"Liberal" and "Conservative" used to mean the same things on both sides of the pond; The US, after all, was created mainly by people from Europe. A "Conservative" tended to support the king/queen and the power of the government, etc. whereas a "Liberal" supported individual rights and freedoms and the rights of the people to rule themselves.This is why American conservatives and liberals alike use the term "liberal democracy" in a positive way on the international stage. This is the form of liberalism now termed "Classical Liberalism"
The initial population of the 13 American colonies, in the immediate aftermath of the revolution would all have been classified as "Liberal" even though they had plenty of political differences and were far more religiously conservative than even most American conservatives today. The colonists who clung to the King of England (who would have been classical conservatives) were called Torries (as a negative term, rather than as a political party label) and many either went back to England, or moved north to Canada; those who remained were strongly in favor of individual liberties and freedoms, and not too fond of royalty and big government.This meant that the entire American political spectrum was on the side of classical liberalism. Political and cultural events drove an inversion in terms in the U.S. First, the early 20th century "Progressive" movement which was popular with the likes of Teddy Roosevelt fell out of favor when ideas they were associated with seemed to go so wrong over in Europe in the lead-up to WWII. The more extreme ends of the American left and right were relatively quiet during the WWII years and in the post-war 50's. When the American left became re-energized in the 60's, and sought to change society, they did so under the banner of "Liberal" which had a more positive link to the idea of "liberal democracy" rather than under the term "progressive" (which still had some negative baggage). When right-leaning Americans reacted to the activity of the left in the 60's (done under the banner "Liberal") it was only natural for them to embrace the term "Conservative" as they fought to protect what they felt the left and "Liberals" were changing/destroying. Liberals in the US now generally favor large government and centralized control (which they came to see as the way to induce the societal changes they sought), while conservatives generally favor the individual and small government (embracing the writings of the nation's founders on the dangers of big government, and seeing every example of government action as a warning of impending tyranny). This flipping of terms in the US is not entirely
complete however because on certain issues (mainly related to national security) conservatives tend to prefer more government and liberals prefer less. There are other issues in the US (like abortion) which would, on the surface, seem to muddy the waters even further for an outsider. The left seem to be ClassicLiberals/ModernConservatives (favoring the individual to have a medical procedure) while the right seems to be ClassicConservative/ModernLiberal (favoring big government control of an individual). Both sides are actually being consistent with the modern terms when you view the issue from their particular perspectives (the left-wing wanting government to enforce what they see as a civil right of a pregnant woman to have a procedure, and the right-wing wanting to protect the individual right of the unborn person).
Interestingly, now that the term "Liberal" has become tainted in the minds of a large block of voters, some left-leaning American politicians are again dusting-off the term "progressive" ( Hillary Clinton has called herself an "early twentieth century progressive" and of course anybody with internet access knows about all the "progressives" putting up websites... ) The bulk of American society remains with a strong focus on the individual, which is why the entire American political spectrum seems so lopsided to a European and why both sides of
The events in question (assuming they happened) were not in the US, did not involve members of any US political party, etc. The link here is thin; accusations of wrongdoing by a company whose parent company is run by a guy who has another company in another country that has a news show that some democrats think is too cozy with the republicans. I know that some people hate Fox news and think it (and by association, its boss Mr. Murdoch) are in the tank for the Republicans, but by that reasoning any negative news story involving any business units associated with any other US media corp could be tagged "democrats". Murdoch goes where the market takes him (Fox news fills a niche everybody else was ignoring), which is why he was getting so chummy with Hillary Clinton early in last year's presidential cycle.
believing an untestable, untouchable, invisible man lives in the sky is being a nut job.
Believing in something that is untestable only means you believe in something that a very small and limited species of rather primitive bipeds on one tiny planet in one unremarkable arm of a rather ordinary galaxy have not yet figured out how to test. This is hardly insane
believing in something that cannot be touched or seen is no less rational; it just means you believe in something that those same small primitive limited bipeds cannot touch or cannot see... I believe that black holes exist but I can neither touch one nor directly view it. I believe atoms exist, but I can neither touch one nor see one. You live in a rather small and depressing universe if you think that any thing humans cannot see, feel and test with our current capabilities does not exist. Had you made that statement a couple of centuries ago, you would have condemned all modern Astronomers to the looney bin (given that what modern astronomers believe in now could not be seen, tested, or felt back then). Humans will presumably continue to develop and I personally put no limits on what our descendants may discover.
If I wondered down the street claiming Fred was i the sky and could through hole pineapples at you, I would be locked away.
And rightly so, because it is provably false, even by mankind in our current primitive state, with only 20th century technology
But change Fred to God and suddenly I'm not insane.
Nope. you're pretty much still insane if you think God is hovering about in the sky hurling pineapples at you (smile)
You also reveal your own prejudices when you declare that all "American Evangelical Christians" are "nutjobs" or "fruitcakes".
Anybody is free to call him/herself an "Evangelical Christian". There's no secret meetingplace, no secret handshake, no organization with a secret member list. There are many disagreements among Evangelicals, so you are insulting a rather wide group of Christians. Many of those American Evangelicals you denounce are at least being more logical and rational than many others. They believe in a perfect God, and they believe that the Bible is the word of that God (written by men who were inspired by that God to write what he wanted written), so it is completely rational for them to believe that the word of that infallible God is without error. (it would be mighty strange to say that an infallible God made errors in getting his words to his people). You are free to disagree with them, but they are not being lunatics if you accept the premise they begin with.
As for Evangelicals being bad because they believe that their beliefs are true and the beliefs of others are false... well that just makes them sane (and like the followers of most other belief systems, including atheism).An irrational person would continue to believe a thing after he has concluded that it is false, or would believe that two things which contradict each-other are both true. Atheists believe Christians are wrong. Hindus think Jews are wrong. Jews think Muslims are wrong. etc. Why do you only denounce American Evangelicals for this?
