Not voting does have the effect of validating the choice of the other voters, but that's not what most nonvoters (who are a very large minority of all eligible voters) think they're saying by not voting.
Congress is not governed rigorously by laws, starting with the fact that Congress can change those laws, and continuing with the fact that Congress sets exceptions to most laws for Congress when it sets laws. The Constitution is an abstract authority, not a person in a black robe at an elevated desk who speaks and controls when others speak, gives spoken instructions and interacts with everyone as an obvious authority. It is perfectly clear that the way laws govern Congress, and the way the Constitution governs it, are not at all like the ways that laws govern juries and judges are authorities in courts.
You know it, too. But you're saying something else to stick to a point that you want to belive, despite plain sense. So I'm not wasting any more of my time on you.
I pity whoever's future hangs in the balance determined by a jury you're on.
The many liberals who attend the Lutheran church a couple of blocks from me would probably forgive you for your stupidity. But I don't.
It's you Republicans who have turned America into the torturing propaganda state that _Brazil_ predicts. You people really are the sickest denialists of all time.
No, their self-segregation has made them ever harder to distinguish from the "mainstream" image the corporate media invents to fool us with. And since Waco, they have become more and more something to worry about.
What's necessary is reassimilating them into general American society. The monoculture they immerse themselves in is what creates them. And since they're such perfect slaves to a corporate state, that's what they get. We have to tear America's momentum away from their death spiral, or get dragged to oblivion with them.
No, people can choose to be stupid, by refusing to learn how to think well. Refusing to hear and remember information is ignorance, but stupidity is a learned behavior that all too many do choose.
Except Texas is the place where stupidity has come closest to installing superstitions like Creationism in science education. Only a few other local school boards have done that. Texas is the state where it's got the closest to victory.
It's the actual stupidity dominating the state that gives Texas accents the stench of stupidity, not the accent itself.
Women don't vote to elect boards who determine what new women will be taught.
Texans do. The majority of Texans have produced their elected officials, including school boards local and statewide, that try to determine that every new Texan should be taught superstition instead of important facts. So Texans have earned the ridicule of themselves as idiotic.
Teaching biology without teaching evolution across millions of years, not just as a trick we can do in a lab, would be like teaching mathematics without teaching the Pythagorean theorem. Have you ever seen the proof of a^2 + b^2 = c^2? No? Of course not.
We have other ways of knowing truth than just by direct personal observation, or by unprovable "faith". People who can't learn to know by those more sophisticated ways are stupid, and deserve pity or ridicule, depending on whether they're trying to exert any power based on their stupidity.
BTW, when we teach evolution properly, we don't teach that it must be smooth over time. You are creating a strawman that does not exist in evolution education.
In Rwanda, the mass murdering and maiming by machete was encouraged by days and weeks of people inciting the violence over radio, insisting that the targets of the violence were not human, insects, to be eradicated ruthlessly and without remorse.
Yes, we are each individuals with responsibility for our actions and our decisions. But we are also members of a species with very strong tribal and herd behaviors. So while people who hear a call to violence who act on it are guilty of their own wrongdoing, so too are people who design the violent reactions of others into mass communications, knowing there are people there who are only a nudge away from committing violence.
Just as we all recognize that shouting "fighting words" at someone telling you they'll punch you if you insult them means the shouter is responsible for their own punched face, we have to recognize that broadcasting calls for violence into an audience filled with people ready to commit it makes you responsible for the expected violence when it comes through.
When you purposely incite violence you're guilty of at least increasing the risk, which is itself damage to the people intimidated by the increased risk.
The "fire in a crowded theater" example uses a theater specifically because it's making a point that sometimes some speech is too dangerous to be allowed freely. In a crowded theater, shouting "fire" on the stage is OK, but shouting "fire" in the audience is obviously not. Even if there is a fire, shouting "fire" in the audience is not OK - the mad rush to the few exits will probably hurt more people than the fire would have.
The point is that it's the meaning of the words, not just the sound of them, and the reasonably expected result, not just the speech in a vacuum, that define the limits of speech.
Which is why this creep was guilty of threatening a public figure, not just freely working his fingers on a keyboard in his parents' basement. The 9th Circuit judges are idiots.
You Teabaggers read too much corporate anarchist porn, and don't do enough thinking about what its characters actually do in real life. The class war has been victorious for the upper classes forever, with sporadic rollbacks over time favoring balance towards the middle class. All of which the Teabaggers are burning down, to their own peril - except for the rich people who fund and equip them.
it was funded by the Koch family through FreedomWorks (they are no longer aligned).
