Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I think one of the biggest problems facing our society is not being willing to acknowledge when the other group is correct or when we are wrong. Everyone is too convinced that they are correct that they are blind to the other person's point of view and opinions. This is spread all across the spectrum, not just in politics. Acknowledging when someone else is correct is good for you and good for relations. The person that you are discussing with will acknowledge that you are seeing their side and can listen to what they consider to be "reason" and they are more likely to listen to your point of view. Its just like here on Slashdot. Often times I get replies to my comments from people who have a different opinion or just have some smart ass remark. I understand, people have different opinions, and they are just as human as I am.
You can still acknowledge the other side and remain strong.
Enemies are people too.
Used to be in Roman times that the greatest senators of the republic were those who were the most stoic.
Now, it seems the most desired senators are those most likely to be on Jerry Springer.
My how the burning of Alexandria set us back much further than we could have thought.
My work here is dung.
They allow you to join a club and make club membership more important in decision making than whether or not someone really represents you.
My biggest frustration with many republicans is the fact that they claim to be for small government, and this administration has been anything but small government.
My biggest frustration with democrats is that they claim to be all for civil liberties yet silently let pass things like Clinton's support of the clipper chip or Hilary's closed door meetings with insurance companies to hammer out a health care plan that benefitted them.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Please share your dictionary. It is not the same as mine, which defines authoritarian as favoring blind submission to authority and/or favoring centralized monarchy or oligarchy with no limits on their power.
To be perfectly fair, authoritarianism comes in many forms, some of which are blind to the facts (Nero) and others of which are not (Stalin). The common thread is lack of any check on power, which is what we're working our way towards the more people rely on the federal government. And, by "people," I mostly mean entitlement-mentality asshats.
Take the Jihad on Smoking, for example.
Actually, I blogged about smoking yesterday. The town my church is in is thinking of banning the SALE of cigarettes at all stores. They'll watch their convenience stores go bankrupt as many of them make a decent profit on cigarettes.
Yet I'd rather see cigarettes banned by stupid towns (people will drive a town over) than banned at the state or federal level. The same is true of cocaine, alcohol, porn, whatever -- if you want to ban it, just do it at the local level and I'll avoid your town if it is a product I support.
History repeatedly shows that the more government tries to get involved, the worse things get.
This really depends. If you are talking about issues on personally morality then you are correct. The alcohol and drug wars are a great example of the government trying to legislate morals. Government can not help a person find inner peace, only the individual can do that.
However, the government is generally succesful when implementing a communities infrastructure. Examples would be TVA and the Highway system. These infrastructures are the foundation of our modern economy. We can thank the government for that.
> I don't care what party you support, when you have two judges up for election to the supreme court and every single democrat on the election committe says something to the effect of "He's a loser and will not be a good judge" who are we kidding? Is this really the sad state of politics in America?
Yes. It's a sign that abortion has become the touchstone of American politics, and that the Supreme Court has come to be seen as a "higher legislature" that will vote your way if you can seat a majority.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You should think about this article a little harder. It's not just the parties in power that ignore the facts, but any of us with very strong convictions. That's as true for the revolutionaries as those currently in power.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
People find similar results when studying brain activity of people playing chess - when considering a good move vs. considering a bad move. Does this mean that people ignore reason when playing chess?
We don't understand the brain, we don't understand how people reason and we don't understand how people make decisions. Anyone who claims otherwise is an idiot, a fraud or both. It is an interesting finding that certain particular areas of the brain "light up" when this particular sample of people are shown a particular sort of information in a particular way - but you can conclude nothing from this.
For myself, the part of my brain that handles emotional responses to complete bullshit is lit up like a XMas tree. Am I, as I type, ignoring reason?
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Nobody cares.
As the right-wing Republicans have demonstrated so clearly, the way to political power is through values. Instead of citing world temparature statistics, ask people what they value. Do they value fresh air, abundant foliage, clean cities? Or do they value pollution, subsidies for big oil and murky rivers?
Look at the values of society today. They can be summarized by fear, isolation and scarcity. Everything we hear out of the far right can be reduced down to this. We're told to be afraid of terrorists, of immigrants, of gays and lesbians. We're told to lock our doors and make sure we keep as much of "our" money as we can, because we certainly don't have enough wealth in this country to go around. We're told to work as hard as we can to get our own, because no one's got our back. Hyper-individualism is the rule of the day.
If there's going to be change in this country, it's going to have to come as a result of a change in the conversation. We need to be talking about how we actually have abundance in this country and there is enough to build the kind of community we want to live in. There's enough to go around when we accept that each of us has a responsibility to contribute to the common good. There's enough to go around when we realize that we live in a connected community, not in isolated cabins on the frontier. There's enough to go around when we stop living in fear and start living in hope; when we realize that we support each other and we don't have to make it on our own.
This is the kind of political power that progressives need. Unfortunately, they're too damn busy being geeks, wonks and nerds to get it.
However, the government is generally succesful when implementing a communities infrastructure. Examples would be TVA and the Highway system. These infrastructures are the foundation of our modern economy. We can thank the government for that.
Government projects are generally extremely wasteful. Anything good the government would do will be done more efficiantly when the people involved are not coerced. And besides, if free individuals won't work together to make their own roads, why should they be forced to?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script.
What about slashdotters who reflexively name groups of people who are considered "irrational"? Aren't you just doing the same thing here?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Government projects are generally extremely wasteful. Anything good the government would do will be done more efficiantly when the people involved are not coerced. And besides, if free individuals won't work together to make their own roads, why should they be forced to?
Corporate projects are also extremely wasteful. If you ever work for a major company you will see that things could be done cheaper with a smaller company. However, the big company always gets chosen for their track record and stability. The Government is similar if one person leaves the government it won't fall apart. Build any roads lately? I bet you use roads on a daily basis.....
