[sigh] Sometimes, you know, the other side is just wrong, or lying, and pointing this out does not constitute demonization. The idea that we should always be "balanced" when it comes to arguments of political import leads to a lot of bullshit getting consideration it doesn't deserve. Global warming deniers at this point are in the same class as creationists, Holocaust-deniers, and flat-earthers -- it's not that they're being dismissed out of hand, it's that their arguments have been proven wrong time and time again, to the point that there's really no point in continuing the argument, and yet they just keep going.
[sigh] The DoJ under Clinton aggressively pursued the Microsoft anti-trust case and was close to asking the courts for a breakup -- which they would almost certainly have received -- when Clinton left office. The DoJ under Bush walked away from a clear win and let Microsoft dictate the terms of a settlement that accomplished nothing. You can argue all day about corruption and corporate control of government, but in this particular case there was a clear difference between administrations, and to claim otherwise is to deny reality.
Also, IIRC, math was a second career for Leibniz -- he started out as a lawyer and diplomat, and did his work on calculus when he was in his later thirties or early forties. This is quite remarkable in math, where almost all the truly groundbreaking discoveries are made by people in their twenties. I have plenty of respect for Newton, but Leibniz was a much saner, more likable, and in many ways more admirable figure.
One of the best Onion headlines ever: "Jenna Bush's Federally Protected Wetlands Now Open For Public Drilling."
[shrug] Personally I don't see it, but then, I'm not much of a fan of plastic spoiled rich girls generally -- a Bush twins porn film would inspire in me the same reaction as the Paris Hilton tapes, which is to say, not much.
In fact, now that I think about it, are there any hot political families right now? None come to mind.
The Republicans replaced the Whigs because the Whigs (and, to a lesser but significant extent, the Democrats as well) were in disarray, and split apart into major chunks, with enough of those chunks coalescing around the Republicans to make them a major party. The same thing happened when Teddy Roosevelt bolted the Republican party -- major realignment of large voting blocs within the existing Big Two -- although in that case none of the names changed. It happened again, later in the 20th c., when the "Dixiecrats" started migrating to the Republicans; again, the names remained the same, but the characters of the parties changed considerably. Absent such a major split within the Big Two, at the highest levels, no third party has ever attained power within the US political system.
I keep expecting a big split in the major parties, starting with the Republicans, but to my frustration it keeps not quite happening. Until it does, the Badnariks and Cobbs and Naders -- hell, even the Perots -- don't have a chance.
I've never heard anyone use "intarweb" seriously; OTOH, I have heard a supposedly educated and technically knowledgeable person talk about how his telecom company was going to be putting its product on "the uni-net." So it's not entirely a straw man.
It's an example of conventional wisdom in effect. Say something bad about public schools, call for a "back to the basics" approach to education, and everyone will nod wisely and stroke their chins and say, "Well, of course public education is badly broken..." blah blah blah. What's pathetically amusing about this is that the vast majority of people who do this are themselves public school graduates; they're effectively calling themselves uneducated morons.
The fact is that hard-working teachers in this country do their best to educate tens of millions of kids, day in and day out, and by and large they succeed. Is the system perfect? Hell no; it's a long way from perfect, and we should do everything we can to improve it. But I know of no other educational system in history that has -- with a mandate to take every kid, regardless of intelligence or willingness to work -- successfully educated the number of people that the American public school system has.
Why, just the other day, I saw Bush use one microphone to bash Kerry, and then another to claim that going to war in Iraq has made America safer. Those critters are smarter than we think!
Hmmm. Others' responses to your post in that thread pretty much sum up what I'd have said. Until he let the "assault weapons" ban lapse (don't get me started on the absurdity of that phrase, or the uselessness of the ban itself -- in any case, it would presumably be preaching to the choir) I'd have had to say that Bush hasn't done a single thing right since taking office.
Fair enough -- s/conservative/Republican/, as I said abobe.
I really don't understand anyone who says the parties are identical. Identically dirty? Maybe. But there is a real ideological difference between them; only from the perspective of Us-vs.-Them fanatics do Kerry's and Bush's positions on most issues of the day look the same.