It's funny that people who often dislike Evangelicals because those Evangelicals are so convinced of their beliefs are, themselves, just as certain of their own beliefs and every bit as eager to condemn the Evangelicals as they think the Evangelicals are to condemn others
Before you get too worried about people who believe you are wrong (but who respect your right to choose to be wrong) try getting a bit more worried about people who believe you are wrong and believe that it is their duty to kill you for that reason.
If law makers like this idea, we should first make lawmakers responsible for all the pollution produced by their work. If some law, after it is applied by society and mangled by various judicial interpretations over the space of several years ends-up having negative effects, we should be able to drag the retired lawmakers out of their nursing homes, and make them clean things up...at their expense.
Somehow I doubt there'd be too many legislators willing to support such a plan in their field of work...
If this nuttiness gets applied to electronics, then it should be applied to EVERYTHING that eventually becomes waste (cars, food, furniture, clothing, houses, airplanes, etc.) Slashdotters ought to be smart enough to see that this has NOTHING to do with toxicity levels or mass in landfills and EVERYTHING to do with government seeking power and control over all aspects of "dangerous" technologies like computers. Governments do not like technologies that enable individuals to push back against governments. If any maker of electronic products must be able to recover the products and recyle them, then no small companies will be able to get into the business; only big corporations (which usually are willing to get in bed with the politicians in order to protect their profits) will be able to be in the business and THEY will implement whatever security schemes, DRM, etc the government instructs them to implement (recall the big phone companies and wiretaps?)
And the question everybody there should be asking is:
Is that $50 being spent actually recyling those products, or are the products being routed to dumps in the third world with the money flowing into general state revenues for other uses?
Far too frequently, these fees are enacted with appeals to the voters to help save the planet, but no actual environmental protection occurs and the politicians use the money like a slush fund to buy supporters
Well, that would certainly be consistent with his plan to catch tax cheats: Appoint them to various high offices and let the confirmation process drive them to pony-up.
1. Clinton administration snagging secret FBI background checks on all the nation's leading Republicans.
2. Democrats illegally recording Newt Gingrich cell phone call and leaking it to the press.
3. Democrat breaking into Gov Palin's e-mail account and plastering the contents all over the web.
4. Hoards of Democrats in a bunch of state offices digging into every possible government record looking for dirt on Joe-the-plumber (the average citizen who dared question the messiah)
5. Both McCain and Obama having their passport records breached
6. The pregnancy of Palin's under-age daughter and details about her boyfriend being splashed all-over the papers.
7. Palin's minor daughter's cell phone info being leaked onto the web
Actually, I though of all the recent breaches by people in both parties, but there seems to be a fixation on Cheney/Bush, and a baseless presumption that Democrats value privacy, on the net that is a bit tiresome and some balance is required. The problem is NOT that the wrong people are in charge or the wrong people are the victims; the problem is that humans are corruptible and too much power in the hands of too few, with too little oversight, will always lead to trouble. No matter which side of the aisle you are on, eventually your people will be the victims and the other people will be the perps. Best that people on both sides hammer-out better rules to protect the privacy of everybody... while still protecting everybody from real harm. Anybody who only notices and gets upset when somebody in his political party is violated is somebody who does not truly care about privacy
No, "Education" will not "fix that". Linux will never take over on the desktop (or the laptop) as long as its developers/advocates have this fundamental concept so completely backwards. The average computer user is not trying to use a computer or an operating system; he or she did not want to "Learn a PC" or "Learn Windows" and certainly does not want to "Learn Linux". The average user wants to play a particular game (so bragging about lots of other free games is not an answer), or wants to send e-mail, or work on a spreadsheet, or write a document, or work on a CAD drawing, etc. The computer and the OS are just the background infrastructure which the user needs but does not want to deal with or know anything about. Any argument about the superiority or "Free" nature of Linux is not persuasive because it completely misses the point. Giving somebody a bunch of tutorial videos to help them learn also completely misses the point.
Want Linux to take over on the desktop? Figure out how to make it WAY more obvious, efficient, and intuitive to to get things done on Linux; not just e-mail and web browsing, but all the things 2/3 of users want to do. The focus needs to be on helping users with tasks and NOT on the OS or the apps. It's ok if the apps have wacky names that the programmers like, but the end user should not even need to know the names of those apps; the average user does not care about the software itself, he or she just wants to use that software to accomplish some task. Average users will only come to love the penguin when the cute little penguin logo is the only thing they need to know about Linux. Innovate. Make Windows look like the operating system that users must "Learn". Make Windows look complex. Never expose an end-user to a command line or a cryptic message or even the concepts of installing or upgrading or patching ANYTHING unless he/she goes looking for it (but make it easy to look for and find these things so the rest of us don't get angry) Make users see Windows as: that operating system where you need to go buy a lot of complex 3rd party apps and pay for "maintenance contracts" and keep applying security updates in order to get things done.
We will know the Linux community has succeeded in this when the average computer user looks for a computer with a penguin symbol on it, because he or she knows this will provide simplicity and productivity... and he or she does not even know what an operating system is or what "linux" is.
Nice they way you turn this into a McCain attack, but I'll answer:
Did McCain (or Hillary Clinton, for that matter) show good judgement in authorizing the attack on Iraq?
none of us will know this for a generation. Hopefully there will be no more massacres of civilians by chemical weapons in Iraq with Saddam gone.
In the Keating Five affair?
Low and unfair blow. The Keating matter re: McCain is very well documented. He was the only Republican caught-up in the matter and the Senate's own lawyers said he should not have been included but the Democrats who ran the senate at the time refused to drop him from the matter because that would turn it into an all-democrat scandal.