Before modding this guy interesting, you might like to consider the fact that the article he links to is full of unjustified assertions, pop pseudo-pyschology and other varieties of what might kindly be termed "crap". For example, take this rather incredible statement, presented as an obvious truth:
When your senses detect a set of stimuli, your brain assembles all the information it has about the source of those stimuli and how to deal with them.
This raises all sorts of difficult issues which the author ignores completely. For example, is it really plausible that the brain assembles all the information relevant to the stimulus and how you might deal with it? That is probably an infinite amount of information. In any given situation, anything whatsoever that you know is potentially useful information. The trick is (we really have no idea how the mind does this) to filter out a tiny fraction of your knowledge using a reasonably fast heurisitic, so that you have a manageable subset of your knowledge to process in any given situation.
Freedom is not increased by mere diminuation of government. Anarchy is freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak.
(ignoring the flamebait)
Be Democrat locally. Be Republican locally. Join communities that accept your views and were you can truly vote with your feet if you disagree -- maybe moving a few miles. When you bring your authoritarian mandates to the federal government, you force your will on people who don't accept your authority.
VOTE!!! If enough people share your views then you will get your libertarian/green/free trade/whatever people into office. There is nothing that stops them from running. The fact is that many of us are happy with the [democrat|republican] party line (I'm the latter). Obviously. Look at the election polls. I will grant you there are many dumb voters. I will grant you that half the nation (roughly) doesn't turn out to vote. If they don't give a f*ck and give up their rights, that sucks but that's their right to do as well. It sucks and I'd love to see 100% turnout. But the fact is when an option presents itself - Pat Buchannan, Ralph Nader, David Cobb, etc - people just don't buy into. Bame marketing, blame not enough money to advertize, blame the fact that "republican" and "democrat" are so engrained in our minds its impossible to think of a third option - OK, whatever, but I'd like to think we are smarter than that. If you really hate the 2 parties, vote for the third option instead of not voting. Its not that hard. I don't see the point in moving everything to the community. What happens when I relocate a few years from now - now I have to re-mold another community into my image. Great. No thanks. This great country is the way it is and there are enough of us who like it. Authoritarian mandates? What authoritarian mandates? If you don't there are other countries with political systems you might enjoy - but I bet you might have to give up a few of the freedoms you enjoy here right now.
It's an economy of scale, too. Something paid for by a few thousand people for the benefit of those people will cost a certain amount. Something paid for by a larger group of people, like a few million, should cost less per person and achieve the same per-person results, sometimes drastically cheaper.
Also remember, the government didn't use to tax in the manner that they do now, or nearly as heavily as they do now. Taxes were predominately put upon imports, and that paid for the government. It wasn't until the 20th Century that an income tax successfully stuck against the populace from the Federal level.
I don't believe that anarchy would work any better than communism worked. Anarchy would require everyone to behave else things would degenerate into violent chaos as individuals who have a desire to achieve more, posess more, or have more status than others would exploit a lack of authority defined from the people to achieve their gains. Government perpetuates law enforcement and thus the possibility for recourse or retribution if an individual seeks gain at the peril of others, and I don't believe that society can ever do without that, as much as it would be utopian if it could be achieved.
Back to your original argument, wouldn't, "...the people involved...work[ing] together to make their own roads..." be a form of Government itself?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
What this describes is the commonplace delusion. People do it all the time. They do it mainly to make life easier on themselves.
What is easier... going through life having made a decision about something and sticking to it... or constantly questioning your views and decisions and actions right up to the moment you have to commit to them?
We train our brains to think within constant boundaries. This helps us decide on a course of action much more quickly and keeps us from being overwhelmed and shutting down completely. We also do this to fit in with our community and gain their trust when making group decisions about communal objectives.
The problem with this methodology is that we decide to never re-evaluate our position. The reason we do this is that society judges us based on past expressions of opinion and labels us hypocrite if we decide to change.
The solution is to change society so that it becomes okay to change position. The barrier is how to set a standard of proof that the individual really has changed their opinion and can be counted on to stick by that opinion.
Anything less than what I've outlined here is an incomplete analysis of how views (religion, politics, preference, etc.) affect individuals within societal relationships.
A comparitive study would be to test the same brain activity within a group of social animals when a leading figure within the group that has majority support goes off and does something unacceptable... I suspect that the rest of the group will ignore the action (brain activity will show a similar response as in theis study) initially in order to maintain the social hierarchy and promote stability within the group... until it happens again and again, at which point they would stage a coup and 'elect' a new leader. We do the same, only on a much grander scale.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Remember that it was Republicans who freed the slaves, pushed the Civil Rights Act, and put more minorities in the Cabinet. As for the Democrats; well, we have Robert "KKK" Byrd and the blatant explotation of the black vote. What do I mean by that? Well, consider the social platforms of the Democratic party-- namely staunch defense of abortion, the push for homosexual marriages*, and opposition to religious expression-- and consider how those points conflict with the very spiritual base of African-Americans.
All the people who reelected Reagan in 1984 would probably disagree with you. "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"* I happen to think that the government should have absolutely nothing to do with marriage, which is a religious institution, and should instead offer "social partnership" licenses to basically any pair of cohabiting adults for tax and social purposes.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Could a 3rd powerful party help remedy this situation?
I don't think anyone can really answer that. Do we have any western democracies with 3 (or more) powerful parties? In most countries where multiple parties work, you still have two strong parties, each flanked by a number of coalition partners, or you have lots of fragmentation, see Italy which is a total mess.
The problem appears to be that the whole minority voice, blabla thing doesn't work out. Parties soon realize that "market share" means power and it is profitable to compromise ones core position if it means getting more votes. So parties don't really represent all that much anymore, except for various groups trying to get as large a share as possible.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The Republicans pay lip service to small government, fiscal responsibility, and strong family, but often act in ways conter to these ideals.
The Democrats pay lip service to civil liberties, social justice, and defending the "little guy", but often act in ways counter to these ideals.
