Either you have a limited grasp of what a constitutional democracy is (which is where these things we call "rights" come from), or you are conveniently ignoring the details for the sake of this argument. The constitution puts limits on what a majority is allowed to put into law exactly for cases such as this. Self-determination is indeed the most important freedom one has, and hence one portion of the population can't be allowed to take away the self-determination of another portion.
Also, assuming that everyone who advocates for gay rights must be gay just reveals your ignorance.
Nobody has EVER advocated forcing churches to perform/recognize gay marriages. Why would you even bring that up except as a ridiculous straw man?
Saying that the religious and state definitions of marriage can't be separated is ridiculous. It's completely up to every religious group where they wish to draw the line.
I first heard about this issue on ArsTechnica of all places. This article by Hannibal claims that Bradley Smith, a vocal opponent of campaign finance reform and the head of the FEC (go figure), is more or less trying to force the reversal of McCain-Feingold.
Evidently his original tactic as head of the FEC was to implement policies to make campaign finance measures as ineffective and rarely-enforced as possible. Now since being successfully sued by representatives Shays and Meehan and ordered to shape up, he's taking the opposite tack and trying to enforce a too-broad view of the laws in order to make them look more onerous than they actually are.
what's the fraction of spam that's sent which is CAN-SPAM compliant?
exactly. Most of the spam I get (which isn't much, admittedly) seems to be of the blatant-identity-theft-scam variety, which of course never comes with removal instructions.
Orders of magnitude? The candidate that would beat every other candidate one on one wins. The only complicated thing is the case where there is no such candidate, which really does mean there's no single clear winner, though most other voting systems wouldn't recognize that.
The point you're missing is that it's not a question of education, it's a question of priorities and choice of which claims one believes. Everyone agrees it would be nice to have a tax so simple that we wouldn't need an IRS and that the system today is 'assassinine'. However I don't buy the argument that a tax that reduces the top possible bracket to 23% (for infinite spending) and the 95th-percentile tax bracket to around 15% would be revenue-neutral. Nobody likes the current US income tax structure but that doesn't mean income is the wrong basis for determining tax liability. It's the right metric, because it measures how much one can afford to pay. Consumption is the wrong metric because people who can afford to save a larger portion of their income pay a correspondingly smaller portion of their income in taxes, and that's true after some point no matter how big a rebate you offer. After a point it winds up more regressive than a flat tax; a flat tax with rebates would be a much better starting point, though a simple progressive income tax would still be preferable.
Rebate or no, a sales tax simply won't scale up so that the rich are paying a decent share. If one has enough income so that one only feels inclined to spend a fraction of it while saving or investing the rest, that's only a fraction of your income you're getting taxed on. There's no reason why consumption rather than actual income should be the metric for the amount one gets taxed; no matter what it's some amount taken out of the economy and it might as well be from those who can afford it.
Plus, calling it some all-one-word double-capitalized name makes it sound like you're advertizing it. Let it stand on its merits, or lack thereof.
Heard of Condorcet voting? It asks each voter to rank the candidates from most to least preferable and effectively runs a seperate election for each pair of candidates. If there's a candidate that wins every match, that candidate is the winner. In some situations there is no winner, and not just in tie situations: for example, with candidates A, B, C and 300 voters, say 110 vote A,B,C, 100 B,C,A, and 90 C,A,B. Should A win even though 190 of 300 people prefer C to A? It seems like common sense that since the majority prefers C to A, A shouldn't win, but that problem exists with any choice of a winner in that situation.
ok... so I'm wrong to see the date 1971 and the name Kerry and think "hmm... kerry, 1971, betrayal - vietnam... winter soldier investigation, VVAW, Hanoi John. Yes, that's what he's driving at." Really. Why else would you stick that date in there? And why instead of defending your beliefs do you cop out with some transparent BS about how that wasn't actually what you were referring to?
