Complete strawman. I never said you could get a taxrate everybody is happy with or full agreement on which services are essential or what quality a technical public good needs to be. I merely said you can find a balance where the tax rate is sufficient to ensure a high standard of living for all citizens without harming economic growth.
>Do you not realize how much of the load those people are already carrying? Almost nothing. With all the loopholes they can take care off - very often it's *actually* nothing. And the US had the highest economic growth rate of it's entire history when the tax rate on the wealthiest was at 90%.
>Look at the tax numbers and you'll see that the top few percent pay a hugely disproportionate amount of the total. Completely and utterly irellevant. What matters is what percentage of their own income they pay - and the answer to that is - as close to zero a makes no difference. And where conservatives get too much power, it's even closer. Sam Brownback dropped it in Kansas to a mere 3.5% - down from an already ridiculously low rate of about 6%. He predicted (because he thought the stuff you think) that this would lead to a massive revenue increase (he projected 658 billion in extra revenue after 2 years) and massive economic growth that would let Kansas outpace it's neighbours in terms of job growth. At the same time he cut the government budget massively - laying off over 20-thousand government workers. What actually happened ? The Kansas budget is in a massive debt crises because the projected revenue not only failed to realise - it fell by far more than he projected it would grow. As for job growth ? Neighbouring states average 3% per year during his term - Kansas a mere 1.1% - which wasn't even close to enough to absorb all the newly unemployed government workers so the actual unemployment rate in Kansas has skyrocketed while the national rate had dropped consistently the entire time. His experiment was such a dismal failure that at this stage it seems likely that Democrat Paul Davis will unseat him in a reliably red state - not least because the majority of the republican party elected officials have endorsed Davis ! Brownback's campaign was funded by the Koch brothers (whose company happens to be headquatered in Kansas - Witchita), and his economic policies were essentially written by them. That's the model conservatives want to push on everybody, and which you endorse. And the complete collapse of Kansas's economy under Brownback is the proof of how bad an idea it really is. Even his fellow republicans don't want anything to do with a republican who actually did what republicans keep promissing to do (Mitch McConnel said 3 years ago that Brownback was doing in Kansas exactly what he wishes he was able to do in Washington).
There are thousands of examples of those ideas being tried - and not a single example of them causing anything but disaster.
>Then logically they could give whatever they think they should be paying in taxes to the government
False. Giving money voluntarily to the government creates way too big a tunnel to hide bribes in. American politicians are already quite sold-out enough, we do not need to have the rich advocating to create yet another large backchannel for them.
The whole point of taxes is that paying them is involuntary, that's literally the only difference between a tax and a bribe and bribes are a very bad thing.
>Not wanting to increase taxes != being let off the hook.
Though right now that's actually quite often exactly what it *does* come down to. G.E. is the largest corporation on earth, their profits are astronomical to say the least... and they haven't actually paid a dime in taxes in decades.
Frankly we don't even need to raise the taxes on the rich - just close the loopholes and equalize them. Set all income taxes (including capital gains) at the same rate, close "fake head office in another country" loopholes (that's easy - tax on money made in this country, regardless of where your company is registered).
You'd end up with a much shorter, much simpler tax-code which is far easier to enforce (less wasted bureaucracy just trying to get the money) and the rich will be paying a fair share.
>Yes, it has been a long proven fact that we can tax ourselves into a thriving economy.
A billion failures have proven over and over that one thing you damn sure can NOT do is tax-cut your way to a thriving economy. Case in point: Sam Brownback basically destroying the economy of Kansas with tax-cuts.
Over-taxing is economically bad, but contrary to republican idiots claims, undertaxing is EVEN WORSE (or at least - more rapidly destructive).
The ideal level of taxation is one which pays for essential services and common public technical goods (i.e. roads, bridges and other infrastructure, parks, museums, libraries etc. etc.) and a solid safety nett without being so high that doing business becomes impossibly expensive. It's perfectly possible to find that balance. Global experience suggests it's at around 40% for the rich. Denmark's taxes are around there - and yet they are considered the single most business-friendly country on earth - while simultaneously having one of the most comprehensive social safety nets in the world and having all but entirely eradicated all poverty.