The Libertarians pay lip service to freedom, but work for a society that is essentially a neo-fuedalism: the amont of power and rights you have is based on how much land you own and wealth you have. If you're not born to land, weath, and oppertunity-- well, sucks to be you, because there's no one to protect your freedom from those that have these forms of power.
The Greens pay lip service to enviornmental protection and social justice, but care more about ideological purity than the actual results of their actions. Thus, their actions often have results that are clearly counter to their aims, but because they're right dammit they do them anyway. They care more about being ideologically correct than about making a real difference for good.
Choosing a political party is just a matter of deciding who's lies are prettier and more appealing.
I would love a party that was fiscally responsible, beleived in personal freedom, social justice, enviornmental responsibility, supported small buisiness, supported real family values (i.e. NOT including "hatred" and "intolerance" and "close-mindedness"), was anti-corruption in government and business and supported government that did what was absolutely neccesary for a strong society, but no more than that. I doubt I will ever see such an animal. (well, one may come along that pays lip service to all these things, but more than that? Not bloody likely.)
4. Your brain considers every item that is compatible with the majority of its information in a given subject area to be correct and every item that is contradictory to its information to be incorrect. As a result, the brain has no internal way to know which items of its information are correct representations of the real world and which are not.
Yes, we do have an internal way to know which items are correct representations of the real world. It's an epistomological philosophy called science, and though it is a slow process requiring rigor and mental discipline, it works quite well. In fact, I would say it is the only way to have any certainty in knowledge.
The fruits of science are still fairly limited. We jave a fairly large pool of knowledge concerning chemistry and physics; we know a little less about biology; and we know almost nothing of sociology and psychology (outside of a few biological facts and a few statistics).
How do I know there is a large congruence between science and the real world? The results of that scientific knowledge are everywhere, in airplanes and longer life and jam and computers and interplanetary exploration and jam (more jam, perhaps) and big fuckoff buildings and psychological manipulation by politicians ("spin").
Granted, the fundamental basis of science is that scientific knowledge is subject to subtle or radical change as new evidence surfaces; but, we do have a fundamental tool for objectively gaining knowledge about our universe.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
History repeatedly shows that the more government tries to get involved, the worse things get. Even in US history we see how politicians have led to death, poverty and addictions.
"History shows" is a very broad statement. You're generalizing thousands of years of humanity. It's a statment that covers thousands of governments and billions of people. If you're trying to convince me of something, don't start with the authoritative-sounding "history shows" phrase. Thinktanks and pundits often use this tactic - it's flashy but not convincing.
When alcohol was illegal, the mob became the new provider. When cocaine was made illegal, the gangs created crack and cocaine blends for what used to be a positive medicinal product (ask any european dentist).
This is a statement about supply/demand and economics. It's not enough to generalize from these examples to all government intervention. The particulars of both the "drug war" and prohibition are very relevant - race, social mood, economics and political pandering all play roles. All are relevant to an understanding of these policy failures.
Taking hard earned wealth from people you don't know with the threat of a gun or jail is not what I consider emotionally-stable or even emotionally-available. Supporting either party offers just that -- free money by forcing others to part with it against their will.
Let's parse this:
Taking hard earned wealth from people you don't know...
How does "knowing" or "not knowing" somebody impact the ethics of wealth-taking? If I know you and rob you, is that ethically "better" than we being strangers? Maybe your issue is the "wealth-taking".
All governments tax, all governments take wealth from the nation's citizens and all governments usually tax with an implicit threat of jail. There's a reason for that - some people don't want to pay. But are all taxes immoral? If you answer yes, then you see governments as intrinsicly immoral or else you have a vision of human nature that isn't supported by fact.
is not what I consider emotionally-stable or even emotionally-available.
Ah - we must submit to your standard of emotional stability. No thanks.
As ideological mantras go, "leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone" seems like a pretty good one to me.
Who is your grandfather, and why should we care what he has written?
As a psychologist, I need to have a name. Citation is more important. His name means nothing to me (I've read a fair bit of psychology-related research, too), so I am going to need some information.
Look, I'm not trying to be rude, but as a sibling poster pointed out, this doesn't exactly jive with what I know to be currently accepted theory about information processing in the human mind.
One thing the human brain does VERY well is pattern matching as pattern discrimination. Consider the idea of facial recognition. This is computationally intensive. Humans do it almost instantly in most cases. It is also capable of discriminating between two similar patterns in a fraction of a second (sorting tasks have demonstrated this quite conclusively).
Very little is actually known about how we process information because we can't get a handle on it all. MRI's are helping, but haven't solved a lot of the problems that we face.
I would therefore appreciate some more information about how these conclusions were reached and what the research supporting them is like.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
At one point, everyone "needing" the product will use/go to the last few locations still allowing it, and these locations will reap so much money and wealth from these products that they just won't have any reason to ban them too.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
It's not news that strong partisans are, well, partisan. The thing to notice here is that the article subject is repeating a meme that is a Republican talking point, getting used more and more desperately to hide rampant criminality. No, both parties do NOT run the K street project, and the last time there was a Democratic administration, the federal deficit SHRANK, and we were more or less at peace with the world.
The real problem is when organizations that have traditionally been neutral arbiters, holding people to truth in public discussions, are taking sides.
That's why little-d democracy in the US is in such serious trouble lately. It's virtually impossible to get out messages which highlight cases where the Republican talking points are flat-out lies ("nobody could have anticipated" New Orleans levee troubles, planes used as terror weapons, energy companies rigging markets, etc). Lies that are shaking the constitutional foundation of the country ... rather unlike anything that's attributable to the Democrats.
Partisanship isn't so much an issue. The problem is the extermination of honesty in traditionally non-partisan (not bipartisan) circles.
