For one, I would like to see actual statistics and reliable analysis that gambling inside private, discreet buildings actually contributes to (not merely correlates with, without causation) actual damaging crimes. Or prostitution, or even drug use. Though alcohol use probably shows us the model, including ways to improve performance, but also how willing we are to accept significantly less than perfect performance.
For another, we're not talking about laws for enforcing complaints when damage has occurred, like noise complaints. We're talking about total prohibition, even when there is no damage (because it's preempted, including stopping all the people who cause no damage whatsoever).
What about "Slashdot abuse"? How much damage and other crime ("killing time" must be against the law somewhere;) are we causing? I'm personally responsible for just under 0.0738696437% of the crime wave. Where's the "Slashdot's Most Posted" list? I need a shrink, not a warden.
Those people also smoke cigarettes, spit on the sidewalk, jaywalk... There's plenty of crimes to bust people on when they actually do them. These gambling laws punish the innocent along with the guilty. That's unamerican.
Also, heavy drug abuse, prostitution, and these other sin "crimes" are none of the government's business, except perhaps in zoning regulations and public health.
If we want to use the hammer of criminalization to help solve those much narrower problems, we could just lock up everyone who ever breaks any law (or biblical commandment, or disobeys their fortune cookie), and put them to "useful work" in government factories and farms.
I don't like my neighborhood filled with the kinds of yuppies who come with a law firm in my neighborhood, hanging out in my local bars and restaurants, talking to my kids on their way home from school. And the huge white collar crime waves so many of them run all day from the neighborhood that do a lot more damage than hookers, drugs, gamblers. I don't want them seducing my children into their way of life. Which is why I live in areas which are zoned so that those kinds of law firms are mostly excluded. But of course I accept that they have their right to make their living (until caught in an actual crime causing actual, nonconsensual, damage) somewhere. Somewhere else, where my preferences aren't offended, but their right to make their living is unimpeded.
Regulating gambling has to do with a lot of things, including just exercising control over people's lives like the Church used to do. Which gets the government all kinds of Church baggage that it should not have, like "faithy" followers instead of skeptical citizens.
Bottom line is that governments have no business regulating compulsive behavior except when it damages others who didn't accept the risk, and when the compulsives damage themselves so consistently that there's a medical solution that needs strong promotion to overcome the compulsive's defenses.
Gambling Prohibition is stupid, like other forms of "sin regulation". Government could use its legal powers to require that gambling venues offer real therapy service referrals to compulsive gamblers. They could even require gambling venues to require gamblers meeting the medical profile to get counseling before gambling.
It would probably not work entirely. Real gamblers have an unmatched brilliance for finding holes in any system, to get what they want. And of course gambling venues love compulsive gamblers, because everyone loses in the long run, and compulsives are some of their biggest customers.
But offering treatment and coordinated entry points to it would work a lot better at fixing the actual problem, damaging (often life-ruining) self-destructive behavior by people who prove they are freaks who can't handle the freedom that they're born with. And actually possibly retrain them to handle the freedom, rather than just turn them away to a different venue where they can destroy themselves (and others who depend on them) without being noticed early enough.
And along the way, the rest of us (the vast majority of adults) who can gamble without these unnecessary "protections" can have our fun. Without the puritans damning us to their hell.
That Malaysian scenario merely underscores what I said. It's the desire for power, regardless of what it's dressed up in, though that hasn't changed much. What has changed is the public's willingness to accept tyranny dressed up as "protection from terrorism", or at least the powermongers' expectations of that willingness.
The US is certainly well down that road. Maybe not as much as Malaysia, though more than Canada.
Doesn't just using HTTPS as the protocol to retrieve pages at URLs make the server sign the code, and encrypt it so no middlemen can change it "in flight"? I guess if the HTTPS server is controlled by the ISP, the server just signs the altered pages. But what kind of downstream test can stop that?
I've been to Malaysia. It's a shame, and scary for everyone, to see it descend into "Islamist" dictatorship. Because it was a "Muslim country" mostly in heritage and meaningless rhetoric until recently. It was almost, but not quite, as officially "Muslim" as, say, Canada is "officially Christian". Canada's still got a queen, too, but she's mostly reduced to a bust on coins. Malaysia's king was more powerful (and more local) than that, but not a whole hell of a lot, especially compared to the secular/elected government. And monarchy was steadily decreasing in any legal influence at all.
But now, Malaysia has the excuse to wield tyrannical powers by working with the terrorists in escalating terror supposedly "to stop terrorists" - by joining them in terrorizing the population. That's the excuse of the powermongers, mainly because terrorized people often accept it. For a while, at least, until it's too late to go back. Even the "Muslim" pretext is just another popular excuse. The authorities don't care about any of that. They care about only power. And the money that power brings, and the power that money brings to stay in power to get more money.