Higher taxes only equals economic decline if they are excessive, and excessive nearly 50 times what the wealthy in America pay on average, considering that "best country in the world to do business" is held by one that's at 20 times the American average.
>What does "some" or "all" have to do with anything
Absolutely everything in economics. Lets use a different example to illustrate why I say this.
In the 1980s Kansas was considering a ban on smoking in supermarkets. Talk shows were lit up with people complaining (there were a lot more smokers back then) and they all said that it shouldn't be a law/regulation, shops that wanted to should just ban it themselves and others can choose to allow it. On the surface, that's a reasonable-ish argument - certainly the kind libertarians make. But there's an interesting twist in the tail. In public every supermarket owner was opposing the regulation. In private - every one of them were hoping it would pass, and secretly funding the campaigns of the politicians pushing it.
Why the discrepancy ? No supermarket owner wanted to allow smoking. It's messy, it left ash and stink everywhere, it damaged stock and furnishings and it upped the cleaning budget a great deal - but at the same time no supermarket dared ban it, if you did you would lose all smokers as customers and your competitors would gain them. So market competition was actually forcing *every* business to do a thing they hated and which was negative to the public - and preventing any of them from changing it. They all wanted it regulated because the only way to do the right thing and survive was if everybody else was forced to do it as well.
This falls in the same category. The only way to pay fair taxes as a rich person - is if everybody else is forced to do it as well. If you do it by yourself, not only will it not achieve much but it will put that person at a distinct competitive disadvantage which will rapidly force him out of business. When that happens, his contribution disappears anyway. So it's perfectly reasonable (and not at all hypocritical) to hold that "all rich people should be fairly taxed" without holding that "I alone should pay fair taxes".
I actually don't agree with the conclusion. Paying the least taxes you can is something that is laudable for everybody to do, at the same TIME, making sure that the "least you can" is a sane amount, that increases progressively with wealth (as opposed to the current regressive system) is also a laudable goal and it's perfectly valid to believe in and advocate for *both*.
What we have right now though is a system where, the richer you are, the better you are able to "pay the least you can" to the point of paying almost nothing in some cases - which is exactly the opposite of how the system should be structured.
Not to mention that the post is an appeal-to-popularity fallacy. Whether you are right or wrong about something is, in fact, utterly and completely unaffected by how many people agree with you.
I have the answer ! We need to genetically engineer the next generation of humans to photosynthesize ! In one fell swoop we will cure:
1) Climate change: as we will be absorbing CO2 from the fossil fuels and there are billions of us - enough to make a serious dent (and we would not be carbon neutral like tropical forests). 2) World hunger: nobody will need to eat, just get daily suntans. 3) Racism: everybody will be green.
Because whether or not somebody is a hypocrite has zero relevance to whether or not what they are saying is true. That was another ad hominem fallacy. Arguing that you MightyMartian's points are invalid because he is a "hypocrite" in your eyes.
Not to mention exactly ZERO actual scientists have ever suggested we stop using technology. Only a teeny-tiny percentage of loonies on the left hold that view and they've been around since long before climate-change (it's just their latest version), they aren't all the dissimilar from the loonies on the right actually - both end up being homesteaders and survivalists - they just have a different reason they think they need to be.
The rational people who accept this science and the scientists themselves by and large have absolutely no interest in abandoning technology of any kind - in fact the prescribed cure is literally the exact OPPOSITE of that (making your post a strawman fallacy as well as an ad hominem) - we want to replace archaic 19th century technology with new, better twenty-first-century technology that can do the same job without the massive downsides.
I'm quite certain the world will end if we allow climate change to continue - but not from natural disasters. Those will just be the catalyst. What comes next is what has - throughout the entirety of human history - always happened you have mass displacement of people and resource shortages. War. And since we're talking about lots of disasters all over the world: lots and lots of war... world war 3 in fact.
And with the weaponry we have... a war like that, with dozens, maybe hundreds, of factions all desperately fighting over critical resources for survival - you have a recipe for a massive reduction in human population, possibly even an extinction-level-event (Sagan's nuclear-winter for example).
Climate change won't wipe us out, enough of us would survive even the worst predicted disasters to prevent that. But with even the least-level predicted disasters - we will wipe each other out.
For the record and to add to what you said, it would stil be ad hominem if that staff was actually the ones doing the research in question.
