Simply untrue, as even a casual perusal of the facts I've presented will show. I'm not making a bad/good claim. I am claiming that never before in the entire history of US politics has any party used the filibuster as much as the Republican minority has under Obama. Not even close. The statistics do not show a lack of compromise. They can't show that, or its reverse. But the facts show you are wrong, the Democrats have tried all kinds of compromises, especially on health care. The final bill contained all sorts of Republican backed ideas, but the Republicans turned around and derided the very ideas they themselves had come up with, because the Democrats were now voicing them. And financial reform, why are the Republicans blocking that? The lie about a 'permanent bailout' is laughably, transparently false. The Republicans even filibustered the vote to debate financial reform last week.
No, flat out, you are wrong. The Republicans do not care about our country, they only care about power, and to regain it, they need Obama to fail. Which means they need our country to fail, and they are only to happy to make that happen. Take off your ideological blinders and look at what they are doing to wreck our country.
Get me a quote where they compared our sitting president to Hitler. As for your other claims, they are true but the statements they are based on are true. Bush committed treason and war crimes.
But I was not claiming the Democrats never said anything bad about the Republicans. Don't know where you got that. I was comparing both parties use of the filibuster and making the claim that Republicans were doing something never before done in the entire history of US politics, and the facts back me up on this.
Just to be clear, Obama is not perfect. He is far too conservative for me. He is a corporatist who supports and defends the status quo, not a socialist, progressive, or even liberal, really. But he has NOT expanded on the horrific abuses of Bush. He is NOT more secretive than Bush. Not even close. Do not make false equivalencies: Obama is far from perfect, and far from the socialist Republicans claim he is, but he is in NO WAY like Bush.
When you make extraordinary, over the top claims, such as claiming that Obama is similar in any way to the worst president in US history, you need to back those claims up with extraordinary proof. You have simply repeated unsourced and disproven allegations.
Really?!? Then why are they opposing regulation of the financial industry? Why are they falsely claiming it will provide 'permanent bailouts' when it will do no such thing? They tried to block even bringing financial regulation up for debate. Face it, the plutocrats own the Republicans, and without the plutocrats feeding them cash, the Republicans can not reach their base to tell them how much they, too, hate the plutocrats. They say what the base wants to hear, but they do what the plutocrats tell them to.
The progressive left is not in favor of state censorship of ideas they oppose, therefore, you will not be able to provide a single example to back up your outrageous claim. But thanks for playing 'False Equivalency,' and here's a copy of our home game as a consolation prize.
Just glance at the graph on that page. You are delusional if you think Democrats have EVER done anything like this to Republicans. Democrats have NEVER used filibuster the way Republicans are using it now. Hell, Republicans have never used it like this. No one has, ever. Republicans have been beating their own records for obstructionism since Obama was elected. No one has ever used rhetoric so violent and divisive. When Republicans use such rhetoric as 'treasonous' and 'communist', they are then beholden to fight such evil with no mercy and no compromise, or admit that their rhetoric was false and misleading. At this point, any compromise would undermine the message they have been drilling into their base: Obama is an evil communist Muslim fascist dictator who is worse than Hitler multiplied by Pol Pot and raised to the power of Stalin. You can't compromise with that. You can't practice bipartisanship with that. You can only fight it with every weapon in your arsenal.
You are drawing a false equivalency when you claim that both parties do it, perhaps in a misguided attempt to appear balanced. Both sides have NOT been doing the same thing for decades. This is new, unprecedented, and totally destructive to good governance. The Republicans appear to want to destroy the country in order to save it.
But if you look at the issues Republicans oppose, you will find that they supported many of those same issues when proposed by Republicans. Like the bailout. No, this is obstructionism, pure and simple. Republicans feel they can not let Obama rack up too many wins. They know their only real chance to regain power is if Obama fails. The Republicans want Obama, and our country, to fail, and so they oppose everything he does, regardless of their own personal beliefs.
I'm an amendment to be Yes, an amendment to be And I'm hoping that they'll ratify me There's a lot of flag burners Who have got too much freedom I wanna make it legal For policemen To beat 'em 'Cause there's limits to our liberties 'Least I hope and pray that there are 'Cause those liberal freaks go too far.
