I understand this is going to quickly get modded -1000 Anti European, but common. Realisticly, Europe does not have the political will to ever stand up to the US in any significant way.
Ooooh, you're so brave, so tough, saying something you "know" is going to get modded down.
Well, what about that? You got a +5, insightful instead.
GMAFB. If you've got something to say, say it -- don't try to impress us with your courage in doing so. Especially since it's false courage; saying "I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but..." is one of the oldest karma whoring tricks in the book. You're not a tough brave individualistic politically incorrect realist speaking truth to power. You're just another drone expressing someone else's talking point.
Europe hasn't had the political will to build a serious, continent-wide military force up until now... because there hasn't been a reason to do so. Current US policies bid fair to provide them with that reason.
Europe has more money and more people than the US. What they don't have is more guns -- but they're right next door to the world's biggest arms factory, which happens to be starved for cash. Anyone who thinks this state of affairs will persist indefinitely isn't paying attention.
If 1 vote in New York counted exactly the same as 1 vote in North Dakota, I guarantee you there would still be campaigning going on in ND as well as NY, because reaching voters is a hell of a lot cheaper in rural areas than in urban ones. You could, at a guess, buy advertising that would blanket both Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming for days at the same price as a single ad running on a network channel in NYC in primetime. Tell me that wouldn't make a difference.
Actually, of course, the way things are right now, 1 ND vote does count exactly the same as 1 NY vote: both of them count for exactly zero. The EC system does not provide greater representation to voters in small states. It disenfranchises all voters who don't live in swing states. (And big swing states at that; remember that the vote in 2000 was just as close in NM as in FL... but nobody cared, because NM wasn't going to decide the election, and everyone knew it.)
Take a look at an electoral college map (i.e., a list of states with electoral votes per state.) It's frightening to realize just how badly a candidate could lose overall, but still take the White House with a few key victories in large swing states.
The EC was a decent compromise two centuries ago. Right now, in the modern political map of the US, it does not work.
FWIW, as a Mac user, I use Mozilla (yes, Mozilla, not Firefox or Camino -- I just like it better) most of the time and Safari some of the time; I find that there are a very few pages that render in Safari but not in Mozilla, but far more pages that are the reverse. [shrug] I doubt I'll ever limit myself to one browser entirely, no matter how good; it's always best to have options.
Every once in a great while I run across a site that won't render in either, presumably having been coded with all kinds of IE-specific crap. My assumption is that whoever is running that site doesn't need my business.
Bingo. It's classic kill-the-messenger stuff: critics = protestors = anti-American = TERRORISTS! Thus anyone who dares to criticize the machines, and to suggest that just maybe possibly there might be a little something wrong with the largest voting machine company in the country being run by someone who has publicly vowed to do everything in his power to deliver votes for a specific candidate... can be written off as an America-hating nutcase.
Multiple meanings of the word "organic." In the chemical sense, a compound is organic if it is composed largely of carbon and hydrogen. The simplest organic compounds (hydrocarbons) contain only carbon and hydrogen. More complex ones are formed by, effectively, removing one or more of the hydrogen atoms and attaching something else ("something else" can of course be very complex in this case.) There are lots and lots of organic compounds, including many sugars, out there which have origins which are not "organic" in the sense you're thinking of.
A Military Times survey last December of 933 subscribers, about 30 percent of whom had deployed for the Iraq war, found that 56 percent considered themselves Republican - about the same percentage who approved of Bush's handling of Iraq. Half of those responding were officers, who as a group tend to be more conservative than their enlisted counterparts.
Not sure what "considered themselves Republican" means -- presumably all the registered R's, plus independents who lean strongly that way. Anyway... From my time in the service (1987-1997) I'd say the numbers are very different for officers and enlisted. The officer corps is strongly conservative and Republican, and becoming more so all the time (and I consider it deeply unhealthy for the nation to have an officer corps that subscribes overwhelmingly to any particular ideology, but that's a matter for another time...) while enlisted personnel follow roughly the same split (1/3 D, 1/3 R, 1/3 other) as the rest of the country. The article pretty much says this:
Among officers, who represent roughly 15 percent of today's 1.4 million active duty military personnel, there are about eight Republicans for every Democrat, according to a 1999 survey by Duke University political scientist Peter Feaver. Enlisted personnel, however - a disproportionate number of whom are minorities, a population that tends to lean Democratic - are more evenly split. Professor Feaver estimates that about one third of enlisted troops are Republicans, one third Democrats, and the rest independents, with the latter group growing.