The soviet space program didn't invent their own physics and fail utterly after all. Science produces the same results regardless of the political philosophies held by the people who are doing it.
>You're asking what marxism has to do with science? Nothing. That was my point
Your point is the REASON you're an idiot ! Even if what you say is true, it doesn't matter one bit. Whether the campus has a leftwing or a rightwing culture has exactly ZERO impact on the results of science which, after all, is based on physical evidence - not ideological biases.
You are utterly wrong in your point of view and even if you weren't that's not a *bad* thing since Marxism is a valid field of academic research (he was, after all, one of the most influential political philosophers of all time) - but it has fuckall to do with the results of research in the physical sciences. If we were discussing research in the humanities then such an observation may be relevant to how to interpret that research, but this is a discussion of a physical science - and the ideological slant of the university has exactly zero bearing on the outcomes, so it can and must be ignored. Not ignoring it is the act of either a denier or an idiot or both.
> Hell, the university where I worked is considered by the lefties as being in bed with the energy industry. Only difference is, the scientists believe in science, which you do not.
Ironically so do even the scientists who are directly employed by the energy industry. ExxonMobil's own scientists told them that fossil fuels would cause warming in the late 80's already. They always knew it. They just weren't allowed to talk about it - and the company told the public something that radically differed from what they discussed internally (which, by the way, is criminal fraud).
>Blah blah blah. At the end of the day, deniers are denying the science. They can dress up their pseudo-scientific denial in any clothing they like, but what it boils down to is "we want to burn as much fossil fuels as we want and any scientist that points out that there are serious consequences to that is a fucking liar!"
Science denial has been a libertarian/free-market-fundamentalist/republican/right-wing/conservative hobby horse forever. For the religious right section it's evolution that they deny. But the economic right has been denying science for as long as it existed. Ayn Rand required all members of her cult^H^H^H^Hsociety to smoke as "smoking proved mans dominance over fire" - and when evidence began to emerge that smoking was linked to cancer she declared that the scientists were communists and their research part of a communist plot to destroy a profit-making industry. She maintained that claim right up to death... from lung cancer.
Evidence has never matter to so-called "economic conservatives" - just like the evidence of the constant and guaranteed failure of their economic policies never stops them touting it. In Kansas it has basically the destroyed the state's economy and yet they persist in believing them. The Austrian school of economics which primarily informs them actively rejects empirical evidence as a matter of principle in fact.
That which is anti-empiricist is, more correctly, described as "pulled out of your ass" and absolutely useless in the real world. That so many people persist in believing these things is tragic. Whatever else it may be, it's the opposite of science.
>Science inherently involves questioning absolutely everything, in every way possible
Erm no. Science involves questioning science with other, better, science. Nothing less. When you have observations, a theory to explain them and lots and lots of evidence to support that theory as the correct explanation - then the only "correct" way to question that scientifically is with OTHER evidence or a better theory.
Thus far none of either has been forthcoming. Until and unless you can either provide a theory that fit both the observations and the evidence better than the current one - you have no scientific case. Newton's laws were the epitomy of physics for almost half a millennium. We didn't surpass them until the 20th century when, for the first time, we had the kind of measurement capability to go beyond it's limits and actually find evidence of things it gets wrong. Sure, many people questioned it along the way, but at no point did we stop using it until we had better science - and even after that we still use it for things where it's shortcomings aren't big enough to matter (the vast majority of our space programs for one thing - things like GPS are rare exceptions where we need to account for relativity aspects). So right now, we have a set of observations and a whole host of other evidence to back them up from completely disparate fields of science and a solid theory to explain them. We should USE that theory as the best we have. Question it if you want to but until better science exists "questioning" is *not* an excuse for failing to use or heed the best theory in the field !
Climate deniers deserve the appellate despite their constant attempt to rebrand themselves as skeptics -because they don't meet the definition of skeptics. Skeptics accept evidence and only evidence. Those who refuse to accept a theory *despite* evidence are the opposite of skeptics, we call them "deniers". It's a perfectly *accurate* description of climate deniers as they fit the definition of a "denier" perfectly.
