For a Moon Colony, Technology Is the Easy Part

[frigidmagi]

NYTimes

Could the United States establish a moon colony and develop a new propulsion system for going to Mars? All within eight years of a Newt Gingrich presidency, as Mr. Gingrich promised this week?

The answers seem to be technologically yes, economically iffy and politically very difficult.

In proposing an ambitious vision for space, Mr. Gingrich stepped into the eternal debate over where the nation’s and NASA’s priorities should lie. Mr. Gingrich spoke little about NASA’s unmanned missions, which many think produce better science with less money. Inspiration and economic frontiers, not science, drive his long-standing enthusiasm for space.

“I come at space from a standpoint of a romantic belief that it really is part of our destiny,” Mr. Gingrich said in his speech on Wednesday. He joked about a legislative proposal, early in his Congressional career, that a moon colony could apply for statehood once its population reached 13,000.

Not surprisingly, at a debate on Thursday, Mr. Gingrich’s Republican opponents lambasted a moon colony as a loony, budget-busting idea in a time of fiscal austerity.

Mitt Romney said he thought a moon base would cost hundred of billions of dollars or more. “I’d rather be rebuilding housing here in the U.S.,” he said.

Ron Paul quipped, “I think we maybe should send some politicians up there.”

The smallest hurdle is technology. After all, sending astronauts back to the moon by 2020 and setting up a permanent home there was the goal of the last Republican president, George W. Bush, and NASA had embarked on developing new rockets and spacecraft to accomplish that. Few doubted that, given enough money and time, NASA would be able to duplicate its success of more than 40 years ago.

A permanent moon base could adapt technologies used in building the International Space Station. NASA was also developing an R.V.-like lunar vehicle where astronauts could drive around the surface of the Moon for weeks at a time.

But money was the problem. When the program, known as Constellation, did not receive as much financing as originally promised, development fell behind, pushing up the price tag. A review of experts concluded that it would cost $150 billion for Constellation to reach its destination close to the original schedule. The Obama administration instead canceled it.

A new NASA program similar to Constellation with brand new rockets would be similarly expensive. But a recent NASA study concluded that the space agency could use smaller existing rockets, coupled with fueling stations in orbit, to reach the Moon within a decade.

A new propulsion system for going to Mars would likely call for reviving old technology — nuclear-powered rocket engines that were originally developed in the 1950s. NASA has already begun work on nuclear propulsion — nuclear reactors that provide continuous thrust — but lacks the money to finish.

But Mr. Gingrich talked of overturning the status quo at NASA, pushing to work faster, to accept greater risks and let private companies take the lead role.

“It’s not something that should be mocked or should be seen as a remote possibility,” said Michael Gold, director of the Washington office of Bigelow Aerospace, a private space company. “The reason this is both possible and economically viable is that many of the systems and technology, if not all, already exist.”

Bigelow, using technology licensed from NASA, has plans to launch two inflatable space stations, capable of housing 36 people, and the same technology could be scaled up to provide living quarters on the moon.

Mr. Gingrich proposed setting aside about 10 percent of NASA’s budget for prizes, similar to the $25,000 that Charles Lindbergh won for being the first to fly across the Atlantic, or, more recently, the $10 million X Prize for commercial spacecraft to rise above the 62-mile-high edge of space.

Over eight years, this would create a prize pot of more than $14 billion. Mr. Gingrich suggested offering a $10 billion prize for the first venture to make a trip to Mars. If no one succeeds, taxpayers pay nothing. If someone does, $10 billion would be cheaper, by a factor of 10 or 100, than any government-run program.

Large aerospace companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin would likely pass on the prizes — it would be a tough sell to investors when the payoff could be nothing at all — but Mr. Gingrich’s allies, including Bob Walker, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, believe that technology billionaires like Jeffrey Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, and Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, would willingly invest their own money in hopes of fame, if not fortune.

Whether any of these ideas could win enough political support is another question. When Mr. Obama called for the cancellation of Constellation, he proposed that NASA rely much more on commercial companies in the future, echoing many of the same themes that Mr. Gingrich is advocating. Mr. Gingrich even wrote an opinion piece lauding Mr. Obama’s proposed plans.