Okay, I should have said "Republican" rather than "conservative." And believe me, as a "liberaltarian" who generally votes Democratic but has been known to bolt for the Libertarians when the Dems get too statist, I'm glad to see at least some principled conservatives considering alternatives to Bush. I guess the main question I have is, why aren't more of them doing it? How can anyone who believes in the traditional conservative values of small government, fiscal responsibility, and prudent foreign policy still support the guy? I don't mean this as a flame -- I'd really like to get some insight here.
Complex judgments aren't easily reduced to a set of clear cut rules. Your request asks for a set of clear cut rules to a problem that requires thought - that's why you don't get the simplistic answers you want. There will always be hairs to split. But a reasonable person knows the difference between someone who should vote and one who probably shouldn't.
But that's the point -- "a reasonable person" is in itself open to all kinds of different definitions. IMNSGDHO, anyone who votes for Bush is prima facie not reasonable; obviously, Bush voters will disagree. There is no standard of reasonableness, and thus no standard of who should or shouldn't vote, that all of us can agree on. That's why we have voting at all... because the alternative is to have Those Who Are Wiser Than Us making all the decisions, and the one thing liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and various permutations and combinations thereof can agree on is that historically, this has been a Really Bad Idea.
Do I think most of my fellow citizens know what the hell's going on? No, actually, I think most of them are idiots. But experience teaches us that the various kinds of idiocy tend to cancel out, and democracy (or at least a reasonable facsimile -- US democratic republicanism, the UK parliamentary system, et al.) gives the genuinely good ideas the best chance of emerging from the muck and mire. The only alternative, historically speaking, has been to give one group of idiots absolute control. I don't want to live in that world, and neither, I suspect -- although I also suspect we'd agree on very little else -- do you.
Um... none of Kerry's wounds were self-inflicted; that's a smear that has been thoroughly discredited by the Navy's own evaluation of Kerry's record. And you're right, Kerry has never had to work a day in his life, any more than Bush has -- but he's chosen to do so, consistently, for his entire adult life. Don't get me wrong; if I were able to choose any one person from the entire native-born US population over the age of 35 to be President, Kerry wouldn't be my first choice. But to put him in the same class as the spoiled, lazy, self-indulgent failure we have in office now is absurd.
In the conservative mind, anything that might possibly benefit the Left is evil and hateful and anti-American, whereas any of the well-documented dirty tricks of the Right (e.g., Republicans financing the efforts of Nader, whose beliefs they obviously do not share, to get ballot access in states where he failed to collect enough signatures) are legitimate politics. Hope that clears things up.
Bingo. I would really love to see someone back Bush into a corner on the wacko beliefs which are common to much of his base, and which I suspect he shares. "Mr. President, do you actuall believe X, Y, and Z? And if not, how do you square that with your appeal to fundamentalists who do?" Never going to happen, of course; religion is the last great, um, sacred cow of American politics.
I'm all for the future you describe. But of the three major technologies you describe that changed our lives in the 20th c. -- the computer, the automobile, and the airliner -- two (the first and last) became as prominent as they did largely because of significant government investment. The internet, of course, was a government project; the home PC built directly on computer-miniaturization techniques developed, not coincidentally, for NASA; and the Wright brothers' first customer was the US Army, and military demands drove aircraft development for the next half-century.
I will say it again, since apparently it didn't register the first time: we need both. Private enterprise provides innovation, competition, and efficiency. Government provides money -- money which industry could supply, but won't until profits are closely in sight -- infrastructure, and long-term planning. Neither is inherently superior to the other, and both work better in an environment of cooperation than in one of mutual ignorance.
Anti-government ideologues never seem to realize how much they sound like Marxists...
Maybe the people asking the questions -- hard-working young people who don't live in their parents' basements and have real concerns about the future -- have a reason for being accusatory toward Bush.
Did you even consider that, or do you just automatically assume that anything that doesn't favor your guy is "biased"?
I think you underestimate the power of fear. I've had the same job since the Clinton administration... but I'm damn near the only person I know who can say that, and yes, that does make me think more poorly of Bush's economic policies. I don't expect to get laid off any time soon, but it can always happen; and knowing that there won't necessarily be another job waiting for me (as there would have been in the Nineties) if it does happen has a lot to do with my antipathy toward Bush.