In joking about bombing Iran
Lots of people tell jokes (I'm sure Obama has too) it only affects people in foil hats.
In embracing the Bush tax cuts
Which got the economy out of the post-clinton-internet-bubble recession and kept the economy movig post 9-11... McCain's just smart enough to not want to hurt the economy by repealing the cuts.
In flip-flopping on the question of turture?
As one who was actually tortured (as opposed to having been embarrassed) McCain has always opposed torture.
Obama's career in the Senate has been brief
Yeah, there for only a year before he started running for president; I like my airline pilots to only have a few days of flight experience as well.
but he's shown a knack for working with Republicans
I'll have what you're drinking. Obama has absolutely no record of ever crossing the aisle to work with Republicans on anything his base opposes. Zip Zero political courage. To say he worked with Dick Lugar on a democrat bill is like saying some republican worked with Sam Nunn on a defense bill; it proves nothing. Most of his law-making career consists of votes of "present" rather than "yea" or "nay"... avoiding votes that could impact his future presidential run was more important to him than getting anything done. The man is a weasel.
Most of the only "poor judgement" claims I've heard so far involve some variant of "he picks poor company"
That shows a lack of understanding about why those particular associations are so troubling: He claims to be post-racial but spends 20 years in a ranting raving racist church? Did he ever (even once, very quietly) stand-up and say "hey folks, this stuff is wrong" ???? Did he persuade anybody in that congregation to repudiate that stuff? So much for judgment. So much for persuasiveness. The guy wants us to believe he can talk to the leaders of Iran and get them to change, but he could not even persuade his own pastor to be less of a bigot? The man will meet any time with the world's tyrants and is friends with a 60's radical bomber, but cannot be bothered to meet with the Generals who are leading the fights in Iraq and Afghanistan when they are in DC? Any time without conditions for Iran's Mullahs, but all sorts of pre-conditions and evasions rather than meet with McCain in "town hall" meetings with voters?
Associations are not normally so important, but when the candidate has no resume, and tells us his primary qualification is his judgment then we must put all the scrutiny on his judgment. Who you associate with tells a lot about your judgment.
Well, now that you mention it, a well-built ark would do much better than what they tried last time!
Last time, they all sat on their butts and waited for the great secular God "FEMA" to save them but they only received visitations from the demigods Geraldo, and Sean Penn...
In the case of Louisiana, and other southern USA states, this means questioning religion, not science. In the case of the USA as a whole, this would also include questioning the idea that global warming might not exist or might not be caused by humans burning fossil fuels.
Those who question religion (in the south, as in the rest of the country) have been quite successful in driving its influence from the schools and most of the government so your presumption that there is a lack of questioning of religion is false. The degree to which most lawmakers and journalists are on the anthropogenic global warming bandwagon also shows there is no lack of criticism and questioning of global warming skeptics
Critical thinking questioning science should only be encouraged in the scientific community itself, because that seems to be the only community where the scientific method is implicitly assumed to be correct. If the child has no idea of what the words "scientific theory" mean, to present arguments questioning any scientific theory will NOT cause any development of the child's critical thinking.
By this reasoning, critical thinking questioning religion should only be encouraged in the religious community itself, because that seems to be the only community where religious principles are implicitly assumed to be correct. If the child has no idea of what the religious words mean, to present arguments questioning any religious belief will NOT cause any development of the child's critical moral and ethical thinking.
By your way of thinking, I suppose only politicians should question the acts of other politicians, only military people should question the military, etc. That way lies a truly dark and dangerous world!
Personally, I think critical thinking is called for in all areas, and most-importantly by those not steeped in the area with biases re-enforced both by personal investment in it and by like-minded peers
Well, when you have a candidate with no experience who says everyone should put their faith in his superior judgment, but that judgment is shown to be poor, I suppose manipulation of information will have to suffice.
I look forward to the installation of my giant telescreen and the newspeak of Big Brother Obama and his minions with their manipulated information. I know that their orthodoxy will be double-plus good for all of us in Oceania!
Eisenhower would be considered a mainstream Democrat these days
No, Move-on would denounce him as an evil militarist for the hundreds of thousands he held without trial and without rights in prison camps all around Europe for the entire duration of WWII, and Eisenhower was more left than most Republicans, but they picked him because he could win.
Nixon, seen at the time as representing the hard right
No, many right-wingers saw Nixon as the lesser-of-two-evils when compared to the Democrat candidates... Nixon pushed-through price controls (NEVER a conservative position)
...Obama, support policies largely in accord with the Republican party of Eisenhower's day
Huh? Obama is full of flowery rhetoric, but his few serious pronouncements are hardly conservative.
Even Saint Reagan, no matter how much today's Republicans venerate him, would be considered suspiciously leftish by modern Republicans if he were a new candidate running for office today
Hardly. Reagan defined the modern GOP. Now JFK, on the other hand, would be driven out of the modern Democratic party by the army of Kos...;-)
Too bad there isn't a fiscal conservative, socially liberal person to vote for.
There is not for the same reason that there is never a serious chance for a Libertarian in modern America: The liberal says to people "do what you want, and the government will protect you from the consequences", the conservative says "Don't do these things, the government will not take care of you", and the Libertarian say "do what you want but the government will not take care of you". Libertarianism sounds good but would never actually be tolerated. The average American will not tolerate the carnage and human wreckage that would result from Libertarian policies; people would demand that "somebody" take care of all the damaged people and while this might have fallen to religious charities in the 1700s, modern Americans look to government for such things (and THAT forces the issue of taxes and big government)
Too bad there isn't a news network without slant anymore.