If you quite your job and just take the basics, that's fine. Ever hear of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? If people's basic needs are met, other drives can kick in, like the drive for social acceptance, respect and love, and if those needs are met, people will generally self-sctualize, or work on becoming the people they want to be. If society is fair, and working gets you social acceptance, respect, and greater freedom to be the person you want to be, most people will work at something useful even if they don't have to.
Not everyone has access to land, you know. But I agree: if someone won't work, they shouldn't get their wants met. Just their needs.
I don't want a society where everyone is equal. That is not fair, people are not equal in practical terms. We're all different. I want a society where the hierarchy is both minimal and natural, where people can not rise above others through coercion, but only through those other's freely given respect.
Personally, I was not raised to be hierarchical. I was raised to be egalitarian. Although logically I know I am a more useful and valuable person than average, I don't feel that way. I feel that fundamentally, everyone is my equal in moral terms.
You can look at the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain as a good example of functional, competitive, non-hierarchical society. Income is capped at ten times the lowest rate. Everything is a cooperative. Anyone who wants to is encouraged to start their own cooperative business, and they get support from cooperative banks, marketing, staffing, and business planning firms. It's socialism done right.
In a society where everyone's basic needs are met, guaranteed, there will be far less pressure from worker's groups like unions to protect the incompetent. Nobody likes getting fired, but nobody likes working with the lazy or incompetent either. In a system where there are no guarantees, it isn't just government that suffers from inefficiencies. Private industries that have outlived their usefulness also hang on tooth and nail, using the power and wealth amassed when they were useful to corrupt the market and stay in business. With real socialism, we could adapt and change more quickly, as whole industries that become useless could be more easily dissolved and the workers retrained to more useful work.
There just needs to be one in that twelve in order for jury nullification to work. But you bring up an interesting point: the majority of people are sheep. That's actually a good thing for the species. We need innovators and leaders, sure. But if everyone was an innovator or a leader, nothing would get done. We need a solid core of people who basically just want to do what their fathers did. And those sheep need their leaders to show them what to do when the old ways aren't the best anymore. We basically have a mix of types of people, the proportions optimized by evolution to give our species as a whole the best chance for survival. We don't really need that many leaders or innovators. Leaders and innovators aren't 'better' than the sheep, we all need each other.
God damn, I love the fact that little shits like you feel compelled to snipe at me. I'm forcing you to react, which makes you my bitch. You've really brightened up my day.
You know what? I am, a little, in my darker moments. I sometimes wish I was stupid (because seeing and knowing too much can be painful) and talentless (because I think talent comes with a responsibility to use it.) Ah, if only I were one of the lazy slobs, my life would be easier and I would be profoundly comfortable in my ignorance.
How many people, worldwide total, have played WoW? How many have seen Star Wars? How many people have quoted a line from WoW, versus the number who have quoted Scarface "Say hello to my lil' friend" or Jerry Maguire "Show me the money" or "You had me at hello."
I, for one, have never played WoW and know next to nothing about it. I've never watched Jerry Maguire but I know all about it and can quote lines.
Video games are where comics were 40-50 years ago, some great art but still seen mostly as entertainment for juvenile boys.
More interesting to me is the question of when the game industry will achieve cultural parity with the film industry. While I've seen a few of video games that I consider great art, but these are never the popular ones. Movies speak to whole cultures, video games speak only to a smaller subset. When will we see a video game with the cultural impact of, say, Star Wars?
Okay, you've got better sources so I must admit to being mistaken. Still, it's clear which way the trend is going, film keeps losing entertainment market share while video games keep gaining. It may yet be a while before games are accepted as real art, look how long it took for comic books.
Here are we have popular geeks who make a living making little pictures and writing little stories for. Everyone loves them. They are witty and funny and frequently have sex with actual women and are everything you are not. Do you know there's a guy who has a whole boring ass blog about how xkcd isn't funny? Nobody reads it, because we all think xkcd IS funny. Penny arcade IS funny. You and the other haters are either too stupid to find the humor, or too jealous to admit it. Once you have achieved something in your life, I doubt you will feel the need to put other achievers down. Maybe you should try, you know, doing something, rather than bitching about the people who do.
Here is where you and I differ: I support socialism. I'm a proud socialist. What I want to see is everyone guaranteed to get the bare minimum for living: food, clean water, 400 square feet of shelter, and medicine, and we should all bear the cos of providing it, because we all benefit by not having desperate, starving humans around. I'm not a social Darwinist, and frankly, you are either a socialist or a social Darwinist who thinks death is the preferable outcome for those who find no place in the system.