It's not that you're homosexual - there's nothing wrong with that. It's your repressed homosexuality that you express in violent fantasies, your obsession with my place in them, that shows you're a sick fuck.
You closet queer Republicans are like that. When you blurt out your repressed denial at someone who confronts you with them and your hypocrisy, you can't even recognize what's being shown you. Instead, you pretend you're defending the people openly like the person you repress, while insisting you're not the one who is the subject.
Crazy. You're fucked up crazy. Don't try to get any more on me.
Rich people don't spend their money on the direct economy the way the rest of the population does. They sink it into goods/services from other rich people, into nonproductive investments like rare art. And often waste it on crap that loses value precipitously (in the market - its utility/productivity value was never more than speculative at best), which has been my personal experience with many very rich people (some billionaire families) from my own educational and social background in NYC, Louisiana, California and Toronto.
You want to look into the "Two Americas" model that people like John Edwards have been publicly explaining lately. The actual economics, with statistics, models and mechanics, are compelling.
Eg. tax cuts for the rich are vastly less productive in the US economy than tax cuts for the less rich, and of course even less productive than improved universal education (especially free education).
The money in the stock market goes to the bankers. "Institutional investors" are bankers. Plus the brokers who make their money as fees on volume traded, not the direction of growth.
What do the bankers do with it? They hire people overseas for labor they mark up and resell to Americans. And buy expensive items from other bankers.
Why do you think worker income has shrunk while corporate profits have exploded? The money stays in the corporate exec class. How else do you explain all the economic indicators, including the vast consumer debt that covers for failed income growth?
Wherein I reply to someone's obscene homosexual fantasies about me by calling them a closet homosexual, and a Republican (which they also demonstrated in the post to which I replied, but is kinda redundant these days).
You're so obsessed with my snide agreement to do you that you've made it into your.sig. You are a freak. Why dress it up in all that blather?
But then there's all you're wrong about: the report about the Qaeda returning to its 2001 strength comes from the official National Intelligence Estimate [usatoday.com]. The 2000 election's "margin of error" was dwarfed by the thousands of votes stolen in Florida and other states. And I don't have OCD, I just have time and energy to spank fools in public.
At least you're not foolish enough to try to keep arguing those facts, among the others.
Thanks for conceding. You should have just said that you don't know anything about debating, NYC, reality...
Then I could have just talked you into going outside. It's nice out there.
"Some periods faster than others": Reagan/Bush (Sr) got elected in 1980 promising to "end big government". They quadrupled the size of the government, practically all on debt (much of which is still being repaid). Next, Clinton did expand government, but not nearly as fast as did Reagan/Bush, and Clinton generated a huge surplus, after inheriting the hugest debt of all time. Next, Bush/Cheney got "elected" in 2000 promising to "end big government". They expanded the government much faster than did Clinton, squandering the surplus, and running up by far the biggest debt of all time: committing us to something like $50 TRILLION in debt, on a planet producing only $35 TRILLION in goods each year.
Yes, government expands. Americans want government to expand: pork barrel spending on local projects to boost their local economy, and more services to protect and develop our lives - while the number of Americans gettign pork and services always grows. We don't want to pay for it, so we often elect people who lie about reducing it.
But ignoring that Republicans are the ones who always jump the size of government vastly more than do Democrats is to lie like they do when they get elected. And to ignore that Bush/Cheney especially have jumped the size of government, while hijacking all the power, even away from the coequal Legislative and Judicial branches, is to lie to let them get away with their Unitary Executive brand of tyranny.
Republicans have a special brand of "power elite". Nixon got forced to resign. Reagan didn't get impeached over Iran/Contra, but only because he'd coopted enough Congressional Democrats to squash the investigations. And Bush/Cheney are indeed heading for impeachmnet now, starting with their Attorney General who's their weakest link.
You are right about the general trends. But Republicans amplify that trend, into one simple policy: steal as much power and money as possible until forced to stop.
They're far from the first to propose nanomechanical computing machines like Babbage's original (and failed) machines. A mentor of mine explained to me in 1990 an idea of building nanoscale rod logicin orbit: microgravity, vacuum, solar power. And I don't think he was the first to think of it.
I'll be impressed when someone actually builds some. Or writes a lot more engaging science fiction than the BBC just published.
I'm not trying to convince these Republican diehards. There's not point, but maybe later they'll eventually have enough and have had the facts put before them. I do it because it's fun. And because many others reading can get something out of it. Either the facts or the logic, or just seeing someone stand up to these finks who've bullied around our country for so long.