There never was; there was simply no balance so you did not notice the bias when all the journalists on TV were left-of-center Democrats. Before cable news came along, all of the networks were in bed with the Democrats and even now they still go to the Democratic party for their talking heads (Walter Cronkite hung out with the Kennedys, Tim Russert was a Democrat staffer, George Stephanopolis worked for Clinton, Bill Moyers was a Johnson guy...)
so.... to summarize, the US has a habit of not starting wars, but eventually and grudgingly marching in to finish them while minimizing American casualties... and this is a bad thing. Hmmm, Nope. Just not seein' it.
The job of the American soldier is not to die for his country, but rather to make some other guy die for his country
Up until I saw this posting, I thought the Slashdot consensus was that GW Bush was an evil whackjob for starting the war in Iraq... but now I see that the US is bad for usually waiting while other people start the slaughter
Exactly. The west is perfectly happy with him when we help him to power
Please tell me you do not get all your facts from wikipedia! "Various U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials have asserted that Saddam was strongly linked with the CIA..."???? There are so many nutcases in both parties in politics in the US that you can get some of them to say almost anything as jimmy Carter, Pierre Salinger, and Al Gore have proven many times in recent years.
We did not put Saddam in power, he got there the way most tyrants do, by murdering his opponents. We did not arm him. When US troops rolled into Iraq it was AK-47s and soviet-era BMPs, Tanks, and aircraft they encountered, not US equipment. It is only correct to say that we had limited involvement with him because he was the enemy of a worse enemy and our government used that to try to gain whatever intelligence it could in the interests of our security. In the real world, you need to keep an eye on some mighty foul people and that sometimes requires you to use some other scum to do it.
I still don't feel really comfortable with jurors making decisions based on "looking into people's eyes", as one of the jurors was saying;
You have a point, but there is a good reason why we want juries and we trust them to "look into people's eyes" as part of making decisions; human beings, while imperfect and capable of bigotry and such are still the better judge of the behaviors, expressions, etc of other human beings. We learn to notice very subtle things in the faces and postures of others starting at a very young age. It will be a long time before any computer gets good at this. For now, people have the superior (though admittedly imperfect) BS-o-meters
Imagine if Albert Einstein had accepted the position of leader of Israel after World War II and ordered some massive war crime, like say slaughtering the Arabs with nukes.
I'm not even Jewish and this is borderline offensive. Why tie Israel or Jews to an unrelated murder, and why the presumption of the Jew perpetrating a "massive war crime"? I hope somebody else does not drag-in asians with eyesight issues or blacks and watermelons, or native Americans with "firewater", arabs with camels, southern white boys with their cousins, or...
This sort of stuff is simply not needed to advance the discussion of one woman apparently murdered by one man (afaik neither being jewish) in California (not the mideast)
The nice thing about Linux is that anybody uncomfortable with using Reiser code in the aftermath of this can simply not use it.
OK, so since this article extrapolated McCain's position into "McCain Supports Warrantless Domestic Surveillance", can we now extrapolate Obama's position to be "Obama Supports Unmonitored Terrorist Calls To Their Cells Inside The US"???
The US government has become too incompetent to cleverly rig a permanent war to get control over the citizens. The government clearly is not in control of the population with all the examples you cite. If those "wars" gave it power and control, then Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, etc. would have become non-persons long ago. Never presume the government's actions arise from smart & devious plans when incompetence and political paralysis will do. Real wars can only be waged against nations and peoples. Modern US politicians want to convince people they are involved in serious efforts to deal with those issues (the term "war" helps them imply a serious WWII-scale effort) but they are too wimpy to actually go after the people involved (they have drug users and dealers, poor people, rich people, makers and sellers of carcinogens, people with families in terror-supporting countries, etc. in their own districts), so they declare wars on things and methods. Such "wars" are not real wars, and cannot be won because those enemies are not capable of losing or surrendering. The happy side-effect though, is more government spending, and more government workers who will support bigger government.
Yeah, right, I really miss all those Russian suicide bombers and that empire whose fanatical leaders thought the world had to end for their utopia to arise...
The intentions of the guy with a weapon are always FAR more important than the capabilities of the weapon.
Aren't we all so glad now that those "anti-science" republicans were replaced by "pro-science" democrats in congress two years ago?
The truth is that there are pro-science republicans and pro-science democrats. There are also republicans AND democrats who have concerns about moral and ethical boundries (which does NOT make them anti-science) and there are republicans AND democrats who are hostile to science. When democrat leaders use science to appeal to another voting block by claiming that democrats are pro-science and republicans are anti-science, serious people should remember things like this and see the rhetoric for what it is...BULL. If Pelosi, Reid & company were truly "pro-science", this would never happen, NIH & NASA would be properly funded, etc.
I do not want some bloated, mis-managed, government agency to have all of my medical records, employment records, or business records. If anybody thinks some sub-contracted flunky at a keyboard will be happy snooping through the passport records of his fellow citizens after their medical records become available as part of some similarly unsecured, poorly engineered, unsupervised federal bureaucracy, you're kidding yourself. This stuff is rapidly spinning out of control and the only way to put the brakes on it is to head back toward what the country started with: a small, tightly focused federal government that keeps records on its citizens to the minimum degree practical.
This situation was bad enough when the idiots in government had our data. It gets worse now that government is outsourcing work to non-government people who will never be properly held to account; it opens the way for outside entities to gain access to the data by hiring people to do temporary data harvesting jobs, injecting those people into those outsourced government positions, then acting shocked and "firing" them when they get caught (with bonuses and options to be re-hired later by another division...) That may not be what happened here, but it will happen as the government gets more of our data and that data becomes more interesting/valuable to outsiders.
Your privacy, like your reputation, is not a physical thing; once you hand it over or damage it, you can never get it back.
