Their aim is just to maximise ad revenue, and the best way to retain viewers is to affirm them. People generally hate to be told they are wrong.
It's a free market: If your audience doesn't like the facts you are giving them, they will take their business elsewhere and find someone selling facts more to their liking.
But accepting (b) leads to some ridiculous consequences. According to the potential principle of (b), you have a duty to cause pregnancy - and for men, the most productive way to achieve this goal would be serial rape. Every woman they refrain from raping is a potential child robbed of life.
Of course it's impractical. But does Trump know that?
The real question here is one that is key to understanding all politicians: Does he actually believe in his own bad ideas, or is he simply lying to get elected?
Let's see... you have a few hundred determined men with hunting rifles. The government has thousands of men with assault rifles, military-grade communications gear, years of training, and artillery and air support, all backed up by an intelligence service that, if not the best in the world, is at least in the top ten.
No, you're not winning this war.
The only reason the Bundy Bunch didn't get shelled into rubble is that they weren't enough of a threat to be worth the bad publicity. The best you might hope for is a long, bloody insurgency. Remember that revolutions fail far more often than they succeed, and that's even assuming you get a significant part of the population on your side. Which you won't, because if that looks like it might happen you can bet the government will start taking influence over the media. It wouldn't be the first time.
I have a concern on the boarder wall: He can't legally build it. He wouldn't have the authority as president, and Congress wouldn't approve it. But he is also a real maverick who is used to getting his own way. What happens if he tries to build it using some blatantly illegal method, like an executive order, or ordering the army to start construction?
The resulting dispute could tear the government apart. I don't think even Trump can bring the county to civil war, but then I didn't think Trump could win the election either.
I know it can be hard to define what 'left' and 'right' mean, but how can Trump be considered to the left? His environmental policy is to scrap the EPA and pull out of all international agreements on climate change, he has already said he plans to eliminate all federal funding for education, and on healthcare he wants to deregulate and transfer all management to the private sector. Doesn't look very left to me.
It's easy to see the logic for interfering: 1. I protect my country. 2. Sometimes I use not-entirely-legal means to achieve this. But I have to bend the law, otherwise people would die. 3. Candidate X leads a platform which may impose some restrictions on my department, including removing our ability to break the law. 4. If my department cannot break the law, then we are crippled. 5. If we are crippled, then the country is in danger. I understand why the people fear us, but that is because they do not have the full picture. 6. Therefore Candidate X is a threat to national security. It's not personal, but we cannot allow their idealistic meddling to open the door to terrorists. 7. Therefore it is my duty to leak anything embarassing on Candidate X.
Much the same thing has happened to conservatism. The religiously-driven 'social conservativism' displaced the political aspects, and look what's become of it today.
Small government! Personal freedom! Except for abortion, sex education and pornography. Oh, and we need the government to sponsor official Christian prayer events and monuments to remind everyone who good Americans ought to be worshipping. And don't forget to regulate the media to people don't see a nipple or hear a dirty word - there must be strict criminal penalties for saying a dirty word on television! Also, we support religious freedom, but everyone in public school should be made to pledge themselves to our God every morning. Other than that, we like small government and support states' rights. Unless they choose to legalise weed or gay marriage, of course, then we need the federal government to step in and overrule them.
Americans have those rights under the constitution because of the Bill of Rights. That's what the bill does: It added the first ten amendments. Before the bill of rights, those amendments did not exist, therefore Americans cannot possible have already had those rights under the constitution.
“I think Snowden is a terrible threat, I think he’s a terrible traitor, and you know what we used to do in the good old days when we were a strong country — you know what we used to do to traitors, right?... We can’t allow this guy to go out there and give out all our secrets and also embarrass us at every level. We should get him back and get him back now.” - Trump, in an interview on Fox & Friends, 2013.
You'd also need to greatly reduce the power of the President, or even abolish the position entirely.
None of this is going to happen though, for the same reason that we in the UK still have unelected bishops and hereditary peers voting in the House of Lords: What legislature is ever going to vote to abolish itsself? That would be crazy. Why would either Republican or Democrat parties ever support any measure that could allow third parties to have more influence at their own expense?
His transition team is staffed almost entirely by current or former lobbyists, too.
Once he takes office, I expect to see some discontent in the Trump-supporter ranks as they realise that Trump has neither the power nor the inclination to do half the things he promised them.