Now, I don't know which of my stuff you've liked, or disliked, but there's no accounting for taste. Especially when you reveal your taste in debate is soured by facts you can't accept, so you reject them as if I made them up - when I didn't.
My debating methods are far from "amateur". I've made plenty of money, and had plenty of fun getting ahead, debating people into surrender, and convincing the people with the power to reward me, follow me, or just laugh along with me. You might not get it, but I'm from NYC, and showing someone they're wrong is our national pasttime.
Like that clown I just screwed into the ground that you're clearly responding to. They didn't even bother to deny they get their news from Fox. Of course they do. And they tried to deny they're Republican, even in the same post they admitted they were. They didn't bother admitting they never go outside into reality, either. I'm doing them a favor confronting their major malfunctions. Which are written all over their posts: Today's Republicans are such a zombie army that it's usually easy to ID them when they poke their snouts outside their mother's TV room. Not always, because of course people do wrong things like vote Republican for all kinds of personal wrong reasons, but I'm so used to nailing them that I do it without thinking too hard, and am rarely wrong.
Are you really serious about criticizing my telling them to go outside? It's such a silly point to argue, especially when going outside is exactly what these reality deprived, faithy serfs usually need most.
But then there's all you're wrong about: the report about the Qaeda returning to its 2001 strength comes from the official National Intelligence Estimate. The 2000 election's "margin of error" was dwarfed by the thousands of votes stolen in Florida and other states. And I don't have OCD, I just have time and energy to spank fools in public.
So I have no interest in learning about how to debate from you. You're someone who's trying to persuade me of something by calling me names, calling me a liar, and getting everything wrong, including basic facts. In fact, if I'm annoying someone with your low quality of debating skills, I'm probably doing something right.
You really are a prizewinning Republican, like the biggest pig at the county fair.
Of all the gibberish you threw at me, the only point you actually want to repeat again is that Saddam "would have used WMDs"? HE HAD NO WMDs. That's why the invasion was insane.
You can disagree that the Qaeda is as strong, but you're just disagreeing with the Pentagon. Like I said, shut off the Fox News TV, and walk outside where it's real.
I didn't say the Democrats are "spotless": another Rumsfeldian strawman. You never stop with that worthless old trick, do you? I guess it must work on you, but it's nothing to me.
You say you're not a fanboy, or a Republican, but you don't seem to have noticed that "child molesting, drug abuse, prostitution, and adultery" are the exact claims to fame of Republicans Mark Foley, Rush Limbo (and Giuliani's cokehead North Carolina campaign director, and a host of others), David Vitter and Newt Gingrich - just to name a very few, and a very few hypocritical crimes among Republican sins. How can you possibly blame the media, when they've all admitted those crimes? Because they admitted them on TV, it's the media's fault? Prizewinning pig!
It's not being a Republican that makes you "stupid, uninformed, and defenseless". It's being stupid, uninformed, and defenseless that makes you a Republican.
And the kind of instant pathological denial that can say "Now, better shut up before my cover as a Republican Operative is blown." in your own post, then read it back in my reply, then say you left that kind of talk in middle school. Classic Republican demento: you have talked yourself onto the shrink's couch, babbling about the time you got your ass kicked on the playground.
You'll have plenty of time to learn to act human without distraction or blaming me for your failure so far, because I'm not giving you any more free clues. When you go raping babies, as you just spit up from deeper in your Republican subconscious, just don't blame me. The only one you're really arguing with here is yourself, and your reflection in the TV. Shut it off and go outside for a change. You might not thank me, but you might just recover from the monstrous state from which you and your Republican buddies have been destroying my country.
Thanks, but I love to link to that Norwegian military expose of the Qaeda strategy not to attack America directly. I can hear the Republican Fox viewers' heads popping from here. Even more satisfying than twisting down rolled bubblewrap.
Besides, if I save one undecided young mind before it's hypnotized by the Republican lies, it's worth it.
Turn off the Fox News and try walking outside for a change.
Not just because it'll get you away from the radiation that's bombarding that plate in your head. But because you'll see the real world.
The stock market's record high is money going to bankers, not most Americans. The market isn't the government, but the rules encouraging the bankers to soak up all the money are made by Bush's government.
Those thousands more terrorists plotting our doom were multiplied by Bush's insane invasion of Iraq instead of fixing Afghanistan. And the terrorists didn't get us at all for the previous 8 years until 9/11/2001, when Bush let the country's guard down by deprioritizing terrorism and bin Laden down below pornography. And since then, the well-known Qaeda strategy has been to attack our allies to drive them away from our catastrophic invasion. Which has worked perfectly, including allowing the Qaeda to become as strong now as it was when it attacked in 2001.