Slashdot Mirror
"Liberal" and "Conservative" used to mean the same things on both sides of the pond; The US, after all, was created mainly by people from Europe. A "Conservative" tended to support the king/queen and the power of the government, etc. whereas a "Liberal" supported individual rights and freedoms and the rights of the people to rule themselves.This is why American conservatives and liberals alike use the term "liberal democracy" in a positive way on the international stage. This is the form of liberalism now termed "Classical Liberalism"
The initial population of the 13 American colonies, in the immediate aftermath of the revolution would all have been classified as "Liberal" even though they had plenty of political differences and were far more religiously conservative than even most American conservatives today. The colonists who clung to the King of England (who would have been classical conservatives) were called Torries (as a negative term, rather than as a political party label) and many either went back to England, or moved north to Canada; those who remained were strongly in favor of individual liberties and freedoms, and not too fond of royalty and big government.This meant that the entire American political spectrum was on the side of classical liberalism. Political and cultural events drove an inversion in terms in the U.S. First, the early 20th century "Progressive" movement which was popular with the likes of Teddy Roosevelt fell out of favor when ideas they were associated with seemed to go so wrong over in Europe in the lead-up to WWII. The more extreme ends of the American left and right were relatively quiet during the WWII years and in the post-war 50's. When the American left became re-energized in the 60's, and sought to change society, they did so under the banner of "Liberal" which had a more positive link to the idea of "liberal democracy" rather than under the term "progressive" (which still had some negative baggage). When right-leaning Americans reacted to the activity of the left in the 60's (done under the banner "Liberal") it was only natural for them to embrace the term "Conservative" as they fought to protect what they felt the left and "Liberals" were changing/destroying. Liberals in the US now generally favor large government and centralized control (which they came to see as the way to induce the societal changes they sought), while conservatives generally favor the individual and small government (embracing the writings of the nation's founders on the dangers of big government, and seeing every example of government action as a warning of impending tyranny). This flipping of terms in the US is not entirely
complete however because on certain issues (mainly related to national security) conservatives tend to prefer more government and liberals prefer less. There are other issues in the US (like abortion) which would, on the surface, seem to muddy the waters even further for an outsider. The left seem to be ClassicLiberals/ModernConservatives (favoring the individual to have a medical procedure) while the right seems to be ClassicConservative/ModernLiberal (favoring big government control of an individual). Both sides are actually being consistent with the modern terms when you view the issue from their particular perspectives (the left-wing wanting government to enforce what they see as a civil right of a pregnant woman to have a procedure, and the right-wing wanting to protect the individual right of the unborn person).
Interestingly, now that the term "Liberal" has become tainted in the minds of a large block of voters, some left-leaning American politicians are again dusting-off the term "progressive" ( Hillary Clinton has called herself an "early twentieth century progressive" and of course anybody with internet access knows about all the "progressives" putting up websites... ) The bulk of American society remains with a strong focus on the individual, which is why the entire American political spectrum seems so lopsided to a European and why both sides of
Why is this story tagged "republicans"?
The events in question (assuming they happened) were not in the US, did not involve members of any US political party, etc. The link here is thin; accusations of wrongdoing by a company whose parent company is run by a guy who has another company in another country that has a news show that some democrats think is too cozy with the republicans. I know that some people hate Fox news and think it (and by association, its boss Mr. Murdoch) are in the tank for the Republicans, but by that reasoning any negative news story involving any business units associated with any other US media corp could be tagged "democrats". Murdoch goes where the market takes him (Fox news fills a niche everybody else was ignoring), which is why he was getting so chummy with Hillary Clinton early in last year's presidential cycle.
believing an untestable, untouchable, invisible man lives in the sky is being a nut job.
Believing in something that is untestable only means you believe in something that a very small and limited species of rather primitive bipeds on one tiny planet in one unremarkable arm of a rather ordinary galaxy have not yet figured out how to test. This is hardly insane
believing in something that cannot be touched or seen is no less rational; it just means you believe in something that those same small primitive limited bipeds cannot touch or cannot see... I believe that black holes exist but I can neither touch one nor directly view it. I believe atoms exist, but I can neither touch one nor see one. You live in a rather small and depressing universe if you think that any thing humans cannot see, feel and test with our current capabilities does not exist. Had you made that statement a couple of centuries ago, you would have condemned all modern Astronomers to the looney bin (given that what modern astronomers believe in now could not be seen, tested, or felt back then). Humans will presumably continue to develop and I personally put no limits on what our descendants may discover.
If I wondered down the street claiming Fred was i the sky and could through hole pineapples at you, I would be locked away.
And rightly so, because it is provably false, even by mankind in our current primitive state, with only 20th century technology
But change Fred to God and suddenly I'm not insane.
Nope. you're pretty much still insane if you think God is hovering about in the sky hurling pineapples at you (smile)
You also reveal your own prejudices when you declare that all "American Evangelical Christians" are "nutjobs" or "fruitcakes".
Anybody is free to call him/herself an "Evangelical Christian". There's no secret meetingplace, no secret handshake, no organization with a secret member list. There are many disagreements among Evangelicals, so you are insulting a rather wide group of Christians. Many of those American Evangelicals you denounce are at least being more logical and rational than many others. They believe in a perfect God, and they believe that the Bible is the word of that God (written by men who were inspired by that God to write what he wanted written), so it is completely rational for them to believe that the word of that infallible God is without error. (it would be mighty strange to say that an infallible God made errors in getting his words to his people). You are free to disagree with them, but they are not being lunatics if you accept the premise they begin with.
As for Evangelicals being bad because they believe that their beliefs are true and the beliefs of others are false... well that just makes them sane (and like the followers of most other belief systems, including atheism).An irrational person would continue to believe a thing after he has concluded that it is false, or would believe that two things which contradict each-other are both true. Atheists believe Christians are wrong. Hindus think Jews are wrong. Jews think Muslims are wrong. etc. Why do you only denounce American Evangelicals for this?