Besides which, if you're not talking about Vietnam, then is it just some disagreement about policy that's got you in such a tizzy that you think he's Betraying America? In that case I think that's kind of weak. I think Bush is a terrible president and has harmed the country; that doesn't mean he's betrayed it. It helps to provide a specific instance of alleged betrayal; just voting for policy contrary to your opinions doesn't cut it.
heh, well, my other post was questioning why anyone would want to try and argue with you and now i'm spoiling for a fight. what can i say
His sig is grousing about Kerry's Vietnam-era activities and strongly implying that protesting any action of the U.S. military is treason. Why are you bothering to argue with him?
I don't know how accurate the Lancet story is either, but the article you link is bullshit. Attacking it on purely statistical grounds is not the way to go. Your article takes a 95% confidence interval and says "Yup, 95%. That's a 1 in 20 chance the effect simply does not exist." Ignoring the fact that the death toll is statistically just as likely to be _above_ the confidence interval as below (so he really should say 1 in 40), but if you take comfort in knowing there's a 1 in 20 chance that Operation Iraqi Freedom hasn't caused at least a 10% increase in the Iraqi death rate, you're nuts.
Plus, when the page's banner links to this gem of a site, it's hardly a stretch to question whether there might be some biases at work.
No, they should definitely whine at someone who's not responsible for helping them but is trying to anyway, ignoring one of the offered solutions because you can complain better about the other one.
It'd be nice if that plan worked, but I think it'd be more likely the D's and R's would work to make it harder for third parties to get on the ballot instead.
Re:Running to the Right requires undemanding voter
on
The Nader Factor
·
· Score: 1
You're probably right about one of the three. Abortion is a pretty polarizing issue. The other two just aren't the same.
Gun control is not that big of a deal to most people. The two types of people who really worry about gun control are the "gun nuts" - people who really just have a vice they don't want the government to interfere with - and the people who have irrational fear of crime and therefore think that gun control is much more essential than it really is.
As for taxes, they're obviously an important issue, but you can't divide the nation into people who are for and against cutting taxes. Everyone's for cutting taxes when they feel that it's worth cutting spending or letting the debt grow. For every libertarian who thinks every government social program should be ended and for every socialist who believes the government should provide for everyone's needs there are countless people in between who would be willing to actually weigh the value of any given program against its cost, if they were given a straight information about it.
There are other things that are probably more polarizing than either of those. I suspect that except for a few other types of single-issue voters, the election will be decided mostly on whether one thought Bush's foreign policy was reasonable - in the sense of trumping up justification for overthrowing the government of some country that was no particular threat to us. Now THAT's polarizing. (and yes, Kerry was wrong about it too, but a lot of people weren't and most of us blame Bush a hell of a lot more.) One either believes that we made our country the "bad guy" and destroyed our international credibility, or that it was all completely justified for some reason, who knows. Anyway, if you're looking for a breaking point, that's the one this election.
Even if the average person waited until marriage to have sex (as if that was ever the case) teens should still be educated about birth control and basic facts about sexuality. Ideally it should be done by their parents and start at a very young age, but if the parents aren't going to be responsible about it then the schools should (lots of parents would probably rather the schools took care of it anyway.) If it wasn't such a big deal with conflicting messages about how it's both highly universally desirable and yet filthy and bad and not a topic for civilized conversation, kids might understand for themselves that it wasn't something they wanted to get involved in until they were more mature. Clinton's surgeon general got fired because she dared to say that masturbation should be acknowledged to exist, and yet the porn industry continues to explode. Conservatives wanting to censor the world for their teenage kids are just compounding the problem.
Yeah, I saw a compilation video that was trying to say he had gotten some brain disease over the past ten years. I'm sure they picked the best speeches from his 1994 debates (the dumb stuff from recently all sounded pretty much like par) but they do have a point. Can one be THAT dumb while getting C's at Yale? before the era of grade inflation?
Slashdot Mirror
Either you have a limited grasp of what a constitutional democracy is (which is where these things we call "rights" come from), or you are conveniently ignoring the details for the sake of this argument. The constitution puts limits on what a majority is allowed to put into law exactly for cases such as this. Self-determination is indeed the most important freedom one has, and hence one portion of the population can't be allowed to take away the self-determination of another portion.
