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You assume such a system will always work like it was originally intended. They rarely do. Bad people figure out ways to exploit existing systems to subvert their original intent. A system for expunging incorrect info gets re-tasked into a system for expunging contrary opinions.

Well sure. And people have exploited fire to be rather more damaging than the original idea of "keeping warm and making tasty meat". People have exploited the stock market to create massive scams. Is this a reason to not have fire and the stock market?

Mind you, teaching critical thinking is the best long term solution even if it is opposed by many people. So until we convince those folks that critical thinking is worth teaching, we'll need to do some other things too.

[indians have] been more republican oriented than democrat

No, they haven't been. That's your world view combined with your racism distorting your perception. Actual data shows "Indian-Americans" are overwhelmingly Democrat.

Why do Indian-Americans flock to the Democratic Party?
Hindu-Americans Don’t Vote Republican

You probably need to check your racism; your distaste for Hindu American's has you associating them with your enemies, despite the fact that such alignment is highly improbable, as common sense should have told you; immigrant groups always align with Democrats.

whatever you say my dude enjoy eating your pets commie

a Federal law that makes it a felony for any foreign national to attempt to influence a U.S. election, and a felony for any U.S. citizen to help them do it

So when are they going to indict and extradite these Australians for helping Bernie Sanders?

When are they going to indict and extradite Christopher Steele, the "ex" MI6 agent that supposedly contacted Russians to compile his "salacious and unverified" Trump dossier? When are they going to prosecute those involved from the DNC, the Clinton campaign, the Department of Justice, and the FBI?

It's funny, we're going on two years of this "Trump-Russia collusion" business, but the bulk of the evidence points to a criminal conspiracy to help the Democrats.

Nice try, but it just isn't possible to write Satire anymore. This sounds just like Fox News.

That's funny, because it's CNN and MSNBC that peddle the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory 24/7. When it reality, it was the DNC and Clinton campaign that funded the foreign agent to talk to Russians in order to conduct a phony dossier on Trump.

met with this Russian woman at Trump Tower

Who did that Russian woman meet with before and after the Don Jr. meeting? Oh, that's right, it was Glenn Simpson, one of the co-founders from Fusion GPS, the law firm hired by the DNC and Clinton campaign. The law firm they used to hire an ex foreign agent to talk to Russian spies and come up with a smear dossier on the main opposition candidate. Huh, it's almost as if they were setting up the Trump campaign with bait. How's that for Russian collusion?

There is a scandal here. It's Watergate and McCarthyism mixed into one -- and it's the Democrats with black hands.

by Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...

The conclusion: "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

As a political example of the appropriate need for balance between meshworks and hierarchies, here is an excerpt from and essay where conservatives call (propertarian) libertarianism the "Marxism of the RIght": https://www.theamericanconserv...
"The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoonâ(TM)s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family [as well as health and community, I'd add] are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments."

this is about the heart of our election process, about how much influence foreign interference had

Huh, you mean like a foreign agent hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to conduct a smear campaign against the opposition candidate?

"Steele, who is British, did far more than simply provide opposition research to the Democratic National Committee. He was able to make sure it reached the most influential people possible in politics, media and government to shape and influence the growing narrative of the 2016 presidential election. In other words, as a skilled professional intelligence officer, Steele ran a full-spectrum information operation against the United States. One could even call it information warfare."

But let's not stop there! Did he have help from Obama's DOJ? Why, yes, he did!

"The Nunes memo also showed then-associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr back-channeled additional material from Steele into the DOJ while working with Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and her replacement, Rod Rosenstein. Ohr's wife Nellie Ohr worked for Fusion GPS, the firm that commissioned the dossier, on Steele's project. Ohr's wife would be especially valuable in that she would be able to clandestinely supply info to corroborate what Steele told the FBI and, via her husband, know to tailor what she passed to the questions DOJ had. The FBI did not disclose the role of Ohr's wife, who speaks Russian and has previously done contract work for the CIA, to the FISA court."

None of these issues are going away.

Indeed.

Not to distract from your main point about his successor, which is good, I want to criticize your use of the term "Conservative types" with a capital C.

Nobody is a more rabid environmentalist than the hunter who wants to protect their land or the fisherman who wants to protect their livelihood. These people are typically conservatives. Conservatives are about preservation and good stewardship. The Republican party does not define what it is to be conservative, and environmentalism is not a liberal or conservative philosophy.

The Republican party has cognitive dissonance over environmentalism because the party has entrenched big-business interests with very short-term thinking. They have vocally pushed the false story that environmental policy is anti-business.