Who's no longer aligned? Tea Party / Kochs? Kochs / Freedomworks? Tea Party / Kochs? What makes you think that any of them aren't still "aligned" (mutually coordinated)?
Have you ever been on a jury? Only because the jury is governed rigorously by laws and an authority in the judge, with both sides of an accusation defended by a professional with interests conflicting with the other's, and an actual person at stake who can go to media with their story, does the drafting of random people from the community work at all.
But the "none of the above" vote is important. AFAIK it's already part of every ballot: just don't answer that question. But what should change is that those "abstain" answers should be counted, and the total including them should require someone get a majority to win. Otherwise a runoff election excluding the lowest vote getters. Or just "Instant-Runoff Voting", where voters pick their top choices in order, and the winner is chosen by the mutually agreed most popular, even if not simply the most common #1 pick.
Friedman's already got his "third party": the "Tea Party" that's not a party. It's just the most extreme Republicans - still voting Republican.
Now he's demanding a new third (not really) party also be Republican.
Thomas Friedman is the guy who spent the first 5+ years of the Iraq Jr War seeing victory "within the next 6 months", for all those years, until he just stopped begging for it. He's never right about anything except the obvious. Why listen to him?
The Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libyan wars cost several hundred $B more. The Pentagon/CIA expense includes budgets spread across many other agencies, like NASA's development and launch budgets for our military/spy satellites. $BILLIONS in "foreign aid" are bribes dual-purposed to American exporters, many of which are indistinguishable from the Pentagon/CIA (weapons, spy systems), and to bribes and other expenses (US funded joint war games, etc) to foreigners integrated with and specified by the Pentagon/CIA. The NSA and other spy/disinfo operations throughout the Federal agencies' budgets.
And all that's borrowed money, which means it's all 150% of the original expense by the time the banks (foreign and domestic) are paid their interest.
If we really spent only $300B a year on Pentagon/CIA, we'd save at least $1.2-1.5B. And the drag on the economy of spending that money on the bloated failure that is the Pentagon/CIA would drop, freeing more actually productive economics, which pay taxes. Taxes that should collect back a fair share from the rich who have demonstrably gained so much from the crooked economy to date, largely war profiteering (speculating on oil during the Iraq War, etc). Presto: a surplus that soon pays off the debt.
The other difference is that the US actually makes war with these welfare recipients. Killing lots of people, training them to kill and to respect killing for the rest of their lives. Military people are not counted among the unemployment rate, though they're over 1% of the workforce. And their work destroys capital and labor, while enabling a US foreign policy of destruction and intimidation instead of the cheaper and more productive investment and inducement. And cultivates the cult of authoritarianism...
$12.9B shit happens? No, that kind of shit doesn't just happen. It's deliberate incompetence designed to feed cronies. Which is exactly what defined Rumsfeld's entire career.
They spent our SS on Federal bonds that are worth at least 50% more now, without any losses. The SS fund has something like 2 $TRILLION+, more than enough to pay all checks for at least another decade, and probably for another several decades.
And in the meantime the SS spent on other things kept the country going. Though if they'd spent it on activities that actually defend and build America instead of on the military (and the interest on the military's debts), we'd be a lot better off, and retirees would have the safe interest coming back larger in their pensions.
Obama's mistake was not firing Gates from the Pentagon. All Gates can claim is $TRILLIONS in losing wars. Obama supposedly kept him around because Gates was willing to cut Pentagon budgets in exchange for keeping them still high and still wasted on losing wars. But maybe not.
Though even blaming Obama for not firing him and ending these stupid wars doesn't excuse Bush and Rumsfeld from creating them and running them for so many years.
What's "pretty simpleminded" is your view of what I posted, because that's not what I posted.
It's the Pentagon/CIA that doesn't detect or protect us from attacks that murder Americans and destroy our security. Even though they already have hundreds of $BILLIONS in spy satellites, and even more in "guys at the tip of the spear". Too many guys, too many spears, too many satellites, not enough defense.
BTW, if you hadn't blurted that "simpleminded" comment, this could have been a debate, despite your mistakes, instead of an argument. But you did blurt. So that's all you get. Goodbye.