[sigh] Everything private parties have so far done in space, the government did first. Look, I'm as enthusiastic about the prospect of being able to buy a ticket to the Moon for my 50th birthday as the next geek, but to say that the government is "keeping us from doing it right" when, in fact, the Rutan team built on decades of NASA experience is just absurd. As with most major enterprises, a combination of public and private efforts will get us much farther than either could on its own.
Seriously, OS X with all the security options turned on (almost all of which, I note, are on by default out of the box) is more secure than any reasonable install of Windows with all the latest'n'greatest third-party stuff. If you must use x86 hardware, then any decent Linux distro may take a little longer to configure for security than OS X does... but it will take far, far less time than the nightmare that is securing Windows.
There are people who only smoke one cigarette, two or three days a week, too. But they are indeed the exception, not the rule. If you don;t have an addictive response to caffeine, well, good for you; but don't assume your experience generalizes to everyone else.
Bingo. Every time there's a study confirming conventional wisdom, people point and laugh, with the implication that the time and money that went into the research was wasted. But it's not; without real, solid, statistically valid research, doctors would still be arguing over whether 'tis better to lower a patient's constitution by bleeding or fortify him with wine. (Anyone who responds to this by bringing up the fact that leeches are sometimes used in modern medicine, or the health benefits of drinking a glass of red wine a day, is spectacularly Missing The Point.) A lot of "common sense" ideas about how our bodies work are, in fact, quite true; at least as many of them are false, and often actively dangerous. Only rigorous study can tell the difference.
Longer answer: IIRC, the Constitution provides that civil defendants have the right to a jury trial in all lawsuits over $20 -- which presumably was a substantial amount of money when that clause was written. Now, it is true that a lot of low-value suits these days are settled in small claims court (the cutoff for this varies from state to state, but it's usually around $500-$1,000, I think) with only a judge or magistrate making the decisions; it's also true that in higher-value cases, it's fairly common for the parties to submit to arbitration rather than taking the case to trial, which of course isn't really an option in criminal cases. But jury trials for lawsuits are still very common, and a number of people I know have served on such juries -- more than have served on criminal juries, in fact.
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[sigh] Sometimes, you know, the other side is just wrong, or lying, and pointing this out does not constitute demonization. The idea that we should always be "balanced" when it comes to arguments of political import leads to a lot of bullshit getting consideration it doesn't deserve. Global warming deniers at this point are in the same class as creationists, Holocaust-deniers, and flat-earthers -- it's not that they're being dismissed out of hand, it's that their arguments have been proven wrong time and time again, to the point that there's really no point in continuing the argument, and yet they just keep going.
[sigh] The DoJ under Clinton aggressively pursued the Microsoft anti-trust case and was close to asking the courts for a breakup -- which they would almost certainly have received -- when Clinton left office. The DoJ under Bush walked away from a clear win and let Microsoft dictate the terms of a settlement that accomplished nothing. You can argue all day about corruption and corporate control of government, but in this particular case there was a clear difference between administrations, and to claim otherwise is to deny reality.
Also, IIRC, math was a second career for Leibniz -- he started out as a lawyer and diplomat, and did his work on calculus when he was in his later thirties or early forties. This is quite remarkable in math, where almost all the truly groundbreaking discoveries are made by people in their twenties. I have plenty of respect for Newton, but Leibniz was a much saner, more likable, and in many ways more admirable figure.
I enjoyed the original version of this movie ...
Best. Slashdot. Comment. EVER.
One of the best Onion headlines ever: "Jenna Bush's Federally Protected Wetlands Now Open For Public Drilling."
[shrug] Personally I don't see it, but then, I'm not much of a fan of plastic spoiled rich girls generally -- a Bush twins porn film would inspire in me the same reaction as the Paris Hilton tapes, which is to say, not much.
In fact, now that I think about it, are there any hot political families right now? None come to mind.
The Republicans replaced the Whigs because the Whigs (and, to a lesser but significant extent, the Democrats as well) were in disarray, and split apart into major chunks, with enough of those chunks coalescing around the Republicans to make them a major party. The same thing happened when Teddy Roosevelt bolted the Republican party -- major realignment of large voting blocs within the existing Big Two -- although in that case none of the names changed. It happened again, later in the 20th c., when the "Dixiecrats" started migrating to the Republicans; again, the names remained the same, but the characters of the parties changed considerably. Absent such a major split within the Big Two, at the highest levels, no third party has ever attained power within the US political system.