This isn't surprising, since officers tend to come from much more priveleged backgrounds than do enlisted personnel.
I also suspect that the numbers vary by service, with the Marines being the most conservative, the Air Force being the most liberal, and the Army and Navy -- largely by virtue of being bigger, and therefore more diverse -- being somewhere in the middle. I'd be interested to see hard numbers on this one of these days.
The thing is, I suspect (I have no way of knowing if this is true, of course) that running a Presidential candidate does more harm than good. First, there's the obvious problem of limited resources; I have no idea how much the LP is spending on the Badnarik campaign, but I honestly think ever penny of it could better be spent for local candidates.
The second problem is more a matter of PR: third party candidates have become a kind of perpetual joke in American politics, this slate of unknown names at the bottom of the ballot that everybody knows don't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. (And on the rare occasions that they get popular enough to have an impact -- Anderson, Perot, Nader -- the Big Two react with fury and horror, which usually ends up hurting the cause of all third-party candidates for years to come.) So if the campaigns are seen as a joke, inevitably that comes to be associated with the party itself.
Better, it seems to me, would be for third parties to concentrate entirely on below-the-radar races (city council, etc.) and then move up one step at a time. Because if at some point there are three or four third-party Representatives, and maybe even a Senator... at that point they will emphatically not be a joke, and then will be the time to think about going for the big prize.
Kind of a Catch-22, isn't it? You can't get elected without experience, and you can't get experience without getting elected...
I've thought for a long time that third parties that want to have a chance in hell of ever getting anywhere in national politics need to start by, for now, pouring their resources into small local elections in which a) there's a lot less money involved, and b) there are a lot fewer voters, so changing just a few people's minds has a reasonable chance of getting your guy elected. If there are a bunch of Libertarian | Green | Reform | Socialist | whatever city councilmen and county commissioners and school board members and... okay, it's not the same thing as having one in the White House, but it's a place to start. This election, start at that level; in a couple more election cycles, maybe pick up a state legislator or two; etc.
And it does matter. Here in Colorado, we have a Libertarian sheriff, in one of the sparsely populated but very large mountain counties, who has made a real difference by pulling his people out of the War On (Some) Drugs. This isn't the same as, say, bringing the troops home from Iraq -- but it's a real action, which has had a real effect on the lives of real people.
Ehhh, I don't think the fact that Nader is on the Reform Party ticket means he's cozying up to Buchanan*. Look at the people who have run under their banner over the last few years: Perot, Ventura, Buchanan, now Nader. You see any common thread between these guys? Nope, neither do I. For whatever reason (probably Perot's money) the RP became a kind of refuge for disaffected politicians who weren't happy with either of the Big 2 or with any of the existing, more coherent third parties. (The Greens or the Libertarians or the Socialists or the Prohibitionists may be loons, but at least you know in what direction their looniness lies.) Honestly, I expect this election to be the RP's last hurrah; I just don't see how they'll keep going after this.
* Who, BTW, is becoming less Neanderthal by the day, or maybe it's just that the current Republicans make him look reasonable by comparison -- I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with anything the guy said, and now I agree with him about half the time.
Um, I note that the grandparent poster's home page is at a.au address -- I have no trouble believing that 70%+ (some figures put it at 90%+) of spam worldwide is American in origin, but that Pacific Rim users see a lower percentage of spam originating in America and a higher percentage from other PR locations.