It's funny that people who often dislike Evangelicals because those Evangelicals are so convinced of their beliefs are, themselves, just as certain of their own beliefs and every bit as eager to condemn the Evangelicals as they think the Evangelicals are to condemn others
Before you get too worried about people who believe you are wrong (but who respect your right to choose to be wrong) try getting a bit more worried about people who believe you are wrong and believe that it is their duty to kill you for that reason.
If law makers like this idea, we should first make lawmakers responsible for all the pollution produced by their work. If some law, after it is applied by society and mangled by various judicial interpretations over the space of several years ends-up having negative effects, we should be able to drag the retired lawmakers out of their nursing homes, and make them clean things up...at their expense.
Somehow I doubt there'd be too many legislators willing to support such a plan in their field of work...
If this nuttiness gets applied to electronics, then it should be applied to EVERYTHING that eventually becomes waste (cars, food, furniture, clothing, houses, airplanes, etc.) Slashdotters ought to be smart enough to see that this has NOTHING to do with toxicity levels or mass in landfills and EVERYTHING to do with government seeking power and control over all aspects of "dangerous" technologies like computers. Governments do not like technologies that enable individuals to push back against governments. If any maker of electronic products must be able to recover the products and recyle them, then no small companies will be able to get into the business; only big corporations (which usually are willing to get in bed with the politicians in order to protect their profits) will be able to be in the business and THEY will implement whatever security schemes, DRM, etc the government instructs them to implement (recall the big phone companies and wiretaps?)
And the question everybody there should be asking is:
Is that $50 being spent actually recyling those products, or are the products being routed to dumps in the third world with the money flowing into general state revenues for other uses?
Far too frequently, these fees are enacted with appeals to the voters to help save the planet, but no actual environmental protection occurs and the politicians use the money like a slush fund to buy supporters
Well, that would certainly be consistent with his plan to catch tax cheats: Appoint them to various high offices and let the confirmation process drive them to pony-up.
1. Clinton administration snagging secret FBI background checks on all the nation's leading Republicans.
2. Democrats illegally recording Newt Gingrich cell phone call and leaking it to the press.
3. Democrat breaking into Gov Palin's e-mail account and plastering the contents all over the web.
4. Hoards of Democrats in a bunch of state offices digging into every possible government record looking for dirt on Joe-the-plumber (the average citizen who dared question the messiah)
5. Both McCain and Obama having their passport records breached
6. The pregnancy of Palin's under-age daughter and details about her boyfriend being splashed all-over the papers.
7. Palin's minor daughter's cell phone info being leaked onto the web
Actually, I though of all the recent breaches by people in both parties, but there seems to be a fixation on Cheney/Bush, and a baseless presumption that Democrats value privacy, on the net that is a bit tiresome and some balance is required. The problem is NOT that the wrong people are in charge or the wrong people are the victims; the problem is that humans are corruptible and too much power in the hands of too few, with too little oversight, will always lead to trouble. No matter which side of the aisle you are on, eventually your people will be the victims and the other people will be the perps. Best that people on both sides hammer-out better rules to protect the privacy of everybody... while still protecting everybody from real harm. Anybody who only notices and gets upset when somebody in his political party is violated is somebody who does not truly care about privacy
No, "Education" will not "fix that". Linux will never take over on the desktop (or the laptop) as long as its developers/advocates have this fundamental concept so completely backwards. The average computer user is not trying to use a computer or an operating system; he or she did not want to "Learn a PC" or "Learn Windows" and certainly does not want to "Learn Linux". The average user wants to play a particular game (so bragging about lots of other free games is not an answer), or wants to send e-mail, or work on a spreadsheet, or write a document, or work on a CAD drawing, etc. The computer and the OS are just the background infrastructure which the user needs but does not want to deal with or know anything about. Any argument about the superiority or "Free" nature of Linux is not persuasive because it completely misses the point. Giving somebody a bunch of tutorial videos to help them learn also completely misses the point.
Want Linux to take over on the desktop? Figure out how to make it WAY more obvious, efficient, and intuitive to to get things done on Linux; not just e-mail and web browsing, but all the things 2/3 of users want to do. The focus needs to be on helping users with tasks and NOT on the OS or the apps. It's ok if the apps have wacky names that the programmers like, but the end user should not even need to know the names of those apps; the average user does not care about the software itself, he or she just wants to use that software to accomplish some task. Average users will only come to love the penguin when the cute little penguin logo is the only thing they need to know about Linux. Innovate. Make Windows look like the operating system that users must "Learn". Make Windows look complex. Never expose an end-user to a command line or a cryptic message or even the concepts of installing or upgrading or patching ANYTHING unless he/she goes looking for it (but make it easy to look for and find these things so the rest of us don't get angry) Make users see Windows as: that operating system where you need to go buy a lot of complex 3rd party apps and pay for "maintenance contracts" and keep applying security updates in order to get things done.
We will know the Linux community has succeeded in this when the average computer user looks for a computer with a penguin symbol on it, because he or she knows this will provide simplicity and productivity... and he or she does not even know what an operating system is or what "linux" is.
Did McCain (or Hillary Clinton, for that matter) show good judgement in authorizing the attack on Iraq?
none of us will know this for a generation. Hopefully there will be no more massacres of civilians by chemical weapons in Iraq with Saddam gone.
In the Keating Five affair?
Low and unfair blow. The Keating matter re: McCain is very well documented. He was the only Republican caught-up in the matter and the Senate's own lawyers said he should not have been included but the Democrats who ran the senate at the time refused to drop him from the matter because that would turn it into an all-democrat scandal.
