I can't help but feel that such a thing must necessarily be, at best, an embarrassment of riches. While I understand that I am making criticisms sight unseen, the utility of focus is one of the first things a non-fiction writer is taught. Very few people are Edward Gibbon or Sima Qian. Myrhvold may very well be in that class, but its unlikely. I can't be any more definitive in good conscience without actually studying the work itself.
It's quite clear on the 23rd line of the chronicle of Sillius Soddus: "There was no census this year."
This just in n00bs, proving a negative is a logical fallacy. It stands to reason that if the Romans had records of other census takings, there would have been a record of the one referenced in the New Testament. No such record exists, therefore the 3rd party account of said census is suspect at best, doubly so because it describes the census as being conducted in a way completely different from all the others. Romans and their tributaries were not required to 'travel to the cities of their birth' or any such nonsense for any other census (and if they were for only onereally different census, you could be sure that it would be a census recorded in many sources for its peculiarity and inconvenience). It was just a deus ex machina fictional use of the Roman state as an excuse to place Joseph and Mary in the right place to fulfill a prophecy. All of these things taken together should demonstrate to most people that the Biblical census was pure fiction.
If talented director X lauds director Y, do that mean that director Y's films are intrinsically valuable? I'm inclined to believe half of it is quid pro quo back scratching, friendly overture, or pure puffery more than it is sincere endorsement. I rather expect that regardless of how many pages he's filled, Myhrvold has more to learn from Adria than Adria has to learn from Myrhvold.
As an American I'm inclined to agree. I think it's just because he was a big deal at MS that people even care, which is entirely the wrong reason. Unfortunately most Americans who aren't chefs or food critics don't know Ferran Adria is. They probably think molecular gastronomy begins and ends with Alton Brown, if they know what that is either. It doesn't help that all the food-related TV here has devolved into petty "reality TV" BS about who can do simple things the fastest. Most Americans are content to eat almost exclusively from chain restaurants and their freezers, and they will never even know what they're missing.
You're contradicting yourself. If sex is marriage, then what is the sin of fornication? Whither adultery if sex is marriage? The Bible never unequivocally proscribes polygamy. The patriarchs had tons of wives and concubines, and even the early church didn't go much further than saying monogamy was required for deacons/bishops. Is every sexual contact a marriage? What does that mean legally and ethically?
The only thing that makes less sense than the Bible on this matter is your interpretation.
You're not very observant are ye? I mentioned oxytocin by name in my original post. I'm already thoroughly familiar (at a layperson's level) with what you're talking about. If you want to pretend, contrary to evidence, that emotional bonding is some simple static procedure akin to "push oxytocin button receive love", that's your prerogative. Just make sure that when a stack of books falls on you about the psychological dimensions of emotional attachment and sexuality you close your eyes lest some of that non-deterministic knowledge poison your lopsided, exclusionary viewpoint.
Humans are much more than their physical contents, and I say that without any allusion to superstitious nonsense like 'souls' or what-have-you. If you cannot account for the social constructions and archetypes that both create and reflect the shared experiences between people, you will never be able to understand the broader motivations individuals have emotionally, with regard to sex or anything else.
What happens in a human brain physically may be reducible to a "simple" electro-chemical interaction, but that does not resolve at a stroke what each iteration means in concert over time.
To return to the subject, go talk to somebody who routinely has sex for money. Barring that, read some autobiographical work of somebody like that. You'll find your "sex leads AUTOMATICALLY to emotional attachment" theory sorely tested by those realities. Hormones only go so far in adjusting conscious experiences. That's why I spoke of self-fulfilling prophecies and placebo effects. If you already have a developing or latent emotional attachment, an oxytocin release will probably increase it significantly. If you already view a person negatively, either individually or as a class, an oxytocin release is probably not enough to change that already surfaced conscious position. When a person has a concrete idea, some vague, hormone-driven feeling is generally not enough to immediately reverse it.