Toyota made a fortune off environmentally friendly cars. When George W Bush told America that raising fuel economy would cost "millions" of jobs, Toyota bet on the technology anyway. When gas prices rose Americans bought fuel-efficient cars bolstering Toyota. The American auto makers were either buying engines from Toyota or licensing their patents. Environmental tech paid off.

When the US government used thermal imaging to inspect for leaks in large ships, big shipping companies objected. But once they realized that cutting down on engine leaks would save them money, they started enforcing the emissions laws themselves because it was profitable.

Conservatives know that investing in environmental technology is often economically productive. Less fuel consumption means less dependency on foreign resources, less damage to American land and resources, and more technological innovation and leadership.

Donald Trump: The Most Libertarian President Since Silent Cal

You've left out some of the real charms of the current era.

Profs claim scientific objectivity reinforces 'whiteness'
Professor Claims Math, Algebra And Geometry Promote ‘White Privilege’
The Appalling Protests at Evergreen State College
All-women's college asks profs not to call students 'women'
Professor notes men are taller than women on average, SJWs storm out angrily
Americans who practice yoga 'contribute to white supremacy', claims Michigan State University professor
Conservatives, Libertarians Are ‘on the Autistic Spectrum,’ Says Duke Professor
Victimhood Culture Only Getting Worse, Professor Warns
Professor: Small Chairs in Preschools Are Sexist, ‘Problematic,’ and ‘Disempowering’
Prof creates checklist for detecting white supremacy

Believing in meritocracy, promoting a "collegial" environment, and even deciding “to stay out of all of this ‘identity politics’” are all forms of tacit white supremacy, she claims.

She Carried A Garrotte!

I blogged yesterday about a mob trying to shut down Jordan B. Peterson and others at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, and wondered aloud, “Where are there police?!” Well, turns out one of the SJWs was arrested after breaking the glass . .

Officials say officers searched her backpack and found a weapon — a metal wire with handles commonly known as a garrotte.”

I could go on, there are so many stones unturned.

Pretty much. People who have spent their whole lives on the left are finding themselves under brutal attack for simply asking some very reasonable questions about some of the things the left is advocating.

The LGBT movement is tearing itself apart right now and taking much of the left with it. People I knew 5+ years ago who were die-hard pro-gay marriage are now jumping ship. They look at the Masterpiece Cake Shop case and say, "This isn't what I signed up for." They wanted "Live and let live", not "Agree with us or be destroyed, heretic".

An increasing number of them are hitting "Peak Trans". They are at the point of the Orwell novel where the left is demanding them accept that 2+2=5. They are being made to accept that a man can become a women because they say so. That pumping children full of off-label drugs, whose long term health effects are unknown, to suppress puberty, sterilizing them permanently, is perfectly okay. They are looking at the left and saying, "Yea, perhaps marriage really is between a man and a woman for the benefit of the children raised in that manage. See ya." and running as fast as they can to the right and center. To where they can at least have a discussion without being doxed and bullied into silence.

http://www.theamericanconserva...

Your recent post about leftists being pushed right by transgender activism and gender identity politics was laughed at by a lot of commenters who think a hyper-liberal woman is unlikely to turn conservative. Well, the joke is on them, because I am one and I am far, far from alone.

I was as far left as you can get without being a full-on Marxist. I thought prostitution was empowering, polyamory was fine, witchcraft was a positive spirituality, and that men who identify as transgender were my sisters. I voted Greens and Democrats all the way...

...My friends and I went from sharing articles by Olbermann and Maddow to following Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson. Our female role models became academics like Dr. Deborah Savage who actually acknowledge biological reality in their examination of gender...

So keep an eye out, the "T" is probably gonna get lopped off "LGBT" before too long. The entire movement is beginning to collapse under it's contradictions. Much like the Soviet Union or the day-care sex-abuse hysteria of the 80s, it will be here one day and gone the next.

That's easy to say but do you expect these people to vote Clinton instead?
http://www.theamericanconserva...
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/new...

That is not much of a correction, though.

It is and it isn't. The whole report masqueraded as an authoritative National Intelligence Assessment while it was not. In fact the claim that it was '4 agencies' was heavily overstated. It was a selection of people from 3 agencies and the people who should know and who should be able to come up with proof, the NSA, has less 'moderate' confidence in the conclusion than the CIA . That's like saying it's plausible. http://www.theamericanconserva...