There's no new democracies in the Mideast: there's a puppet sham Iraq government sucking up resources while covering for a civil war pointed at us from every direction. And there's another puppet Afghanistan government that controls nothing but Kabul. And ridding the world of Saddam, an evil dictator your favorite Republican, Reagan, propped up with the very gas he used to murder "his own people", the Kurds for whom Saddam was hanged as the specific war crime that produced his death sentence. And your Republicans even screwed that up. Both small: the revenge killing that will never stop escalating violence in that part of the world. And large: the total catastrophe for everyone that the invasion has produced for years, with no end in sight.
The "voted into office" in 2000 wasn't tyranny, it was first a stolen election, then a perversion of the Supreme Court. The following 6 years of torture, illegal renditions, suspended Habeas Corpus, relentless domestic spying in violation of FISA, outing a CIA/WMD agent to cover up lying us into war, the political rigging of the Justice Department... the list goes on. That is precisely the kind of tyranny that Nixon tried during his Vietnam, right down to the FISA that was created and updated to prevent Nixon's specific domestic spying operations. It's not that Republicans have "opposing views", it's that their "views" are just smokescreen for the tyranny they've dealt with their endless power abuses.
It's really boring, but still disgusting, the way you Republicans will trot out the Rumsfeld Doctrine: always reverse any charge against you to its opposite extreme, then deny that straw man. I never said anything about anyone "slightly conservative", but rather the obvious Republican extremist I easily slapped down in the post that set you off.
So yes, every talking point you chanted in your post exposes that you're a Republican operative. Republicans, the "Conservative" ones, anyway, used to be against big government, government coercion, "foreign entanglements", "nation building", "social engineering", lying, torture, cheating, stealing, child molesting, drug abuse, prostitution, adultery... Every single disgusting act you Republicans have made your trademarks.
So yes, you'd better shut up. You people have been wrong about every damn thing you've said since you've gotten any power. Any decent group of people would be so shamed by their old fallen champion Nixon, that they'd never repeat the crimes. But you people have rushed to outdo the old tyrant, and praise the crimes as the hand of god. The evidence of your largely irreparable damage is everywhere. Go outside. Shut up and listen. And promise yourself (you can't say anything to me I could ever believe) that you'll learn how to act before trying it again in public. You'll thank me, when you learn to be a human and live in reality again.
Anonymous filthy Coward can't stop their dirty queer fantasies about me. What's most bizarre is that they need to tart it up into politics to tell the world they need me to fuck them.
Anonymous Republican Cowards are the lamest closeted homosexuals: can't get a date, blame the Democrats.
I get the AC attacks, too. You're not alone. Most are just an indication of the rotten streak in our current society: 50M+ Republican voters who wanted Bush not just once, but twice, even if they're just props to steal the elections. Though there is at least one website I've seen that does have a bunch of pathetic losers coordinating attacks on selected Slashdotters. Sick, but stupid and meaningless: except that these people are really sick, stupid and meaningless.
But the harassers aren't systematic or organized enough to attack us in any meaningful way. What else can they do other than parade their stupid vindictiveness in front of a public audience who doesn't really care that much anyway? If they were that good, they'd have their minds sane enough not to do their insipid little crusades.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. But they usually aren't as scary as they seem before you know who they are.
Anyway, it's nice to get someone else saying "me too" instead of just a bunch of anonymous "troll mod" cowards attacking my posts, or yours.
You don't need to use your imagination, Anonymous Republican operative Coward. You can look at the last 218 years of America's government, and see that it's never been anywhere near this bad. Even though tax money has always funded the government, and been determined by the "power elite" who control that money.
Because the proper and usual traditional functioning of the US government has not been through the power monopoly that Bush's Republicans had for the last 6 years. Following 6 years just controlling Congress, after 12 years controlling just the White House, which came 5 years after Nixon got kicked out for trying a smaller-scale tyranny.
The Constitution balances conflicting powers to control that money. But Bush/Cheney's government has united all the power into a "unitary executive" exploit of weaknesses of our system: a king and his court routinely ignoring Congress, rigging/endrunning the courts and making "laws" without the process that don't apply to them when they break them.
Congress has to impeach these criminal tyrants. That might surprise you, Anonymous Republican operative Coward, because you thought impeachment was just to attack a popular president. But anyone else who cares about our Constitutional democratic republic should have seen it coming for a long, long time.
Slashdot Mirror
For one, I would like to see actual statistics and reliable analysis that gambling inside private, discreet buildings actually contributes to (not merely correlates with, without causation) actual damaging crimes. Or prostitution, or even drug use. Though alcohol use probably shows us the model, including ways to improve performance, but also how willing we are to accept significantly less than perfect performance.