And none of them can tell me where in the Bible it says "No sex before marriage"
1 Corinthians 7 mentions it several times, nor is that the only place. While it's true that most Catholic ritual has no Biblical basis, the restrictions on sexual contact are quite clear.
Emotional bonding is not a simple byproduct of hormones and neurotransmitters released during and after intercourse. If that were true, every female prostitute would be madly in love with however many clients she has; however much of the time the opposite is the case. Be careful of placebo effects and self-fulfilling prophecies. Long before there was any study of oxytocin there has been in many societies a conflation of sexual attraction and love and cause and effect relationships between the two. Neither love nor sex automatically proceeds from the other, whether by physiological or metaphysical impetuses.
China's love for administrators runs far, far deeper than a difference between single-party rule and liberal democracy. China has been an authoritarian bureaucracy since at least the Qin Dynasty whereupon Shang Yang's legalist reforms were applied across the whole nation. For thousands of years it was the dream of most literate Chinese (and extensibly their families) to pass the civil service exams and become respected bureaucrats. After so many generations that has become inextricable from the Chinese culture and society.
People in the West need to understand China's past before they can understand its present, let alone its future, but sadly aside from "Confucius" (I always wonder what Master Kong would think of the original romanization of his name) and Mao most Westerners don't even know any significant Chinese or their contributions. People need to know who Li Kui was before they can understand how fundamentally he shaped Chinese society.
See, now you're letting reality ruin that perfectly good angsty self-righteous rhetorical bullshit. How else is this guy going to get his bleeding heart pumping without a convenient scapegoat?
Could be worse, over in Europe there are still courts where judges are called 'Lord'. That aside, it's naught much more than angsty rhetoric (borne of poor reasoning) to call them tyrants because they don't build cars and therefore don't help people.
Judges are simply people, some of them are unscrupulous, others incorruptible, some are stupid, others are virtually sages, but like any group of people most of them lie in the middle. They're neither angels nor devils.
Moreover their titular honor is a social construction as much as or moreso than it is a direct result of their own egos. It is important (from the larger society's own perspective) for those placed in a position to make decisions about the use of the power of the state to mete out justice in the form of imprisonment, financial recompense, or even death itself to be considered persons of exceptional honor and character whether they are or not. That is the reason it is granted by the title of their office. The pretense is even more important to the proper function of the system, insofar as it is possible, when it is not earned.
Aside from those who are indeed truly sheep, few people deny that the justice systems of the world are imperfect and in need of various reforms, but that can be said of any institution, public or private. There is no reason beyond sophistry to pretend that they are in some way egregiously deficient in comparison to other human constructs, or individually inferior in both utility and character to other human beings.
The US Constitution has, outside of a few incorporated clauses and amendments, just about ZERO to do with the structure and procedures of state governments. States can have different numbers of congressional houses, different apportionment, different primaries, etc. etc. from the federal government. State laws and referendums/initiatives are judged, with rare exceptions, within the context of state constitutions. So saying that "[super majority for tax increases] has already been ruled unconstitutional in other states" means absolutely nothing, because those decisions would have been made in the context of each individual state constitution.
It's a not-thinly-veiled out of hand dismissal of anybody's opinion who wasn't involved before being informed by somebody else. How is somebody's opinion invalidated by not living and breathing Wiki? Oh that's right, that's the only way anybody can become an editor anymore. So anybody who voices an opinion from the "outside" is written off because that would be too much of a "dumb numbers game" like democracy. Fuck all those "other" opinions, long live Wiki-elites! Oligarchy forever!
So you run out of 'good-faith contributors' well before you run out of asshats.
This is so true. It seems like every time there is a "Wiki screws the pooch" article there are a dozen comments containing stories of occasional contributors who after witnessing or being involved in some kind of editing drama that always end with "and that's why I stopped contributing to Wiki". It stands to reason that if this sort of antagonism is allowed to fester then the only people who will be left will be those content to engage in it.
