The Truth about Navigators
- Thread starter resident_evil
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resident_evil
Senator
America is suffering moral bankruptcy and is likely the reason we are financially bankrupt.
resident_evil
Senator
I don't hold O'Keefe in the absolute highest regards but he does get some good work done. He is able to find the most morally bankrupt people to conspire with. It is astonishing how shameless these people are. I guess theses particular liberals are just working the atheists' Golden Rule morality. lol.
marvin martian
Emperor
A lot of them are just recycled ACORN workers, SEIU thugs-for-hire, drug addicts, "community organizers" (agitators) and other assorted felons and losers. These people are not suitable for regular employment in the productive sector of society, thus they are shuttled from one government "opportunity" to another, in between stints on welfare (or probably while collecting welfare, likely).
After they have busted out their "navigator" jobs, they'll go on to the next thing, perhaps working on confiscation crews collecting citizens' "surplus" firearms, doing "welfare checks" on homeschooling and Christian families (for the children, of course) or working on death squads to eliminate "domestic terrorists"...
Amerika the beautiful! Paging Lee Greenwood...
After they have busted out their "navigator" jobs, they'll go on to the next thing, perhaps working on confiscation crews collecting citizens' "surplus" firearms, doing "welfare checks" on homeschooling and Christian families (for the children, of course) or working on death squads to eliminate "domestic terrorists"...
Amerika the beautiful! Paging Lee Greenwood...
resident_evil
Senator
The purge is coming either way (i.e. who knows who will be doing the purging) and Obama has done little but to exasperate that fact.
Arkady
President
First, we aren't financially bankrupt. A bankrupt person or company is one that's unable to pay its bills. The only time that's been in jeopardy, in this country, is when the Republicans threatened to force default. Our debts remain remarkably easy for us to pay. Right now our gross federal debt is 103.2% of GDP. Much of that is debt we owe to ourselves (Treasuries held in government trust funds or by the federal reserve system). Debts held by the public (other than the Fed) are 62% of GDP. And most of that is only owed internally: debt that the government owes Americans who hold its treasuries -- a bit like a situation where a partnership is in debt to one of the partners. However, even taking the full 103.2% figure, that's akin to someone who earns $100,000 per year having a mortgage of $103,200. And because our borrowing is at supremely low interest rates, net interest on debt is only 6% of GDP this year. So, it's akin to someone who earns $100,000 per year having a monthly interest expense of $500. And that has been dropping -- net interest was 8.5% of GDP as recently as 2008!
Would you consider that person bankrupt?
As for the idea that our moral bankruptcy is leading to financial bankruptcy, the country is VASTLY less morally bankrupt than it was for most of its history. Let's remember that for the first almost 90 years of history, a significant percentage of people in this country were considered legal property, and could be raped and murdered at will, with no legal recourse. Even after that moral blight was purged with the blood of the Civil War, that minority remained legally discrimnated against for another hundred years. And a ful half of the population (women) had no right to vote for the first 144 years of the nation. Then there's the fact that the nation was waging a genocidal war against the aboriginal population of the continent for much of its history. Throw in McCarthyism and persecution of gays. If moral bankruptcy led to financial banrkuptcy, we should currently be as well-situated financially as at any point in our history, since we're more morally solvent than ever before.
resident_evil
Senator
1) The Fed printing $40B to buy U.S. debt is bankruptcy.
2)Low interest rates and reserve currency status are simply hiding the deep shit we are in.
3)The micro example never fully explains macro realities (or vice versa).
4) You had to bring slavery into the discussion? I quit those kind of debates because they are not productive.