Yeah, it's really shitty how they handled the Eich thing (Note: I'm NOT endorsing that site, the specific article just has some good points) but I'm not downloading "faggot social justice leftists," I'm downloading a browser, a tool to get things done. Just because a bunch of people working at a tech company have shitty beliefs doesn't mean I should avoid them entirely on principle. The same could be said about Google; the company is notoriously "left-leaning" which is really "identity politics authoritarian-leaning" if we want to be honest, yet I use YouTube and Google Calendar all the time at no cost to me, and I don't think much about the company's ideology.

Now when these entities decide to screw me over in some way, I'll start moving away from their offerings. YouTube has screwed around enough to make me start putting my stuff on other platforms just in case YouTube continues to do dumb shit.

I thought 'The American Conservative' ( http://www.theamericanconserva... ) was started just because they who called themselves paleoconservatives felt they were being squeezed out of the discourse. So together with some libertarians I consider them well informed , but unfortunately in the current context , fringe.

What Scott Ritter claims/shows is that first, an National Intelligence Assessment is a lot more modest than a National Intelligence Estimate, and that what was published as a National Intelligence Assessment does not qualify as such.
It's a fraud - by selected people from the intelligence community - to push conclusions that the Intelligence Agencies would not be willing to support. Ritter also discusses a lot of other irregularities that all point in the same direction: the conclusion to blame Russia for everything was devised upfront, the rest was a matter of building a case. Just like with Iraq.

http://www.theamericanconserva...

Former CIA Officer: President Obama Should Pardon Edward Snowden

Barry Eisler spent three years in a covert position in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and is the author of 12 novels, including The Detachment

He let Americans evaluate omniscient domestic surveillance for themselves

This week, Edward Snowden, multiple human rights and civil rights groups, and a broad array of American citizens asked President Obama to exercise his Constitutional power to pardon Snowden. As a former CIA officer, I wholeheartedly support a full presidential pardon for this brave whistleblower.

All nations require some secrecy. But in a democracy, where the government is accountable to the people, transparency should be the default; secrecy, the exception. And this is especially true regarding the implementation of an unprecedented system of domestic bulk surveillance, a mere precursor of which Senator Frank Church warned 40 years ago could lead to the eradication of privacy and the imposition of “total tyranny.”

That today we are engaged in a meaningful debate about whether such a system is desirable is almost entirely due to the conscience, courage and conviction of one man: Edward Snowden. Without Snowden, the American people could not balance for themselves the risks, costs and benefits of omniscient domestic surveillance. Because of him, we can.

For this service, the government has charged Snowden under the World War I-era Espionage Act. Yet Snowden did not sell information secretly to any enemy of America. Instead, he shared it openly through the press with the American people.

For this service, Snowden has been accused of having “blood on his hands“—the same evidence-free cliché trotted out every time a whistleblower reveals corruption, criminality or anything else the government would prefer to hide. That this charge is being aired by the very people responsible for wars that have led to thousands of dead American servicemen and servicewomen; hundreds of thousands burned, blinded, brain-damaged, crippled, maimed and traumatized; and hundreds of thousands of innocent foreigners killed, is more than ironic. It’s also a form of psychological projection, or propaganda, intended to distract from where true responsibility for bloodshed lies.

And for this service, the usual suspects have claimed Snowden has caused “grave damage to national security.” As always, the charge is backed by nothing but air, and ignores—in fact, is intended to distract from—the real damage caused by metastasizing governmental secrecy. This includes not only disastrous government mistakes and cover-ups (see the Bay of Pigs, the “missile gap,” the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraqi wea

'Michael Franco recently sat down and watched "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" again .. His advice to anyone who's thinking of doing the same is to save your childhood memories and skip watching it again..'

I disagree, the subsequent prequels and the remade insertions into the original were a disaster. Not only that Lucas never went on to make another decent movie. Not only that Hollywood stopped making movies for grown-ups and concentrated instead on special-effect extravaganzas which, while being expensive to produce, would be guaranteed to make money in across the movie going demography.

George Lucas Destroyed Modernity

Citation please. Because I haven't heard any mainstream conservative groups try to restrict free speech.

I don't know if you would call the Bush Administration "mainstream conservative" or not, but...

http://www.theamericanconserva...

I think most people are unaware of what constitutes debate.

How To Speak Gibberish & Win A National Debate Title
http://www.theamericanconserva...