Social Darwinism is a theory supported by the owning class because it lets them offer 'do what I say, or starve to death' to workers who have no real choice. But what I don't want to see is what we have now: socialism for the very rich only.
If the government provides the bare minimum, and runs any natural monopolies, but the free market does everything else, I would be a very happy socialist.
Well it may be a false comparison, but the video game industry is now larger than the film industry in terms of revenue. The film industry made around 10.5 billion in revenues in 2008, while the video game industry made around 11.5 billion. This is counting movie and game sales and rentals. The film industry may hold more cultural cachet and influence, and more people consider films to be true art, but that is changing as well.
Both men are trying to improve their art. Gabe has come a long way from his humble beginnings. Tycho's writing outside the comics is still an acquired taste. I think it is partly an affectation, he's the smart one, Gabe is the dumb one, but those are still personae they put on for the comic.
I think that every ten years or so, the legal system should get a reset, and if we still want a law then the legislators need to pass it again. We need some kind of automatic garbage collection process. Also, let's make jury nullification official and legal. It is the whole reason we have juries instead of letting judges decide. If all twelve random citizens think a law is such bunk that it shouldn't be enforced, then it shouldn't be enforced.
It is much easier to control government than a corporation. Still, you have a point. It's hard to control the damage when we mistakenly elect an incompetent.
However, we could have done what the Republicans attempted and impeached him, but apparently, too few Democrats have the balls to try something like that.
Meh, that's not the purpose of the laws. This ain't no Harrison Bergeron, despite what many nerds believe. But this is a systemic problem, I agree: too many, too confusing laws, not enforced. We need to simplify our legal system so that the common man has access to justice, and so that money will not give anyone an advantage in the system. Then we need to enforce the laws, especially against white collar criminals who cause billions of dollars worth of damage to society.
Slashdot Mirror
Simply untrue, as even a casual perusal of the facts I've presented will show. I'm not making a bad/good claim. I am claiming that never before in the entire history of US politics has any party used the filibuster as much as the Republican minority has under Obama. Not even close. The statistics do not show a lack of compromise. They can't show that, or its reverse. But the facts show you are wrong, the Democrats have tried all kinds of compromises, especially on health care. The final bill contained all sorts of Republican backed ideas, but the Republicans turned around and derided the very ideas they themselves had come up with, because the Democrats were now voicing them. And financial reform, why are the Republicans blocking that? The lie about a 'permanent bailout' is laughably, transparently false. The Republicans even filibustered the vote to debate financial reform last week.
No, flat out, you are wrong. The Republicans do not care about our country, they only care about power, and to regain it, they need Obama to fail. Which means they need our country to fail, and they are only to happy to make that happen. Take off your ideological blinders and look at what they are doing to wreck our country.
Get me a quote where they compared our sitting president to Hitler. As for your other claims, they are true but the statements they are based on are true. Bush committed treason and war crimes.
But I was not claiming the Democrats never said anything bad about the Republicans. Don't know where you got that. I was comparing both parties use of the filibuster and making the claim that Republicans were doing something never before done in the entire history of US politics, and the facts back me up on this.
Just to be clear, Obama is not perfect. He is far too conservative for me. He is a corporatist who supports and defends the status quo, not a socialist, progressive, or even liberal, really. But he has NOT expanded on the horrific abuses of Bush. He is NOT more secretive than Bush. Not even close. Do not make false equivalencies: Obama is far from perfect, and far from the socialist Republicans claim he is, but he is in NO WAY like Bush.
When you make extraordinary, over the top claims, such as claiming that Obama is similar in any way to the worst president in US history, you need to back those claims up with extraordinary proof. You have simply repeated unsourced and disproven allegations.
Really?!? Then why are they opposing regulation of the financial industry? Why are they falsely claiming it will provide 'permanent bailouts' when it will do no such thing? They tried to block even bringing financial regulation up for debate. Face it, the plutocrats own the Republicans, and without the plutocrats feeding them cash, the Republicans can not reach their base to tell them how much they, too, hate the plutocrats. They say what the base wants to hear, but they do what the plutocrats tell them to.