It would be an atrociously stupid idea anyway. That's why the founding fathers rejected it for the federal courts. Several states do have judges chosen with elections - and it's a disaster across the board. Good judges are rarely good campaigners - these are skillsets that require almost exactly opposite ways of thinking, and are very few people are good at both. Many a very good judge has lost his job to a horrifyingly bad one who was good at campaigning (and well-funded by some wealthy third-party who had a problem with the sitting judge, like an upcoming trial where they wanted a less tort-friendly judge perhaps). Many a terrible judge has had the job for years because they are running uncontested.
Sane legal systems throughout the world have the very senior judges appointed by the head of state, and all other positions appointed by other judges. Many systems have something like a judiciary council and judges who serve there vet and appoint judges to various courts to fill openings.
There is a great deal of sense in having candidates for an extremely specialist job like that of a judge vetted by people who are highly familiar with the field. It's the same reason programmers tend to prefer job interviews by people who are themselves (or at least used to be) programmers. What coder expects a fair assessment from somebody who can't understand half the words in your resume ? In the case of a judge, it's more like 75% of the words in there that make absolutely no sense to somebody who hasn't had the same training.
If programmers wrote programs the way builders build buildings COBOL would be released next year, at 5 times the original budget and decades over the original schedule.
They did. They got to vote on the guy whom the constitution empowers to appoint the judge (yes, that's what it says, the senate is also -by that same constitution REQUIRED to give him a fair hearing and give a yes/no response based on the facts).
The American people made their choice and spoke their voice - twice.
What's your point ? Liberals want NO politicians bribed in ANY parties.
That democratic politicians are not on the same page as their voters is hardly an unusual event in politics, which also accounts for a lot of Sander's support - as he is the only candidate who actively campaigns AGAINST the influence of the rich on politics for EITHER party.
No. Trump doesn't count. Trump IS the rich. He is NOT defending the middle class from rich people buying government favours -he's cutting out the middle man and trying to just buy himself a government.
Slashdot Mirror
Complete strawman. I never said you could get a taxrate everybody is happy with or full agreement on which services are essential or what quality a technical public good needs to be. I merely said you can find a balance where the tax rate is sufficient to ensure a high standard of living for all citizens without harming economic growth.
>Do you not realize how much of the load those people are already carrying?
Almost nothing. With all the loopholes they can take care off - very often it's *actually* nothing. And the US had the highest economic growth rate of it's entire history when the tax rate on the wealthiest was at 90%.
>Look at the tax numbers and you'll see that the top few percent pay a hugely disproportionate amount of the total.
Completely and utterly irellevant. What matters is what percentage of their own income they pay - and the answer to that is - as close to zero a makes no difference. And where conservatives get too much power, it's even closer. Sam Brownback dropped it in Kansas to a mere 3.5% - down from an already ridiculously low rate of about 6%.
He predicted (because he thought the stuff you think) that this would lead to a massive revenue increase (he projected 658 billion in extra revenue after 2 years) and massive economic growth that would let Kansas outpace it's neighbours in terms of job growth. At the same time he cut the government budget massively - laying off over 20-thousand government workers.
What actually happened ? The Kansas budget is in a massive debt crises because the projected revenue not only failed to realise - it fell by far more than he projected it would grow. As for job growth ? Neighbouring states average 3% per year during his term - Kansas a mere 1.1% - which wasn't even close to enough to absorb all the newly unemployed government workers so the actual unemployment rate in Kansas has skyrocketed while the national rate had dropped consistently the entire time.
His experiment was such a dismal failure that at this stage it seems likely that Democrat Paul Davis will unseat him in a reliably red state - not least because the majority of the republican party elected officials have endorsed Davis ! Brownback's campaign was funded by the Koch brothers (whose company happens to be headquatered in Kansas - Witchita), and his economic policies were essentially written by them. That's the model conservatives want to push on everybody, and which you endorse.
And the complete collapse of Kansas's economy under Brownback is the proof of how bad an idea it really is. Even his fellow republicans don't want anything to do with a republican who actually did what republicans keep promissing to do (Mitch McConnel said 3 years ago that Brownback was doing in Kansas exactly what he wishes he was able to do in Washington).
There are thousands of examples of those ideas being tried - and not a single example of them causing anything but disaster.