I live with the reality that exists or has been demonstrated, rather than with fantasy. We've seen what happens without government. Somalia. Afganistan. The Middle East, before Europe attempted to assert itself.
With no government, people attempt to take power. It happens in the form of dictatorships, theocracies, 'councils' of those looking to gain, etc.
Anarchy is great, in theory. Unfortunately as soon as you add people to the mix, then you have disagreements, which leads to fights. On a large enough scale you develop factions, which lead to direct conflict, action, and violence. And, you keep getting stuck with some form of organization, which is government.
I'd rather have a potentially just government that actually has laws to protect me from other individuals and from itself, even if it doesn't do the best job of it, than to have no law.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
From the article summary:
A new study monitored brain activity of partisans; they shun logic and use emotional processing centers to justify their candidate's contradictory statements.
From your post:
Look, here's the first thing to understand. In a political debate, facts don't matter. Read that again. Facts don't matter. This has been shown over and over again. People respond to values, not facts. Progressives lose because they argue the facts.
I see; the problem with conservatves is they never use facts, dammit!
Does ANYONE else see some kind of connection here?
People are not as afraid or as disconnected as you think - especially so nowdays thanks to blogs. And that goes for both conservatives and liberals alike.
It is only when you admit both sides are capabile of rational thought and logical argumnets that you can start to make headway in some kind of realistic progress in unison.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's called the confirmation bias, and it happens to everyone. Even me.
Whenever you see information, your brain is hard-wired to interpret that information as best fits your current conclusions, and to forget or ignore parts of that information that don't fit as well.
Once you know the confirmation bias is there, however, you can more easily see yourself doing it, and perhaps mitigate the effects more easily. But it's still there!
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Some Christians, for example, might have a visceral reaction to the presentation of logical or scientific errors in the Bible; but at the same time, a non-believer would have a similar response to a believer's unshakable claim to a real spiritual presence in his or her life. In both cases the believer and non-believer are faced with information that threatens their ideas of the constitution of reality. But they're more than ideas. These beliefs are part of the fabric of each person's world -- they are the frame for experiencing and understanding space and time. Threats to faith (in God's existence or his absence) threaten one's sense of well-being.
Political beliefs, which may or may not be an extension of religious ones, are also a part of one's ideas about the structure of the world. For some, religious belief might tell them how they relate to God and the cosmos and the individuals they know in their lives. Political beliefs, though, tell them how institutions relate to one another and to individuals. Most likely, these political beliefs are an extension of religious ones, but they don't have to be. Threats to political beliefs like threats to political ones mess with people's core concepts of how the world is put together.
But this makes sense. A visceral reaction to contradictory information is a natural and even helpful response most of the time. You can't go around constantly re-evaluating what you believe and then changing your course of action -- that will make you completely ineffectual or crazy.
There's a reason large cities in texas have such low violent crime rates compared to other parts of the country.
A larger %age of the citizens have guns. on them.
By gun regulationists reasoning texas should have a HIGHER rate of violent crime.
Shadus
That's logical. If you only sell guns to people who'd never misuse them, of course crime will drop (or at the very least, not go up). However, ensuring sale of firearms only to such people, and ensuring that such firearms will never be stolen and misused is impossible. The statistical arguments for both sides conflict to be honest.
The only thing that blows about that model is that going through multiple municipalities sucks. As a real life example, the city of Carbondale, IL does not allow you to pssess a pistol (and it might even extend to all firearms, I'm not sure and can't be bothered to look it up right now) within its limits. Fair enough, but what if you're driving though from one town that allows it, to another? Well, you can get fined/arrested for breaking a municipal ordinance. That's the only city in the state that I'm aware of that has this law, but imagine if every city had a entire catalog of different laws than its neighbors. It would be a bitch to figure out all the different stupid laws municipalities like to pass, and then remember them when you visit each one. Stupid shit like what time the liquor store closess is no big deal, but when it comes down to vehicle codes and weapons possession laws, they can vary greatly.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
"Partisan".
Republicans are the only people who use this word, they and newscasters. It's a lovely thing, because they only use it as a term for people who call them liars.
As for the "balanced" folk, the newscasters, the majority of Americans: the truth, reality, the right answers, call it what you will, is not determined by looking at the "left" and the "right" and finding with certitute that reality lies somewhere in the middle, with liars hedged all about it on "both" "sides".
There are two sides in today's reality, the rightists with Bush as their titular head, and everyone else in the world, which the rightists term the "left".
That's why the Democrats are such a mess. They're absolutely everyone else that isn't Bush. They aren't a side, they're the majority of us, the contrarians to Bush's view of reality.
The rightists are monomaniacs, magical thinkers, borderline psychopathic personalities. They can't change their minds; it's not a concept they can understand. They have the truth, and everyone else can go to hell. Evidence, science, exposure, error, nothing can reach them. They lack empathy and think it a strength.
Bush and his co-thinkers have been wrong on the environment, tax cuts, terrorism, civil rights, causus belli, voting machines, the Swift Boat and Murtha smears, privacy, education, regulation, disaster relief, military reform, anti-missle tech, reactivating nuke weapon building, the UN, diplomacy, the powers of the executive, secret prisons, torture flights, torture, kidnapping, lying about same, secret executions, unpersoning American citizens in secret, being wrong about damned near every terrorist arrest and imprisonment, having the JAG's turn against him, the CIA turn against him, finally the military turn against him, the destruction of our preparedness for war, hiding personal military misconduct, wilderness preservation, the FCC, the internet(s), the Clinton's stealing furniture (Bush at least admitted they were wrong aboutthat, but who heard the retraction?, redistricting out of turn, bribery, treason in outing CIA ops for revenge, destroying the budget through tax cuts, borrowing from everywhere, on and on and on. He recognizes no error, no mistakes. At the "Q&A" last Monday, a student asked him why he cut education and student loans. He look confused, and denied he did it. Magical thinking. He can lie and not think it lying. This is the worst kind of madness. He enjoys lying. He thinks it artful. He laughs out loud as he fabricates, badly, on the fly.