;) are we causing? I'm personally responsible for just under 0.0738696437% of the crime wave. Where's the "Slashdot's Most Posted" list? I need a shrink, not a warden.
For another, we're not talking about laws for enforcing complaints when damage has occurred, like noise complaints. We're talking about total prohibition, even when there is no damage (because it's preempted, including stopping all the people who cause no damage whatsoever).
What about "Slashdot abuse"? How much damage and other crime ("killing time" must be against the law somewhere
Those people also smoke cigarettes, spit on the sidewalk, jaywalk... There's plenty of crimes to bust people on when they actually do them. These gambling laws punish the innocent along with the guilty. That's unamerican.
Also, heavy drug abuse, prostitution, and these other sin "crimes" are none of the government's business, except perhaps in zoning regulations and public health.
If we want to use the hammer of criminalization to help solve those much narrower problems, we could just lock up everyone who ever breaks any law (or biblical commandment, or disobeys their fortune cookie), and put them to "useful work" in government factories and farms.
I don't like my neighborhood filled with the kinds of yuppies who come with a law firm in my neighborhood, hanging out in my local bars and restaurants, talking to my kids on their way home from school. And the huge white collar crime waves so many of them run all day from the neighborhood that do a lot more damage than hookers, drugs, gamblers. I don't want them seducing my children into their way of life. Which is why I live in areas which are zoned so that those kinds of law firms are mostly excluded. But of course I accept that they have their right to make their living (until caught in an actual crime causing actual, nonconsensual, damage) somewhere. Somewhere else, where my preferences aren't offended, but their right to make their living is unimpeded.
Regulating gambling has to do with a lot of things, including just exercising control over people's lives like the Church used to do. Which gets the government all kinds of Church baggage that it should not have, like "faithy" followers instead of skeptical citizens.
Bottom line is that governments have no business regulating compulsive behavior except when it damages others who didn't accept the risk, and when the compulsives damage themselves so consistently that there's a medical solution that needs strong promotion to overcome the compulsive's defenses.
Gambling Prohibition is stupid, like other forms of "sin regulation". Government could use its legal powers to require that gambling venues offer real therapy service referrals to compulsive gamblers. They could even require gambling venues to require gamblers meeting the medical profile to get counseling before gambling.
It would probably not work entirely. Real gamblers have an unmatched brilliance for finding holes in any system, to get what they want. And of course gambling venues love compulsive gamblers, because everyone loses in the long run, and compulsives are some of their biggest customers.
But offering treatment and coordinated entry points to it would work a lot better at fixing the actual problem, damaging (often life-ruining) self-destructive behavior by people who prove they are freaks who can't handle the freedom that they're born with. And actually possibly retrain them to handle the freedom, rather than just turn them away to a different venue where they can destroy themselves (and others who depend on them) without being noticed early enough.
And along the way, the rest of us (the vast majority of adults) who can gamble without these unnecessary "protections" can have our fun. Without the puritans damning us to their hell.
That Malaysian scenario merely underscores what I said. It's the desire for power, regardless of what it's dressed up in, though that hasn't changed much. What has changed is the public's willingness to accept tyranny dressed up as "protection from terrorism", or at least the powermongers' expectations of that willingness.
The US is certainly well down that road. Maybe not as much as Malaysia, though more than Canada.
Doesn't just using HTTPS as the protocol to retrieve pages at URLs make the server sign the code, and encrypt it so no middlemen can change it "in flight"? I guess if the HTTPS server is controlled by the ISP, the server just signs the altered pages. But what kind of downstream test can stop that?
I've been to Malaysia. It's a shame, and scary for everyone, to see it descend into "Islamist" dictatorship. Because it was a "Muslim country" mostly in heritage and meaningless rhetoric until recently. It was almost, but not quite, as officially "Muslim" as, say, Canada is "officially Christian". Canada's still got a queen, too, but she's mostly reduced to a bust on coins. Malaysia's king was more powerful (and more local) than that, but not a whole hell of a lot, especially compared to the secular/elected government. And monarchy was steadily decreasing in any legal influence at all.
But now, Malaysia has the excuse to wield tyrannical powers by working with the terrorists in escalating terror supposedly "to stop terrorists" - by joining them in terrorizing the population. That's the excuse of the powermongers, mainly because terrorized people often accept it. For a while, at least, until it's too late to go back. Even the "Muslim" pretext is just another popular excuse. The authorities don't care about any of that. They care about only power. And the money that power brings, and the power that money brings to stay in power to get more money.
I just hope Canada can hold out longer.
It's not that you're homosexual - there's nothing wrong with that. It's your repressed homosexuality that you express in violent fantasies, your obsession with my place in them, that shows you're a sick fuck.