>Then logically they could give whatever they think they should be paying in taxes to the government
False. Giving money voluntarily to the government creates way too big a tunnel to hide bribes in. American politicians are already quite sold-out enough, we do not need to have the rich advocating to create yet another large backchannel for them.
The whole point of taxes is that paying them is involuntary, that's literally the only difference between a tax and a bribe and bribes are a very bad thing.
>Not wanting to increase taxes != being let off the hook.
Though right now that's actually quite often exactly what it *does* come down to. G.E. is the largest corporation on earth, their profits are astronomical to say the least... and they haven't actually paid a dime in taxes in decades.
Frankly we don't even need to raise the taxes on the rich - just close the loopholes and equalize them. Set all income taxes (including capital gains) at the same rate, close "fake head office in another country" loopholes (that's easy - tax on money made in this country, regardless of where your company is registered).
You'd end up with a much shorter, much simpler tax-code which is far easier to enforce (less wasted bureaucracy just trying to get the money) and the rich will be paying a fair share.
Hell, here where I live I could buy 5 or 6 large mansions cash with 655k US...
>Yes, it has been a long proven fact that we can tax ourselves into a thriving economy.
A billion failures have proven over and over that one thing you damn sure can NOT do is tax-cut your way to a thriving economy. Case in point: Sam Brownback basically destroying the economy of Kansas with tax-cuts.
Over-taxing is economically bad, but contrary to republican idiots claims, undertaxing is EVEN WORSE (or at least - more rapidly destructive).
The ideal level of taxation is one which pays for essential services and common public technical goods (i.e. roads, bridges and other infrastructure, parks, museums, libraries etc. etc.) and a solid safety nett without being so high that doing business becomes impossibly expensive.
It's perfectly possible to find that balance. Global experience suggests it's at around 40% for the rich. Denmark's taxes are around there - and yet they are considered the single most business-friendly country on earth - while simultaneously having one of the most comprehensive social safety nets in the world and having all but entirely eradicated all poverty.
Higher taxes only equals economic decline if they are excessive, and excessive nearly 50 times what the wealthy in America pay on average, considering that "best country in the world to do business" is held by one that's at 20 times the American average.
>What does "some" or "all" have to do with anything
Absolutely everything in economics. Lets use a different example to illustrate why I say this.
In the 1980s Kansas was considering a ban on smoking in supermarkets. Talk shows were lit up with people complaining (there were a lot more smokers back then) and they all said that it shouldn't be a law/regulation, shops that wanted to should just ban it themselves and others can choose to allow it. On the surface, that's a reasonable-ish argument - certainly the kind libertarians make. But there's an interesting twist in the tail. In public every supermarket owner was opposing the regulation. In private - every one of them were hoping it would pass, and secretly funding the campaigns of the politicians pushing it.
Why the discrepancy ? No supermarket owner wanted to allow smoking. It's messy, it left ash and stink everywhere, it damaged stock and furnishings and it upped the cleaning budget a great deal - but at the same time no supermarket dared ban it, if you did you would lose all smokers as customers and your competitors would gain them. So market competition was actually forcing *every* business to do a thing they hated and which was negative to the public - and preventing any of them from changing it. They all wanted it regulated because the only way to do the right thing and survive was if everybody else was forced to do it as well.
This falls in the same category. The only way to pay fair taxes as a rich person - is if everybody else is forced to do it as well. If you do it by yourself, not only will it not achieve much but it will put that person at a distinct competitive disadvantage which will rapidly force him out of business. When that happens, his contribution disappears anyway.
So it's perfectly reasonable (and not at all hypocritical) to hold that "all rich people should be fairly taxed" without holding that "I alone should pay fair taxes".
I actually don't agree with the conclusion. Paying the least taxes you can is something that is laudable for everybody to do, at the same TIME, making sure that the "least you can" is a sane amount, that increases progressively with wealth (as opposed to the current regressive system) is also a laudable goal and it's perfectly valid to believe in and advocate for *both*.
What we have right now though is a system where, the richer you are, the better you are able to "pay the least you can" to the point of paying almost nothing in some cases - which is exactly the opposite of how the system should be structured.
Not to mention that the post is an appeal-to-popularity fallacy. Whether you are right or wrong about something is, in fact, utterly and completely unaffected by how many people agree with you.