I just had to get that in, because I know most IT workers are socially conservative enough that they don't care realize simple truths, to instead feel good about mythical scenarios where bad pedestrians and bad cyclists, are equally bad as bad drivers. But because of the speed and mass of the cyclists and pedestrians is so small, they are much less dangerous than even the best drivers. Here is an article from a conservative perspective that points out the massive automobile culture predicated on suburbs was the result of massive government spending and subsidies to favor the car:
The American Conservative: The Conservative Case Against the Suburbs

And what do you think farming subsidies in developed countries are but protectionism? The Common Agricultural Policy in Europe has been rocking for almost sixty years now, and similar policies are in place in the US as far as I'm aware. These exist so you don't have to rely on whichever third world despot can whip his citizens the hardest for your basic food supply, but essentially they're strategic economic protectionism. Here's a good example of successful protectionism.

  1. The Japanese government has used a plethora of constantly evolving regulations to keep the combined share of all non-Japanese automakers to just 4 percent of the Japanese market. The share never varies, whether the yen is strong or weak. (The yen is up nearly 50 percent against the dollar in the last five years.)
2. The Detroit corporations, in common with all major automakers, make many cars in Europe configured for Britain’s drive-on-the-left roads, and by extension for Japan’s. They also make countless components and assemblies that have been shut out of Japan for no other reason than that they are not made there.
3. Even Volkswagen, which sells broadly as many cars around the world as Toyota, has been allocated—that is the right word—just 1 percent of the Japanese market; by contrast Toyota’s share is close to 40 percent. (Volkswagen is lucky, incidentally: Hyundai’s share is 0.02 percent and Daewoo’s 0.003 percent, and this in a country where close to 1 percent of the people are ethnic Koreans.) ...

Perhaps the most graphic evidence of Tokyo’s true policy has been the story of the Renault-Nissan alliance. Originally established in 1999 and consolidated in subsequent years, this odd-couple partnership ostensibly gave Paris-based Renault control of Yokohama-based Nissan. In a powerful symbol of Japan’s ostensible acquiescence to American-style globalization, Renault’s Carlos Ghosn was even installed as simultaneous chief executive of both companies.

Given that Renault enjoyed a fundamental advantage in lower French wages and was more than a match for Nissan managerially, many observers expected it to make big inroads in the Japanese market. After all, the Nissan distribution chain—Japan’s second largest—was now ostensibly Ghosn’s to reshape. As reported by the BBC in 2005, the two companies were “expected to go through a process of rapid integration.” In particular they hoped to achieve savings through “jointly owned distribution subsidiaries.”

To the extent that the companies have cooperated on distribution, however, this has been confined entirely to markets beyond Japan. In the Japanese home market, Nissan has kept its distribution system strictly off-limits to Renault. The result is that, far from increasing, Renault’s Japanese market share has dropped from a negligible 0.08 percent in 1999 to a totally insulting 0.04 percent in 2009, the latest year for which figures are available. Indeed, to the extent that the company’s brand is known at all on Japanese roads, it is as a minor brand of Taiwanese-made bicycles!

And this is just the beginning of Renault’s woes. Judged by growth in total global sales, Renault has consistently been a hopeless also-ran, whereas Nissan has been a star performer. (Renault’s global sales are up less than 15 percent since the first full year of the partnership, whereas Nissan’s have zoomed nearly 78 percent. Nissan’s success has been attributable not least to increasing inroads in Renault’s home turf of Western Europe.)

The Left loves.....blogging their useless opinions to find people with similar views.

Conservatives love blogging a lot.

Bloviating is a human tradition that knows no political parties (a couple of those blogs look reasonably good, too).

One of the more positive things that has happened recently is that they got starved for victims so they started attacking their own political camps. They were basically doing purity tests. Once everyone is a liberal how do they justify their existence? well... they then ask "how liberal are you"... and they just start goal posting moving to make sure they have enough people to be outraged with at any given time.

So anyway, they were doing that and eventually they hit a segment of their own political contingent that fought back. And now they're a little baffled because a lot of the wind has gone out of their sails. They're getting attacked from all sides now and they're losing credibility rapidly.

Its funny because they're such dogmatic robots that they don't really understand what happened.

We'll see... they'll either be suppressed to the general good of society or they'll osterize most of their political base which will lead to a structural schism in the faction which will weaken them collectively.

Hit. Nail. Head. I wish I had mod points today. What's happening with liberalism today is a case study in self destruction. All we need to do is sit back and watch it play out.

Like those ideological purity tests...if we started measuring conservatives on the basis of how conservative are you, it would surely mark the beginning of the end. Liberal purity tests have pushed their kind so far to the extreme, they're now attacking themselves. And their tactic of keeping one constituency or another outraged at any given time has totally backfired.

