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kdawson really seems to like this topic... as pointed out in the summary, this was slashdotted two weeks ago on her watch.

This submission, furthermore, stems from "plasmacutter". In a mini-flame war between he and I (note - this is in response to my post, yes), he goes on to claim that:

- Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, Policy Review, and the Christian Science Monitor "have been thoroughly debunked as extreme right" (I'd love to know who did that bit of debunking, and just how they determine what's "extreme right") while considering Al Franken to be an "influential political thinker". (source)

- Apparently believes anyone who has a Ph.D., particularly in the political sciences (I realize the social sciences aren't popular here on /., but when one is discussing election results/poll data, they're the best source) must belong to the "elite echelons" of the upper class (Also... people with Ph.D's in fields like those you are speaking about also tend to be in the elite echelons of the upper class, because those degrees tend to cost you more money than you make from them (without the right connections, of course.. wink wink).. and you wander why they espouse elitist right wing values and are listened to by elitist right wing leaders? (source). I got a good laugh out of this then, and still do, especially considering my top 3 favorite political science professors are, in order: 1. a Democrat, 2. a Green, and finally 3. a Republican. And I attend one of the most conservative universities in the entire U.S.

The submitter of the previous story was similarly a bit off his rocker.

In short, what we have here is kdawson publishing pretty much anything he or she likes about this matter to stir up debate and ad clicks, and all of it coming from that bastion of journalism, that peer-reviewed gem of western society, Rolling Stone.

Surely Slashdot can do better than this. There are LOTS of topics of interest to the left that could be covered in a decent manner. Why kdawson keeps banging away on this one note is baffling to me.

-withdraw from iraq, try to do so gracefully since were damned if we stay and damned if we go.

So, the Democrats' official position is that Iraq's hopeless? Wow, I'm inspired with confidence. The solution of "no solution". Great.

-undo the damage to our civil liberties done by the patriot act

Yes, because the majority of the U.S. population is so pissed off that you can look at library records. Forgive me, but the PATRIOT Act is by far the least of my concerns. As someone who has done more than his fair share of studying national security issues, I recognize the need for something that goes well beyond FISA, which was designed to operate against different kinds of threats.

-reform social security by removing the blatant privatization bush put in which basically amounts to abolshment (but with the added benefit of commissions to brokers before your stock tanks)

Make Social Security insoluble. Great. Pardon me as I run for the ballot box...

-Universal health care (which responds to the increasing 10s of millions of people without healthcare, and which they make a damned good economic case for!)

Because it's worked oh so well for Europe and Canada! Quick, let's all jump on that bandwagon! And where do you plan on getting the funding for all of this?

-Investigation into bush's illegal activites, followed hopefully by impeachment

DOWN WITH BUSHITLER! Please, did you bother to read the post above?

-Investigation into oil companies among others for gouging.

Because there could only be one source for all the world's problems - rich people.

Among others.. it's all laid out..

I sincerely hope this isn't a serious party platform. Please, please tell me that your post is some kind of sick joke. No serious group could put this forward and expect people to vote for them.

Big media is owned by republicans so you don't see it.. listen to air america and they spend each and every day spelling out those exact same points.

And, of course, the big time media conspiracy theory which I don't buy from the right wing and find particularly fatuous when coming from the left. Yes, I must listen to the great Air America and exorcise the right wing demons like Ted Turner! Save me! Why, I've been wasting all of this time reading ridiculous publications like Foreign Affairs, Policy Review, and the Christian Science Monitor when I could've been listening to some idiot and paid political actor with a BA in Government tell me what to think in the form of nice, compact bumper sticker slogans! Oh, the fool I must be! I must throw away my entire library of books written by influential political thinkers and replace it with Al Franken and Noam Chomsky ravings!

If you're looking to convince me your party has anything resembling a platform, you've failed miserably.

Sorry, but the disavowal of differences between races is running up against more and more scientific evidence to the contrary. Human racial groupings may not be as discrete as species, but they have medical relevance.

The reality of race
http://mednews.stanford.edu/releases/2005/january/ racial-data.htm
http://www.policyreview.org/DEC01/satel.html
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0002A35 3-C027-1E1C-8B3B809EC588EEDF

Medical significance of race
http://jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/080501/m et_6870358.html
http://www.marrow.org/NMDP/black_african_american_ patients.html
http://p221.ezboard.com/fbalkanhistoryfrm17.showMe ssage?topicID=2.topic

*sigh* Go read a history book. Preferably one starts at least two decades before "And then came the Americans and kicked the evil Krauts' asses". Stuff like the Weimaran Republic and the like.

If you want a small idea how big department stores (owned by Jews) were perceived by the general population, have a look here: http://www.policyreview.org/apr01/matus.html. But I see no reason to give references for facts that should be known to anyone wanting to engage in any kind of meaningful discussion about National Socialism. It's all in the history books, you just need read the, um, boring parts (no war, no kicking Kraut ass, etc).