You closet queer Republicans are like that. When you blurt out your repressed denial at someone who confronts you with them and your hypocrisy, you can't even recognize what's being shown you. Instead, you pretend you're defending the people openly like the person you repress, while insisting you're not the one who is the subject.
Crazy. You're fucked up crazy. Don't try to get any more on me.
Rich people don't spend their money on the direct economy the way the rest of the population does. They sink it into goods/services from other rich people, into nonproductive investments like rare art. And often waste it on crap that loses value precipitously (in the market - its utility/productivity value was never more than speculative at best), which has been my personal experience with many very rich people (some billionaire families) from my own educational and social background in NYC, Louisiana, California and Toronto.
You want to look into the "Two Americas" model that people like John Edwards have been publicly explaining lately. The actual economics, with statistics, models and mechanics, are compelling.
Eg. tax cuts for the rich are vastly less productive in the US economy than tax cuts for the less rich, and of course even less productive than improved universal education (especially free education).
What a fool you are to waste time going to a fight while I'm laughing at you, having fun elsewhere.
You're the kind of stupid shit who learned from the cartoon villains as a child. And never grew out of it.
Here, would you hold this anvil while I get you to post your video of "How I Spent My Summer Vacation Getting Punked Like a Bitch By DocRuby"?
The money in the stock market goes to the bankers. "Institutional investors" are bankers. Plus the brokers who make their money as fees on volume traded, not the direction of growth.
What do the bankers do with it? They hire people overseas for labor they mark up and resell to Americans. And buy expensive items from other bankers.
Why do you think worker income has shrunk while corporate profits have exploded? The money stays in the corporate exec class. How else do you explain all the economic indicators, including the vast consumer debt that covers for failed income growth?
Why bother?
.sig:
.sig. You are a freak. Why dress it up in all that blather?
I'll just comment on your
"Doc Ruby proves he's a bigot here
Wherein I reply to someone's obscene homosexual fantasies about me by calling them a closet homosexual, and a Republican (which they also demonstrated in the post to which I replied, but is kinda redundant these days).
You're so obsessed with my snide agreement to do you that you've made it into your
At least you're not foolish enough to try to keep arguing those facts, among the others.
Thanks for conceding. You should have just said that you don't know anything about debating, NYC, reality...
Then I could have just talked you into going outside. It's nice out there.
Goodbye.
"Some periods faster than others": Reagan/Bush (Sr) got elected in 1980 promising to "end big government". They quadrupled the size of the government, practically all on debt (much of which is still being repaid). Next, Clinton did expand government, but not nearly as fast as did Reagan/Bush, and Clinton generated a huge surplus, after inheriting the hugest debt of all time. Next, Bush/Cheney got "elected" in 2000 promising to "end big government". They expanded the government much faster than did Clinton, squandering the surplus, and running up by far the biggest debt of all time: committing us to something like $50 TRILLION in debt, on a planet producing only $35 TRILLION in goods each year.
Yes, government expands. Americans want government to expand: pork barrel spending on local projects to boost their local economy, and more services to protect and develop our lives - while the number of Americans gettign pork and services always grows. We don't want to pay for it, so we often elect people who lie about reducing it.
But ignoring that Republicans are the ones who always jump the size of government vastly more than do Democrats is to lie like they do when they get elected. And to ignore that Bush/Cheney especially have jumped the size of government, while hijacking all the power, even away from the coequal Legislative and Judicial branches, is to lie to let them get away with their Unitary Executive brand of tyranny.
Republicans have a special brand of "power elite". Nixon got forced to resign. Reagan didn't get impeached over Iran/Contra, but only because he'd coopted enough Congressional Democrats to squash the investigations. And Bush/Cheney are indeed heading for impeachmnet now, starting with their Attorney General who's their weakest link.
You are right about the general trends. But Republicans amplify that trend, into one simple policy: steal as much power and money as possible until forced to stop.
They're far from the first to propose nanomechanical computing machines like Babbage's original (and failed) machines. A mentor of mine explained to me in 1990 an idea of building nanoscale rod logic in orbit: microgravity, vacuum, solar power. And I don't think he was the first to think of it.
I'll be impressed when someone actually builds some. Or writes a lot more engaging science fiction than the BBC just published.
I'm not trying to convince these Republican diehards. There's not point, but maybe later they'll eventually have enough and have had the facts put before them. I do it because it's fun. And because many others reading can get something out of it. Either the facts or the logic, or just seeing someone stand up to these finks who've bullied around our country for so long.
Now, I don't know which of my stuff you've liked, or disliked, but there's no accounting for taste. Especially when you reveal your taste in debate is soured by facts you can't accept, so you reject them as if I made them up - when I didn't.