I don't really blame liberals for being baffled. They've spent so much time in an echo chamber, they've lost touch. When reality finally slaps them in the face, it is only natural for them to try to figure out what happened. The question is, do they have the capability to make the necessary changes in order to correct their course?

Somehow I doubt it. Liberals are so

intractable recession: The US, in general, is a declining superpower and its starting to show. our skin-and-bones transportation budget, crumbling bridges, and pothole ridden highways are so common as to be a feature. A decade of intentional federal gridlock by republicans clammouring for austerity measures in the face of a housing market crisis and educational loan crisis didnt help. and a decade prior our zeal to fight the war without end amen depleated a lot of our reserves from the clinton adminstration that could have been used to shore up what 60 years ago was a mark of american achievement...namely our highway infrastructure.

Actually, the problem isn't so much recession as it is a lack of economic growth. Just being out of a recession isn't enough. We can't afford the roads we're building unless the economy (and the tax revenues) grow at a good rate.

It's a dirty little secret, but our transportation budgets aren't adding up. To oversimplify: Every time we extend infrastructure, we add two drains on budgets. The first is depreciation - basically a way of budgeting for the cost of replacement years down the road. The second is maintenance - budgeting to repair the infrastructure. It's easy to ignore depreciation and kick the can down the road. And it's easy to skimp on maintenance (especially if the results won't be too bad before the next election cycle). Which means we end up building infrastructure where the tax revenues can't adequately fund the ongoing costs of the infrastructure once we remove the other necessary ongoing costs of an expansion (city services such as police & fire, etc).

What's worse is our ongoing style of expansion is frequently fault intolerant. Say you put in a big box store such as Walmart. Big box stores, as a general rule, aren't the best producers of tax revenue per square foot. You're frequently better off with a dense commercial or residential development instead - a tall apartment building, or a bunch of small stores. So already, when you add a big box store, it's not the best bang for the buck. And those big box stores tend to require their own infrastructure - new intersections, sometimes new roads, etc - since they are frequently built on the edge of development. But what's worse is if the big box store goes under - it's hard to find another tenant due to the size of the structure.

If you want to read more about this, I'd recommend either the Strong Towns website, or the American Conservative. The latter may seem odd, since walkable, liveable communities is frequently seen as a liberal idea, but there's a strong fiscal argument for New Urbanism.

. . . based on their academic performance, see: http://www.theamericanconserva...

http://www.theamericanconserva...

Or is that source too liberal for you?

Supreme Court Ruling Allows Strip Searches for Any Arrest.

The percentage of the U.S. population in prison is higher than any other nation in the world.

Secret U.S. government agencies give very profitable secret contracts to what is called the Beltway Bandits. U.S. taxpayers pay, both in money and in the resulting inflation.

The Bush family makes money by getting taxpayers to pay for war: The Bush-Saudi Connection. There is an entire book about that: House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties.

http://www.theamericanconserva...
"This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments."

I would add "community" and "health" as public goods government should also help support.

BTW, to underscore the point that charity only tends to work well in communities where people are well known to each other (either that or an abstract gifte economy like JP Hogan wrote about), see:
"Switzerland's shame: The children used as cheap farm labour"
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
"Gogniat, his brother and two sisters were "contract children" or verdingkinder as they are known in Switzerland. The practice of using children as cheap labour on farms and in homes began in the 1850s and it continued into the second half of the 20th Century. Historian Loretta Seglias says children were taken away for "economic reasons most of the time⦠up until World War Two Switzerland was not a wealthy country, and a lot of the people were poor". Agriculture was not mechanised and so farms needed child labour.
If a child became orphaned, a parent was unmarried, there was fear of neglect, or you had the misfortune to be poor, the communities would intervene. Authorities tried to find the cheapest way to look after these children, so they took them out of their families and placed them in foster families. ...
The extent to which these children were treated as commodities is demonstrated by the fact that there are cases even in the early 20th Century where they were herded into a village square and sold at public auction. ...
"Children didn't know what was happening to them, why they were taken away, why they couldn't go home, see their parents, why they were being abused and no-one believed them," she says.
"The other thing is the lack of love. Being in a family where you are not part of the family, you are just there for working." And it left a devastating mark for the rest of the children's lives. Some have huge psychological problems, difficulties with getting involved with others and their own families. For others it was too much to bear. Some committed suicide after such a childhood.
Social workers did make visits. David Gogniat says his family had no telephone, so when a social worker called a house in the v

High income college educated whites vote Republican.