"Outsider" would practically be a compliment. They seem to think that anybody who isn't an editor is a scum-sucking sub-human whose opinion is intrinsically worthless.
do we really need a Slashdot front page story every time Wikipedia does something suboptimal?
Yes, without public pressure ego-tripping editors could do "suboptimal" AKA wrong things with impunity. Transparency is supposed to be Wikipedia's strength, and good decisions should have nothing to fear from public knowledge.
Generally Considered Lame and not really effective at building consensus
Which is a euphemism for "all the deletionists get butthurt when they can't hide from the public backlash".
Do I really have to explain to you what an analogy is? Come on. This isn't your first rodeo, you're grasping at straws.
Anonymous was just acting out of love for her, like a parent?
No, you dunce, since you obviously didn't get it the first time, let me repeat myself: if you don't control your kids behavior, the world will do it for you, and it won't be kind about how it does it.
Parents are supposed to get their kids in line in a loving way before the world does it in an unloving way. Never did I say that Anonymous (of all things!) was acting out of love, and if you're so dense that's what you're taking away just so you can set up some ridiculous strawman, I'm wasting my time writing anything.
I won't defend imperial Russia except to say that in the area of famines the worst in the last century before the revolution, that of 1891-2, "only" killed as many as half a million. Even adjusting per capita for population differences over the intervening forty years that is a much lower impact, atrocious though it still was. As bad as imperial Russia was, numerically Soviet Russia was still worse. Yes, imperial Russia was still practically feudal, the poor were disenfranchised and barely able to scrape together a living, but that didn't really change under the Soviets until the late 40s or early 50s, and even then the quality of life was still a century behind the West.
What good was it to have substituted one totalitarianism for another? Simply replacing the tsar with the party and aristocrats with commissars didn't make Russians any less slaves. Their lives still weren't their own, they could only do whatever a given committee said they could do, how was that better?
You think that commerce within a state is unrelated to commerce without a state?
Wickard v. Filburn is the ultimate manifestation of that detestable slippery slope logic. Do you think it was within the authority of the commerce clause to use the full power of the state to prevent a man from simply growing a crop on his own land to feed his own animals? After all, that "affects interstate commerce" according to the FDR administration because of what he wasn't buying. By this standard everything is interstate commerce, all the way down to a windowbox full of herbs or the software you might write for your own use. After all, your doing something for yourself means you're not buying it from somebody else, and that hypothetical seller might have been from out-of-state, so it's magically interstate commerce. It's a sick, tyrannical interpretation, antithetical to everything the nation was founded on, and was made by a court more afraid of FDR's appointees than their own consciences.
Interstate commerce should be interpreted as interstate commerce, not "whatever" happens to affect interstate commerce. The commerce clause is not license to do absolutely anything based on mere links to interstate commerce. It's this kind of indirect thinking that has led to other abuses, like Kelo v. New London, wherein several centuries of precedent regarding eminent domain as being applicable for direct public use only were thrown away, because the taxes and revenue from that wholly private development were considered to be in the public interest. So the takings clause is subverted to the point where anybody can use the power of the state to force the sale of anything for any reason, provided the taxes involved grease the palm of government.
Everyone that is represented in Congress (at least by a voting member; non-voting delegates don't amount to much) is represented by three members: Two senators and one representative.
For somebody who is so liberal with the important words of the Constitution, you're sure strict about the interpretation of rants on the internet (where intent was clear enough that you mention it on the second line, but I waste my breath, you have no appreciation of intent). I'm sure the million people of the 3rd congressional district in Nevada will take comfort knowing that their level of representation is really a cozy and personal one person for every 333,000+.