There is nothing like this list of crimes against sanity on the "other" side. The truth is not in the middle, and both "partisan" sides are not equal in mendacity. The war in Iraq will cost two trillion at the end.We're broke. He's lying. All the 'pubs, even McCain, are lying even to this minute. The "other side" still thinks that they are playing a gentleman's game, as I watched the Alito hearings. They just don't understand what they are up against.
It's easy to play the fallacy of the false middle. It makes one seem wise, and has the advantage of relieving one of the hard work of making judgements based on actual knowledge. Reporters of the new school use it constantly. Thusly:
"Bush said today that the sky is green. Some Democratic spokesmen have said that the President is not being straight with the American people. Here are three talking heads to tell you why they are wrong."
All reporting thereforward is based on the Green Sky world, with occasional fillips of quotes from "partisans" saying that he might not be right. Entire cable networks dedicate there time to Green Sky stories, and it becomes the truth, inextricable. Later, geniuses talk about how both the Blue Sky and Green Sky "proponents" have not told the truth, and that they are addicted to their positions and their combat.
But the sky is fucking BLUE. It's not blue-green.
So your proof that Reaganomics didn't help the economy is based on a single indicator-- the national deficit. I'll play along. I looked on your chart and I noticed that the budget deficit was higher when Reagan left office. However, it was growing immensely when he came in at the same time interest rates were shicklingly high. It became a surplus when Clinton came into office. That was a laudable feat, but that fact that our defense and national security were gutted during that time span makes it suspect. In any case, it doesn't prove that supply-side economics doesn't work-- it proves that Clinton adopted those policies for his own, under a different name.
http://www.house.gov/jec/fiscal/tx-grwth/reagtxct/ reagtxct.htm
Following this paper, Clinton enacted tax cuts and the economy skyrocketed. At least, until the Internet Bubble burst in 1999-2000. Notice the steep dropoff during the last year of his presidency. Oh wait, that's supposed to be Bush's fault! My bad.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
No, that's an excellent SCOTUS nominee: regardless of his beliefs and attitudes on a subject, a Supreme Court Justice is supposed to determine what the LAW says on a subject. Umpires can't take sides, regardless of their personal beliefs & attitudes.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Your attitude, though held with benevolent intentions, is exactly the sort of international policy that helped lead to 9/11.
Every time the US becomes the international Santa Claus--every time it "chooses sides" in an international dispute--it creates a US ally... but it also creates a US enemy. When I'm helping your enemy out with food and supplies, you don't tend to regard me highly.
And we're supposed to be surprised when one of these enemies, that we created via our international policy, bites back at us? Give me a break.
Washington and Jefferson had the right idea: peaceful commerce with all nations, yet entangling alliances (and consequentially enemies) with none. We've got to start staying out of international affairs unless they pose a direct threat to us. If the people of this country want to help others not in this country, I think that's great--just use your own pocket money and let US taxes take care of the US first.
"the facts don't lie."
And just where do you get these 'facts'? According to the Congressional Budget Office and Census Bureau, inflation adjusted wages have risen (1973-2003) for all income deciles; even the lowest 10%. When you look at overall income the picture only gets better. The bottom quintile of US workers in 2003 was making 28% more (in inflation adjusted purchasing parity) than they did in 1967. Perhaps they could be better off with wiser economic policy, but the poor are certainly not getting poorer.
I don't know why this meme is so pervasive; probably just the lack of any real perspective. For example, my mother and her four siblings were raised in a home smaller than the one I share with just my wife, and her parents were considered solidly middle-class. I own a home that was built in 1947. It was originally ~1000 sq ft, almost exactly the median size for homes built in ~1950. In 2003 the median new home was over 2200 sq ft. The cost hasn't risen much either; about 3% per sq ft. Folks are making more disposable income and blowing it on bigger homes.
46 & 2
The case of slavery doesn't fit here. Suppose Town S has slavery, while Town N does not. In a free market of laws, someone disagreeing with Town S's policy could simply go to Town N. But of course, the people living in Town S who have a problem with slavery are not free to go to Town N, because, well... they're slaves.
A free market is all very well, provided that all participants are free. If some are slaves, then that market is definitely not free.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
There's a reason large cities in texas have such low violent crime rates compared to other parts of the country.
This presupposes that large cities in Texas have low violent crime rates. They don't.
The three largest cities in Texas would be (in order) Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio.
All three have higher rates (as of 2002) of Murder, Rape, and Aggravated Assault than NYC, and Houston and Dallas have higher Robbery rates than NYC as well.
NYC has some of the stricter gun control laws in the US.
And in response to the other poster I saw who replied to you, I don't know what Miami gun saturation is, but the violent crime rates are no where near the worst in US big cities.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
I see all the points reflected in recent politics in the USA.
I'd say Fox News understood this. On the night of the 2000 election, all the news channels received new data from Florida. There was no way Fox or anybody else could possibly have processed those data and come to any kind of a conclusion, but Fox went ahead and declared George W. Bush the victor (the person who actually made the call was a cousin of Bush). The other networks, not wanting to be last, followed suit and declared Bush the victor. The facts at that point could not support declaring either candidate the winner in Florida. But since Fox called the state for Bush and the other networks irresponsibly followed suit, the impression was created in the minds of the public that Bush had won. When the Gore campaign asked for a recount, it was seen as Gore trying to overturn a Bush victory when in fact no winner should have been declared by that point. The eventual analysis of the disputed ballots showed that if the Gore campaign had asked for and gotten a full recount, Gore would have won Florida. However, the Supreme Court stopped recounts, and one of the more delicious bits of irony in recent history is that the Democrats had only requested some weird partial recounts they had a better chance of winning, but they actually would have lost even if the Supreme Court had allowed them to continue. Only a full recount would have given a Gore victory, independent of the criterion used for counting ballots (most restrictive, most "liberal", or even allowing each county to apply its own established criteria). Further, the Gore campaign focused on undervotes, the famous "dimples" and "hanging chads," and ignored overvotes. Recent analysis has shown that there were tens of thousands of overvotes, largely from African-American districts, that would have gone for Gore. In those cases, the voter had both marked or punched to indicate a vote for Gore and written in Gore in the write-in space. Since the voter had "voted for two candidates" (even though the ballots were just marked two ways for the same candidate), those ballots were discarded. IF the Gore campaign had called for re-checking of overvotes, and depending on the criteria for accepting overvote ballots, Gore could have won Florida by tens of thousands of votes. I find something very funny in the fact that the Dems tried to get the partial recounts they thought would be most favorable for themselves, and in fact ignored much richer potential ways of winning, including the truly democratic full recount.
