance.

The Russians didn’t want to kill all of the people and take the lands of their conquered, they wanted to kill some of them and steal some stuff, and make the people suffer under godless communism, which was not nice, but still better than being killed. The Czech Republic has emerged from under the Russkies worse for wear, but under Hitler there would have been nothing to emerge.

You know the Romans were doing well enough way back when, but the other Italians around them were giving them a hard time, so they had to conquer them, and then they ran up against the Etruscans, who they had to conquer, and so it went. Everytime they conquered an irritating neighbor they found themselves right on the border with another irritating neighbor. You right wingers remind me of that, you are always looking for the next enemy. Without a main enemy you would curl up and die.

I guess you could say the Romans did build up that magnificent empire, up until they finally reached too far. I think in reality the whole family of nations is well, partly friends and partly enemies as out inclinations take us, so we always have enemies, but the idea that there is always one country or group of countries that is public enemy number one just doesn’t seem logical.