73% of Asian Americans voted for Obama in the last election.

If NPR can put even more college educated white techies out of work by importing even more Asian techies, they'll get more of existing whites voting Democrat and more immigrants who are known to vote Democrat even at high income levels.

I like how the charts also show that the most highly educated are the least likely to vote Republican. Makes one think, doesn't it?

High income college educated whites vote Republican.

73% of Asian Americans voted for Obama in the last election.

If NPR can put even more college educated white techies out of work by importing even more Asian techies, they'll get more of existing whites voting Democrat and more immigrants who are known to vote Democrat even at high income levels.

Further, the most dangerous cities to live in today, are precisely those cities with the strictest gun control.

Those cities enacted gun control laws because they were already the most dangerous cities. The effectiveness of those gun control laws is up for debate, but you got the cause and effect completely backwards. And you're modded up +5 Insightful. God, what's happening to Slashdot these days?

empirical evidence weighs in on my side

Sure, some of it does. But there is at least an equal amount of evidence supporting the opposing side of view, unless you ignore Japan, Hawaii, and articles like this and (yes, you read that right, The American Conservative) this and this.

My hunch is that there is probably little to no correlation between gun control and crime rates. So gun control is probably not a good way of curbing crime. But claiming that the evidence is irrefutable that more guns equals more safety is patently absurd. It's just as bad as the NRA claiming that armed teachers in every school would have prevented Sandytown. (Maybe it would've, but we'd have four or five instances each year of clueless teachers injuring a coworker with an accidental discharge or killing a student they "swore had a knife.")

Turkey is good at exporting corruption. Sibel Edmonds spilled the dirt on their efforts to bribe US congressmen like Dennis Hastert to deny genocide status to Armenians and help Turkey become a nuclear state

But, when you run off to our biggest political rivals [...]

Mitt? Is that you?

and tell the world the details of how we spy [...]

If we're to have an open and democratic system, the American people must be told when their laws are being violated by their supposed servants. In an open system, you cannot tell the people without telling the world.

And, for what purpose did it serve? It did nothing to help the American people.

Nothing?

[...] he revealed some shady intelligence gathering programs the US was running against its own people [...]

That's not nothing.

The US is using its national intelligence agencies to obtain intelligence on terrorists trying to kill people.

Yes, and obtaining intelligence on political movements like Occupy Wall Street.

The intelligence agencies themselves don't have police powers.

Oh? What's that you say? TFA is about warrantless surveillance undertaken by the FBI, which is the federal agency with explicit domestic police powers.

The suspect in this case is accused of assisting a terrorist group.

Under the USA PATRIOT Act, providing "material support" to a terrorist group can be as simple as expressing support for it. And having a terrorism suspect browse your web site is enough to spark a secret investigation of your organization which scares away many of the donors who keep it in operation.

East Germany's secret police had both an intelligence function and police powers.

The FBI, Secret Service, Drug Enforcement Agency, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, at least, are agencies with police powers and intelligence operations. Heck, even the NYPD is in on the deal.

Their primary purpose was to keep the East German Communist party in power.

Given that NSA snooping hasn't indisputably foiled even a single terrorist plot, and the FBI instigated virtually all of the "terrorist" plots they've busted, I have to wonder what is the primary purpose of these agencies. Surely not to intimidate political dissidents!

You could be arrested and imprisoned for such things as making jokes about the nation's leadership, wanting to form a new political party,

Here in the U.S., they've at least figured out that making jokes about the leadership is essentially harmless and does nothing to erode their power. If people started to rise up to challenge them, we might see that change; the architecture of oppression is in place. As for forming a new political party, it does no harm to talk of it, because it's essentially impossible due to the laws in most areas which protect the two incumbent parties.

being a member of an unapproved church,

Like a mosque?

trying to leave the country without permission (could get you shot on the spot)

It won't get you shot, but you apparently can't leave without permission. The U.S. apparently has more finesse than East Germany did.

and many other possible infractions.

There are plenty of other infractions that'll get you in trouble, like walking while black,

Only in the US does Obama get called leftist. He is either centrist or moderate rightist.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-conservative-obama/

Compare his policies to Ronald Reagan and you will find very little difference. For example both ran huge deficits in order to stimulate job growth.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/11/20/channeling-the-gipper.html

The fact of the matter is that the right wing of American politics has become really extreme over the past 10 years.