Also, assuming that everyone who advocates for gay rights must be gay just reveals your ignorance.
Nobody has EVER advocated forcing churches to perform/recognize gay marriages. Why would you even bring that up except as a ridiculous straw man?
Saying that the religious and state definitions of marriage can't be separated is ridiculous. It's completely up to every religious group where they wish to draw the line.
Evidently his original tactic as head of the FEC was to implement policies to make campaign finance measures as ineffective and rarely-enforced as possible. Now since being successfully sued by representatives Shays and Meehan and ordered to shape up, he's taking the opposite tack and trying to enforce a too-broad view of the laws in order to make them look more onerous than they actually are.
yeah, they got sued to hell for it too. I wonder if the record companies are going to be willing to deal with this guy given his history.
what's the fraction of spam that's sent which is CAN-SPAM compliant?
exactly. Most of the spam I get (which isn't much, admittedly) seems to be of the blatant-identity-theft-scam variety, which of course never comes with removal instructions.
so have the tool load when it's selected and change the cursor to an hourglass or whatever while it's loading. big deal.
Orders of magnitude? The candidate that would beat every other candidate one on one wins. The only complicated thing is the case where there is no such candidate, which really does mean there's no single clear winner, though most other voting systems wouldn't recognize that.
when sympathetic groups do that, it's for some greater good, not for screwing people over.
The point you're missing is that it's not a question of education, it's a question of priorities and choice of which claims one believes. Everyone agrees it would be nice to have a tax so simple that we wouldn't need an IRS and that the system today is 'assassinine'. However I don't buy the argument that a tax that reduces the top possible bracket to 23% (for infinite spending) and the 95th-percentile tax bracket to around 15% would be revenue-neutral. Nobody likes the current US income tax structure but that doesn't mean income is the wrong basis for determining tax liability. It's the right metric, because it measures how much one can afford to pay. Consumption is the wrong metric because people who can afford to save a larger portion of their income pay a correspondingly smaller portion of their income in taxes, and that's true after some point no matter how big a rebate you offer. After a point it winds up more regressive than a flat tax; a flat tax with rebates would be a much better starting point, though a simple progressive income tax would still be preferable.
Rebate or no, a sales tax simply won't scale up so that the rich are paying a decent share. If one has enough income so that one only feels inclined to spend a fraction of it while saving or investing the rest, that's only a fraction of your income you're getting taxed on. There's no reason why consumption rather than actual income should be the metric for the amount one gets taxed; no matter what it's some amount taken out of the economy and it might as well be from those who can afford it.
Plus, calling it some all-one-word double-capitalized name makes it sound like you're advertizing it. Let it stand on its merits, or lack thereof.
Sales tax instead of progressive income tax?? Way to fuck over everyone but the super-rich.
will the naked statues be back on TV?
nah, nobody uses version numbers anymore. Expect Internet Explorer MT or some crap like that.
Heard of Condorcet voting? It asks each voter to rank the candidates from most to least preferable and effectively runs a seperate election for each pair of candidates. If there's a candidate that wins every match, that candidate is the winner. In some situations there is no winner, and not just in tie situations: for example, with candidates A, B, C and 300 voters, say 110 vote A,B,C, 100 B,C,A, and 90 C,A,B. Should A win even though 190 of 300 people prefer C to A? It seems like common sense that since the majority prefers C to A, A shouldn't win, but that problem exists with any choice of a winner in that situation.
ok... so I'm wrong to see the date 1971 and the name Kerry and think "hmm... kerry, 1971, betrayal - vietnam... winter soldier investigation, VVAW, Hanoi John. Yes, that's what he's driving at." Really. Why else would you stick that date in there? And why instead of defending your beliefs do you cop out with some transparent BS about how that wasn't actually what you were referring to?