5)You can look around and clearly see we are morally bankrupt and listing a litany of examples would also not be productive.
anybody here who thinks the guy making 15k at his regular job that he reports to the IRS, but the extra money he makes cleaning houses or doing yard work and doesn't report, is perping some massive fraud? if so, you're nuts. how much income tax do you think he's paying on that 15k? none.
raise your hand if you think anyone would tell an insurance company that they're a smoker. seriously, anyone?
how long will it take for this organization to get James O'Keefe, ex-con, in trouble again for taping without permission and under false pretenses? remember, O'Keefe, under threat of criminal charges, had to cough up his unedited tapes of ACORN. then recall, that O'Keefe was charged for breaking in Sen Landrieu's office in New Orleans and spent a year under house arrest in his parents (LOL) home. the punk is a sociopath.
oops, I almost forgot to trash the writer of the article, John Fund. he's a piece of work who has been promoting false claims of voter fraud.....to cash in on book sales. he's also the rightwinger who impregnated his girlfriend's daughter and forced her to have an abortion.
raise your hand if you think anyone would tell an insurance company that they're a smoker. seriously, anyone?
how long will it take for this organization to get James O'Keefe, ex-con, in trouble again for taping without permission and under false pretenses? remember, O'Keefe, under threat of criminal charges, had to cough up his unedited tapes of ACORN. then recall, that O'Keefe was charged for breaking in Sen Landrieu's office in New Orleans and spent a year under house arrest in his parents (LOL) home. the punk is a sociopath.
oops, I almost forgot to trash the writer of the article, John Fund. he's a piece of work who has been promoting false claims of voter fraud.....to cash in on book sales. he's also the rightwinger who impregnated his girlfriend's daughter and forced her to have an abortion.
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Arkady
President
I like the idea of such undercover citizen sting operations to catch malfeasance. Unfortuantely, O'Keefe has revealed himself to be a complete liar, who misrepresents events and selectively edits footage to remove key context, so I don't take his work seriously -- he's simply not trustworthy enough for me to assume that he's presenting a more or less accurate view of what happened.
That said, I'd be shocked if this kind of thing weren't happening. You see it from sympathetic people all the time, in the public and the private sector. I recently tried to return something that broke, only to find that I was a day beyond the warranty period. The person helping me said she'd file it with the prior day's date, though I declined. She wasn't trying to be dishonest or steal from her employer on my behalf. She was just sympathetic to my situation and didn't want to be a stickler. She was trying to be nice. I'd imagine a lot of navigators are that way, too. They don't stand to benefit, personally, by giving people tips on how to lie to get cheaper healthcare. They just feel sympathic for the person and want to help out, however dishonestly. It's human nature, and it's unrealistic to think it wouldn't happen in a situation like this. It probably makes sense to have paid spot-checkers who pose as applicants to catch those doing this -- if they knew they were being watched, they'd be more likely to mind their manners.
On a side note, I personally was involved in something I consider similar, though it was perfectly legal. I used to teach for the Princeton Review, where my job was teaching all the "tricks of the trade" to help privileged kids game the SAT test for an extra hundred points or so. We taught them things like how the test was structured so that each section started with easy questions and ended with hard ones, so early in a section never pick what looks like a hard answer (e.g., the answer isn't going to be "peregrinations," and late in a section never pick what looks like an easy answer (e.g., the answer isn't going to be "gigantic"). It made a mockery of the test, and I was paid to do it, ultimately to the disadvantage of all the kids who couldn't afford the Princeton Review but would be judged against the kids that could. Giving that kind of inside information about how to raise your test score through tricks doesn't strike me as terribly different, ethically, from giving an applicant for insurance tips on how to lower his premiums dishonestly, other than the legality of it.
resident_evil
Senator
I completely disagree with this characterization of all of O'Keefe's work. He gives context and has even let out complete footage sans editing. The judgment remained the same. What I don't like is his tone of hate and mockery of those he unmasks.
The balance of your post once again depicts how the Golden Rule works as a moral paradigm in the secular atheist world. It is a morally bankrupt moral structure. Acceptance of it does not validate it but rather indemnifies an amoral society by the weight of popular opinion. A poor mechanism to substitute for a true moral compass.
Arkady
President
By what definition? The Fed has been buying up US debt since the Fed came into existence, so if that's what"bankruptcy" is, we've been bankrupt for longer than any of us have been alive, and pretty much every major nation is also bankrupt, since they all have similar central banking functions.
Why does the market continue to buy US debt for such paltry rates if we're in deep shit? Is the market just completely blind?