I mean, of course, left-wing dictatorships as opposed to right-wing ones. E.g., Nazi Germany was actually a pretty good place to be a businessman, as long as you didn't mind the risk of your employees (or yourself!) disappearing without warning; and the German economy in the Nazi era was healthier than it had been since WW1, or indeed, would be for some time after WW2. The USSR never did learn this lesson -- largely because, as you say, of its core leftist ideas -- and this led, quite directly, to its downfall. China is still meaningfully "leftist" in a lot of ways, but the Chinese government is realistic above all else, and to the exclusion of inconvenient ideology.
I suspect that Microsoft's definition of "better" in search engine terms looks a lot more like the Chinese government's than Google's does. Just a thought...
More likely, they'll be "outsourcing" to those areas of China which, right now, are effectively still living in the Middle Ages. Coastal China is now very nearly First World, but they've got a lot of Second and Third World inside the country to work with. And they're patient.
It seems to me that the Chinese government made a tacit agreement with the Chinese people after Tiananmen Square: you keep your mouths shut about politics (and if you don't, we've got tanks to remind you) and we'll let you get rich. It would be nice to believe that economic freedom and social freedom are inextricably linked, but in fact China (and Vietnam, for that matter) are doing a pretty good job of allowing the first while keeping strict controls on the second. This is a trick the Right learned long ago, but now the Left is catching up.
... to lift technology export restrictions. Right now. All of them. (Okay, with the exception of classified military research -- but we should also take a hard look at what's classified, and why, and whether keeping it classified does any good.) Once upon a time, when the US and its European allies were the only source for high tech, this policy made a certain amount of sense on national security grounds. But now, the restrictions only serve to weaken national security, by hurting the technology base in the US -- or are simply annoyances to be worked around by companies like Microsoft and Oracle, which are theoretically US companies but are in fact loyal only to themselves.
Wrong. It's an O(log n) problem. Ten times as many votes takes twice as long to count; 100 times as many votes takes three times as long to count; etc. Not a big deal, and much less vulnerable to tampering than machines with closed hardware and software, and apparently zero security, made by a private company whose CEO has declared his allegiance to a particular candidate for the highest office in the land...
Certainly scientists have their own political biases, but a) if they let the politics override the evidence, they are by definition bad scientists, and b) there is no reason to assume that a scientific enquiry has a political motive; most science, believe it or not, stems from no political motivation whatsoever. The assertion that "scientists are (political) people too" is of course true, but it seems to me that it is most often used by those who find scientific discoveries politically unpalatable.
Heh. You're not a "mere civilian;" the principle of civilian control of the military is deeply enshrined in the American tradition. (And no, I don't believe that all civilians are automatically ignorant of the military; what set my teeth on edge was the combination of stereotypical conservative chickenhawk ignorance and then questioning my service because I disagreed with him -- again, utterly stereotypical chickenhawk behavior.) The vast majority of military personnel and veterans are perfectly happy to respect civilians, as long as they get the same respect in return...
Anyway, all that being said: I'd say the priorities are good ones, but out of order. Specifically -- look, no one (well, okay, hardly anyone) joins the military expecting to die, but the risk is always there, and everyone knows it. A suicidal soldier who wants to die for his country is more a risk than an asset; but a soldier who is not willing to take the risk of death to accomplish the mission isn't much use either. And if it comes to one troop's life vs. the country, or even the mission at hand right now... well, that's not a choice at all, and everyone knows it.
So the priorities are: country, then policy, then personal survival. The key phrase in the oath of enlistment is, "support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic." All the rest of it, about obeying orders and such, is a description of the means, not the end.
I doubt you served at all, ever. You sound like an utterly typical chickenhawk conservative who thinks he knows everything about the military because he knows some guy who knows some guy who says... etc., but who never had the guts to wear a uniform himself. You, and Dick Cheney, can go fuck yourselves.
sincerely, Daniel Dvorkin former SSgt, USAF USAR infantryman 1987-1989 USAF medic 1989-1997
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I understand this is going to quickly get modded -1000 Anti European, but common. Realisticly, Europe does not have the political will to ever stand up to the US in any significant way.
..." is one of the oldest karma whoring tricks in the book. You're not a tough brave individualistic politically incorrect realist speaking truth to power. You're just another drone expressing someone else's talking point.