The progressive left is not in favor of state censorship of ideas they oppose, therefore, you will not be able to provide a single example to back up your outrageous claim. But thanks for playing 'False Equivalency,' and here's a copy of our home game as a consolation prize.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_(United_States_Senate)
Just glance at the graph on that page. You are delusional if you think Democrats have EVER done anything like this to Republicans. Democrats have NEVER used filibuster the way Republicans are using it now. Hell, Republicans have never used it like this. No one has, ever. Republicans have been beating their own records for obstructionism since Obama was elected. No one has ever used rhetoric so violent and divisive. When Republicans use such rhetoric as 'treasonous' and 'communist', they are then beholden to fight such evil with no mercy and no compromise, or admit that their rhetoric was false and misleading. At this point, any compromise would undermine the message they have been drilling into their base: Obama is an evil communist Muslim fascist dictator who is worse than Hitler multiplied by Pol Pot and raised to the power of Stalin. You can't compromise with that. You can't practice bipartisanship with that. You can only fight it with every weapon in your arsenal.
If you look at the statistics for voting and filibusters, you will see that you are completely wrong.
http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/2010/01/25/how-the-filibuster-changed-and-brought-tyranny-of-the-minority.html
http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/index.ssf/2010/02/filibuster_abuse_founding_fath.html
and a good graph showing just how wrong you are, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_(United_States_Senate)
You are drawing a false equivalency when you claim that both parties do it, perhaps in a misguided attempt to appear balanced. Both sides have NOT been doing the same thing for decades. This is new, unprecedented, and totally destructive to good governance. The Republicans appear to want to destroy the country in order to save it.
But if you look at the issues Republicans oppose, you will find that they supported many of those same issues when proposed by Republicans. Like the bailout. No, this is obstructionism, pure and simple. Republicans feel they can not let Obama rack up too many wins. They know their only real chance to regain power is if Obama fails. The Republicans want Obama, and our country, to fail, and so they oppose everything he does, regardless of their own personal beliefs.
I'm an amendment to be
Yes, an amendment to be
And I'm hoping that they'll ratify me
There's a lot of flag burners
Who have got too much freedom
I wanna make it legal
For policemen
To beat 'em
'Cause there's limits to our liberties
'Least I hope and pray that there are
'Cause those liberal freaks go too far.
If you quite your job and just take the basics, that's fine. Ever hear of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? If people's basic needs are met, other drives can kick in, like the drive for social acceptance, respect and love, and if those needs are met, people will generally self-sctualize, or work on becoming the people they want to be. If society is fair, and working gets you social acceptance, respect, and greater freedom to be the person you want to be, most people will work at something useful even if they don't have to.
Not everyone has access to land, you know. But I agree: if someone won't work, they shouldn't get their wants met. Just their needs.
I don't want a society where everyone is equal. That is not fair, people are not equal in practical terms. We're all different. I want a society where the hierarchy is both minimal and natural, where people can not rise above others through coercion, but only through those other's freely given respect.
Personally, I was not raised to be hierarchical. I was raised to be egalitarian. Although logically I know I am a more useful and valuable person than average, I don't feel that way. I feel that fundamentally, everyone is my equal in moral terms.
You can look at the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain as a good example of functional, competitive, non-hierarchical society. Income is capped at ten times the lowest rate. Everything is a cooperative. Anyone who wants to is encouraged to start their own cooperative business, and they get support from cooperative banks, marketing, staffing, and business planning firms. It's socialism done right.
In a society where everyone's basic needs are met, guaranteed, there will be far less pressure from worker's groups like unions to protect the incompetent. Nobody likes getting fired, but nobody likes working with the lazy or incompetent either. In a system where there are no guarantees, it isn't just government that suffers from inefficiencies. Private industries that have outlived their usefulness also hang on tooth and nail, using the power and wealth amassed when they were useful to corrupt the market and stay in business. With real socialism, we could adapt and change more quickly, as whole industries that become useless could be more easily dissolved and the workers retrained to more useful work.
There just needs to be one in that twelve in order for jury nullification to work. But you bring up an interesting point: the majority of people are sheep. That's actually a good thing for the species. We need innovators and leaders, sure. But if everyone was an innovator or a leader, nothing would get done. We need a solid core of people who basically just want to do what their fathers did. And those sheep need their leaders to show them what to do when the old ways aren't the best anymore. We basically have a mix of types of people, the proportions optimized by evolution to give our species as a whole the best chance for survival. We don't really need that many leaders or innovators. Leaders and innovators aren't 'better' than the sheep, we all need each other.