Instead, Bush was seen as being the rightful winner, and Gore as being a sore loser. The recounts were seen as the desperate acts of a losing campaign, when in fact there was no way, short of careful analysis of all the ballots, of knowing who had won. The first "unanimous" declaration of a winner in Florida was for Bush, and voters largely accepted that as fact and ignored further arguments about the validity of the declared result.
Fox later apologized for making that call so prematurely, but the damage was done, and there was no way to make it right.
As a result, many people look to their "neighbors" when unsure. Since there were a lot of people saying Bush was the rightful winner and Gore was just a sore loser, and since the first "offficial" information the people had received was a Bush victory, a majority didn't want to hear anything about questioning the result, even though nobody had enough information at that time to determine who had "really" won.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
I hate to say it, but if that were the case, we'd never have anything pass.
Actually, I thought that was the goal.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Unfortunately many criminals have poor impulse control and critical reasoning... it's doubtful that they would consider something like this when it would mean having to travel somewhere else and delay their crime.
Virtually no criminal expects to be caught, which removes many of the things that rational people would see as deterrants (ie the death penalty).
I'd make a crappy criminal.
I wasn't aware people robbing stores deserved the death penalty, nor was I aware you were appointed head of vigilante justice. The right thing to do is fork over the money if he's got a gun, not try to shoot him and hope you don't miss. Money is only money.
Studies show that where politics involve more than 2 sides, people must actually justify their arguments rather than bash and demonize the other side, as there is no simple "other side" to blame for everything wrong.
Ofcourse, this is utterly unimagineable for people living in the US, and I will be flamed into oblivion being named labeled both Neocon, Liberal and what not.
Since I'll probably get bashed however I put this, let me put it this way: There's no politics or democracy in the US, only corrupt government and manipulation of the public. There, I said it. I have karma to burn.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Which is the exact reason gun laws don't work, only the law-abiding obey them. Do you really think that someone that has decided to rob or murder is concerned about breaking a gun law?
It isn't just up to the police. You need to provide real oppertunities for people. Who is more likely to rob you, a poor crack addict or someone with a full-time job who isn't blowing their money on drugs? People need hope and jobs.
It isn't so simple. The idea is to make guns harder for criminals to get -- Not impossible. Just because you can't stop every criminal from getting a gun doesn't mean you can't reduce the number. We can't stop every rapist either, but even a 10% reduction in rapes is worth pursuing.
Jesus, did I just hear you say, "the right thing to do is to fork over the money if he's got a gun"? By some very temporally localized definition of the word "safe", that might be the safest course of action, but how can you say that's the right thing to do? It's certainly the wrong thing for the criminal to do. Why is it the right thing to do to give up your property (or anything else)?
This isn't a matter of execution for robbery or vigilante justice. Follow the logic (try to turn off that emotion center from the article):
1) Stranger demands your property/cash, and has no right to do so.
2) You say, "no", which is about the only reasonable response to such a request.
3) Robber pulls gun, threatens your life in order to convince you to say yes.
4) Your response to the unlawful threat of lethal force by this criminal is pretty much unbounded.
If you decided to shoot him in order to stop this threat of unlawful lethal force, and succeed in doing so, you've done nothing wrong. The important distinction here is that you are not shooting someone for trying to take $50 from you. You're shooting them in order to stop the unlawful threat on your life, to defend yourself against lethal force. If they hadn't brought the lethal force to the table, then a simple "no" would have sufficed to protect one's property.
11*43+456^2
If someone told me that "BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE", I would not ignore that fact.
I'm just saying.
[o]_O
This reminds me of a quote from a TV show I saw when I was a kid:
guy calling into radio show with southern accent: "You know, if everyone carried around a sawed-off shutgun, there'd be a lot less crime!"
DJ's response: "Yeah, and a lot less people too, dork!"
To paraphrase - you're not going to stop criminals by giving everyone guns. You're just going to create "stronger" criminals - and a lot more people will die, criminals and non-criminals included.
Based on your example, I expect all the criminals robbing the town without guns, will have gotten their guns from the other town. They'll build up a veritable collection of guns, and once the town without guns increases their security (either through police, technology, or guns) then do you think the criminals are going to stop? No, they're gonna say, "Well... this town over here has a bunch of security now. This other town over here has no security, but i know a lot of'em have guns. But I bet I have *more* guns. Yeah, let's go boys!" So now, instead of some material goods being stolen, people are getting killed, maimed, what have you.
Look, the point of gun control is not to punish responsible citizens. The point is to make it harder for criminals to get guns.
I want to tie this back in to cigarettes, but my views on cigarettes are skewed due to public health care. Guns on the other hand create the same issues universally.
Not to mention the fact that the poster, and anyone who just accepts these 8 assertions, is doing what these 8 points are supposedly warning against...
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Money is only money
No, money is not only money. Money is a store of labor -- my labor. Laboring is part of why we live.