If you're talking about a limit in the House, though, where are you planning on putting them? Does the Capitol get a new wing? Or would you gut the existing south wing and make it into one big chamber? (Assuming that's enough room; the maximum number of representatives allowed is something like 10,000)
So, for you the barrier to representative balance and justice is... a building? In the first place, the capitol of the United States wasn't even Washington until 1800, and it was sized for not much more than the requirements of the government at the time, which is why it had to be enlarged in 1850 (among several other smaller expansions). Would you have frozen it in time in its post-1812, pre-1850 configuration, regardless of the harm it would have done to proper government of the country? Are you that petty? Then why would you suggest that the building as it is now is some kind of ultimate, insurmountable obstacle, more important than the nation it was built to serve? (Yes, that's a strawman, but I'm at full rhetorical height here.) I have worked in the capitol building, and while it is architecturally inspiring, the simple fact is that the core of it was designed before there was even electricity, let alone phones or networks. It is a barely functioning patchwork, especially the House offices, which are being practically crushed under the burden of staff that they are supposed to house, I know that already better than you do.
The point is that it's probably time the original capitol building be turned into a museu
I have a daughter, and if I caught her doing shit like that I wouldn't make a video about how Anonymous 'dun goofed', I'd have her off the internet for quite a while and doing hard labor in the yard.
People need to learn there are consequences, and before you blather about 'where's teh consequences for anonymoose?!?!1!one!' That's not how cause and effect in ethics works. If Dude 1 shoots some innocent person and Dude 2 sees it happen (and believes Dude 1 is still an imminent threat to others etc. etc.) and shoots Dude 1, Dude 2 is not going to be up on murder charges. Dude 2, in fact, will be hailed as a hero. Yeah, Anonymous "visciously attacked" a thirteen year old girl (not, I might add, 'for being a thirteen year old girl' because most girls that age *don't* go around making threat videos, or do you have no context for normal behavior that you think Jessi Slaughter's is typical?), but only after she proved herself to be neurotic imbalanced moron who needed to be taken down a peg. Her parents obviously weren't doing it, that's how she ended up that way. Let me tell you something as a parent: if you don't control your kids behavior, the world will do it for you, and it won't be kind about how it does it.
I'm pretty hard on my daughter, I've said as much to her face, but the thing is my harshness still has a foundation of love. It doesn't begin and end with intent to harm, and bears no malice, but the experience will temper her against the real harms and malices of the larger world. My parents were hard on me in the same way, and it is directly responsible for my success, such as that is.
(And I would wager that if prospective employers read everything you said over a decade on/., you wouldn't get hired either. Luckily the sheer tedium of such a scenario saves both of us, indeed, all of us. For the record, however, fuck that shit.)
I'm sure the millions killed by the consequent tyrannical mismanagement will agree. I suppose that the suppression of even mere discussion of the famine of 1932-3 as sedition is "state propaganda" too?
STFU zombie Robespierre. The answer is not and was not 'keep on killing until circumstances improve'. The answer is the elimination of imbalances in the power of the government. The Civil War ended the balance between the federal government and the states. FDR's 'pack the court' threat ended the balance of power between the executive and the judiciary. The wild expansion of represented population has ended the balance of power between the people and their representatives. (Did you know when the nation was founded the entire population was less than New York City today? And for that there were *four* layers of government: federal, state, county/parish, and municipal.) Today a population the size of what was the entire nation at its founding is now only a fraction of the constituency of many individual representatives.
There needs to be radical reform. The states need to reassert their sovereignty on intrastate matters as some are trying to do through a corollary of the commerce clause (the federal government is empowered to regulate commerce between, but not inside states). The supreme court should utilize the division of the political landscape as insurance to overturn decisions made during FDR's administration that were essentially made against the conscience of the justices of the time due to FDR's legislative gun to the head. (Cases like the atrocious Wickard v. Filburn which have heretofore only partially and alternately been contradicted by subsequent rulings.) Lastly absolute limits must be placed on the maximum population that can be represented by merely one man in congress, and steps must be taken to end gerrymandering at all levels.
I'm not holding my breath to see any of this happen, but without a real desire to restore balance to representative government and the checks between branches, there is no hope to resist the slow creep of corruption nor tyranny.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't blame me, I voted for CowboyNeal.