My debating methods are far from "amateur". I've made plenty of money, and had plenty of fun getting ahead, debating people into surrender, and convincing the people with the power to reward me, follow me, or just laugh along with me. You might not get it, but I'm from NYC, and showing someone they're wrong is our national pasttime.
Like that clown I just screwed into the ground that you're clearly responding to. They didn't even bother to deny they get their news from Fox. Of course they do. And they tried to deny they're Republican, even in the same post they admitted they were. They didn't bother admitting they never go outside into reality, either. I'm doing them a favor confronting their major malfunctions. Which are written all over their posts: Today's Republicans are such a zombie army that it's usually easy to ID them when they poke their snouts outside their mother's TV room. Not always, because of course people do wrong things like vote Republican for all kinds of personal wrong reasons, but I'm so used to nailing them that I do it without thinking too hard, and am rarely wrong.
Are you really serious about criticizing my telling them to go outside? It's such a silly point to argue, especially when going outside is exactly what these reality deprived, faithy serfs usually need most.
But then there's all you're wrong about: the report about the Qaeda returning to its 2001 strength comes from the official National Intelligence Estimate. The 2000 election's "margin of error" was dwarfed by the thousands of votes stolen in Florida and other states. And I don't have OCD, I just have time and energy to spank fools in public.
So I have no interest in learning about how to debate from you. You're someone who's trying to persuade me of something by calling me names, calling me a liar, and getting everything wrong, including basic facts. In fact, if I'm annoying someone with your low quality of debating skills, I'm probably doing something right.
Run along and play outside, now.
You really are a prizewinning Republican, like the biggest pig at the county fair.
Of all the gibberish you threw at me, the only point you actually want to repeat again is that Saddam "would have used WMDs"? HE HAD NO WMDs. That's why the invasion was insane.
You can disagree that the Qaeda is as strong, but you're just disagreeing with the Pentagon. Like I said, shut off the Fox News TV, and walk outside where it's real.
I didn't say the Democrats are "spotless": another Rumsfeldian strawman. You never stop with that worthless old trick, do you? I guess it must work on you, but it's nothing to me.
You say you're not a fanboy, or a Republican, but you don't seem to have noticed that "child molesting, drug abuse, prostitution, and adultery" are the exact claims to fame of Republicans Mark Foley, Rush Limbo (and Giuliani's cokehead North Carolina campaign director, and a host of others), David Vitter and Newt Gingrich - just to name a very few, and a very few hypocritical crimes among Republican sins. How can you possibly blame the media, when they've all admitted those crimes? Because they admitted them on TV, it's the media's fault? Prizewinning pig!
It's not being a Republican that makes you "stupid, uninformed, and defenseless". It's being stupid, uninformed, and defenseless that makes you a Republican.
And the kind of instant pathological denial that can say "Now, better shut up before my cover as a Republican Operative is blown." in your own post, then read it back in my reply, then say you left that kind of talk in middle school. Classic Republican demento: you have talked yourself onto the shrink's couch, babbling about the time you got your ass kicked on the playground.
You'll have plenty of time to learn to act human without distraction or blaming me for your failure so far, because I'm not giving you any more free clues. When you go raping babies, as you just spit up from deeper in your Republican subconscious, just don't blame me. The only one you're really arguing with here is yourself, and your reflection in the TV. Shut it off and go outside for a change. You might not thank me, but you might just recover from the monstrous state from which you and your Republican buddies have been destroying my country.
Get out. And goodbye.
Whoops, wrong unnecessary Republican return flame post.
You're probably right about the one you were talking about.
Thanks, but I love to link to that Norwegian military expose of the Qaeda strategy not to attack America directly. I can hear the Republican Fox viewers' heads popping from here. Even more satisfying than twisting down rolled bubblewrap.
Besides, if I save one undecided young mind before it's hypnotized by the Republican lies, it's worth it.
Nah, it's the headpopping.
Turn off the Fox News and try walking outside for a change.
Not just because it'll get you away from the radiation that's bombarding that plate in your head. But because you'll see the real world.
The stock market's record high is money going to bankers, not most Americans. The market isn't the government, but the rules encouraging the bankers to soak up all the money are made by Bush's government.
Those thousands more terrorists plotting our doom were multiplied by Bush's insane invasion of Iraq instead of fixing Afghanistan. And the terrorists didn't get us at all for the previous 8 years until 9/11/2001, when Bush let the country's guard down by deprioritizing terrorism and bin Laden down below pornography. And since then, the well-known Qaeda strategy has been to attack our allies to drive them away from our catastrophic invasion. Which has worked perfectly, including allowing the Qaeda to become as strong now as it was when it attacked in 2001.