I have the answer ! We need to genetically engineer the next generation of humans to photosynthesize !
In one fell swoop we will cure:
1) Climate change: as we will be absorbing CO2 from the fossil fuels and there are billions of us - enough to make a serious dent (and we would not be carbon neutral like tropical forests).
2) World hunger: nobody will need to eat, just get daily suntans.
3) Racism: everybody will be green.
Because whether or not somebody is a hypocrite has zero relevance to whether or not what they are saying is true. That was another ad hominem fallacy. Arguing that you MightyMartian's points are invalid because he is a "hypocrite" in your eyes.
Not to mention exactly ZERO actual scientists have ever suggested we stop using technology. Only a teeny-tiny percentage of loonies on the left hold that view and they've been around since long before climate-change (it's just their latest version), they aren't all the dissimilar from the loonies on the right actually - both end up being homesteaders and survivalists - they just have a different reason they think they need to be.
The rational people who accept this science and the scientists themselves by and large have absolutely no interest in abandoning technology of any kind - in fact the prescribed cure is literally the exact OPPOSITE of that (making your post a strawman fallacy as well as an ad hominem) - we want to replace archaic 19th century technology with new, better twenty-first-century technology that can do the same job without the massive downsides.
I'm quite certain the world will end if we allow climate change to continue - but not from natural disasters. Those will just be the catalyst. What comes next is what has - throughout the entirety of human history - always happened you have mass displacement of people and resource shortages. War. And since we're talking about lots of disasters all over the world: lots and lots of war... world war 3 in fact.
And with the weaponry we have... a war like that, with dozens, maybe hundreds, of factions all desperately fighting over critical resources for survival - you have a recipe for a massive reduction in human population, possibly even an extinction-level-event (Sagan's nuclear-winter for example).
Climate change won't wipe us out, enough of us would survive even the worst predicted disasters to prevent that. But with even the least-level predicted disasters - we will wipe each other out.
For the record and to add to what you said, it would stil be ad hominem if that staff was actually the ones doing the research in question.
The soviet space program didn't invent their own physics and fail utterly after all. Science produces the same results regardless of the political philosophies held by the people who are doing it.
>You're asking what marxism has to do with science? Nothing. That was my point
Your point is the REASON you're an idiot ! Even if what you say is true, it doesn't matter one bit. Whether the campus has a leftwing or a rightwing culture has exactly ZERO impact on the results of science which, after all, is based on physical evidence - not ideological biases.
You are utterly wrong in your point of view and even if you weren't that's not a *bad* thing since Marxism is a valid field of academic research (he was, after all, one of the most influential political philosophers of all time) - but it has fuckall to do with the results of research in the physical sciences. If we were discussing research in the humanities then such an observation may be relevant to how to interpret that research, but this is a discussion of a physical science - and the ideological slant of the university has exactly zero bearing on the outcomes, so it can and must be ignored. Not ignoring it is the act of either a denier or an idiot or both.
> Hell, the university where I worked is considered by the lefties as being in bed with the energy industry. Only difference is, the scientists believe in science, which you do not.
Ironically so do even the scientists who are directly employed by the energy industry. ExxonMobil's own scientists told them that fossil fuels would cause warming in the late 80's already. They always knew it. They just weren't allowed to talk about it - and the company told the public something that radically differed from what they discussed internally (which, by the way, is criminal fraud).
Nope. Unfortunately their opinions are relevant to the outcome of elections, which in turn makes them relevant to actually using this science.
>Blah blah blah. At the end of the day, deniers are denying the science. They can dress up their pseudo-scientific denial in any clothing they like, but what it boils down to is "we want to burn as much fossil fuels as we want and any scientist that points out that there are serious consequences to that is a fucking liar!"
Science denial has been a libertarian/free-market-fundamentalist/republican/right-wing/conservative hobby horse forever. For the religious right section it's evolution that they deny. But the economic right has been denying science for as long as it existed. Ayn Rand required all members of her cult^H^H^H^Hsociety to smoke as "smoking proved mans dominance over fire" - and when evidence began to emerge that smoking was linked to cancer she declared that the scientists were communists and their research part of a communist plot to destroy a profit-making industry. She maintained that claim right up to death... from lung cancer.