Many of us statists have endlessly tried making intelligent counter-arguments to people who use the term "statist". After many years I've stopped beating my head against the wall. This article explains why: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/marxism-of-the-right/

From your article:

... libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government.

The problem is, some of us are actually capable of making reasonable distinctions -- we can conceive that ethics and government might be best run by different rules or sets of rules. We can consider that the society and the state are not the same. So when we advocate libertarianism in government we, for example, do denounce the state forcibly redistributing wealth, yet do not claim that a hand up for those below is anything less than essential to a healthy society. We simply hold it as our own moral duty to voluntarily help those less fortunate than ourselves.

Of course, not all libertarians agree with this (hardly surprising, that a banner of "personal freedom" one should find a wide array of philosophy) . Objectivists, for example, are explicitly opposed to such notions as charity. (Objectivism seems to be what he's principally arguing against, perhaps because objectivists are about the most unflattering "representatives" of libertarianism as a whole, perhaps (one may more charitably assume) because they are some of the most vocal, thus conspicuous, libertarians on the internet. IMO only hideous evil creeps can seriously think through objectivism and still espouse it, yet it's popular as a fad amongst youths asserting their "independence" in political thought.) Then there's many people who come to espouse libertarianism simply because "I want to do what I want to do", with no thought for ethics at all. But some of us (I believe many, though likely not most) do make the distinction between ethics and law, and by rejecting this distinction in his very definition of libertarianism, Mr. Locke neatly sidesteps any rational discussion of whether any particular thing, clearly beneficial to society, might be better served by voluntary action (both individual and collective) than by state coercion. He replaces that discussion with the false dichotomy that all needs left unserved by the state are left unserved altogether.

Moreover, he flatly accuses anyone who calls into question this false dichotomy, or indeed any other reason his arguments don't apply to their own beliefs, of intellectual dishonesty -- claiming (with no justification, other than what can only be summarised as "mumble-grumble-Commies!") that those espousing any sane, defensible form of libertarianism must be doing so only to win parlor debates, while in the street they agitate for the radical, indefensible forms that they truly believe in. Such underhanded subversives we libertarians are, every single one of us! Moderate, sensible intellectuals by day, black-clad bomb-tossing anarchists by night! What a pity Mr. Locke has seen through this grand conspiracy of ours.

Indeed, one can tell he truly does think libertarians are the "Marxists of the Right", as this is a page straight from the conservative Marxist-fighting handbook, where no rhetorical trick is too dishonest. I know several more-or-less rational conservatives who recognize the state is only a part of society, and that some aspects of society are best handled by voluntary action, but who simply believe many more aspects of society should be state-controlled than I do -- since they don't share Locke's "Marxists of the Right" view, we can have good, logical, honest discussions about where to draw the line, and we can both kind of shake our heads and laugh at the Objectivists, but let anyone suggest a Marxist, socialist, or close-enough-for-cons

Many of us statists have endlessly tried making intelligent counter-arguments to people who use the term "statist". After many years I've stopped beating my head against the wall. This article explains why: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/marxism-of-the-right/

While auto-dealership laws go back to the ’20s and ’30s, the dealers’ nationwide legal grip on selling cars was established by state legislatures in the postwar era out of concern that the Big Three would establish networks of their own dealers. It was a time haunted by bigness, as Americans stared at the giant corporations that had swelled to dominate the economic landscape and feared that consumers would soon become subject to whatever whims the companies cared to impose on them. Smaller businesses feared General Motors, General Electric, and the rest of corporate America for the same reason those companies could promise a lifetime of employment followed by a generous pension: they seemed immortal. As Kenneth Elzinga of UVA explained recently at an ISI Faculty Seminar, there was a palpable fear that big companies would slash their prices below cost until all their smaller competitors were driven out, and then, having the market to themselves, they would dramatically raise prices.

For the auto industry this was particularly feared, as 1950s cars were, compared to today, terribly unreliable. The state antitrust laws that prohibited manufacturers from selling direct also set limits on entry and exit in order to ensure that a car company could not decide a region to be undesirable and just pull up stakes, leaving the customers they had sold long-term products to without a source of spare parts or service. Legislators feared that allowing manufacturers to set up their own dealerships would make the communities subject to the whims of the latest Detroit strategy document, so they sought to break up the process. With independent dealers, states hoped to insulate themselves from concentrated corporate power and force it to serve their communities if it wanted to sell to them.