Ooooh, you're so brave, so tough, saying something you "know" is going to get modded down.
Well, what about that? You got a +5, insightful instead.
GMAFB. If you've got something to say, say it -- don't try to impress us with your courage in doing so. Especially since it's false courage; saying "I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but
Europe hasn't had the political will to build a serious, continent-wide military force up until now ... because there hasn't been a reason to do so. Current US policies bid fair to provide them with that reason.
Europe has more money and more people than the US. What they don't have is more guns -- but they're right next door to the world's biggest arms factory, which happens to be starved for cash. Anyone who thinks this state of affairs will persist indefinitely isn't paying attention.
You didn't read the post you replied to at all, did you?
Aaargh.
... but nobody cared, because NM wasn't going to decide the election, and everyone knew it.)
If 1 vote in New York counted exactly the same as 1 vote in North Dakota, I guarantee you there would still be campaigning going on in ND as well as NY, because reaching voters is a hell of a lot cheaper in rural areas than in urban ones. You could, at a guess, buy advertising that would blanket both Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming for days at the same price as a single ad running on a network channel in NYC in primetime. Tell me that wouldn't make a difference.
Actually, of course, the way things are right now, 1 ND vote does count exactly the same as 1 NY vote: both of them count for exactly zero. The EC system does not provide greater representation to voters in small states. It disenfranchises all voters who don't live in swing states. (And big swing states at that; remember that the vote in 2000 was just as close in NM as in FL
Take a look at an electoral college map (i.e., a list of states with electoral votes per state.) It's frightening to realize just how badly a candidate could lose overall, but still take the White House with a few key victories in large swing states.
The EC was a decent compromise two centuries ago. Right now, in the modern political map of the US, it does not work.
FWIW, as a Mac user, I use Mozilla (yes, Mozilla, not Firefox or Camino -- I just like it better) most of the time and Safari some of the time; I find that there are a very few pages that render in Safari but not in Mozilla, but far more pages that are the reverse. [shrug] I doubt I'll ever limit myself to one browser entirely, no matter how good; it's always best to have options.
Every once in a great while I run across a site that won't render in either, presumably having been coded with all kinds of IE-specific crap. My assumption is that whoever is running that site doesn't need my business.
Bingo. It's classic kill-the-messenger stuff: critics = protestors = anti-American = TERRORISTS! Thus anyone who dares to criticize the machines, and to suggest that just maybe possibly there might be a little something wrong with the largest voting machine company in the country being run by someone who has publicly vowed to do everything in his power to deliver votes for a specific candidate ... can be written off as an America-hating nutcase.
Why do YOU hate America so much, Citizen?
Multiple meanings of the word "organic." In the chemical sense, a compound is organic if it is composed largely of carbon and hydrogen. The simplest organic compounds (hydrocarbons) contain only carbon and hydrogen. More complex ones are formed by, effectively, removing one or more of the hydrogen atoms and attaching something else ("something else" can of course be very complex in this case.) There are lots and lots of organic compounds, including many sugars, out there which have origins which are not "organic" in the sense you're thinking of.
A Military Times survey last December of 933 subscribers, about 30 percent of whom had deployed for the Iraq war, found that 56 percent considered themselves Republican - about the same percentage who approved of Bush's handling of Iraq. Half of those responding were officers, who as a group tend to be more conservative than their enlisted counterparts.
... From my time in the service (1987-1997) I'd say the numbers are very different for officers and enlisted. The officer corps is strongly conservative and Republican, and becoming more so all the time (and I consider it deeply unhealthy for the nation to have an officer corps that subscribes overwhelmingly to any particular ideology, but that's a matter for another time ...) while enlisted personnel follow roughly the same split (1/3 D, 1/3 R, 1/3 other) as the rest of the country. The article pretty much says this:
Not sure what "considered themselves Republican" means -- presumably all the registered R's, plus independents who lean strongly that way. Anyway
Among officers, who represent roughly 15 percent of today's 1.4 million active duty military personnel, there are about eight Republicans for every Democrat, according to a 1999 survey by Duke University political scientist Peter Feaver. Enlisted personnel, however - a disproportionate number of whom are minorities, a population that tends to lean Democratic - are more evenly split. Professor Feaver estimates that about one third of enlisted troops are Republicans, one third Democrats, and the rest independents, with the latter group growing.