Cutting the military spending instead of SS, Medicare or the rest of what's being cut instead would be a lot better. Most of the spending doesn't go to the labor, and a lot more gets sent overseas, and much less comes back in taxes. Besides, military personnel and contractors are better able to find other income than are the oldest, poorest and sickest Americans. Besides, SS doesn't even contribute to the debt, except in that it's a source of domestic loans to the government at a very low interest rate, so it allows the debt to exist without dependence on foreigners or banksters.
But of course the cutting of these social benefit repayment programmes is proposed to happen immediately, if not sooner. Those delicate balances are somehow just tough luck. When the same is suggested for the military and intel industry, well, they're just too soft to consider taking it, I guess.
Eisenhower spent his 8 years as president shoving as much money and power at the military-industrial complex as he possibly could. He was elected president based on his years as the US supreme commander in Europe, pushing the Western Front against the Russians' advancing Eastern Front to crush the Nazis, which shoved as much money and power into the military-industrial complex as was physically possible. Though the 1940s MIC feast was well worth the investment, his 1950s splurge wasn't.
Eisenhower deserves credit for calling out the military-industrial complex. But he was about to retire, untouchable, having made his entire career creating it.
The US could eliminate our deficits immediately by cutting our Pentagon/CIA budget to under $300B a year from its current $TRILLION+, and soon pay off the accumulated debt with the surplus. Vietnam + Iraq + Afghanistan = several $TRILLION, plus interest on the debt that paid for them is over 50% more (since we borrowed again and again to pay the interest). Plus all the veterans benefits including healthcare, housing, education, disability - rightly paid on a wrongfully bloated military force.
Instead we're stealing new $TRILLIONS for the Pentagon/CIA from the old deposits the latest generations have paid down on our Social Security pensions. With millions of Americans now throwing the US credit rating into the trash by voting for their politicians (mostly, but not exclusively, Republicans - all the Republicans). Who won't sacrifice a 5 year writeoff of private jets into a 7 year writeoff, even as the jets' owners get in return a drop from a 35% tax rate to a 29% rate, and their corporate taxes dropped even more.
The only war the Pentagon/CIA have won since Japan surrendered 2/3 of a century ago is the class war.
Slashdot Mirror
Not voting does have the effect of validating the choice of the other voters, but that's not what most nonvoters (who are a very large minority of all eligible voters) think they're saying by not voting.
Congress is not governed rigorously by laws, starting with the fact that Congress can change those laws, and continuing with the fact that Congress sets exceptions to most laws for Congress when it sets laws. The Constitution is an abstract authority, not a person in a black robe at an elevated desk who speaks and controls when others speak, gives spoken instructions and interacts with everyone as an obvious authority. It is perfectly clear that the way laws govern Congress, and the way the Constitution governs it, are not at all like the ways that laws govern juries and judges are authorities in courts.
You know it, too. But you're saying something else to stick to a point that you want to belive, despite plain sense. So I'm not wasting any more of my time on you.
I pity whoever's future hangs in the balance determined by a jury you're on.
The many liberals who attend the Lutheran church a couple of blocks from me would probably forgive you for your stupidity. But I don't.
It's you Republicans who have turned America into the torturing propaganda state that _Brazil_ predicts. You people really are the sickest denialists of all time.
No, their self-segregation has made them ever harder to distinguish from the "mainstream" image the corporate media invents to fool us with. And since Waco, they have become more and more something to worry about.
What's necessary is reassimilating them into general American society. The monoculture they immerse themselves in is what creates them. And since they're such perfect slaves to a corporate state, that's what they get. We have to tear America's momentum away from their death spiral, or get dragged to oblivion with them.
Which kindergarten classes are teaching about aberrant sexual behavior in history class? Or even have "history class"?
That's not "intelligence", that's "stupidity". Are you from Texas?
No, people can choose to be stupid, by refusing to learn how to think well. Refusing to hear and remember information is ignorance, but stupidity is a learned behavior that all too many do choose.
Except Texas is the place where stupidity has come closest to installing superstitions like Creationism in science education. Only a few other local school boards have done that. Texas is the state where it's got the closest to victory.
It's the actual stupidity dominating the state that gives Texas accents the stench of stupidity, not the accent itself.
Women don't vote to elect boards who determine what new women will be taught.
Texans do. The majority of Texans have produced their elected officials, including school boards local and statewide, that try to determine that every new Texan should be taught superstition instead of important facts. So Texans have earned the ridicule of themselves as idiotic.
Sounds like a good way to test their belief in evolution, too. To your maker!
