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Algorithm Names Powell 'Ideal' Vice President Candidate
CWmike writes "Turns out the ideal vice presidential candidate for Sen. John McCain is the same person as the ideal vice presidential candidate for Sen. Barack Obama, according to a sophisticated online survey based on technology developed at MIT. Mr. Ideal? Colin Powell, a former U.S. Army general and former secretary of state. Affinnova's survey methods doesn't use the typical polling method of asking respondents to pick a name from a list. Instead, it gives respondents larger concepts, including photos, biographical information and possible first-term priorities. Affinnova calls this algorithm 'evolutionary optimization.' Steve Lamoureaux, the company's chief innovation officer, said of the VP finding: 'We never imagined that the same candidate would show up for both parties.'"
.. same as the old boss.
'We never imagined that the same candidate would show up for both parties.'
What? The Demopublicans and the Republicrats are all the same? That unpossible!
Powell strikes me as a vastly better civil servant than politician. But if Obama wins, he should definitely ask Powell to be Sec Def or Sec State. Hell, same with McCain for that matter. He was a good Sec. of State in an administration that didn't give two shits about him or his opinions, imagine what he could do if the President actually tried to make use of his experience and expertise.
The enemies of Democracy are
Colin Powell was the face of the deception campaign the Bush administration orchestrated. He was the one who went to the United Nations, and made a whole bunch of claims that turned out to be false. He's damaged goods. Why on earth would someone suggest he'd be a good candidate in a year when the electorate is itching to repudiate everything about this war?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Shock and Amaze! A politician who has made almost no memorable positions known on any domestic policy beyond truism of cooperation is liked by everybody!
Of course he's a top pick by everybody--he's like Opera-- nobody knows what his actual beliefs and agenda is, therefore nobody disagrees with him. If Colin Powell were so audacious as to actually make his position known on a politically hot subject he would suddenly see his popularity plummet.
This is America. If you agree with me you're a good guy. If you don't, you're a muslim terrorist. The only way to be liked by everybody is to say nothing of consequence.
Yup, what the US really needs is a VP who has shown that he's willing to help out his boss by publicly giving excruciatingly bad "intelligence" to the United Nations.
I keep hearing "McCain is too old" and then read other age-relative statements about VP selection and wonder who age really matters to. Yes, at the extreme, I worry about the ages of the candidates but only to the extent that it is extreme and has other impacts (eg, health or lack of experience).
But are there people out there who are like "Gee, he's too old" even when the candidate's age has no bona fide health impact? Do the same people think "Gee, he's too young" about someone younger? Obviously there's no health issue, but experience could matter a lot.
I don't think of age outside of physical health, but I worry from the way the media portrays McCain's age that we're falling a little victim to the cult of youth.
Including what is "best" for non-property-owners?
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Not to the rest of the world, he didn't. Everyone outside the US knew his presentation in the UN was a sham for the US public, and not for the world, since the rest of the world got to see the TV reports (funny how the US stations didn't carry them, hmmm ...) debunking his "findings" before he even presented them.
More like "Semi-Colin Powell" or "Up Your Colin Powell", since he's at best, a half-measure, and at worse, helped give everyone the shaft by presenting known lies as truth.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Well the fact is that he told his bosses the truth, and they didn't want to hear it. They told him to go speak a pack of lies, and he did. You can feel free to hold that against him, following orders is no excuse and all that. That doesn't change the fact that in the employ of an administration that wanted to listen to his honest opinions, he would be a tremendous asset.
The enemies of Democracy are
Why should I let a illiterate imbecile (snip) vote about my future?
On similar lines:
Why should I let a uncouth non-college-graduate vote about my future ?
If you aren't smart enough to get a PhD, how can you decide what good for the entire country ? We should allow only PhD's to vote.
The simple answer to that is because its not just your future they are voting for, its their own future too. If you live in city, should the president you elect not have any powers to make any changes in the rural areas ? Why should an urbanite decide a farmers future. etc. etc.
Any survey that says one of the primary party leaders would be the same person for either party is obviously in error.
Why? It reminds me of an example from a class I took once. Imagine you have a beach with two ice cream salesmen, for the exercise assume the customers are uniformly distributed, price is equal and they have no preference or loyalty. Now the theoretically optimal is obviously that they set up at 1/4 and 3/4, each getting half the beach and the customers walk as little as possible. But then, one of the ice cream salesmen decides to stand a little closer to the center, catching more than half. The other moves closer to compensate and so it goes. Eventually they'll stand right next to each other on the middle of the beach. With both fighting for the customers in the center, they'll become more and more equal until there's basicly no difference at all.
Try mapping it directly over to politics, with the customers as the voters and reps/dems as the icecream salesmen and the distance to the ice cream salesmen as the political distance. Everyone's fighting over the independent voters so both focus on what they want. I think what happened here is that you showed they're so close, if one is a little better at buzzword bingo it could "win" both sides. I think he should run for both parties, would be funny... Obama/Powell vs McCain/Powell, maybe it'd clue people in on how little choice they really have.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
People will say they want the person with the best tax policy, yet vote for the guy with the nicest shoes or looks like a hero. The Governator is only there because he dealt to the bad guys in the movies, not because of anything he's done in Real Life.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
But I, nor any white man I know, is racist.