I can't help but feel that such a thing must necessarily be, at best, an embarrassment of riches. While I understand that I am making criticisms sight unseen, the utility of focus is one of the first things a non-fiction writer is taught. Very few people are Edward Gibbon or Sima Qian. Myrhvold may very well be in that class, but its unlikely. I can't be any more definitive in good conscience without actually studying the work itself.
It's quite clear on the 23rd line of the chronicle of Sillius Soddus: "There was no census this year."
This just in n00bs, proving a negative is a logical fallacy. It stands to reason that if the Romans had records of other census takings, there would have been a record of the one referenced in the New Testament. No such record exists, therefore the 3rd party account of said census is suspect at best, doubly so because it describes the census as being conducted in a way completely different from all the others. Romans and their tributaries were not required to 'travel to the cities of their birth' or any such nonsense for any other census (and if they were for only one really different census, you could be sure that it would be a census recorded in many sources for its peculiarity and inconvenience). It was just a deus ex machina fictional use of the Roman state as an excuse to place Joseph and Mary in the right place to fulfill a prophecy. All of these things taken together should demonstrate to most people that the Biblical census was pure fiction.
If talented director X lauds director Y, do that mean that director Y's films are intrinsically valuable? I'm inclined to believe half of it is quid pro quo back scratching, friendly overture, or pure puffery more than it is sincere endorsement. I rather expect that regardless of how many pages he's filled, Myhrvold has more to learn from Adria than Adria has to learn from Myrhvold.
As an American I'm inclined to agree. I think it's just because he was a big deal at MS that people even care, which is entirely the wrong reason. Unfortunately most Americans who aren't chefs or food critics don't know Ferran Adria is. They probably think molecular gastronomy begins and ends with Alton Brown, if they know what that is either. It doesn't help that all the food-related TV here has devolved into petty "reality TV" BS about who can do simple things the fastest. Most Americans are content to eat almost exclusively from chain restaurants and their freezers, and they will never even know what they're missing.
Welcome to the new Slashdot. Sadly I think Encyclopedia Dramatica is more right about "us" every day.
(And don't let my high UID fool anybody, I only registered for the 10th anniversary parties, but I was reading from year one.)
You're contradicting yourself. If sex is marriage, then what is the sin of fornication? Whither adultery if sex is marriage? The Bible never unequivocally proscribes polygamy. The patriarchs had tons of wives and concubines, and even the early church didn't go much further than saying monogamy was required for deacons/bishops. Is every sexual contact a marriage? What does that mean legally and ethically?
The only thing that makes less sense than the Bible on this matter is your interpretation.
You're not very observant are ye? I mentioned oxytocin by name in my original post. I'm already thoroughly familiar (at a layperson's level) with what you're talking about. If you want to pretend, contrary to evidence, that emotional bonding is some simple static procedure akin to "push oxytocin button receive love", that's your prerogative. Just make sure that when a stack of books falls on you about the psychological dimensions of emotional attachment and sexuality you close your eyes lest some of that non-deterministic knowledge poison your lopsided, exclusionary viewpoint.
Humans are much more than their physical contents, and I say that without any allusion to superstitious nonsense like 'souls' or what-have-you. If you cannot account for the social constructions and archetypes that both create and reflect the shared experiences between people, you will never be able to understand the broader motivations individuals have emotionally, with regard to sex or anything else.
What happens in a human brain physically may be reducible to a "simple" electro-chemical interaction, but that does not resolve at a stroke what each iteration means in concert over time.
To return to the subject, go talk to somebody who routinely has sex for money. Barring that, read some autobiographical work of somebody like that. You'll find your "sex leads AUTOMATICALLY to emotional attachment" theory sorely tested by those realities. Hormones only go so far in adjusting conscious experiences. That's why I spoke of self-fulfilling prophecies and placebo effects. If you already have a developing or latent emotional attachment, an oxytocin release will probably increase it significantly. If you already view a person negatively, either individually or as a class, an oxytocin release is probably not enough to change that already surfaced conscious position. When a person has a concrete idea, some vague, hormone-driven feeling is generally not enough to immediately reverse it.