This isn't surprising, since officers tend to come from much more priveleged backgrounds than do enlisted personnel.
I also suspect that the numbers vary by service, with the Marines being the most conservative, the Air Force being the most liberal, and the Army and Navy -- largely by virtue of being bigger, and therefore more diverse -- being somewhere in the middle. I'd be interested to see hard numbers on this one of these days.
The thing is, I suspect (I have no way of knowing if this is true, of course) that running a Presidential candidate does more harm than good. First, there's the obvious problem of limited resources; I have no idea how much the LP is spending on the Badnarik campaign, but I honestly think ever penny of it could better be spent for local candidates.
... at that point they will emphatically not be a joke, and then will be the time to think about going for the big prize.
The second problem is more a matter of PR: third party candidates have become a kind of perpetual joke in American politics, this slate of unknown names at the bottom of the ballot that everybody knows don't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. (And on the rare occasions that they get popular enough to have an impact -- Anderson, Perot, Nader -- the Big Two react with fury and horror, which usually ends up hurting the cause of all third-party candidates for years to come.) So if the campaigns are seen as a joke, inevitably that comes to be associated with the party itself.
Better, it seems to me, would be for third parties to concentrate entirely on below-the-radar races (city council, etc.) and then move up one step at a time. Because if at some point there are three or four third-party Representatives, and maybe even a Senator
Kind of a Catch-22, isn't it? You can't get elected without experience, and you can't get experience without getting elected ...
... okay, it's not the same thing as having one in the White House, but it's a place to start. This election, start at that level; in a couple more election cycles, maybe pick up a state legislator or two; etc.
I've thought for a long time that third parties that want to have a chance in hell of ever getting anywhere in national politics need to start by, for now, pouring their resources into small local elections in which a) there's a lot less money involved, and b) there are a lot fewer voters, so changing just a few people's minds has a reasonable chance of getting your guy elected. If there are a bunch of Libertarian | Green | Reform | Socialist | whatever city councilmen and county commissioners and school board members and
And it does matter. Here in Colorado, we have a Libertarian sheriff, in one of the sparsely populated but very large mountain counties, who has made a real difference by pulling his people out of the War On (Some) Drugs. This isn't the same as, say, bringing the troops home from Iraq -- but it's a real action, which has had a real effect on the lives of real people.
Ehhh, I don't think the fact that Nader is on the Reform Party ticket means he's cozying up to Buchanan*. Look at the people who have run under their banner over the last few years: Perot, Ventura, Buchanan, now Nader. You see any common thread between these guys? Nope, neither do I. For whatever reason (probably Perot's money) the RP became a kind of refuge for disaffected politicians who weren't happy with either of the Big 2 or with any of the existing, more coherent third parties. (The Greens or the Libertarians or the Socialists or the Prohibitionists may be loons, but at least you know in what direction their looniness lies.) Honestly, I expect this election to be the RP's last hurrah; I just don't see how they'll keep going after this.
* Who, BTW, is becoming less Neanderthal by the day, or maybe it's just that the current Republicans make him look reasonable by comparison -- I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with anything the guy said, and now I agree with him about half the time.
Um, I note that the grandparent poster's home page is at a .au address -- I have no trouble believing that 70%+ (some figures put it at 90%+) of spam worldwide is American in origin, but that Pacific Rim users see a lower percentage of spam originating in America and a higher percentage from other PR locations.
Agreed, because America will be rulled by a mullah within a few years of Kerry taking office and we won't have elections any more.
You mispelled "Diebold".
I would contend that people who carry cell phones only tend to be more intelligent, hence more conservative.
I think I'm just going to let that sentence sit there all by itself for a while, in all its lonely glory.
That post just got you on my friends list.
It's kind of a special case when the person investigating you for the alleged wrongdoing is the same person who allegedly gave you the order.