Trump has also demonstrated a strange immunity. Time after time he says things that should ruin any American politician, yet every time it just slides off him.
If Clinton had won, then there would be Trump supporters rioting right now, and for much the same reason.
The only way to really solve this would be to greatly reduce the power of the office of President, to the point that it wouldn't really matter so much who controlled it. It's just too much power today for one person to wield, and the 'superstar president' effect reduces campaigns to a media circus.
The lack of protection has an up-side: Speed. Without the overhead of bounds checking, you can do things very, very quickly. There's a reason that things like OS kernels and renderers are usually written in C or C++, and make extensive use of buffers.
With great power comes great possibility for screwing up.
The meaning of the story is actually very clear when you read it in context. The 'spilling seed' wasn't the issue: It was about levirate marriage. Under Jewish law of the time, if a man were to die married but childless then his wife (like all his other property) is inherited by his brother (In event of multiple brothers, properly is divided - but one of them gets the wife or wives). This is not optional on either part: The brother *has* to marry the wife, like it or not. Onan inherited a wife in this way (after God killed his brother for general wickedness), but he really didn't want her. Even worse, he was legally obligated to father a child - who, if male, would then be the legal child of his dead brother, not himself, and thus immediately qualify for a share of the wealth.
This put Onan in a rather awkward situation: He gets a wife he doesn't want, he can't get rid of her, and he has a legal duty to impregnate her, and to add insult to injury he then has to give most of the wealth he just inherited to this child (if male) upon said child reaching maturity - and the child wouldn't even be his own legally, so couldn't continue his line, but would be the child of his disgraced brother instead.
Well, Onan wasn't standing for that, so crafty Onan thinks he can weasel his way out: He will carry out his expected sexual duty, but in such a way as to avoid fathering a child by refraining from orgasm within his new wife. No son means Onan gets full inheritence, and he isn't providing a legal child to his brother whome he didn't really like anyway.
Unfortunately for Onan, the omniscient God takes marital duties very seriously, and smote Onan dead on the spot for his violation of Jewish law. The moral of the story isn't too hard to see: Do your duty to your family and to your people, no matter how much it may cost you personally. And if you don't, God is watching, and he has a temper.
People did underestimate Trump, and those people are still unable to figure out how he actually manages to do it. Every week he does something that should destroy the career of any politician, yet it only ever seems to make his approval go upwards. He's insulted an entire ethnic group, he's lied, he's mocked a reporter's disability *on camera* and then denied it afterwards, he's had a skeleton-in-the-closet dug up in which he bragged of his womanising ways and ability to get away with groping because he is rich. Any other politician would have gone down in flames five times over, but Trump is somehow immune to all this. It's like all the historic rules of politics just no longer hold true, and anything goes now.
The more concerning part is that this might hold true as President too, and he is used to an autocratic managment approach in the private sector. People complained about Bush using his executive powers to overrule Congress, people on the other side of the political divide complained about Obama doing the same... but Trump may be worse than either of them. If Congress won't build the wall, I wouldn't be surprised if he simply orders the army to seize property and start construction.
The debate on abortion in the US is legally messy. There's one faction that campaigns for abortion on demand without restriction, one side that campaigns for a total ban with maybe the narrowist exception to save life. The majority of people don't actually support either position, but because of the importance of the Roe case it's not possible to campaign for a compromise: The pro-choice faction needs to defend Roe at all costs, and they know that if they lose it the pro-life faction will sieze the chance to rush straight to the opposite extreme in many states. There is no possibility for anything in between.
It was a major election on a close margin. Whenever that happens, regardless of who wins, there is going to be a bit of rioting. The losing side will feel disenfranchised, because the other side only won by a slim majority yet secured a 100% victory. It just feels unfair, and unfairness makes people angry. This is one of the inherent problems of any political system which incorporates majority-wins votes, and a reason proportional representation was invented.
Fossil fuels don't 'run out' as such. It just gets more expensive over time, as the cheapest to access deposits are the first to be extracted. Eventually you have to go from 'stick a pipe in the ground' to deep wells, then expensive offshore driling, then more-expensive fracking wells that have to be relocated at regular intervals, then even-more-expensive shale processing... until you eventually come to a point where it's so expensive to get more out, you might as well just go with renewables anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps there is simply a correlation between political affiliation and lying?
Their aim is just to maximise ad revenue, and the best way to retain viewers is to affirm them. People generally hate to be told they are wrong.