Yes. Conservatives have a tendency to frame things within a worldview that imagines moral decline, such that we're currently in a fallen state. That's the most fundamental aspect of conservatism -- an idea that improvemet is more likely to be found in recapturing some imagined golden age of the past, rather than pressing forward to some hoped-for golden age yet to come (which is the view of progressives). So, I find it useful, especially in the context of a moral discussion, to remind people what the past actually looked like. The past of this country was a open sewer of slavery, institutional bigotry, subjugation of women, exploitation of workers, abuse of children, and eradication of the original inhabitants of the continent. That's no moral golden age for which to pine. We may have a long, long way to go to climb completely out of the sewer of the past, and the stink of it still clings to us, but it's important to remember how far we've come.
Arkady
President
I favor Kant's imperatives, which are a more sophisticated version of the sentiment behind the golden rule. We should only due such things that are according to rules that we would want to be general rules of conduct for everyone. Using that formulation, the navigator's behavior was immoral, since none of us would want to live in a society made ungovernable by everyone trying to help everyone else to getting around the laws -- even laws designed to flow funds efficiently to where they're most needed. Kant's formulation is an extremely useful one for analyzing such moral questions soundly. By comparison, traditional religious rules don't tend to be terribly helpful in answering moral questions.
resident_evil
Senator
As I recall Emanuel Kant was hard to read and he was decidedly a self professed Christian and Jew (if that factors).
Now I'll google that memory. :0)
resident_evil
Senator
My bad I was thinking Spinoza.
resident_evil
Senator
So you expect the breadth of society to have the intellectual capacity to follow Kant's derivations of morality?
resident_evil
Senator
1) To the best of my knowledge this is the first time in history that the Fed has bought U.S. debt. And the Fed raises other questions too. Where does the Fed get its money? How much has the Fed loaned out to foreign institutions? The Fed is NOT transparent. This is a problem.
2) The market has been blind to all the crashes that have occurred. How can you not know that.
3) Just because you are unaware to moral decay and the concomitant consequences does not mean you are right. And to suppose that an argument to the lessening of moral values somehow implies that moral values were perfectly executed in the past is meaningless. What we have is the re-defining of right as wrong and wrong as right in the book of secular atheist's moral code. Slavery was always wrong. Just ask some of the founding fathers who owned slaves. What we have now though is liberal thieves who would steal property and redistribute it basically making slaves of earners and that is considered morally right.
Arkady
President
Yeah. I know lots of great thinkers love Spinoza, but I found his writing pretty dense and hard to follow. Kant's better, in my opinion. He didn't hide his meaning in a cloud of abstractions -- you could ultimately boil his thinking down to some surprisingly practical moral guidance. When I'm in doubt, it's my go-to line of analysis.
For example, if I was a "navigator" deciding whether to guide a sympathetic health care applicant to cheat, I'd ask myself how the system would function if everyone in my position were to guide sympathetic health care applicants to cheat, and I'd realize the result would be a misallocation of funds from the most deserving (as determined by methodology devised by the elected representatives of the people whose tax money is being used for the subsidies), to the most charismatic (those best able to convince people like me that they deserve having the rules bent). The short-term result would be a more expensive, less effective program, and the long-term result would be a thicket of bureaucracy designed to cut down on such cheating, resulting in even more expense and less effectiveness. So, morally, I should not help someone cheat, even if I found him sympathetic and really wanted to help lower his health care costs.
That kind of analysis is superior to a black and white rule like "don't lie," since there are situations where following that rule would be immoral (e.g., you're hiding Anne Frank's family in yor attic and the Gestapo comes around and asks if you have any leads on the whereabouts of Jews).
Arkady
President
I don't think it should be all that hard. I had the gist of it when I read it in 11th grade -- enough to serve as a practical moral guide, if not to have teased out all the nuance. What's the alternative? For young children and the genuinely mentally incompetent, I suppose we can just encourage them to defer to someone else who is trustworthy for making such decisions for them, when in doubt (e.g., a parent). But for others, should we infantilize them by having them put into a parental role over them some priest or man in the sky (as reveaeld by legends invented by illiterate desert nomads thousands of years ago)? That strikes me as too dangerous. If you get your "morality" from religion, there's pretty much nothing you can't be made to do. Some of the most fervently religious people in history were torturers (the Inquisition), genocidal conquerers (the Conquistadors), warmongers (the Crusaders), terrorists (al Qaeda or the Jewish Zealots), etc.