However, Mr. Gingrich, a longtime space enthusiast, seems more likely to spend the political capital to push his proposals. Charles Miller, formerly a senior adviser at NASA for commercial space, said all of the pieces of Mr. Gingrich’s space plans were plausible if not fleshed out.

“The improbable thing at this point is if Newt will become president,” he said.

What a Moon Colony Would Require

* Rockets capable of carrying astronauts and cargo to the moon. NASA is developing a new heavy-lift rocket. Newt Gingrich suggests smaller existing rockets could suffice. But smaller rockets would make the mission more complicated because moon-lander pieces would have to be assembled in orbit, as was the Space Station.

* A spacecraft that can land on the moon. Such a craft does not exist, but no big technology leaps are needed since NASA did this more than 40 years ago when astronauts landed on the moon. For a permanent base, a larger craft would be needed to ferry the pieces.

* Habitats where the astronauts would live. Years ago, NASA began preliminary designs but did not progress far before the program was canceled. A commercial company, Bigelow Aerospace, believes its technology of inflatable modules can be adapted for lunar habitats.

Anything built on the moon would have to withstand the sharp-edged lunar dust and large temperature swings, which go from -200 to +200 degrees Fahrenheit.

I don't see to many people trying a Mars mission for just 10 billion given that prize might not even cover the expenses.

*sigh*

Thing is usually I'd be all for this, but this isn't gonna work meshed with his economic policy nor do I believe Grinch is that serious. I also don't have a high opinion of the man's attention span.

[Josh]

He could well be sincere about it, but a Gingrich presidency would be so mired in shit from day one that his intentions in that area wouldn't mean a damn thing.

Damn shame that we can't get people in position to push the vision, though. I mean, people with functional hearts and brains.

[Cynical Cat]

Every presidential candidate for as long as I can remember has promised more bucks for space and they have all, to one degree or another, failed to deliver. Especially in this economic climate, any space promises are worthless.

[Josh]

Way to be cynical, cat.

And depressingly accurate.

[General Havoc]

Way to be cynical, cat.

And depressingly accurate.

Well we don't do anything else on these forums anymore except try to out-cynicize one another, so why not?

[Josh]

Way to be cynical, cat.

And depressingly accurate.

Well we don't do anything else on these forums anymore except try to out-cynicize one another, so why not?

Why yes, that is all we do. Thankfully we have you to cynicize about our cynicism.

That, by the way, was sarcasm.

More seriously, when you have a political system that operates on marketing over pretense of substance, cynicism is the healthy response. When, as Cat observed, every presidential candidate makes noise in support of the space program and then fails to follow through, cynicism is warranted.

The space program itself was born in politics. There's a reason they take off in Florida but are controlled from the Johnson space center in Houston. So when it served political ends, the space program was fully funded and a national priority. As soon as the Soviets conceded the race to the moon, the program was ratcheted back until we were just dicking around in LEO with those damn shuttles. Now they're gone, and everyone has to hitch rides with the Russians to the ISS because we've let our capabilities wither away.

In spite of all this, every president has promised that we're going to do cool stuff in space.

So now I have provided a substantive reason why it is logical to be cynical about the promises vs. the deeds of our politicians in terms of the space program, as more succinctly but just as accurately put by the Cat, feel free to illustrate why cynicism isn't warranted in this case rather than complaining that our tone doesn't satisfy your New Year's resolution.

[Derek Thunder]

I think there's reason for optimism in that a metallic asteroid the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs would have trillions of dollars of resources contained within. Eventually that's going to be too tempting a prize to just leave sitting out there.

[Cynical Cat]

Everyone likes the idea of doing cool stuff in space, but the US has such huge, long standing budget issues and the number of people for whom it is a make or break issue is very small. Like the university system it benefited from the Cold War and the dick waving associated with it and has been somewhat neglected ever since we no longer had to prove we're better than the communists. Unlike the university system, the number of people connected to and going through it professionally is pretty small. It's simply easier to axe than just about anything else when the fighting over budget numbers comes up and that's pretty damn often.

[General Havoc]

Why yes, that is all we do. Thankfully we have you to cynicize about our cynicism.

That, by the way, was sarcasm.

More seriously, when you have a political system that operates on marketing over pretense of substance, cynicism is the healthy response. When, as Cat observed, every presidential candidate makes noise in support of the space program and then fails to follow through, cynicism is warranted.