Evidence has never matter to so-called "economic conservatives" - just like the evidence of the constant and guaranteed failure of their economic policies never stops them touting it. In Kansas it has basically the destroyed the state's economy and yet they persist in believing them. The Austrian school of economics which primarily informs them actively rejects empirical evidence as a matter of principle in fact.
That which is anti-empiricist is, more correctly, described as "pulled out of your ass" and absolutely useless in the real world. That so many people persist in believing these things is tragic. Whatever else it may be, it's the opposite of science.
>Science inherently involves questioning absolutely everything, in every way possible
Erm no. Science involves questioning science with other, better, science. Nothing less. When you have observations, a theory to explain them and lots and lots of evidence to support that theory as the correct explanation - then the only "correct" way to question that scientifically is with OTHER evidence or a better theory.
Thus far none of either has been forthcoming. Until and unless you can either provide a theory that fit both the observations and the evidence better than the current one - you have no scientific case. Newton's laws were the epitomy of physics for almost half a millennium. We didn't surpass them until the 20th century when, for the first time, we had the kind of measurement capability to go beyond it's limits and actually find evidence of things it gets wrong. Sure, many people questioned it along the way, but at no point did we stop using it until we had better science - and even after that we still use it for things where it's shortcomings aren't big enough to matter (the vast majority of our space programs for one thing - things like GPS are rare exceptions where we need to account for relativity aspects).
So right now, we have a set of observations and a whole host of other evidence to back them up from completely disparate fields of science and a solid theory to explain them. We should USE that theory as the best we have. Question it if you want to but until better science exists "questioning" is *not* an excuse for failing to use or heed the best theory in the field !
Climate deniers deserve the appellate despite their constant attempt to rebrand themselves as skeptics -because they don't meet the definition of skeptics. Skeptics accept evidence and only evidence. Those who refuse to accept a theory *despite* evidence are the opposite of skeptics, we call them "deniers". It's a perfectly *accurate* description of climate deniers as they fit the definition of a "denier" perfectly.
This is comcast. Their lawyers would argue that his service level has been constant throughout.
Actually I was agreeing with and expanding upon your point.
It does however require them to duly consider the candidate.
It would be an atrociously stupid idea anyway. That's why the founding fathers rejected it for the federal courts. Several states do have judges chosen with elections - and it's a disaster across the board.
Good judges are rarely good campaigners - these are skillsets that require almost exactly opposite ways of thinking, and are very few people are good at both.
Many a very good judge has lost his job to a horrifyingly bad one who was good at campaigning (and well-funded by some wealthy third-party who had a problem with the sitting judge, like an upcoming trial where they wanted a less tort-friendly judge perhaps).
Many a terrible judge has had the job for years because they are running uncontested.
Sane legal systems throughout the world have the very senior judges appointed by the head of state, and all other positions appointed by other judges. Many systems have something like a judiciary council and judges who serve there vet and appoint judges to various courts to fill openings.
There is a great deal of sense in having candidates for an extremely specialist job like that of a judge vetted by people who are highly familiar with the field. It's the same reason programmers tend to prefer job interviews by people who are themselves (or at least used to be) programmers. What coder expects a fair assessment from somebody who can't understand half the words in your resume ? In the case of a judge, it's more like 75% of the words in there that make absolutely no sense to somebody who hasn't had the same training.
If programmers wrote programs the way builders build buildings COBOL would be released next year, at 5 times the original budget and decades over the original schedule.
They did. They got to vote on the guy whom the constitution empowers to appoint the judge (yes, that's what it says, the senate is also -by that same constitution REQUIRED to give him a fair hearing and give a yes/no response based on the facts).
The American people made their choice and spoke their voice - twice.
What's your point ?
Liberals want NO politicians bribed in ANY parties.
That democratic politicians are not on the same page as their voters is hardly an unusual event in politics, which also accounts for a lot of Sander's support - as he is the only candidate who actively campaigns AGAINST the influence of the rich on politics for EITHER party.
No. Trump doesn't count. Trump IS the rich. He is NOT defending the middle class from rich people buying government favours -he's cutting out the middle man and trying to just buy himself a government.
We cannot however burn the bodies of the climatologists. God may think we're using them for energy...