In joking about bombing Iran
Lots of people tell jokes (I'm sure Obama has too) it only affects people in foil hats.
In embracing the Bush tax cuts
Which got the economy out of the post-clinton-internet-bubble recession and kept the economy movig post 9-11... McCain's just smart enough to not want to hurt the economy by repealing the cuts.
In flip-flopping on the question of turture?
As one who was actually tortured (as opposed to having been embarrassed) McCain has always opposed torture.
Obama's career in the Senate has been brief
Yeah, there for only a year before he started running for president; I like my airline pilots to only have a few days of flight experience as well.
but he's shown a knack for working with Republicans
I'll have what you're drinking. Obama has absolutely no record of ever crossing the aisle to work with Republicans on anything his base opposes. Zip Zero political courage. To say he worked with Dick Lugar on a democrat bill is like saying some republican worked with Sam Nunn on a defense bill; it proves nothing. Most of his law-making career consists of votes of "present" rather than "yea" or "nay"... avoiding votes that could impact his future presidential run was more important to him than getting anything done. The man is a weasel.
Most of the only "poor judgement" claims I've heard so far involve some variant of "he picks poor company"
That shows a lack of understanding about why those particular associations are so troubling: He claims to be post-racial but spends 20 years in a ranting raving racist church? Did he ever (even once, very quietly) stand-up and say "hey folks, this stuff is wrong" ???? Did he persuade anybody in that congregation to repudiate that stuff? So much for judgment. So much for persuasiveness. The guy wants us to believe he can talk to the leaders of Iran and get them to change, but he could not even persuade his own pastor to be less of a bigot? The man will meet any time with the world's tyrants and is friends with a 60's radical bomber, but cannot be bothered to meet with the Generals who are leading the fights in Iraq and Afghanistan when they are in DC? Any time without conditions for Iran's Mullahs, but all sorts of pre-conditions and evasions rather than meet with McCain in "town hall" meetings with voters?
Associations are not normally so important, but when the candidate has no resume, and tells us his primary qualification is his judgment then we must put all the scrutiny on his judgment. Who you associate with tells a lot about your judgment.
How to build an arc for the next Katrina.
Well, now that you mention it, a well-built ark would do much better than what they tried last time!
Last time, they all sat on their butts and waited for the great secular God "FEMA" to save them but they only received visitations from the demigods Geraldo, and Sean Penn...
In the case of Louisiana, and other southern USA states, this means questioning religion, not science. In the case of the USA as a whole, this would also include questioning the idea that global warming might not exist or might not be caused by humans burning fossil fuels.
Those who question religion (in the south, as in the rest of the country) have been quite successful in driving its influence from the schools and most of the government so your presumption that there is a lack of questioning of religion is false. The degree to which most lawmakers and journalists are on the anthropogenic global warming bandwagon also shows there is no lack of criticism and questioning of global warming skeptics
Critical thinking questioning science should only be encouraged in the scientific community itself, because that seems to be the only community where the scientific method is implicitly assumed to be correct. If the child has no idea of what the words "scientific theory" mean, to present arguments questioning any scientific theory will NOT cause any development of the child's critical thinking.
By this reasoning, critical thinking questioning religion should only be encouraged in the religious community itself, because that seems to be the only community where religious principles are implicitly assumed to be correct. If the child has no idea of what the religious words mean, to present arguments questioning any religious belief will NOT cause any development of the child's critical moral and ethical thinking.
By your way of thinking, I suppose only politicians should question the acts of other politicians, only military people should question the military, etc. That way lies a truly dark and dangerous world!
Personally, I think critical thinking is called for in all areas, and most-importantly by those not steeped in the area with biases re-enforced both by personal investment in it and by like-minded peers
Well, when you have a candidate with no experience who says everyone should put their faith in his superior judgment, but that judgment is shown to be poor, I suppose manipulation of information will have to suffice.
I look forward to the installation of my giant telescreen and the newspeak of Big Brother Obama and his minions with their manipulated information. I know that their orthodoxy will be double-plus good for all of us in Oceania!
Eisenhower would be considered a mainstream Democrat these days
No, Move-on would denounce him as an evil militarist for the hundreds of thousands he held without trial and without rights in prison camps all around Europe for the entire duration of WWII, and Eisenhower was more left than most Republicans, but they picked him because he could win.Nixon, seen at the time as representing the hard right
No, many right-wingers saw Nixon as the lesser-of-two-evils when compared to the Democrat candidates... Nixon pushed-through price controls (NEVER a conservative position) ...Obama, support policies largely in accord with the Republican party of Eisenhower's day
Huh? Obama is full of flowery rhetoric, but his few serious pronouncements are hardly conservative.Even Saint Reagan, no matter how much today's Republicans venerate him, would be considered suspiciously leftish by modern Republicans if he were a new candidate running for office today
Hardly. Reagan defined the modern GOP. Now JFK, on the other hand, would be driven out of the modern Democratic party by the army of Kos...Too bad there isn't a fiscal conservative, socially liberal person to vote for.
There is not for the same reason that there is never a serious chance for a Libertarian in modern America: The liberal says to people "do what you want, and the government will protect you from the consequences", the conservative says "Don't do these things, the government will not take care of you", and the Libertarian say "do what you want but the government will not take care of you". Libertarianism sounds good but would never actually be tolerated. The average American will not tolerate the carnage and human wreckage that would result from Libertarian policies; people would demand that "somebody" take care of all the damaged people and while this might have fallen to religious charities in the 1700s, modern Americans look to government for such things (and THAT forces the issue of taxes and big government)
Too bad there isn't a news network without slant anymore.