There's no new democracies in the Mideast: there's a puppet sham Iraq government sucking up resources while covering for a civil war pointed at us from every direction. And there's another puppet Afghanistan government that controls nothing but Kabul. And ridding the world of Saddam, an evil dictator your favorite Republican, Reagan, propped up with the very gas he used to murder "his own people", the Kurds for whom Saddam was hanged as the specific war crime that produced his death sentence. And your Republicans even screwed that up. Both small: the revenge killing that will never stop escalating violence in that part of the world. And large: the total catastrophe for everyone that the invasion has produced for years, with no end in sight.
The "voted into office" in 2000 wasn't tyranny, it was first a stolen election, then a perversion of the Supreme Court. The following 6 years of torture, illegal renditions, suspended Habeas Corpus, relentless domestic spying in violation of FISA, outing a CIA/WMD agent to cover up lying us into war, the political rigging of the Justice Department... the list goes on. That is precisely the kind of tyranny that Nixon tried during his Vietnam, right down to the FISA that was created and updated to prevent Nixon's specific domestic spying operations. It's not that Republicans have "opposing views", it's that their "views" are just smokescreen for the tyranny they've dealt with their endless power abuses.
It's really boring, but still disgusting, the way you Republicans will trot out the Rumsfeld Doctrine: always reverse any charge against you to its opposite extreme, then deny that straw man. I never said anything about anyone "slightly conservative", but rather the obvious Republican extremist I easily slapped down in the post that set you off.
So yes, every talking point you chanted in your post exposes that you're a Republican operative. Republicans, the "Conservative" ones, anyway, used to be against big government, government coercion, "foreign entanglements", "nation building", "social engineering", lying, torture, cheating, stealing, child molesting, drug abuse, prostitution, adultery... Every single disgusting act you Republicans have made your trademarks.
So yes, you'd better shut up. You people have been wrong about every damn thing you've said since you've gotten any power. Any decent group of people would be so shamed by their old fallen champion Nixon, that they'd never repeat the crimes. But you people have rushed to outdo the old tyrant, and praise the crimes as the hand of god. The evidence of your largely irreparable damage is everywhere. Go outside. Shut up and listen. And promise yourself (you can't say anything to me I could ever believe) that you'll learn how to act before trying it again in public. You'll thank me, when you learn to be a human and live in reality again.
Anonymous filthy Coward can't stop their dirty queer fantasies about me. What's most bizarre is that they need to tart it up into politics to tell the world they need me to fuck them.
Anonymous Republican Cowards are the lamest closeted homosexuals: can't get a date, blame the Democrats.
Moderation 0
50% Troll
50% Insightful
TrollMods are a little behind the small, but real and growing, definite majority of Americans with an opinion who already want to impeach Bush/Cheney.
I get the AC attacks, too. You're not alone. Most are just an indication of the rotten streak in our current society: 50M+ Republican voters who wanted Bush not just once, but twice, even if they're just props to steal the elections. Though there is at least one website I've seen that does have a bunch of pathetic losers coordinating attacks on selected Slashdotters. Sick, but stupid and meaningless: except that these people are really sick, stupid and meaningless.
But the harassers aren't systematic or organized enough to attack us in any meaningful way. What else can they do other than parade their stupid vindictiveness in front of a public audience who doesn't really care that much anyway? If they were that good, they'd have their minds sane enough not to do their insipid little crusades.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. But they usually aren't as scary as they seem before you know who they are.
Anyway, it's nice to get someone else saying "me too" instead of just a bunch of anonymous "troll mod" cowards attacking my posts, or yours.
You don't need to use your imagination, Anonymous Republican operative Coward. You can look at the last 218 years of America's government, and see that it's never been anywhere near this bad. Even though tax money has always funded the government, and been determined by the "power elite" who control that money.
Because the proper and usual traditional functioning of the US government has not been through the power monopoly that Bush's Republicans had for the last 6 years. Following 6 years just controlling Congress, after 12 years controlling just the White House, which came 5 years after Nixon got kicked out for trying a smaller-scale tyranny.
The Constitution balances conflicting powers to control that money. But Bush/Cheney's government has united all the power into a "unitary executive" exploit of weaknesses of our system: a king and his court routinely ignoring Congress, rigging/endrunning the courts and making "laws" without the process that don't apply to them when they break them.
Congress has to impeach these criminal tyrants. That might surprise you, Anonymous Republican operative Coward, because you thought impeachment was just to attack a popular president. But anyone else who cares about our Constitutional democratic republic should have seen it coming for a long, long time.
We need Congress to impeach Bush/Cheney already. This national nightmare has gone on far too long.