The space program itself was born in politics. There's a reason they take off in Florida but are controlled from the Johnson space center in Houston. So when it served political ends, the space program was fully funded and a national priority. As soon as the Soviets conceded the race to the moon, the program was ratcheted back until we were just dicking around in LEO with those damn shuttles. Now they're gone, and everyone has to hitch rides with the Russians to the ISS because we've let our capabilities wither away.

In spite of all this, every president has promised that we're going to do cool stuff in space.

So now I have provided a substantive reason why it is logical to be cynical about the promises vs. the deeds of our politicians in terms of the space program, as more succinctly but just as accurately put by the Cat, feel free to illustrate why cynicism isn't warranted in this case rather than complaining that our tone doesn't satisfy your New Year's resolution.

Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.

You know, I don't claim to be a prophet, or at least I shouldn't. I've been wrong about my predictions that come up in the future more often than I've been right, it seems. So I can't tell you, Josh about what will happen in the future under this president or that one. I can't sit here and tell you that Newt or Obama or whoever will fulfill this promise or that one. All I can really tell you is what I see from the things that have happened in the past.

You're right, of course, that the space program was an act of politics from the get go. And that it remains one for the most part. I know why we launch our shuttles from Florida and control them from Texas, and I know why we shifted from Apollo to the Shuttles. Personally, I would not characterize the twenty-year, 135-mission space shuttle program, pursued across six different presidential administrations, even in the face of the loss of 40% of the spacecraft involved, as "dicking around in LEO", but then I'm sure you have some reason for characterizing it as such. I shouldn't be judging, after all.

If we were discussing being skeptical of these periodic promises, then I probably wouldn't have opened my mouth. As Cyncat and yourself have pointed out, there's plenty of reason to. But we're not. You yourself described this mindset of yours as cynical. I agree that's what it is. This isn't simply a matter of word choice, it's a matter of intent and philosophy. And a cynical mindset has nothing to do with possibilities, it has to do with fact. Prediction. Being right.

I don't know if you're right, Josh. I don't know if Cyncat is. But here's what I do know. The cold war created the space race, and sustained it for a long time, along with the desire to prove nationalistically that we were so much more awesome than everyone else. We're hardly the only nation with that need ingrained in our psyches. So while I cannot predict the future, I do have a sufficiently vivid imagination to picture several of them. Politics created the space program, and politics can re-create it if need be, or boost it back to prominence. Maybe the Chinese will provide enough of a competitive push to make us to so. Maybe one of the hundreds of extra-solar planets we are now discovering by the hundreds and thousands will be found to have life on it. Maybe an asteroid will be found on a collision course. Maybe national priorities will shift, as they have shifted so many times in the past. Maybe technologies will make commercial exploitation of space travel more viable, or one of the various foundations and prizes under offer will spur some new development. Maybe the Pope will proclaim that space travel and its advancement is the duty of any good christian. Maybe the Mormons will. Maybe the Muslims will. Maybe the economy will recover. Or maybe it won't, and we'll limp along for a while longer, doing only the programs that we feel we can afford.

You see, you asked me to provide you with an illustration of why cynicism isn't warranted in this case. My illustration, is your post. Your post wherein you described the political origins of the space program as though it tainted the Apollo missions and made them base and corrupt. Your post wherein you characterized everything since Apollo, the Space Shuttles, the ISS, Hubble, the Mars Rovers, as nothing more than "dicking around". Your post, is why cynicism is not warranted. Your post is why it is never warranted. Because all cynicism does is let you safely recast everything around you in a dismissive, contemptuous manner, and then claim to know the future.

Cynicism is a road that leads nowhere. Cynicism is a lie you require others to believe in order to maintain your sense of self-worth. Cynicism is nothing, does nothing, discovers nothing, struggles with and grapples with nothing. Cynicism is contempt manifested in mental form. Cynicism is the belief that nothing can get better, and nothing ever will. It dogmatism by another name. It is the desire to abate one's own fear, hopelessness, and doubt, by inflicting them on others, and thereby to masquerade as wit and intelligence. And it does not fool me. Cynicism is not warranted in this case because I just cited you eight possibilities for how the space program might once more be accelerated, even as Derek Thunder cited you one more. It is not warranted because the "dicking around" you described actually involved a great deal of accomplishment, whether you choose selectively to ignore it all or not. Re-framing the argument so that everything positive is excluded is an old cynic's trick, and as an old cynic myself, I can spot it a mile away. Cynicism is not warranted in this case because we stand at a turbulent time in history when many things are changing at paces never before seen, and the things believed impossible not long ago are happening daily, and because the same pressures that created the space program in the 50s are still with us, and stronger now than they were then. What shifts they will bring is beyond my knowledge. No matter how much you might claim otherwise, they are also beyond yours.