There never was; there was simply no balance so you did not notice the bias when all the journalists on TV were left-of-center Democrats. Before cable news came along, all of the networks were in bed with the Democrats and even now they still go to the Democratic party for their talking heads (Walter Cronkite hung out with the Kennedys, Tim Russert was a Democrat staffer, George Stephanopolis worked for Clinton, Bill Moyers was a Johnson guy...)so.... to summarize, the US has a habit of not starting wars, but eventually and grudgingly marching in to finish them while minimizing American casualties... and this is a bad thing. Hmmm, Nope. Just not seein' it.
The job of the American soldier is not to die for his country, but rather to make some other guy die for his country
Up until I saw this posting, I thought the Slashdot consensus was that GW Bush was an evil whackjob for starting the war in Iraq... but now I see that the US is bad for usually waiting while other people start the slaughter
Exactly. The west is perfectly happy with him when we help him to power
Please tell me you do not get all your facts from wikipedia! "Various U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials have asserted that Saddam was strongly linked with the CIA..."???? There are so many nutcases in both parties in politics in the US that you can get some of them to say almost anything as jimmy Carter, Pierre Salinger, and Al Gore have proven many times in recent years.
We did not put Saddam in power, he got there the way most tyrants do, by murdering his opponents. We did not arm him. When US troops rolled into Iraq it was AK-47s and soviet-era BMPs, Tanks, and aircraft they encountered, not US equipment. It is only correct to say that we had limited involvement with him because he was the enemy of a worse enemy and our government used that to try to gain whatever intelligence it could in the interests of our security. In the real world, you need to keep an eye on some mighty foul people and that sometimes requires you to use some other scum to do it.
Well done! I did not think there was anything in this that could give me a laugh.
I still don't feel really comfortable with jurors making decisions based on "looking into people's eyes", as one of the jurors was saying;
You have a point, but there is a good reason why we want juries and we trust them to "look into people's eyes" as part of making decisions; human beings, while imperfect and capable of bigotry and such are still the better judge of the behaviors, expressions, etc of other human beings. We learn to notice very subtle things in the faces and postures of others starting at a very young age. It will be a long time before any computer gets good at this. For now, people have the superior (though admittedly imperfect) BS-o-meters
Imagine if Albert Einstein had accepted the position of leader of Israel after World War II and ordered some massive war crime, like say slaughtering the Arabs with nukes.
I'm not even Jewish and this is borderline offensive. Why tie Israel or Jews to an unrelated murder, and why the presumption of the Jew perpetrating a "massive war crime"? I hope somebody else does not drag-in asians with eyesight issues or blacks and watermelons, or native Americans with "firewater", arabs with camels, southern white boys with their cousins, or ...
This sort of stuff is simply not needed to advance the discussion of one woman apparently murdered by one man (afaik neither being jewish) in California (not the mideast)
The nice thing about Linux is that anybody uncomfortable with using Reiser code in the aftermath of this can simply not use it.
OK, so since this article extrapolated McCain's position into "McCain Supports Warrantless Domestic Surveillance", can we now extrapolate Obama's position to be "Obama Supports Unmonitored Terrorist Calls To Their Cells Inside The US"???
I'm just asking...
The US government has become too incompetent to cleverly rig a permanent war to get control over the citizens. The government clearly is not in control of the population with all the examples you cite. If those "wars" gave it power and control, then Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, etc. would have become non-persons long ago. Never presume the government's actions arise from smart & devious plans when incompetence and political paralysis will do. Real wars can only be waged against nations and peoples. Modern US politicians want to convince people they are involved in serious efforts to deal with those issues (the term "war" helps them imply a serious WWII-scale effort) but they are too wimpy to actually go after the people involved (they have drug users and dealers, poor people, rich people, makers and sellers of carcinogens, people with families in terror-supporting countries, etc. in their own districts), so they declare wars on things and methods. Such "wars" are not real wars, and cannot be won because those enemies are not capable of losing or surrendering. The happy side-effect though, is more government spending, and more government workers who will support bigger government.
Yeah, right, I really miss all those Russian suicide bombers and that empire whose fanatical leaders thought the world had to end for their utopia to arise...
The intentions of the guy with a weapon are always FAR more important than the capabilities of the weapon.
Aren't we all so glad now that those "anti-science" republicans were replaced by "pro-science" democrats in congress two years ago? The truth is that there are pro-science republicans and pro-science democrats. There are also republicans AND democrats who have concerns about moral and ethical boundries (which does NOT make them anti-science) and there are republicans AND democrats who are hostile to science. When democrat leaders use science to appeal to another voting block by claiming that democrats are pro-science and republicans are anti-science, serious people should remember things like this and see the rhetoric for what it is...BULL. If Pelosi, Reid & company were truly "pro-science", this would never happen, NIH & NASA would be properly funded, etc.
I do not want some bloated, mis-managed, government agency to have all of my medical records, employment records, or business records. If anybody thinks some sub-contracted flunky at a keyboard will be happy snooping through the passport records of his fellow citizens after their medical records become available as part of some similarly unsecured, poorly engineered, unsupervised federal bureaucracy, you're kidding yourself. This stuff is rapidly spinning out of control and the only way to put the brakes on it is to head back toward what the country started with: a small, tightly focused federal government that keeps records on its citizens to the minimum degree practical.
This situation was bad enough when the idiots in government had our data. It gets worse now that government is outsourcing work to non-government people who will never be properly held to account; it opens the way for outside entities to gain access to the data by hiring people to do temporary data harvesting jobs, injecting those people into those outsourced government positions, then acting shocked and "firing" them when they get caught (with bonuses and options to be re-hired later by another division...) That may not be what happened here, but it will happen as the government gets more of our data and that data becomes more interesting/valuable to outsiders.
Your privacy, like your reputation, is not a physical thing; once you hand it over or damage it, you can never get it back.