God damn, I love the fact that little shits like you feel compelled to snipe at me. I'm forcing you to react, which makes you my bitch. You've really brightened up my day.
You know what? I am, a little, in my darker moments. I sometimes wish I was stupid (because seeing and knowing too much can be painful) and talentless (because I think talent comes with a responsibility to use it.) Ah, if only I were one of the lazy slobs, my life would be easier and I would be profoundly comfortable in my ignorance.
How many people, worldwide total, have played WoW? How many have seen Star Wars? How many people have quoted a line from WoW, versus the number who have quoted Scarface "Say hello to my lil' friend" or Jerry Maguire "Show me the money" or "You had me at hello."
I, for one, have never played WoW and know next to nothing about it. I've never watched Jerry Maguire but I know all about it and can quote lines.
Video games are where comics were 40-50 years ago, some great art but still seen mostly as entertainment for juvenile boys.
More interesting to me is the question of when the game industry will achieve cultural parity with the film industry. While I've seen a few of video games that I consider great art, but these are never the popular ones. Movies speak to whole cultures, video games speak only to a smaller subset. When will we see a video game with the cultural impact of, say, Star Wars?
Okay, you've got better sources so I must admit to being mistaken. Still, it's clear which way the trend is going, film keeps losing entertainment market share while video games keep gaining. It may yet be a while before games are accepted as real art, look how long it took for comic books.
I'm bitching about talentless losers who demean others out of jealousy rather than any real critique. That's hardly hypocritical.
I wasn't referring to you, but to the AC.
Here are we have popular geeks who make a living making little pictures and writing little stories for. Everyone loves them. They are witty and funny and frequently have sex with actual women and are everything you are not. Do you know there's a guy who has a whole boring ass blog about how xkcd isn't funny? Nobody reads it, because we all think xkcd IS funny. Penny arcade IS funny. You and the other haters are either too stupid to find the humor, or too jealous to admit it. Once you have achieved something in your life, I doubt you will feel the need to put other achievers down. Maybe you should try, you know, doing something, rather than bitching about the people who do.
Here is where you and I differ: I support socialism. I'm a proud socialist. What I want to see is everyone guaranteed to get the bare minimum for living: food, clean water, 400 square feet of shelter, and medicine, and we should all bear the cos of providing it, because we all benefit by not having desperate, starving humans around. I'm not a social Darwinist, and frankly, you are either a socialist or a social Darwinist who thinks death is the preferable outcome for those who find no place in the system.
Social Darwinism is a theory supported by the owning class because it lets them offer 'do what I say, or starve to death' to workers who have no real choice. But what I don't want to see is what we have now: socialism for the very rich only.
If the government provides the bare minimum, and runs any natural monopolies, but the free market does everything else, I would be a very happy socialist.
Well it may be a false comparison, but the video game industry is now larger than the film industry in terms of revenue. The film industry made around 10.5 billion in revenues in 2008, while the video game industry made around 11.5 billion. This is counting movie and game sales and rentals. The film industry may hold more cultural cachet and influence, and more people consider films to be true art, but that is changing as well.
Both men are trying to improve their art. Gabe has come a long way from his humble beginnings. Tycho's writing outside the comics is still an acquired taste. I think it is partly an affectation, he's the smart one, Gabe is the dumb one, but those are still personae they put on for the comic.
I think that every ten years or so, the legal system should get a reset, and if we still want a law then the legislators need to pass it again. We need some kind of automatic garbage collection process. Also, let's make jury nullification official and legal. It is the whole reason we have juries instead of letting judges decide. If all twelve random citizens think a law is such bunk that it shouldn't be enforced, then it shouldn't be enforced.
It is much easier to control government than a corporation. Still, you have a point. It's hard to control the damage when we mistakenly elect an incompetent.
However, we could have done what the Republicans attempted and impeached him, but apparently, too few Democrats have the balls to try something like that.
Your opinion has been noted, for what that's worth. Just out of curiosity, which of my facts do you dispute?
Meh, that's not the purpose of the laws. This ain't no Harrison Bergeron, despite what many nerds believe. But this is a systemic problem, I agree: too many, too confusing laws, not enforced. We need to simplify our legal system so that the common man has access to justice, and so that money will not give anyone an advantage in the system. Then we need to enforce the laws, especially against white collar criminals who cause billions of dollars worth of damage to society.