And even if none of those things were the case, cynicism is not warranted here, because cynicism is itself a lie, predicated on the fiction that the cynic is wiser by virtue of his ability to predict events through his lens of myopic pessimism. It is an ugly thing, that does not merely deny the existence of improvement on any level, but cruelly mocks the possibility. There is a cruelty to it. A visceral flash of superiority, of someone trying to prove themselves smart by dismissing everyone else as stupid. I do not describe it thus because I wish to accuse you of being cruel, myopic, or a liar. I describe it thus as one who has had lengthy association with its corrosive touch. One who used it as a hiding place, a mask of smug superiority from whence I could dismiss the aspirations of the "lesser" men around me. When I spoke with cynicism, I spoke not just with the belief, but the need to prove, perversely, that the world was exactly as I saw it. The need to tear down all other possibilities, and to mock them. The need to make posts on the internet that dismissed people's belief in any possibility of change as the ravings of stupid people out to fulfill their own base urges or smugly characterize their entire world view as the fulfillment of a new years resolution. That person was me. At times it still is.

So, to sum, why is cynicism not warranted here? Because NASA has done amazing things since the Apollo program ended. And so has the ESA, and the Russian Space authority, and even the Chinese one. Because the shuttles retired last year, and one of the benefits of elective government is the rapidity (relatively speaking) of change. Because the United States created the space program out of whole cloth, for whatever motives, base or angelic, you wish to ascribe them to, and despite your belief as such, it has never gone away. But more importantly, it is not warranted because even if all the things I just said were untrue, cynicism as you have employed it here is nothing but bile. You posed it as a challenge to me. To illustrate to you that you are wrong, or to concede defeat before your superior logic. But the fact is, both of us are discussing fantasy. We do not know what the space program will bring, and while it's perfectly fine to maintain a healthy skepticism, or even black, dour pessimism, if that's what you prefer, what is not fine is to walk into a thread, post definitive declarations of how cynical predictions of the future are the only accurate ones, and jump all over anyone who suggests otherwise.

It's a public forum, Josh, and you're free to do the above if you like. But I fear you've mis-understood my resolution. It wasn't to attack anyone whose sentiments didn't match with rose-colored glasses. It was to stop paying lip service to the pretense that the smartest person in the room is the one who can create the blackest portrait of the future. It was to put to an end the policy of behaving as though the only opinions that are sacrosanct are the ones that use cynicism to produce a wall of nihilistic contempt. It was, in short, to begin treating cynics as I have previously treated everyone else who claims to know the future. It was, additionally, to try and excise that behavior in myself. Obviously, this is a work in progress, but Rome was not built in a day.

So go ahead and be as cynical as you like, but don't expect me to accord it some mystical sense of intellect. You were correct when you said that I was cynicizing your cynicism. One loses, at times, one's ability to process such things by other means, at least if one is me. But take it from one who knows well Josh: Cynicism is not wit. Cynicism is its absence.

[Josh]

I've got a fair bit going on at the moment so I can't really parse your reply in its entirety and answer it fully. But just so you know I'm not ducking things, I'll give you this:

Cynicism, to me, is a rational trait when used to challenge promises or movements that have been proven to tend to be lies. In that sense, it's a healthy response to protect against being suckered by every slick salesman that comes along and promises you (literally in this case) the moon.

As I said before I actually do appreciate your point of view on the subject. There's a lot of too-cool dismissive crap running amok these days. It's not informed cynicism, like what Cat and I pointed out about previous history of presidential administrations. Rather, it is that attempt to be the first cool kid to trash a new idea or personality on the scene.

I wasn't even knocking NASA when I said we're dicking around in LEO. NASA's doing what it can under blatantly shitty budgeting processes.