I keep expecting a big split in the major parties, starting with the Republicans, but to my frustration it keeps not quite happening. Until it does, the Badnariks and Cobbs and Naders -- hell, even the Perots -- don't have a chance.
I've never heard anyone use "intarweb" seriously; OTOH, I have heard a supposedly educated and technically knowledgeable person talk about how his telecom company was going to be putting its product on "the uni-net." So it's not entirely a straw man.
It's an example of conventional wisdom in effect. Say something bad about public schools, call for a "back to the basics" approach to education, and everyone will nod wisely and stroke their chins and say, "Well, of course public education is badly broken ..." blah blah blah. What's pathetically amusing about this is that the vast majority of people who do this are themselves public school graduates; they're effectively calling themselves uneducated morons.
The fact is that hard-working teachers in this country do their best to educate tens of millions of kids, day in and day out, and by and large they succeed. Is the system perfect? Hell no; it's a long way from perfect, and we should do everything we can to improve it. But I know of no other educational system in history that has -- with a mandate to take every kid, regardless of intelligence or willingness to work -- successfully educated the number of people that the American public school system has.
Why, just the other day, I saw Bush use one microphone to bash Kerry, and then another to claim that going to war in Iraq has made America safer. Those critters are smarter than we think!
Hmmm. Others' responses to your post in that thread pretty much sum up what I'd have said. Until he let the "assault weapons" ban lapse (don't get me started on the absurdity of that phrase, or the uselessness of the ban itself -- in any case, it would presumably be preaching to the choir) I'd have had to say that Bush hasn't done a single thing right since taking office.
Fair enough -- s/conservative/Republican/, as I said abobe.
I really don't understand anyone who says the parties are identical. Identically dirty? Maybe. But there is a real ideological difference between them; only from the perspective of Us-vs.-Them fanatics do Kerry's and Bush's positions on most issues of the day look the same.
Okay, I should have said "Republican" rather than "conservative." And believe me, as a "liberaltarian" who generally votes Democratic but has been known to bolt for the Libertarians when the Dems get too statist, I'm glad to see at least some principled conservatives considering alternatives to Bush. I guess the main question I have is, why aren't more of them doing it? How can anyone who believes in the traditional conservative values of small government, fiscal responsibility, and prudent foreign policy still support the guy? I don't mean this as a flame -- I'd really like to get some insight here.
Complex judgments aren't easily reduced to a set of clear cut rules. Your request asks for a set of clear cut rules to a problem that requires thought - that's why you don't get the simplistic answers you want. There will always be hairs to split. But a reasonable person knows the difference between someone who should vote and one who probably shouldn't.
... because the alternative is to have Those Who Are Wiser Than Us making all the decisions, and the one thing liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and various permutations and combinations thereof can agree on is that historically, this has been a Really Bad Idea.
But that's the point -- "a reasonable person" is in itself open to all kinds of different definitions. IMNSGDHO, anyone who votes for Bush is prima facie not reasonable; obviously, Bush voters will disagree. There is no standard of reasonableness, and thus no standard of who should or shouldn't vote, that all of us can agree on. That's why we have voting at all
Do I think most of my fellow citizens know what the hell's going on? No, actually, I think most of them are idiots. But experience teaches us that the various kinds of idiocy tend to cancel out, and democracy (or at least a reasonable facsimile -- US democratic republicanism, the UK parliamentary system, et al.) gives the genuinely good ideas the best chance of emerging from the muck and mire. The only alternative, historically speaking, has been to give one group of idiots absolute control. I don't want to live in that world, and neither, I suspect -- although I also suspect we'd agree on very little else -- do you.
Um ... none of Kerry's wounds were self-inflicted; that's a smear that has been thoroughly discredited by the Navy's own evaluation of Kerry's record. And you're right, Kerry has never had to work a day in his life, any more than Bush has -- but he's chosen to do so, consistently, for his entire adult life. Don't get me wrong; if I were able to choose any one person from the entire native-born US population over the age of 35 to be President, Kerry wouldn't be my first choice. But to put him in the same class as the spoiled, lazy, self-indulgent failure we have in office now is absurd.
In the conservative mind, anything that might possibly benefit the Left is evil and hateful and anti-American, whereas any of the well-documented dirty tricks of the Right (e.g., Republicans financing the efforts of Nader, whose beliefs they obviously do not share, to get ballot access in states where he failed to collect enough signatures) are legitimate politics. Hope that clears things up.