Thus the laws were originally intended to protect consumers on the local level. Now, especially in the face of subversive business models like Tesla's, matters have changed. Local dealers are in closer league with manufacturers, the latter often even providing financing for purchases. The arrangement is mutually beneficial: manufacturers can prevent upstarts like Tesla from getting a foothold in the market; dealers, acting as middle-men, can reap the rich benefits of rentseeking through powerful lobbies targeted toward state governments. N.b., however, this arrangement does not prevail in all states.

Rand Paul is a Republican and if you expect any change by continuing to vote for the same two parties that have been in power since the beginning then you're insane. The clearest message you can send that you want change is to vote for another party.

By the way, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/rand-paul-learns-to-love-the-drug-war/.

'they' have control and everyone knows it. you been asleep or something?

It is, as one commentator has recently put it, the bitter legacy of Mickey Mouse.

So, they voted the "wrong" way and now we get to take revenge on them? How does that work?

Don't worry though - any overly bright kid with Future Farmers of America, 4-H Club, or ROTC on his college admission will be refused entry to the Ivy League. Like you say, it's important to punish these people for living in rural areas.

The brief has been pulled from the RSC website. It's as good a guess as any that it was pulled so fast because someone at the MPAA or RIAA put the kibosh on this. Copies of it still circulate about the internet.

The original brief was written by congressional staffer, a young guy by the name of Derek Khanna. It seems it was not a committee-wide document. Khanna continues a discussion on the matter over at Reddit. I should imagine by now that Khanna has his balls in a vice for this embarrassment.

If you're the kind of person who regularly complains about IP laws, but would rather do something about it, write Khanna a note of support by email or twitter. That doesn't mean you have to agree completely with the brief or other things Khanna has to say. It just gives him the ammunition to say that copyright reform is a good direction for the GOP and that his writing about it was not a mistake. As daemonenwind notes about, the GOP, particularly the younger elements of it, is now taking a hard look at its platform. You may be rather jaded, as I am, and believe that the old neo-con guard is likely to carry the day. They are. But if there's any hope of changing the discourse on this it will be at a time right now, when the older ways of the GOP have received electoral repudiation that a flood of cash couldn't stop. The promise of real electoral support that could come from a pro-reform platform will be particularly attractive now, especially if they get the sense that those under 35 care about this.

"Did I vote for the wrong part?" WTF? Do you honestly think parties exist for any other means to distract you from the actual politics? Besides, they PULLED THE REPORT down, and disowned it in less than 24 hours, go read TFA's update. You did vote for the wrong party: Voting along party lines is fucking moronic.

Yes, too bad it's not a policy backed by the GOP (or the MPAA / RIAA), they've pulled down the fucking report, and retracted it.
If you want to read that dead "policy" change, it's still on scribd.

Update: The RSC has now taken down the brief and disowned it via this memo from Executive Director Paul Teller.

The RNC has disowned and pulled the brief. The main article (http://www.theamericanconservative.com/an-anti-ip-turn-for-the-gop/ contains a link to the pulled document. http://www.scribd.com/doc/113633834/Republican-Study-Committee-Intellectual-Property-Brief.

Regarding "throw away your lightbulbs" -- I believe George Bush signed that bill.

In addition, the requirements (the current ones) can be met with halogen lightbulbs (they're sufficiently efficient) which are not very different from incandescent bulbs in light quality (they are somewhat bluer). And, given modest assumptions about the price of electricity or how many hours per day you run a light bulb, the new LED lights (the one I tried was about $30 at Home Depot) pay for themselves quickly, and work very well -- they are on instantly, have better light, are durable, contain no mercury. I am sure that the much more expensive new Philips light has even better light quality, though it will not pay for itself as quickly. I've also read a good review of CREE EcoSmart LED bulbs. CREE is a good name (I use CREE and Philips LEDs on bicycles that live outdoors in Massachusetts; summing over all the bikes and all the LEDs, over 20 LED-years of weather exposure, with no failures).

I know this is off-topic, but you were just completely wrong, and on the internet, too.

Libertarianism: "Marxism of the Right "
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/

Have you read what I wrote outlining four potentially interwoven possibilities? Why do you create a "false choice" between two extremes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
"A false dilemma (also called false dichotomy, the either-or fallacy, fallacy of false choice, black-and-white thinking, or the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses) is a type of logical fallacy that involves a situation in which only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there are additional options (sometimes shades of grey between the extremes). For example, "It wasn't medicine that cured Ms. X, so it must have been a miracle.""

See also:
"Marxism of the Right"
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/

We have lots of options. The question is what sort of society do we want to live in together?