If someone decides they want to threaten me, on my property, and take from me, I will teach them the lesson of using forcing aggressively. I am fully in support of using force defensively on your own property to repel an attack, an intruder or any criminal. If they think they can take what is mine, they have another thing coming.
There is no difference to me between a thief, a rapist, a murderer or an arsonist. My body is my property, my land is my property and my business is my property. If my property is harmed directly by someone for bad reasons, I will defend my property completely.
Far too often, though, libertarians interpret "leave you alone" as "do nothing of importance at all".
That's the problem with libertarians: unlike the other parties, when they say that they are for small government, they mean it - in a very extreme sense.
Do we want the government to run an air-traffic-control system? To test drugs and medical devices? To fund the development and production of influenza vaccines? To enforce environmental standards?
If the government doesn't do it, who will? Clearly, market forces can work in some cases - UL helps ensure the safety of many devices without government intervention; new drugs are developed with minimal government assistance. But even private development of drugs relies on the protection of the government - patent law. And few are foolish enough to believe that most companies give a damn about the environment; we have 50+ years of history that show that.
Where does the government belong? It's a difficult question to answer. But few people believe that it should be as limited as libertarians believe.
I agree that one of the major problems in politics is that observable facts are not used in the decisions making process. The root of the problem is not that the facts are ignored but that no one actually knows what the facts are and the party that controls the US government is not interested in finding them out.
Take the decision to go to war with Iraq, for example. We had the "fact" that Iraq was involved in 9/11, the "fact" that Iraq had WMD, the "fact" that Iraq intended to give these WMD to Al Qaeda to be used against the USA, the "fact" that the USA would be welcomed as liberators, the "fact" that as soon as Saddam Hussien was out of power Iraq would become a prosperous and stable democracy, the "fact" that democracy would ooze across the borders of Iraq and cause the entire Middle East to become stable and properous and democratic, etc.
The problem, as I see it, is that one party (the Republicans) controls at least two of the three branches of government and that the leaders of that party (Bush, Cheney, etc.) have no interest in using government resources to actually find out what the facts are. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration devoted no resources to providing the American people with a careful fact based analysis of what WMD Iraq actually had. Instead, the American people had to decide, based only on raw emotion, whether they trusted the Bush administration's "secret" evidence that Iraq had WMD along with the Bush administrations other claims.
This is still the situation. For example, when it comes to the decision of how long the USA should maintain troops in Iraq, the American people are faced with a similar dilemna. The Bush administration claims that 100,000+ troops are needed in Iraq to prevent the "terrorists" from "winning". The Bush administration has not provided any scientific proof based on obserable facts as to what effect the American troops are having in Iraq or what effects decreasing troop levels would have. There are reasons why having maintaining troop levels would be beneficial and there are reasons why decreasing troop levels would be beneficial.
Without a detailed study it is not possible to know what outcomes would be observed with a substantial reduction in troop levels. The Bush administration has not, however, shown any interest in actually doing such a fact based scientific study and, as a result, the American people are still put in a situation where they have to evaluate possible outcomes based only on whether they trust the Bush administration at a raw emotional level.
I'm in favor of making getting guns inconvenient, but LESS inconvenient than acquiring them illegally. People with a legitmate purpose can put up with the process-- assuming that you grant that the state is just enough to have a monopoly on force, then you can also grant that they have a legitimate interest in regulating firearms. Sometimes I feel like the NRA likes to gloss over the fact that for some kinds of weapon, YES, they are only designed to KILL PEOPLE.
Your little snipe about being a Democrat undermines your argument, rhetorically speaking. Didn't you RTFA?
Your theory in a nutshell: "the good people only use guns at the right time, and only the bad people use them for bad things". I don't really want to debate that statement, as that's a philosophical and moral framework, not a question about the effect of guns.
... then it's a win."
Here are facts: It's undeniable that a substantial fraction of the people who use guns are 18 or under. It's undeniable that the likelihood of someone dying is greater in a gunfight than in a knifefight. It's undeniable that guns carry with them risks like improper use, mistaken identity, and use by unauthorized persons such as children. And it's undeniable that Great Britain, which does not permit individual gun ownership, has long had a much lower homicide rate than the US. Kids with guns, fights turned deadly, higher homicide rate? The facts don't entirely support your proposition that "if you allow guns to be sold to anyone,
The debate over gun control is not fundamentally fact-based, it is philosophy-based, and it often tends toward cultural issues ("are we defend-ourselves-with-a-gun type people or not?").
Or you could introduce a real democracy, with proportional representation and actually have more than two parties that get seats in the parliament.
Douglas Adams summed this up quite well.
'On [the robot's] world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.'"
'Odd,' said Arthur, 'I thought you said it was a democracy.'
'I did,' said Ford, 'It is.'
'So,' said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, 'why don't the people get rid of the lizards?'
'It honestly doesn't occur to them,' said Ford. 'They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.'
'You mean they actually vote for the lizards?'
'Oh yes,' said Ford with a shrug, 'of course.'
'But,' said Arthur, going for the big one again, 'why?'
'Because if they didn't vote for a lizard,' said Ford, 'the wrong lizard might get in'"
Utter complete crap. If you are confronting an armed robber in your house after dark, you'll likely be dead long before the police arrive. There are a few "wrecking crews" operating in Houston right now. They've killed a few families. If they come to your house and you have access to a weapon and a phone, you're gonna call the police instead of attempting to stop the guys raping and killing your family? WTF?
This sig kills fascists.
It isn't so simple. The idea is to make guns harder for criminals to get -- Not impossible. Just because you can't stop every criminal from getting a gun doesn't mean you can't reduce the number. We can't stop every rapist either, but even a 10% reduction in rapes is worth pursuing.
Actually, it is so simple.
Let's say we ban guns completely. While we're at it, let's ban marijuana and alcohol... Oh wait, we tried that and found out it doesn't matter what policy says; if someone wants their gun/pot/liquor, they will obtain it. Even if you criminalize the source of the product--the manufacturing--people will still get what they want.
