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Both Parties Ignore the Facts
An anonymous reader writes "Any democrat will tell you the republicans ignore the facts. Any republican will tell you the democrats ignore the facts. Turns out they're right. A new study monitored brain activity of partisans; they shun logic and use emotional processing centers to justify their candidate's contradictory statements. 'With their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix.'"
Definition of authoritarian adj 1: characteristic of an absolute ruler or absolute rule; having absolute sovereignty; "an authoritarian regime"; "autocratic government"; "despotic rulers"; "a dictatorial rule that lasted for the duration of the war"; "a tyrannical government" [syn: autocratic, dictatorial, despotic, tyrannical] 2: likened to a dictator in severity [syn: dictatorial] 3: expecting unquestioning obedience; "he was imperious and dictatorial"; "the timid child of authoritarian parents"; "insufferably overbearing behavior toward the waiter" [syn: dictatorial, overbearing] n : a person behaves in an tyrannical manner; "my boss is a dictator who makes everyone work overtime" [syn: dictator]
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Absolutely. Professor John Lott discovered that when more guns are sold to peaceful citizens, crime drops.
To use an overused example, imagine that you are a criminal and you have two towns to choose to rob a house from. One town lets anyone have a gun for any reason. The other town bans guns entirely. Which town will you go to?
Gun regulations give criminals the equivalent of a sign that says "Rob Me!" in your yard.
Remember that while they do use the same name, they are not the same people, don't have the same goals nor the same views on the world.
The Republican party was once standing at the left of the United States political scene. This is no longer the case, and there is no way in hell you can assimilate the current neo-con republican party with the humanitarian progressive republican party of the 19th century.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Miami has the highest crime rate in the country, and has for some time. And the largest amount of guns per person. Highest murder rate, everything. There are plenty of arguments on both sides for this debate.
Canada has a strong multi-party system. Look at the results from Monday's election: Conservatives won 124 seats, Librals 103, Bloc Quebecois 51, New Democratic Party 29, with the Green party not winning any seats but getting nearly 5% of the vote. Granted, only the Conservatives and Librals have actually won an election, but the other parties form a very strong opposition, especially when the winning party does not actually have a majority.
There is also more variation between these parties than between the US Democrats and Republicans, even discounting the Bloc, which is essentially a separatist party. I think the multi-party system encourages more variation, because if two parties become too similar in their agendas, other parties are there to fill in the void.
First of all, there are way more than two political parties. Thus, there are way more than two "sides", which most people ignorantly arguing politics fail to realize/acknowledge.
Second, the adversarial system is what's crushing the efficacy of our political system. With two major parties that have passed a great deal of legislation to keep it exclusively two major parties, we've set up a system that "us" vs. "them". The main problem with that is at any given point in time, about half of the people involved want the system to fail, so they can get their people in office. Democrats want Bush to fail just as much as Republicans wanted Clinton to fail (speaking in generalities, of course).
Both parties scream bloody murder at each other in order to scare people in to voting for them, if for no other reason than to make sure "the other side" doesn't win. Take any major issue in the past 20-30 years and measure as objectively as possible the change since the beginning of the issue. Have abortion rights changed significantly since Roe vs. Wade? No. Has Social Security collapsed? No. Have taxes gone up under both Republican and Democratic supervision? Yes.
For all of their shouting about the "crisis" of this or that, we're just fine. To the average American in their routine life, not a whole lot has changed as a result of any political action.
So stop shouting about how "they" are going to ruin everything, and start figuring out how to work with whoever IS in office to help them make the best choices.
the KillerB