Now, for my own part I didn't have a New Year's resolution, but I did decide to cut down on my level of unnecessary snark a while back. So sorry about the cutting edge in my reply.

These days I'm pretty politically nihilistic, which is why I tend to avoid political discussions altogether. I'm actually pretty rosy-glasses myself about the human race overall and the nature of existence. It's just that I first became aware of the world at the tail-end of the Carter administration (Not exhaustively, I was freaking six. But I knew the names of the candidates at least. I actually saw Kennedy kneecap Carter's reelection prospects with his upstage gag at the convention.) I've seen presidents come and presidents go, I've seen every last one of them straight-up reverse on matters they explicitly campaigned on or promised during their presidency. So when it comes to politicians, the informed reflex is to look at the record, see the trend, and understand that you're most likely dealing with a professional liar or an amateur on the way to becoming a professional liar. In that case, cynicism isn't about being the smartest fellow around, it's about protecting yourself against being suckered.

[General Havoc]

Yeah... sorry man. When I get going, I tend to just ramble on and on forever. Working on that'll be next year's resolution.

There's a lot of definitions of cynicism floating around. I shouldn't assume that everyone means the same thing by it that I do. And as I said, there's nothing wrong with a healthy sense of skepticism, particularly when politicians are speaking promises in an election year. At risk of sounding cynical myself, the track record for promises of that sort is... poor.

I deal with a lot of cynicism in my everyday life. Online and off. I mean it in the sense I was describing, not the one you were. And lest I sound like some saint, I used to be (and probably still am) the source of a lot of it. It's deceptively easy to fall into, and the worst part is that, at least in my experience, it tends to start becoming self-perpetuating. However well informed one might be when making a choice to believe this or that, cynicism breeds itself into a loop, and one starts looking for confirmation of one's own expectations instead of taking things as they are. Maybe I'm more prone to fatalism than most, who knows. But to me, the term "informed cynicism" is oxymoronic, as cynicism has nothing to do with how much you know about a subject, just your expectations on it.

But again, I don't know how everyone deals with this sort of thing. I just know how corrosive it becomes to me personally. What you call cynicism, I might call simple skepticism or healthy realism. On the other hand I might not.

I understand why people get cynical about politics or news, certainly. But... while I certainly agree that every president since Carter (and probably every one before him) did indeed flip on promises made, what cynicism does is start leading you to define their presidencies by that, until that's all that happened. But bear in mind, Obama said he'd end Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He did that. He said he'd pass health care reform. He did that. He said he'd get us out of Iraq, and by and large he did that too. He also said he'd do a lot of things that he has not done, or that qualify the above. We can (and have) talked a lot about all the things he hasn't done, or can't do, or broke his promises over. That's legitimate. But it's not legitimate to turn that into the only story of Obama or the others or of the presidency as a whole, and I just don't consider it reasonable to focus entirely on that, even for presidents whose track record was pretty bad all things considered. Even George W. Bush managed to save a million lives in Africa by increasing RVD accessibility by a factor of 25.

It is certainly true that every president, Carter included, lied to you. You should, of course, bear that in mind when listening to the next batch come through. But one should also bear in mind that they also did many other things, good and bad and in between, some of which might well surprise you.

[Josh]

Wellll... that's the thing-

Obama wasn't ending DADT until the Log Cabin Republicans forced the issue with a lawsuit. Obama fought for 'health care reform' that largely amounts to an insurance industry payoff in the form that his opponent campaigned for and Obama campaigned against. As for leaving Iraq, a dispute with the Iraqi government appears to have played into that.

I never trusted him, because nothing he said was new. He just packaged it quite well and caught the exact moment when people really wanted to believe that somebody was really going to clean up DC. But you know who the first presidential candidate who promised to clean up the government and clear out the deadwood was? Jefferson, running against Adams. The sentiment promoted by the Jefferson campaign was that the post-Washington administration had gotten fat and lazy in political power and taken the country away from its revolutionary values. Jefferson, of course, was going to come in and make everything right again. Jefferson, of course, didn't.

Since then, most candidates have run on some variation of the 'breath of fresh air' approach, and every four to eight years at least some people fall for it.