Amazingly free software has avoided becoming overtly politicized! Probably because software developers are a lot more intelligent than the average "movement".

When I say politicized, here's the long academic, but very interesting explanation of what I'm talking about:

Why everything everywhere all the time must be political.

The short explanation is this:

I was once on a electronic music mailing list dedicated to the subgenre of electronic music known as "Trance". This is just electronic music but more repetitive. Electronic music of this subgenre in general does not have lyrics.

Anyway, the Iraq war was starting and some guy came on the list and said "If you're really a 'Trancer' and believe in the trance music spirit you'll come to my anti-Iraq war protest".

I replied back that if ALL I really cared about was trance music than I would be for Nuking Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia and putting the entire middle east under the domination of Israel as Israel has some of the best trance music in the world and raves, techno music, dancing, hallucinogenic drugs etc are treated far more severely in these Islamic countries than in Israel.

Anyway, invevitably every single movement of any size is at least attempted to be co-opted somehow into the left wing political coalition, no matter how tenuous the link between the left's ideology and the aims of the movement they are attempting to assimilate.

I think you're misunderstanding me. I never professed any desire to respect all cultures equally. Female circumcision, not allowing women to go to school, slavery, etc... all these things are objectively wrong and indefensible. You'll here no cultural relativism from me.

And what exactly would you call Imperial Japan before and during WWII? A commune? Anarchy? No, it was just as authortarian, if not as actively repressive, as Saddam's regime.

Yes, but we had a plan when we took over Japan. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/rebuilding-iraq -0316.html What I said about the need for civil society and democratic culture isn't earth-shattering by the way, it's a widely accepted view among academics and policy wonks. http://www.policyreview.org/jun03/diamond.html And once again, it has nothig to do with race. Have a purebred american kid grow up in the middle east, and the same problems with lack of experience and faith in the system would arise. We were't planning to prevent museum looting within days of the start of hostilities, we were planning on being able to react to chemical and biologic weapons attacks on our troops. If we'd known that the entire Iraqi army would fall apart again, I think we would have done a better job.
We should have been planning to prevent museum looting, high ranking military planners were saying all along that the invasion itself would be a cakewalk, but that we would need 100,000 more troops to secure the piece and prevent looting. There were also desperate please from the Iraqi National Museum for security and they went unheeded. Also, the iraqi army didn't "fall apart" we intentionally disbanded it, thus depriving thousands of young, healthy men with military training from a living (which adds to the pool of potential terrorist recruits) and undermining Iraq's ability to provide for its own security. There were bad guys in the Iraqi army, many of the higher ups were Baathist idealogues and many prison guards, obviously, engaged in torture, but the vast majority of the soldiers had no ideological bias, or were even pro-democracy and respected the rule of law. By the way, the democrats didn't have the same intelligence as the white house, contrary to the white house spin. They were very selective about what information was released to congress and prevented reports that put much of the intelligence into question from coming to light until it was too late.

[Better formatting]

No, World War 2 helped end that cycle early, NOT FDR. Cycles are part of nature, they will happen one way or another. This one was just exacerbated by the relatively recently formed Fed Reserve and their decision to shrink the money supply so drastically.

http://www.amatecon.com/gd/gdoverview.html
"What caused the Great Depression? To get a handle on that, it's necessary to look at previous depressions and compare. The Great Depression was by no means the first depression this country ever had, but it was clearly the worst. What made it different than the rest? At the time of the Great Depression, government intervention in the economy was higher than it had ever been and a special government agency had been set up specifically to prevent depressions and their associated problems, such as bank panics."

http://www.libertyhaven.com/theoreticalorphilosoph icalissues/economichistory/mysteries.shtml
"Many free-market economists had attempted to answer the first question, including Benjamin M. Anderson and Murray N. Rothbard,2 but none had the impact equal to Milton Friedman's empirical studies on money in the early 1960s. His was the first effective effort to destroy the argument that the Great Depression was the handiwork of an inherently unstable capitalistic system. Friedman (and his co-author, Anna J. Schwartz) demonstrated forcefully that it was not free enterprise, but rather government - specifically the Federal Reserve System - that caused the Great Depression."

Your belief that the GD was caused by a Free Market has been misproven many times. It's still a common fallacy, but it's not true. But, I find it hard to believe that anyone can actually think that FDR saved us from it. He didn't. HITLER and HIROHITO brought us out of that slump.

http://www.policyreview.org/aug01/roberts.html
"A country that doesn't understand its own history is not well equipped to deal with its future. The Great Depression was not a failure of the old order. It was the failure of the new order that had just begun.
The Federal Reserve is the most powerful institution of a new order that believed in the efficacy of government and its ability to do good. The same Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression when its wise men made a series of cumulative mistakes that contracted the money supply by one-third and wiped out purchasing power in an unprecedented fashion."