I mean, of course, left-wing dictatorships as opposed to right-wing ones. E.g., Nazi Germany was actually a pretty good place to be a businessman, as long as you didn't mind the risk of your employees (or yourself!) disappearing without warning; and the German economy in the Nazi era was healthier than it had been since WW1, or indeed, would be for some time after WW2. The USSR never did learn this lesson -- largely because, as you say, of its core leftist ideas -- and this led, quite directly, to its downfall. China is still meaningfully "leftist" in a lot of ways, but the Chinese government is realistic above all else, and to the exclusion of inconvenient ideology.
I suspect that Microsoft's definition of "better" in search engine terms looks a lot more like the Chinese government's than Google's does. Just a thought ...
More likely, they'll be "outsourcing" to those areas of China which, right now, are effectively still living in the Middle Ages. Coastal China is now very nearly First World, but they've got a lot of Second and Third World inside the country to work with. And they're patient.
It seems to me that the Chinese government made a tacit agreement with the Chinese people after Tiananmen Square: you keep your mouths shut about politics (and if you don't, we've got tanks to remind you) and we'll let you get rich. It would be nice to believe that economic freedom and social freedom are inextricably linked, but in fact China (and Vietnam, for that matter) are doing a pretty good job of allowing the first while keeping strict controls on the second. This is a trick the Right learned long ago, but now the Left is catching up.
... to lift technology export restrictions. Right now. All of them. (Okay, with the exception of classified military research -- but we should also take a hard look at what's classified, and why, and whether keeping it classified does any good.) Once upon a time, when the US and its European allies were the only source for high tech, this policy made a certain amount of sense on national security grounds. But now, the restrictions only serve to weaken national security, by hurting the technology base in the US -- or are simply annoyances to be worked around by companies like Microsoft and Oracle, which are theoretically US companies but are in fact loyal only to themselves.
Wrong. It's an O(log n) problem. Ten times as many votes takes twice as long to count; 100 times as many votes takes three times as long to count; etc. Not a big deal, and much less vulnerable to tampering than machines with closed hardware and software, and apparently zero security, made by a private company whose CEO has declared his allegiance to a particular candidate for the highest office in the land ...
Certainly scientists have their own political biases, but a) if they let the politics override the evidence, they are by definition bad scientists, and b) there is no reason to assume that a scientific enquiry has a political motive; most science, believe it or not, stems from no political motivation whatsoever. The assertion that "scientists are (political) people too" is of course true, but it seems to me that it is most often used by those who find scientific discoveries politically unpalatable.
Heh. You're not a "mere civilian;" the principle of civilian control of the military is deeply enshrined in the American tradition. (And no, I don't believe that all civilians are automatically ignorant of the military; what set my teeth on edge was the combination of stereotypical conservative chickenhawk ignorance and then questioning my service because I disagreed with him -- again, utterly stereotypical chickenhawk behavior.) The vast majority of military personnel and veterans are perfectly happy to respect civilians, as long as they get the same respect in return ...
... well, that's not a choice at all, and everyone knows it.
Anyway, all that being said: I'd say the priorities are good ones, but out of order. Specifically -- look, no one (well, okay, hardly anyone) joins the military expecting to die, but the risk is always there, and everyone knows it. A suicidal soldier who wants to die for his country is more a risk than an asset; but a soldier who is not willing to take the risk of death to accomplish the mission isn't much use either. And if it comes to one troop's life vs. the country, or even the mission at hand right now
So the priorities are: country, then policy, then personal survival. The key phrase in the oath of enlistment is, "support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic." All the rest of it, about obeying orders and such, is a description of the means, not the end.
I doubt you served at all, ever. You sound like an utterly typical chickenhawk conservative who thinks he knows everything about the military because he knows some guy who knows some guy who says ... etc., but who never had the guts to wear a uniform himself. You, and Dick Cheney, can go fuck yourselves.
sincerely,
Daniel Dvorkin
former SSgt, USAF
USAR infantryman 1987-1989
USAF medic 1989-1997