Now, do each of these presidents have the occasional gem of a good policy amidst the turds of power-brokering? Sure. I don't regard them as mustache-twirling villains by any stretch. Just political players, and politicians are essentially used car salesmen with policy-making powers. So you can't and shouldn't ever expect any of them to fix your problems or 'fix' the country. It's important to keep an eye on politics, and sometimes you have to stick in and try to get something changed when you can. But the entire design of a presidential campaign is to sell the candidate as some form of crusading messiah, and they've been practicing that art for a couple of centuries now. Occasionally we even manage to get a decent one.

Back to the matter of cynicism, sure, a lot of it is based on definition. What I might recommend to you is that rather than attacking what you perceive as cynicism by labeling it when you see it, instead dispute the actual facts of the case. Agree or disagree, I respect that in your subsequent posts in the thread, you've assembled a relevant disagreement with my points. Part of the reason that I got snarky in reply (aside from the fact that I'm kind of an asshole) is that just telling us we're cynical is, as I said, an assault on the tone of our statements rather than a dispute of the actual facts. It's a style over substance argument that's not going to convince people not to be destructively cynical.

[General Havoc]

You see, this is sort of the problem. I label things as cynical rather than debate the facts point by point because cynicism isn't about facts, it's about labeling. I really hate to do this, but consider your second to last paragraph there:

Now, do each of these presidents have the occasional gem of a good policy amidst the turds of power-brokering? Sure. I don't regard them as mustache-twirling villains by any stretch. Just political players, and politicians are essentially used car salesmen with policy-making powers. So you can't and shouldn't ever expect any of them to fix your problems or 'fix' the country. It's important to keep an eye on politics, and sometimes you have to stick in and try to get something changed when you can. But the entire design of a presidential campaign is to sell the candidate as some form of crusading messiah, and they've been practicing that art for a couple of centuries now. Occasionally we even manage to get a decent one.

There's not one single point of fact in that paragraph for me to oppose or support. That's not a bad thing, don't get me wrong. It's your opinion, describing the methodology whereby you came to the conclusions you came to. But while I can say that I agree with it or disagree with it (I disagree with it, by the way), I cannot do so by means of facts. "Politicians are essentially used-car salesmen" is not a fact, it is a metaphor of opinion. I can no more disprove it than I can disprove your favorite color. This doesn't mean it's right, but I'm left with the choice of either completely ignoring it, or calling it out as a particularly cynical view of the world that does not, in my mind, meet with reality. Even if I present my counter-opinion at great length and with many examples, it's still nothing more than opinion, how I shade the facts of the world versus how you do.

The problem with debating cynicism with facts is that I would need to be an expert on literally every subject in order to do that, and much as I might make arrogant claims to the contrary, I am not an expert on everything. The reason I would need to be an expert is, again, because cynicism isn't about the facts, it's about how we interpret the facts, and what facts we choose to dismiss as irrelevant. For example, I proposed that one of the good things Obama has done is repeal DADT. Your reply was that Obama only did so because of some lawsuit. For all I know, you are correct. But notice that we are no longer discussing the accomplishments or lack thereof of the Obama administration, but instead discussing the motivations for which Obama repealed DADT. Let us presume that I do research and find that you are correct about those motivations, and that he only did so when forced to by a republican lawsuit. Does this mean that repealing DADT didn't 'count'? It is no longer a good thing? And if I find out that you are not correct about them, will the debate shift to a different subject? Will we then discuss how DADT wasn't important in the first place, or how the military itself is evil, and so superficial changes to its makeup don't matter? I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but having a fact-based discussion on cynicism usually results in the conversation progressively shifting from subject to subject until one is finally found that fits the world-view of the cynic, and every other subject is dismissed as irrelevant for one reason or another.

Take another example, where you said that our disputes with the Iraqi government were a factor in our leaving Iraq when we did. I don't believe that's the case at all. The timetable we set up for leaving Iraq goes back years, and this is not the first time nor the fifth that we've had a dispute with the Iraqi government. But to prove that, I have to prove a negative. I have to prove not only that we ended the Iraq war at long last, but that all of the reasons for which we ended it were virtuous. Not merely the balance, all of them. Because according to the logic above, if the withdrawal from Iraq was motivated even in part by a dispute with the government, that's enough to disqualify it as a positive accomplishment.