Teaching biology without teaching evolution across millions of years, not just as a trick we can do in a lab, would be like teaching mathematics without teaching the Pythagorean theorem. Have you ever seen the proof of a^2 + b^2 = c^2? No? Of course not.
We have other ways of knowing truth than just by direct personal observation, or by unprovable "faith". People who can't learn to know by those more sophisticated ways are stupid, and deserve pity or ridicule, depending on whether they're trying to exert any power based on their stupidity.
BTW, when we teach evolution properly, we don't teach that it must be smooth over time. You are creating a strawman that does not exist in evolution education.
In Rwanda, the mass murdering and maiming by machete was encouraged by days and weeks of people inciting the violence over radio, insisting that the targets of the violence were not human, insects, to be eradicated ruthlessly and without remorse.
Yes, we are each individuals with responsibility for our actions and our decisions. But we are also members of a species with very strong tribal and herd behaviors. So while people who hear a call to violence who act on it are guilty of their own wrongdoing, so too are people who design the violent reactions of others into mass communications, knowing there are people there who are only a nudge away from committing violence.
Just as we all recognize that shouting "fighting words" at someone telling you they'll punch you if you insult them means the shouter is responsible for their own punched face, we have to recognize that broadcasting calls for violence into an audience filled with people ready to commit it makes you responsible for the expected violence when it comes through.
When you purposely incite violence you're guilty of at least increasing the risk, which is itself damage to the people intimidated by the increased risk.
The "fire in a crowded theater" example uses a theater specifically because it's making a point that sometimes some speech is too dangerous to be allowed freely. In a crowded theater, shouting "fire" on the stage is OK, but shouting "fire" in the audience is obviously not. Even if there is a fire, shouting "fire" in the audience is not OK - the mad rush to the few exits will probably hurt more people than the fire would have.
The point is that it's the meaning of the words, not just the sound of them, and the reasonably expected result, not just the speech in a vacuum, that define the limits of speech.
Which is why this creep was guilty of threatening a public figure, not just freely working his fingers on a keyboard in his parents' basement. The 9th Circuit judges are idiots.
Everyone knows that if this fool had threatened to kill Bush like that, he would have been kidnapped and sent to a secret torture prison.
You Teabaggers read too much corporate anarchist porn, and don't do enough thinking about what its characters actually do in real life. The class war has been victorious for the upper classes forever, with sporadic rollbacks over time favoring balance towards the middle class. All of which the Teabaggers are burning down, to their own peril - except for the rich people who fund and equip them.
Who's no longer aligned? Tea Party / Kochs? Kochs / Freedomworks? Tea Party / Kochs? What makes you think that any of them aren't still "aligned" (mutually coordinated)?
Have you ever been on a jury? Only because the jury is governed rigorously by laws and an authority in the judge, with both sides of an accusation defended by a professional with interests conflicting with the other's, and an actual person at stake who can go to media with their story, does the drafting of random people from the community work at all.
But the "none of the above" vote is important. AFAIK it's already part of every ballot: just don't answer that question. But what should change is that those "abstain" answers should be counted, and the total including them should require someone get a majority to win. Otherwise a runoff election excluding the lowest vote getters. Or just "Instant-Runoff Voting", where voters pick their top choices in order, and the winner is chosen by the mutually agreed most popular, even if not simply the most common #1 pick.
Friedman's already got his "third party": the "Tea Party" that's not a party. It's just the most extreme Republicans - still voting Republican.
Now he's demanding a new third (not really) party also be Republican.
Thomas Friedman is the guy who spent the first 5+ years of the Iraq Jr War seeing victory "within the next 6 months", for all those years, until he just stopped begging for it. He's never right about anything except the obvious. Why listen to him?
The Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libyan wars cost several hundred $B more. The Pentagon/CIA expense includes budgets spread across many other agencies, like NASA's development and launch budgets for our military/spy satellites. $BILLIONS in "foreign aid" are bribes dual-purposed to American exporters, many of which are indistinguishable from the Pentagon/CIA (weapons, spy systems), and to bribes and other expenses (US funded joint war games, etc) to foreigners integrated with and specified by the Pentagon/CIA. The NSA and other spy/disinfo operations throughout the Federal agencies' budgets.
And all that's borrowed money, which means it's all 150% of the original expense by the time the banks (foreign and domestic) are paid their interest.