It's a free market: If your audience doesn't like the facts you are giving them, they will take their business elsewhere and find someone selling facts more to their liking.
But accepting (b) leads to some ridiculous consequences. According to the potential principle of (b), you have a duty to cause pregnancy - and for men, the most productive way to achieve this goal would be serial rape. Every woman they refrain from raping is a potential child robbed of life.
Of course it's impractical. But does Trump know that?
The real question here is one that is key to understanding all politicians: Does he actually believe in his own bad ideas, or is he simply lying to get elected?
Let's see... you have a few hundred determined men with hunting rifles. The government has thousands of men with assault rifles, military-grade communications gear, years of training, and artillery and air support, all backed up by an intelligence service that, if not the best in the world, is at least in the top ten.
No, you're not winning this war.
The only reason the Bundy Bunch didn't get shelled into rubble is that they weren't enough of a threat to be worth the bad publicity. The best you might hope for is a long, bloody insurgency. Remember that revolutions fail far more often than they succeed, and that's even assuming you get a significant part of the population on your side. Which you won't, because if that looks like it might happen you can bet the government will start taking influence over the media. It wouldn't be the first time.
I have a concern on the boarder wall: He can't legally build it. He wouldn't have the authority as president, and Congress wouldn't approve it. But he is also a real maverick who is used to getting his own way. What happens if he tries to build it using some blatantly illegal method, like an executive order, or ordering the army to start construction?
The resulting dispute could tear the government apart. I don't think even Trump can bring the county to civil war, but then I didn't think Trump could win the election either.
I know it can be hard to define what 'left' and 'right' mean, but how can Trump be considered to the left? His environmental policy is to scrap the EPA and pull out of all international agreements on climate change, he has already said he plans to eliminate all federal funding for education, and on healthcare he wants to deregulate and transfer all management to the private sector. Doesn't look very left to me.
It's easy to see the logic for interfering:
1. I protect my country.
2. Sometimes I use not-entirely-legal means to achieve this. But I have to bend the law, otherwise people would die.
3. Candidate X leads a platform which may impose some restrictions on my department, including removing our ability to break the law.
4. If my department cannot break the law, then we are crippled.
5. If we are crippled, then the country is in danger. I understand why the people fear us, but that is because they do not have the full picture.
6. Therefore Candidate X is a threat to national security. It's not personal, but we cannot allow their idealistic meddling to open the door to terrorists.
7. Therefore it is my duty to leak anything embarassing on Candidate X.
Here in the UK, about half of us are watching America with horror right now. The other half are watching with popcorn.
Much the same thing has happened to conservatism. The religiously-driven 'social conservativism' displaced the political aspects, and look what's become of it today.
Small government! Personal freedom! Except for abortion, sex education and pornography. Oh, and we need the government to sponsor official Christian prayer events and monuments to remind everyone who good Americans ought to be worshipping. And don't forget to regulate the media to people don't see a nipple or hear a dirty word - there must be strict criminal penalties for saying a dirty word on television! Also, we support religious freedom, but everyone in public school should be made to pledge themselves to our God every morning. Other than that, we like small government and support states' rights. Unless they choose to legalise weed or gay marriage, of course, then we need the federal government to step in and overrule them.
Americans have those rights under the constitution because of the Bill of Rights. That's what the bill does: It added the first ten amendments. Before the bill of rights, those amendments did not exist, therefore Americans cannot possible have already had those rights under the constitution.
Unlikely.
“I think Snowden is a terrible threat, I think he’s a terrible traitor, and you know what we used to do in the good old days when we were a strong country — you know what we used to do to traitors, right? ... We can’t allow this guy to go out there and give out all our secrets and also embarrass us at every level. We should get him back and get him back now.” - Trump, in an interview on Fox & Friends, 2013.
You'd also need to greatly reduce the power of the President, or even abolish the position entirely.
None of this is going to happen though, for the same reason that we in the UK still have unelected bishops and hereditary peers voting in the House of Lords: What legislature is ever going to vote to abolish itsself? That would be crazy. Why would either Republican or Democrat parties ever support any measure that could allow third parties to have more influence at their own expense?
If that becomes a possibility, you can expect to see the rules changed somehow to make sure it isn't any more.
His transition team is staffed almost entirely by current or former lobbyists, too.
Once he takes office, I expect to see some discontent in the Trump-supporter ranks as they realise that Trump has neither the power nor the inclination to do half the things he promised them.