It's not hard to find pot (trust me) even though it's illegal where I am. It wasn't hard to find liquor back during Prohibition even though it was illegal then. And it wouldn't be difficult to find a firearm if they were to make them illegal.
EVEN IF it did increase the difficulty 10%, the unforseen consequences wouldn't be worth it. The previous law-abiding gun owner, under gun prohibition, would have less incentive to find a gun illegally than a criminal intending to do harm. The criminal WILL find the gun; the nice guy just wanting protection says it's too much trouble (and because he'd have to go through the black market, increases his risk of injury--the very thing he's wanting to be protected from).
I would say that I was a radical Republican until about midway through George II's reign. Now I'd say I'm basically a libertarian who is pessimistic about them ever winning anything due to the large proportion of nuts in the ranks. My current plan is to vote Democrat for every office unless there is a viable libertarian in the running. I feel very strongly that a Republican majority in control is seriously detrimental to America's future. At least the kind of America I wish to live in. I'd rather see things split between both major parties so they spend more time attacking each other than us and other countries.
Anyway, up to George II, when I'd see a Democrat on TV they'd almost always strike me as sniveling little wimps with geeky pretensions. Republicans didn't necessarily thrill me either, but I didn't dislike them on first impression. Now the Democrats don't seem so wimpy and whiny. Although with most politicians, I think there is a strong chance they are lying when their lips are moving. But what is most interesting to me, is the degree of loathing I feel at the sight of George the Second and anyone associated with him. At one point during the hurricane Katrina incident, I got so mad, I jumped off the couch and yelled at the TV and barely stopped myself from throwing a shoe at his image. That's very unlike me. It doesn't surprise me that politics turns off logic and turns on emotion in the human brain.
I think further study should be done to see if people can purposely turn on their logic centers while in debate.
http://www.marxist.com/
In the US, we have all kinds of issues and debates being trolled to us by the media (abortion, immigration, gun laws, drug laws, think of the children, etc.) that we get distracted by all of this. This leaves very few people to actually keep an eye on the politicians, the lobbyists, and the corporations. While we heatedly debate the finer points of abortion, those in power are free to redirect the resources of the country to their friends and themselves. This includes both dems and reps. It is not partisan or political. Maybe they don't all do it, but the temptation is there.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
This is just an instance of too much government creating the problems it says we need more government and more laws to solve.
The only reason we have to pay for someone else's substance addiction problem is because the government forces us to do so. Solution: No more tax-funded health care for treatment of addictions. If some members of society sympathize with the addict and want to help them, they can donate their own money to appropriate charities. The problem then belongs to the person who created it or to people who voluntarily want to help them. No more effects on unconsenting third parties, no more need for laws prohibiting it.
If the substances the person is consuming is harmful, then there will be consequences inherent in the activity - we don't need laws to create them.
You "forgot" an important example, but that's almost certainly either because it doesn't neatly fit into your preconceived notions, or because your history classes ignore it. The example is the large parts of Spain that were organized in Anarcho-syndicalist collectives during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell went to Spain a Socialist but once there, found he respected the Anarchists (Anarcho-syndicalists) more because of their ability to actually get things done while the Republicans (different meaning there and then than it has now in the USA), Communists, and Socialists bickered over politics.
You cited some examples of what happens in a "without government" situation (and I don't necessarily agree with that assessment). I'll remind you that Mussolini, Pol Pot, Stalin, and somebody Godwin prohibits me from mentioning were all able to do the horrible things they did because they used the power of governments. Would it be fair for me to say we've seen what happens when there is a government, citing these examples, and conclude that governments just don't work, except in theory?
FWIW, I'm not an anarchist, but I just hate seeing the same ol' lame authoritarian apologist arguments against anarchism (whether it be anarcho-capitalism, communist anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, or any other variety) parroted. One who believes anarchy can work is no more naïve than one who believes government can work.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
Unfortunately, many also believe something that blindingly easy is relevant and possible in a country of almost 300 million.
You've hit upon part of the problem -- if it's decided that 300 million people will be micro-managed by one government, it's already game over. But it's not an all or nothing proposition, we have multiple levels of government.
This country began as a union of equal states, each governing locally as they thought best, and answerable to their citizens, with the feds performing a tightly circumscribed and carefully considered set of functions. Now, Big Brother tells the states that a guy smoking marijuana in his basement affects interstate commerce, and therefore falls under federal purview.
Be careful what you wish for.
And this is where a big part of the argument falls apart; if the mugger/robber isn't threatening you with immediate, lethal force, your justification for up and shooting him dead is not complete.
Otherwise, where do you draw the line? Someone with a baseball bat could be lethally dangerous; do you kill him? How about someone intentionally sideswiping your car on the freeway? Can you shoot him too?
I'm not a gun control fanatic. I believe that guns should be regulated at least as much as cars, and there should be a separate insurance category for gun ownership (as it is with cars; I don't agree that homeowner's insurance with a gun rider is the same). Having said that, I also believe that non-felons should be allowed to own guns; I don't have the moral/legal/ethical authority to deny anyone anything categorically.
I could have said more, but this should be enough to garner flames from both sides...
While I have no problem with (and encourage and teach) self-defense, "planting criminals" who "harm" your property is a serious crime. You do not get to be judge, jury, and executioner if some punk kid eggs your car, or even tries to steal it.
And you'd quite possibly get killed.
Whatever cash you lose is probably less than than the attorney fees plus lost wages you spend in court after killing the guy, or in the hospital if he wounds you - or your lost wages in the grave if he kills you.
If you're in a situation where repeated robbery is a threat to your ability to feed and house yourself, it may be worth it to fight. But in general, fighting an armed robber, who has the massive advantage of determining the time, place, and circstances of the encounter, is not the wise choice.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
today... they just sit on their bums yappin' the same garbage over and over again