Besides which, if you're not talking about Vietnam, then is it just some disagreement about policy that's got you in such a tizzy that you think he's Betraying America? In that case I think that's kind of weak. I think Bush is a terrible president and has harmed the country; that doesn't mean he's betrayed it. It helps to provide a specific instance of alleged betrayal; just voting for policy contrary to your opinions doesn't cut it.
heh, well, my other post was questioning why anyone would want to try and argue with you and now i'm spoiling for a fight. what can i say
His sig is grousing about Kerry's Vietnam-era activities and strongly implying that protesting any action of the U.S. military is treason. Why are you bothering to argue with him?
It must be those goddamned liberals and their treason again.
You shouldn't need the government to help uphold your traditions.
I don't know how accurate the Lancet story is either, but the article you link is bullshit. Attacking it on purely statistical grounds is not the way to go. Your article takes a 95% confidence interval and says "Yup, 95%. That's a 1 in 20 chance the effect simply does not exist." Ignoring the fact that the death toll is statistically just as likely to be _above_ the confidence interval as below (so he really should say 1 in 40), but if you take comfort in knowing there's a 1 in 20 chance that Operation Iraqi Freedom hasn't caused at least a 10% increase in the Iraqi death rate, you're nuts.
Plus, when the page's banner links to this gem of a site, it's hardly a stretch to question whether there might be some biases at work.
No, they should definitely whine at someone who's not responsible for helping them but is trying to anyway, ignoring one of the offered solutions because you can complain better about the other one.
Unfortunately since it's based on QT it'd be pretty difficult to do that and have it still be free on win32.
It'd be nice if that plan worked, but I think it'd be more likely the D's and R's would work to make it harder for third parties to get on the ballot instead.
You're probably right about one of the three. Abortion is a pretty polarizing issue. The other two just aren't the same.
Gun control is not that big of a deal to most people. The two types of people who really worry about gun control are the "gun nuts" - people who really just have a vice they don't want the government to interfere with - and the people who have irrational fear of crime and therefore think that gun control is much more essential than it really is.
As for taxes, they're obviously an important issue, but you can't divide the nation into people who are for and against cutting taxes. Everyone's for cutting taxes when they feel that it's worth cutting spending or letting the debt grow. For every libertarian who thinks every government social program should be ended and for every socialist who believes the government should provide for everyone's needs there are countless people in between who would be willing to actually weigh the value of any given program against its cost, if they were given a straight information about it.
There are other things that are probably more polarizing than either of those. I suspect that except for a few other types of single-issue voters, the election will be decided mostly on whether one thought Bush's foreign policy was reasonable - in the sense of trumping up justification for overthrowing the government of some country that was no particular threat to us. Now THAT's polarizing. (and yes, Kerry was wrong about it too, but a lot of people weren't and most of us blame Bush a hell of a lot more.) One either believes that we made our country the "bad guy" and destroyed our international credibility, or that it was all completely justified for some reason, who knows. Anyway, if you're looking for a breaking point, that's the one this election.
Even if the average person waited until marriage to have sex (as if that was ever the case) teens should still be educated about birth control and basic facts about sexuality. Ideally it should be done by their parents and start at a very young age, but if the parents aren't going to be responsible about it then the schools should (lots of parents would probably rather the schools took care of it anyway.) If it wasn't such a big deal with conflicting messages about how it's both highly universally desirable and yet filthy and bad and not a topic for civilized conversation, kids might understand for themselves that it wasn't something they wanted to get involved in until they were more mature. Clinton's surgeon general got fired because she dared to say that masturbation should be acknowledged to exist, and yet the porn industry continues to explode. Conservatives wanting to censor the world for their teenage kids are just compounding the problem.
Yeah, I saw a compilation video that was trying to say he had gotten some brain disease over the past ten years. I'm sure they picked the best speeches from his 1994 debates (the dumb stuff from recently all sounded pretty much like par) but they do have a point. Can one be THAT dumb while getting C's at Yale? before the era of grade inflation?