And none of them can tell me where in the Bible it says "No sex before marriage"
1 Corinthians 7 mentions it several times, nor is that the only place. While it's true that most Catholic ritual has no Biblical basis, the restrictions on sexual contact are quite clear.
Emotional bonding is not a simple byproduct of hormones and neurotransmitters released during and after intercourse. If that were true, every female prostitute would be madly in love with however many clients she has; however much of the time the opposite is the case. Be careful of placebo effects and self-fulfilling prophecies. Long before there was any study of oxytocin there has been in many societies a conflation of sexual attraction and love and cause and effect relationships between the two. Neither love nor sex automatically proceeds from the other, whether by physiological or metaphysical impetuses.
China's love for administrators runs far, far deeper than a difference between single-party rule and liberal democracy. China has been an authoritarian bureaucracy since at least the Qin Dynasty whereupon Shang Yang's legalist reforms were applied across the whole nation. For thousands of years it was the dream of most literate Chinese (and extensibly their families) to pass the civil service exams and become respected bureaucrats. After so many generations that has become inextricable from the Chinese culture and society.
People in the West need to understand China's past before they can understand its present, let alone its future, but sadly aside from "Confucius" (I always wonder what Master Kong would think of the original romanization of his name) and Mao most Westerners don't even know any significant Chinese or their contributions. People need to know who Li Kui was before they can understand how fundamentally he shaped Chinese society.
See, now you're letting reality ruin that perfectly good angsty self-righteous rhetorical bullshit. How else is this guy going to get his bleeding heart pumping without a convenient scapegoat?
Could be worse, over in Europe there are still courts where judges are called 'Lord'. That aside, it's naught much more than angsty rhetoric (borne of poor reasoning) to call them tyrants because they don't build cars and therefore don't help people.
Judges are simply people, some of them are unscrupulous, others incorruptible, some are stupid, others are virtually sages, but like any group of people most of them lie in the middle. They're neither angels nor devils.
Moreover their titular honor is a social construction as much as or moreso than it is a direct result of their own egos. It is important (from the larger society's own perspective) for those placed in a position to make decisions about the use of the power of the state to mete out justice in the form of imprisonment, financial recompense, or even death itself to be considered persons of exceptional honor and character whether they are or not. That is the reason it is granted by the title of their office. The pretense is even more important to the proper function of the system, insofar as it is possible, when it is not earned.
Aside from those who are indeed truly sheep, few people deny that the justice systems of the world are imperfect and in need of various reforms, but that can be said of any institution, public or private. There is no reason beyond sophistry to pretend that they are in some way egregiously deficient in comparison to other human constructs, or individually inferior in both utility and character to other human beings.
The US Constitution has, outside of a few incorporated clauses and amendments, just about ZERO to do with the structure and procedures of state governments. States can have different numbers of congressional houses, different apportionment, different primaries, etc. etc. from the federal government. State laws and referendums/initiatives are judged, with rare exceptions, within the context of state constitutions. So saying that "[super majority for tax increases] has already been ruled unconstitutional in other states" means absolutely nothing, because those decisions would have been made in the context of each individual state constitution.
It's a not-thinly-veiled out of hand dismissal of anybody's opinion who wasn't involved before being informed by somebody else. How is somebody's opinion invalidated by not living and breathing Wiki? Oh that's right, that's the only way anybody can become an editor anymore. So anybody who voices an opinion from the "outside" is written off because that would be too much of a "dumb numbers game" like democracy. Fuck all those "other" opinions, long live Wiki-elites! Oligarchy forever!
Language is a living thing, get over it, forsooth!
So you run out of 'good-faith contributors' well before you run out of asshats.
This is so true. It seems like every time there is a "Wiki screws the pooch" article there are a dozen comments containing stories of occasional contributors who after witnessing or being involved in some kind of editing drama that always end with "and that's why I stopped contributing to Wiki". It stands to reason that if this sort of antagonism is allowed to fester then the only people who will be left will be those content to engage in it.