Bingo. I would really love to see someone back Bush into a corner on the wacko beliefs which are common to much of his base, and which I suspect he shares. "Mr. President, do you actuall believe X, Y, and Z? And if not, how do you square that with your appeal to fundamentalists who do?" Never going to happen, of course; religion is the last great, um, sacred cow of American politics.
I'm all for the future you describe. But of the three major technologies you describe that changed our lives in the 20th c. -- the computer, the automobile, and the airliner -- two (the first and last) became as prominent as they did largely because of significant government investment. The internet, of course, was a government project; the home PC built directly on computer-miniaturization techniques developed, not coincidentally, for NASA; and the Wright brothers' first customer was the US Army, and military demands drove aircraft development for the next half-century.
...
I will say it again, since apparently it didn't register the first time: we need both. Private enterprise provides innovation, competition, and efficiency. Government provides money -- money which industry could supply, but won't until profits are closely in sight -- infrastructure, and long-term planning. Neither is inherently superior to the other, and both work better in an environment of cooperation than in one of mutual ignorance.
Anti-government ideologues never seem to realize how much they sound like Marxists
Maybe the people asking the questions -- hard-working young people who don't live in their parents' basements and have real concerns about the future -- have a reason for being accusatory toward Bush.
Did you even consider that, or do you just automatically assume that anything that doesn't favor your guy is "biased"?
I think you underestimate the power of fear. I've had the same job since the Clinton administration ... but I'm damn near the only person I know who can say that, and yes, that does make me think more poorly of Bush's economic policies. I don't expect to get laid off any time soon, but it can always happen; and knowing that there won't necessarily be another job waiting for me (as there would have been in the Nineties) if it does happen has a lot to do with my antipathy toward Bush.
[sigh] Everything private parties have so far done in space, the government did first. Look, I'm as enthusiastic about the prospect of being able to buy a ticket to the Moon for my 50th birthday as the next geek, but to say that the government is "keeping us from doing it right" when, in fact, the Rutan team built on decades of NASA experience is just absurd. As with most major enterprises, a combination of public and private efforts will get us much farther than either could on its own.
Yeah, I was thinking that.
... but it will take far, far less time than the nightmare that is securing Windows.
"What security software do you use?"
"It's this great product from Apple."
"Apple? Really? What's it called?"
"Mac OS X."
Seriously, OS X with all the security options turned on (almost all of which, I note, are on by default out of the box) is more secure than any reasonable install of Windows with all the latest'n'greatest third-party stuff. If you must use x86 hardware, then any decent Linux distro may take a little longer to configure for security than OS X does
About $380 in 2004 dollars. /me nods
So that makes sense -- still pretty close to the cutoff for small claims cases today.
There are people who only smoke one cigarette, two or three days a week, too. But they are indeed the exception, not the rule. If you don;t have an addictive response to caffeine, well, good for you; but don't assume your experience generalizes to everyone else.
Bingo. Every time there's a study confirming conventional wisdom, people point and laugh, with the implication that the time and money that went into the research was wasted. But it's not; without real, solid, statistically valid research, doctors would still be arguing over whether 'tis better to lower a patient's constitution by bleeding or fortify him with wine. (Anyone who responds to this by bringing up the fact that leeches are sometimes used in modern medicine, or the health benefits of drinking a glass of red wine a day, is spectacularly Missing The Point.) A lot of "common sense" ideas about how our bodies work are, in fact, quite true; at least as many of them are false, and often actively dangerous. Only rigorous study can tell the difference.
Short answer: you're wrong.
Longer answer: IIRC, the Constitution provides that civil defendants have the right to a jury trial in all lawsuits over $20 -- which presumably was a substantial amount of money when that clause was written. Now, it is true that a lot of low-value suits these days are settled in small claims court (the cutoff for this varies from state to state, but it's usually around $500-$1,000, I think) with only a judge or magistrate making the decisions; it's also true that in higher-value cases, it's fairly common for the parties to submit to arbitration rather than taking the case to trial, which of course isn't really an option in criminal cases. But jury trials for lawsuits are still very common, and a number of people I know have served on such juries -- more than have served on criminal juries, in fact.