No, World War 2 helped end that cycle early. Cycles are part of nature, they will happen one way or another. http://www.amatecon.com/gd/gdoverview.html "What caused the Great Depression? To get a handle on that, it's necessary to look at previous depressions and compare. The Great Depression was by no means the first depression this country ever had, but it was clearly the worst. What made it different than the rest? At the time of the Great Depression, government intervention in the economy was higher than it had ever been and a special government agency had been set up specifically to prevent depressions and their associated problems, such as bank panics." http://www.libertyhaven.com/theoreticalorphilosoph icalissues/economichistory/mysteries.shtml "Many free-market economists had attempted to answer the first question, including Benjamin M. Anderson and Murray N. Rothbard,2 but none had the impact equal to Milton Friedman's empirical studies on money in the early 1960s. His was the first effective effort to destroy the argument that the Great Depression was the handiwork of an inherently unstable capitalistic system. Friedman (and his co-author, Anna J. Schwartz) demonstrated forcefully that it was not free enterprise, but rather government - specifically the Federal Reserve System - that caused the Great Depression." Your belief that the GD was caused by a Free Market has been misproven many times. It's still a common fallacy, but it's not true. But, I find it hard to believe that anyone can actually think that FDR saved us from it. He didn't. HITLER and HIROHITO brought us out of that slump. http://www.policyreview.org/aug01/roberts.html "A country that doesn't understand its own history is not well equipped to deal with its future. The Great Depression was not a failure of the old order. It was the failure of the new order that had just begun. The Federal Reserve is the most powerful institution of a new order that believed in the efficacy of government and its ability to do good. The same Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression when its wise men made a series of cumulative mistakes that contracted the money supply by one-third and wiped out purchasing power in an unprecedented fashion."

Go Go Gadget Flame Suit!

Here's the real answer:
Why there is a culture war

The Summary is

Good academic performance is looked down upon in high school due to the indoctronation of children into the cult of anti-hero worship. Which means, worshipping drug dealers, gangsters and other degenerates as role models and heros of youth. This is not an organic phenomenon but instead is an implementation of Gramsci's theories of social revolution by means of cultural marxism that were produced in the 30s and implemented in the United States in the 60s.

For those who disagree I dare you to read Fonte's article. It will help make a lot of bizarre phenomenon and double standards in our culture make perfect sense.

private institutions? none of their damn business.

As far as I know there are only two or three private colleges that do not accept federal funding (Hillsdale College in Michigan, Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and Patrick Henry College in Virginia). I graduated from Hillsdale in 2002 and so this fact falls close to home, but you can see these other sources for verification.

This brings us back on topic, should the federal government be able to keep tabs on its investment? Maybe the better question is should the federal government be funding (read controlling) nearly all of the higher education in the nation? Seeing as only 3 colleges are run without federal money, which I would like to find anyone who gets funding without strings attached.

As time goes on I suppose you can regard Europe in the same way, so you'll eventually have another big, real grown-up country to compare yourselves with!

I certainly hope so, whenever it happens. Big countries have their own problems, so I'd expect empathy from Europe-the-nation (more than the sniping we get now). Although given the name-calling between it members, it looks as if this nation will take some time to birth itself.

About why I can't accept Europe as a nation yet: If we stick to the original rudimentary charter available to the Federal US government (interstate trade, maintaining the union's borders, and dealing with the outside world) it's clear Europe is 1/3rd there (common market which IIRC regulates internation trade and currency -- with exceptions).

The day Europe can take joint decisions on defense and foreign policy it will show it is a real country, IMO. And this is nontrivial because these things (all rationalization aside) are emotive: you can't wipe away years of European history and mistrust in a day.

Btw, you may want to read this (rather long) old document, it's tangentially related to the European superstate and shows how European 'unity' has often been imagined more as a pawn than anything else.

The problem is OBL is living in a fantasy world

Taken from this site:

Advocates of gun-control advocates sometimes cite a 1995 study of concealed-carry policies by three researchers from the University of Maryland. The study looked at five urban areas and found that in four of them, the handgun homicide rate rose after a concealed-carry law had been enacted. But David McDowall, one of the authors, says that the small set of data limits the conclusions to be drawn from the study. He also states that there is no evidence permit holders commit crimes. The study is a classic illustration of how changing the parameters of a "before-and-after" analysis can change the results. For each city, McDowall and his colleagues averaged the yearly crime rates from 1973 until the year before the law went into effect, and compared that figure to the average rate of all subsequent years. If, instead, we compare the year before the law went into effect with the most recent year for which we have complete data (1994), then the homicide rate declined in three of the five cities.

I think this link would be a helpful one for everyone on both sides of the pond to read. It certainly got me thinking. It's a little lengthly but definately worth it.

Power and Weakness

Excellent !