Well, congratulations on yourself, but how do you know nobody you know is racist? You're white, so they aren't going to be racist against you. And if they know you consider yourself to proudly be non-racist, why would they reveal that to you? Or, maybe, you just don't know the right subset of the population, don't live in the right areas. Is where you live mono-cultural? As in nobody says anything bad about blacks because there aren't any around to bother them? Do you live in a truly integrated neighborhood/city? It seems like it's mostly in the conflict areas, white-dominated areas facing a minority 'incursion', where this happens...
Cus I've certainly met some of them. I've had people openly express their racism to me, under the assumption that I'd be sympathetic as another white man (which I mostly am). I've heard people openly slander blacks in their earshot, even store owners talking trash while black customers are in their store. From Chicago to New York to Texas, I've heard some vile, vile racism.
I can't say this nicely, I assure you I mean nothing personal, but it seems to me the only ones who say there is no anti-black racism in America are simply sheltered from it.
Not that this is ultimately a bad thing... I believe racism is learned, and the more people are simply not exposed to it, and grow up wondering how or why anyone could be racist, the better the next generation will be.
White Americans are, by and large, afraid of even being thought of as racist.
That doesn't mean they aren't. It means they're going to be much less likely to be openly racist unless they're safely among their friends. And even then, not always, but those are the worst cases. Your "average" racist is simply going to leave their mouth shut and wield their racism more subtly.
And given what I've seen and heard, I shudder to think of what would be said and done if there weren't such a huge stigma against it.
We can see the same thing, more obviously, with homophobia. It's starting to get less and less acceptable to be openly anti-gay, at least in the more progressive parts of society, while absolutely not the case in the less-progressive. But has this actually made all these people unwilling to gay-bash into non-homophobes, or has it just made them reluctant to express their discomfort and disgust? Isn't that the inherent joke of "not that there's anything wrong with that", a superficial statement of tolerance that immediately follows a vehement rejection of the very concept?
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
The enemies of Democracy are
Bullshit. Dems deserve blame because they have squandered congressional majorities, and went along with the bullshit (PATRIOT Act for one) the Reps brought to the table. Crying 'Poor us!' then passing totalitarian legislation anyway isn't an excuse from blame, its just being a group of pussies.
I am absolutely sick and tired of this "white America is overtly racist".
Well, white America is overtly racist. I know you talk about social chastisement for being a racists white but I've never met a white guy that wasn't popular for making a black joke every now and then. You really just need to quit pretending that there is any other case. It's just a fact of life. People that think that a few speeches by Martin Luther King and a couple of segregated schools can change the attitudes of a nation in a generation are utterly stupid. Being racist, in many people's eyes, is that they aren't allowed to call black people n---rs any more, and so, because they don't do that, they don't see themselves as racist...
except that...
More white people, if they see a black guy in a Lexus getting pulled over by the cops, will assume that the guy was doing drugs or is some kind of a gangster than a guy with a business or an advanced degree. If alone, they'll cross the street when they see more than one black guy.. if with a bunch of people, they'll sing Sweet Home Alabama and make that black guy go to another block. How is it in America that we have major corporations investing billions of dollars in building up data centers in places from the phillipines to india and you don't as much as even a server placed in an inner city?
There's plenty of white people too, that say that would prefer a white quarterback to their favorite NFL team. There's more to white America than a few suburban towns. All you have to do is take a drive through the civil war museums and you'll find that Confederate flags and merchandise sells on par with that of the Union. If you go into prisons, you immediately find that whites all band up into neo-nazi gangs, and, if there is a criticism of the right wing these days about religion, it is that christianity, with its message of peace, has been used to pollute the white race.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that we'd see confederate flags -everywhere-, should Obama get elected. Like he's seriously going to get a lot of votes in the South.. Come on... where's all the black NASCAR drivers? I see confederate flags more now, than I ever have before. I live in a mixed neighborhood and you have the white side of the street with guys flying the Stars and Bars and on the black side of the street you have a bunch of black guy dressed up like gangstas. People do not talk to each other -at all-, and its no different than it was when blacks and whites were throwing bricks at each other during the race riots of the early 1980s.
If there's any institution out there that is -not- racist, it is the membership of pro sports teams, and the US military. There's plenty of white soldiers that don't like blacks and plenty of whites that don't like black, but, when a black man saves a white man's life, and vice versa, things like race just don't matter, and, in this present war, there's an aweful lot of that going on.
This isn't to say that whites are all devils (Farrakhan joke deliberate), or that blacks are angels. It is to say that racism is far from dead in the USA and quite honestly I do not think it will ever be. There will never be a day where we do not have to have some sort of affirmative action in university or even in some workplaces. There will never be a day where we do not have to constantly police ourselves to ensure that people are not being judged on anything different than their ability. Racism isn't like a disease that you cure, its a chronic condition that requires persistent and determined management by the nation, the government, companies and finally the people.
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