Trump has also demonstrated a strange immunity. Time after time he says things that should ruin any American politician, yet every time it just slides off him.
If Clinton had won, then there would be Trump supporters rioting right now, and for much the same reason.
The only way to really solve this would be to greatly reduce the power of the office of President, to the point that it wouldn't really matter so much who controlled it. It's just too much power today for one person to wield, and the 'superstar president' effect reduces campaigns to a media circus.
The lack of protection has an up-side: Speed. Without the overhead of bounds checking, you can do things very, very quickly. There's a reason that things like OS kernels and renderers are usually written in C or C++, and make extensive use of buffers.
With great power comes great possibility for screwing up.
Ideologies are not just religious. They can be religious, but not all are.
The meaning of the story is actually very clear when you read it in context. The 'spilling seed' wasn't the issue: It was about levirate marriage. Under Jewish law of the time, if a man were to die married but childless then his wife (like all his other property) is inherited by his brother (In event of multiple brothers, properly is divided - but one of them gets the wife or wives). This is not optional on either part: The brother *has* to marry the wife, like it or not. Onan inherited a wife in this way (after God killed his brother for general wickedness), but he really didn't want her. Even worse, he was legally obligated to father a child - who, if male, would then be the legal child of his dead brother, not himself, and thus immediately qualify for a share of the wealth.
This put Onan in a rather awkward situation: He gets a wife he doesn't want, he can't get rid of her, and he has a legal duty to impregnate her, and to add insult to injury he then has to give most of the wealth he just inherited to this child (if male) upon said child reaching maturity - and the child wouldn't even be his own legally, so couldn't continue his line, but would be the child of his disgraced brother instead.
Well, Onan wasn't standing for that, so crafty Onan thinks he can weasel his way out: He will carry out his expected sexual duty, but in such a way as to avoid fathering a child by refraining from orgasm within his new wife. No son means Onan gets full inheritence, and he isn't providing a legal child to his brother whome he didn't really like anyway.
Unfortunately for Onan, the omniscient God takes marital duties very seriously, and smote Onan dead on the spot for his violation of Jewish law. The moral of the story isn't too hard to see: Do your duty to your family and to your people, no matter how much it may cost you personally. And if you don't, God is watching, and he has a temper.
That isn't identity politics. It's human nature. Tribal species.
People did underestimate Trump, and those people are still unable to figure out how he actually manages to do it. Every week he does something that should destroy the career of any politician, yet it only ever seems to make his approval go upwards. He's insulted an entire ethnic group, he's lied, he's mocked a reporter's disability *on camera* and then denied it afterwards, he's had a skeleton-in-the-closet dug up in which he bragged of his womanising ways and ability to get away with groping because he is rich. Any other politician would have gone down in flames five times over, but Trump is somehow immune to all this. It's like all the historic rules of politics just no longer hold true, and anything goes now.
The more concerning part is that this might hold true as President too, and he is used to an autocratic managment approach in the private sector. People complained about Bush using his executive powers to overrule Congress, people on the other side of the political divide complained about Obama doing the same... but Trump may be worse than either of them. If Congress won't build the wall, I wouldn't be surprised if he simply orders the army to seize property and start construction.
The debate on abortion in the US is legally messy. There's one faction that campaigns for abortion on demand without restriction, one side that campaigns for a total ban with maybe the narrowist exception to save life. The majority of people don't actually support either position, but because of the importance of the Roe case it's not possible to campaign for a compromise: The pro-choice faction needs to defend Roe at all costs, and they know that if they lose it the pro-life faction will sieze the chance to rush straight to the opposite extreme in many states. There is no possibility for anything in between.
It was a major election on a close margin. Whenever that happens, regardless of who wins, there is going to be a bit of rioting. The losing side will feel disenfranchised, because the other side only won by a slim majority yet secured a 100% victory. It just feels unfair, and unfairness makes people angry. This is one of the inherent problems of any political system which incorporates majority-wins votes, and a reason proportional representation was invented.
Fossil fuels don't 'run out' as such. It just gets more expensive over time, as the cheapest to access deposits are the first to be extracted. Eventually you have to go from 'stick a pipe in the ground' to deep wells, then expensive offshore driling, then more-expensive fracking wells that have to be relocated at regular intervals, then even-more-expensive shale processing... until you eventually come to a point where it's so expensive to get more out, you might as well just go with renewables anyway.