"Outsider" would practically be a compliment. They seem to think that anybody who isn't an editor is a scum-sucking sub-human whose opinion is intrinsically worthless.
do we really need a Slashdot front page story every time Wikipedia does something suboptimal?
Yes, without public pressure ego-tripping editors could do "suboptimal" AKA wrong things with impunity. Transparency is supposed to be Wikipedia's strength, and good decisions should have nothing to fear from public knowledge.
Generally Considered Lame and not really effective at building consensus
Which is a euphemism for "all the deletionists get butthurt when they can't hide from the public backlash".
Anonymous was just acting out of love for her, like a parent?
No, you dunce, since you obviously didn't get it the first time, let me repeat myself: if you don't control your kids behavior, the world will do it for you, and it won't be kind about how it does it.
Parents are supposed to get their kids in line in a loving way before the world does it in an unloving way. Never did I say that Anonymous (of all things!) was acting out of love, and if you're so dense that's what you're taking away just so you can set up some ridiculous strawman, I'm wasting my time writing anything.
I won't defend imperial Russia except to say that in the area of famines the worst in the last century before the revolution, that of 1891-2, "only" killed as many as half a million. Even adjusting per capita for population differences over the intervening forty years that is a much lower impact, atrocious though it still was. As bad as imperial Russia was, numerically Soviet Russia was still worse. Yes, imperial Russia was still practically feudal, the poor were disenfranchised and barely able to scrape together a living, but that didn't really change under the Soviets until the late 40s or early 50s, and even then the quality of life was still a century behind the West.
What good was it to have substituted one totalitarianism for another? Simply replacing the tsar with the party and aristocrats with commissars didn't make Russians any less slaves. Their lives still weren't their own, they could only do whatever a given committee said they could do, how was that better?
You think that commerce within a state is unrelated to commerce without a state?
Wickard v. Filburn is the ultimate manifestation of that detestable slippery slope logic. Do you think it was within the authority of the commerce clause to use the full power of the state to prevent a man from simply growing a crop on his own land to feed his own animals? After all, that "affects interstate commerce" according to the FDR administration because of what he wasn't buying. By this standard everything is interstate commerce, all the way down to a windowbox full of herbs or the software you might write for your own use. After all, your doing something for yourself means you're not buying it from somebody else, and that hypothetical seller might have been from out-of-state, so it's magically interstate commerce. It's a sick, tyrannical interpretation, antithetical to everything the nation was founded on, and was made by a court more afraid of FDR's appointees than their own consciences.
Interstate commerce should be interpreted as interstate commerce, not "whatever" happens to affect interstate commerce. The commerce clause is not license to do absolutely anything based on mere links to interstate commerce. It's this kind of indirect thinking that has led to other abuses, like Kelo v. New London, wherein several centuries of precedent regarding eminent domain as being applicable for direct public use only were thrown away, because the taxes and revenue from that wholly private development were considered to be in the public interest. So the takings clause is subverted to the point where anybody can use the power of the state to force the sale of anything for any reason, provided the taxes involved grease the palm of government.
Everyone that is represented in Congress (at least by a voting member; non-voting delegates don't amount to much) is represented by three members: Two senators and one representative.
For somebody who is so liberal with the important words of the Constitution, you're sure strict about the interpretation of rants on the internet (where intent was clear enough that you mention it on the second line, but I waste my breath, you have no appreciation of intent). I'm sure the million people of the 3rd congressional district in Nevada will take comfort knowing that their level of representation is really a cozy and personal one person for every 333,000+.