If we really spent only $300B a year on Pentagon/CIA, we'd save at least $1.2-1.5B. And the drag on the economy of spending that money on the bloated failure that is the Pentagon/CIA would drop, freeing more actually productive economics, which pay taxes. Taxes that should collect back a fair share from the rich who have demonstrably gained so much from the crooked economy to date, largely war profiteering (speculating on oil during the Iraq War, etc). Presto: a surplus that soon pays off the debt.
The other difference is that the US actually makes war with these welfare recipients. Killing lots of people, training them to kill and to respect killing for the rest of their lives. Military people are not counted among the unemployment rate, though they're over 1% of the workforce. And their work destroys capital and labor, while enabling a US foreign policy of destruction and intimidation instead of the cheaper and more productive investment and inducement. And cultivates the cult of authoritarianism...
$12.9B shit happens? No, that kind of shit doesn't just happen. It's deliberate incompetence designed to feed cronies. Which is exactly what defined Rumsfeld's entire career.
They spent our SS on Federal bonds that are worth at least 50% more now, without any losses. The SS fund has something like 2 $TRILLION+, more than enough to pay all checks for at least another decade, and probably for another several decades.
And in the meantime the SS spent on other things kept the country going. Though if they'd spent it on activities that actually defend and build America instead of on the military (and the interest on the military's debts), we'd be a lot better off, and retirees would have the safe interest coming back larger in their pensions.
Obama's mistake was not firing Gates from the Pentagon. All Gates can claim is $TRILLIONS in losing wars. Obama supposedly kept him around because Gates was willing to cut Pentagon budgets in exchange for keeping them still high and still wasted on losing wars. But maybe not.
Though even blaming Obama for not firing him and ending these stupid wars doesn't excuse Bush and Rumsfeld from creating them and running them for so many years.
What's "pretty simpleminded" is your view of what I posted, because that's not what I posted.
It's the Pentagon/CIA that doesn't detect or protect us from attacks that murder Americans and destroy our security. Even though they already have hundreds of $BILLIONS in spy satellites, and even more in "guys at the tip of the spear". Too many guys, too many spears, too many satellites, not enough defense.
BTW, if you hadn't blurted that "simpleminded" comment, this could have been a debate, despite your mistakes, instead of an argument. But you did blurt. So that's all you get. Goodbye.
Cutting the military spending instead of SS, Medicare or the rest of what's being cut instead would be a lot better. Most of the spending doesn't go to the labor, and a lot more gets sent overseas, and much less comes back in taxes. Besides, military personnel and contractors are better able to find other income than are the oldest, poorest and sickest Americans. Besides, SS doesn't even contribute to the debt, except in that it's a source of domestic loans to the government at a very low interest rate, so it allows the debt to exist without dependence on foreigners or banksters.
But of course the cutting of these social benefit repayment programmes is proposed to happen immediately, if not sooner. Those delicate balances are somehow just tough luck. When the same is suggested for the military and intel industry, well, they're just too soft to consider taking it, I guess.
Eisenhower spent his 8 years as president shoving as much money and power at the military-industrial complex as he possibly could. He was elected president based on his years as the US supreme commander in Europe, pushing the Western Front against the Russians' advancing Eastern Front to crush the Nazis, which shoved as much money and power into the military-industrial complex as was physically possible. Though the 1940s MIC feast was well worth the investment, his 1950s splurge wasn't.
Eisenhower deserves credit for calling out the military-industrial complex. But he was about to retire, untouchable, having made his entire career creating it.
The US could eliminate our deficits immediately by cutting our Pentagon/CIA budget to under $300B a year from its current $TRILLION+, and soon pay off the accumulated debt with the surplus. Vietnam + Iraq + Afghanistan = several $TRILLION, plus interest on the debt that paid for them is over 50% more (since we borrowed again and again to pay the interest). Plus all the veterans benefits including healthcare, housing, education, disability - rightly paid on a wrongfully bloated military force.
Instead we're stealing new $TRILLIONS for the Pentagon/CIA from the old deposits the latest generations have paid down on our Social Security pensions. With millions of Americans now throwing the US credit rating into the trash by voting for their politicians (mostly, but not exclusively, Republicans - all the Republicans). Who won't sacrifice a 5 year writeoff of private jets into a 7 year writeoff, even as the jets' owners get in return a drop from a 35% tax rate to a 29% rate, and their corporate taxes dropped even more.
The only war the Pentagon/CIA have won since Japan surrendered 2/3 of a century ago is the class war.