From: chased@rbbb.Eng.Sun.COM (David Chase)
Newsgroups: ca.politics,ba.politics
Subject: Picking and Choosing our References
Date: 18 Aug 1992 00:29:26 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, Ca.
NNTP-Posting-Host: rbbb

In article <11781@optilink.UUCP> cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) writes:
>In article <l8lkevINNrno@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>, chased@rbbb.Eng.Sun.COM (David Chase) writes:
>> In article <11715@optilink.UUCP> cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) writes:
># #In any case, both Judaism and Christianity have pretty clear
># #prohibitions on homosexuality.
># 
># They have pretty clear prohibitions on LOTS of things. [Some
># of which we seem to feel free to ignore.]

>Yup.  The New Testament is not similarly limited.  It contains its
>own prohibitions on homosexuality, separate from the Levitical
>code.

Citations would be nice.  Monday's NYTimes had a nice little op-ed
piece today addressing just this topic, going into more detail than I
feel like typing in.  The assertion was (generally) that you are
misinterpreting those NT passages; they have obvious meanings other
than those that you assign to them.

In general, (as other posters have noted) you seem to be picking out
those portions of various Authoritative Sources (in this case, the
Bible, which is of importance to many, though not all) that support
your case, and ignoring those parts which do not.  I wonder -- what
are your rules for picking and choosing?  If it reduces to "this is
what I agree with", then your authoritative citations are merely
restatements of your own personal prejudice.  (I must admit that I am
guilty of this as well -- I have always felt that poly-cotton blends
were unclean, and was quite cheered to discover an Authority to
support my prejudice.)

There are other instances of this as well -- for instance, it appears
to be a Libertarian article of faith that the Free Market will cure
most (if not all) ills, or at least bring things into a tolerable
approximation of fairness and equal opportunity.  Principles of
economics, and supply-demand relationships are cited to justify this.

Yet, in my fairly distracted following of economics, there are many
instances where these basic principles seem not to hold.  Sometimes it
seems that our markets converge on a local optimum, rather than a
global optimum (Ken Arrow's work, which I believe appeared in some
form in Scientific American within the last 5 years).  Several of the
theories assume perfect information about the market, which is
certainly far from the truth.  Transaction costs seem to also cause
deviations from theoretical perfection.  There was a recent (within
the last year) article, in either Science News or the NYTimes, about
violations of the assumed relationships between supply, demand, and
price in restaurants.  There's some recent talk that perhaps the
people who manage publicly-held companies don't act in the best
interests of the people who own the companies, and actually erect
barriers to help maintain their control of the companies.  All very
interesting, and all somewhat contrary to the notion that the free
market will find an "economic optimum" without outside interference.
I'd think this would also be very interesting to Libertarians, but I
sure don't see much discussion of it here.

As another example, occasional attacks on "intellectuals" (whoever
*they* are) seem to only apply to those intellectuals with whom the
attacker disagrees.  Bloom and Boskin are OK; Thurow and Reich are
not.  Why the distinction?

To give equal to time the hard (verifiable) sciences, check out the
first article in the December 1990 issue of SIAM Review.  Apparently,
conventional analysis of suspension bridges assumes that ropes can be
pushed.  One assumes that no bugs of similar magnitude lurk in (say)
our understanding of economics :-).

David Chase
Sun
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