If you're talking about a limit in the House, though, where are you planning on putting them? Does the Capitol get a new wing? Or would you gut the existing south wing and make it into one big chamber? (Assuming that's enough room; the maximum number of representatives allowed is something like 10,000)
So, for you the barrier to representative balance and justice is... a building? In the first place, the capitol of the United States wasn't even Washington until 1800, and it was sized for not much more than the requirements of the government at the time, which is why it had to be enlarged in 1850 (among several other smaller expansions). Would you have frozen it in time in its post-1812, pre-1850 configuration, regardless of the harm it would have done to proper government of the country? Are you that petty? Then why would you suggest that the building as it is now is some kind of ultimate, insurmountable obstacle, more important than the nation it was built to serve? (Yes, that's a strawman, but I'm at full rhetorical height here.) I have worked in the capitol building, and while it is architecturally inspiring, the simple fact is that the core of it was designed before there was even electricity, let alone phones or networks. It is a barely functioning patchwork, especially the House offices, which are being practically crushed under the burden of staff that they are supposed to house, I know that already better than you do.
The point is that it's probably time the original capitol building be turned into a museu
I have a daughter, and if I caught her doing shit like that I wouldn't make a video about how Anonymous 'dun goofed', I'd have her off the internet for quite a while and doing hard labor in the yard.
/., you wouldn't get hired either. Luckily the sheer tedium of such a scenario saves both of us, indeed, all of us. For the record, however, fuck that shit.)
People need to learn there are consequences, and before you blather about 'where's teh consequences for anonymoose?!?!1!one!' That's not how cause and effect in ethics works. If Dude 1 shoots some innocent person and Dude 2 sees it happen (and believes Dude 1 is still an imminent threat to others etc. etc.) and shoots Dude 1, Dude 2 is not going to be up on murder charges. Dude 2, in fact, will be hailed as a hero. Yeah, Anonymous "visciously attacked" a thirteen year old girl (not, I might add, 'for being a thirteen year old girl' because most girls that age *don't* go around making threat videos, or do you have no context for normal behavior that you think Jessi Slaughter's is typical?), but only after she proved herself to be neurotic imbalanced moron who needed to be taken down a peg. Her parents obviously weren't doing it, that's how she ended up that way. Let me tell you something as a parent: if you don't control your kids behavior, the world will do it for you, and it won't be kind about how it does it.
I'm pretty hard on my daughter, I've said as much to her face, but the thing is my harshness still has a foundation of love. It doesn't begin and end with intent to harm, and bears no malice, but the experience will temper her against the real harms and malices of the larger world. My parents were hard on me in the same way, and it is directly responsible for my success, such as that is.
(And I would wager that if prospective employers read everything you said over a decade on
I'm sure the millions killed by the consequent tyrannical mismanagement will agree. I suppose that the suppression of even mere discussion of the famine of 1932-3 as sedition is "state propaganda" too?
STFU zombie Robespierre. The answer is not and was not 'keep on killing until circumstances improve'. The answer is the elimination of imbalances in the power of the government. The Civil War ended the balance between the federal government and the states. FDR's 'pack the court' threat ended the balance of power between the executive and the judiciary. The wild expansion of represented population has ended the balance of power between the people and their representatives. (Did you know when the nation was founded the entire population was less than New York City today? And for that there were *four* layers of government: federal, state, county/parish, and municipal.) Today a population the size of what was the entire nation at its founding is now only a fraction of the constituency of many individual representatives.
There needs to be radical reform. The states need to reassert their sovereignty on intrastate matters as some are trying to do through a corollary of the commerce clause (the federal government is empowered to regulate commerce between, but not inside states). The supreme court should utilize the division of the political landscape as insurance to overturn decisions made during FDR's administration that were essentially made against the conscience of the justices of the time due to FDR's legislative gun to the head. (Cases like the atrocious Wickard v. Filburn which have heretofore only partially and alternately been contradicted by subsequent rulings.) Lastly absolute limits must be placed on the maximum population that can be represented by merely one man in congress, and steps must be taken to end gerrymandering at all levels.
I'm not holding my breath to see any of this happen, but without a real desire to restore balance to representative government and the checks between branches, there is no hope to resist the slow creep of corruption nor tyranny.