This is my problem with cynicism and the reason I have resorted to simply labeling it, as I simply don't see that I have a choice. You stated "you can't and shouldn't ever expect any of them to fix your problems or 'fix' the country." How exactly am I supposed to counter that by means of fact? To do that, I would have to demonstrate, factually, that all forty-four presidents we have had so far have solved great problems of society, and not only that, but that they did so permanently, from altruistic motives, and without any negative consequences whatsoever. Any one of those failings will result in that example being dismissed. You just dismissed all three of my previous examples by those very means. So either I write you a comprehensive (and completely untrue) version of the history of the United States, or I'm 'wrong' and all politics are evil.

That's not exactly a compelling choice there.

I don't agree in the slightest with the position you just stated vis-a-vis the American political system. I think it's an incredibly cynical and even myopic view of how politics functions. To claim that you can never expect politicians to fix any problems at all requires, to my mind, an almost obsessive blindness to the history of the last two hundred years. I could cite everything from Social Security to the abolition of slavery to the interstate system to Eisenhower calling out the army to integrate the schools in Arkansas. I could cite GPS. I could cite the defeat of Nazism. I could even cite Obama's health care law. But all of those things would just be anecdotal citations, which can be rationalized away or have the argument re-framed to make them not count: Social Security caused deficits. Slavery's abolition left behind Jim Crow. The interstate system caused environmental problems. Eisenhower overstepped his authority, or was forced to do it by non-governmental agencies. GPS is a gimmick. Nazism was destroyed by the soviets...

Obama fought for 'health care reform' that largely amounts to an insurance industry payoff in the form that his opponent campaigned for and Obama campaigned against.

At that point, I now have to debate seven different subjects with you, none of which were the original one, every one of which is subject to further dismissal or reframings. If I don't, then you have 'proven' that all politics are evil.

You are correct that what I am arguing consists of style over substance. You are also correct that such arguments are highly unlikely to be effective. But the reason I engage in them is because what I am objecting to is stylistic, and has, in my mind, no substance to it. We can debate the facts of DADT, or Obamacare, or the end of the war in Iraq, or many other things. What we cannot do is sit down and debate the facts of whether or not politics itself is an intrinsic evil incapable of resolving problems. That's a philosophical question, that can only be resolved through other means. I certainly have an opinion on it, and I do believe that my opinion is right and yours wrong (as, no doubt, you believe the reverse). But I can't phrase that one by means of facts, because facts have nothing to do with it.

I do appreciate your suggestion as to what I ought to do to resolve this problem of mine, but I think my actual proceeding will be different. I will debate fact here, don't get me wrong. And I will try to do more than just labeling people as cynics and being done with it, because as you rightly pointed out, that's just as dismissive as anything I've objected to. But I think the primary thing I will do is start posting some news and science stories of my own. This forum does not lack for people eager to grind axes over some fresh atrocity, disaster, or outrage. I think however it might help to have a bit more of a balanced perspective on the state of the world by highlighting the stories, and they are many, that pass completely by this forum because their content does not speak to a doom-laden view.

But insofar as we are discussing not the facts, but the spin we place upon them, I am afraid I know of no recourse but to object to them in like terms. Baring literal omniscience, that may simply be the best I can do.

[Josh]

Okay, you're right that this sprawls way beyond the original subject. Furthermore, I'll concede that I did over-generalize with regards to the entire political process, though in truth I will narrow it down to what I regard as the modern political system as it stands and how it largely focuses on profit via symbolism over substance.

We have pretty much hit the wall with the current topic, but thanks for your thoughts and for engaging on it. You have given me things to think about and I always appreciate that.

[General Havoc]

Okay, you're right that this sprawls way beyond the original subject. Furthermore, I'll concede that I did over-generalize with regards to the entire political process, though in truth I will narrow it down to what I regard as the modern political system as it stands and how it largely focuses on profit via symbolism over substance.

We have pretty much hit the wall with the current topic, but thanks for your thoughts and for engaging on it. You have given me things to think about and I always appreciate that.

You're probably right. Thanks as well for engaging on the matter. And if I wound up sounding like the thought police there, I do apologize. I've not been trying to claim that any of the things you said are illegitimate, just to explain why I have replied to them in the way I did. I hope it didn't come across too arrogantly.